Asus Zenbook A16

MSRP $1,699.99

“A stylish and comfortable laptop with exceptional battery life, a beautiful display, and solid performance”

Pros

• Looks and feels fantastic
• Handled every work-based task exceptionally
• Able to run a good number of local LLMs
• Exceptional battery life
• Solid port selection
• Shockingly low weight for a laptop of this size

Cons

• Large center touchpad can be annoying
• Some GPU-intense applications can still hit the battery hard
• It feels a little fragile overall

Quick Take

Asus Zenbook A16 is a bit of a step into the future. It features Qualcomm’s new flagship Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, an 18-core ARM-based processor designed to put Windows PCs on par with Apple Silicon.

The result is a fantastic professional laptop. You get truly exceptional battery life, along with solid performance during pretty much all work-based tasks. There is some light gaming capability, and the Asus Zenbook A16 also does a half-decent job as a portable cinema when the work day is done, thanks to its stunning 16-inch 3k display.

Cosmetically, the Asus Zenbook A16 is pretty stylish and has a pleasing tactile feel when you’re working on it. It’s absolutely feather-light too, weighing up to two pounds less than some of its direct competitors. Couple with a solid warranty offer, and you have one of the most competitive laptops in the $1,500 to $2,000 bracket.

Asus Zenbook A16 specs: A peek at the innards we tested

Asus Zenbook A16 design and build: An undeniably high-quality feel to it

The Zenbook A16 is pretty stylish and modern at first glance. Holding and using it doesn’t shatter that perception. Instead, it builds on it. But there’s also an underside. Asus’ Zenbook A16 is pretty large for a laptop.

You can’t really do much about that without sacrificing the 16-inch display that’s one of its main selling points. But everything that isn’t that display is pretty minimal, keeping the form factor as compact as possible. The laptop has an edge-to-edge glass panel, and overall, it’s just over half an inch thick.

Despite its slim profile, it comes with a lot of ports built into it.

Namely, two USB-C ports both capable of carrying data at 40 Gb/s, an HDMI port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The right side of the laptop is a bit of a nostalgia trip. It features a USB-A port and an SD card slot, which is ideal if you use a camera for a living or work with some slightly older tech you don’t want to get rid of.

The weight is minimal too, with the whole thing coming in at just a shade over two and a half pounds. It’s one of the lightest options on the market, especially at this size.

The “Ceraluminum” shell, which is a ceramic-like coating, really adds to the overall feeling of physical quality. It feels smooth in the hand, while promising to be both scuff and smudge-resistant. That was definitely the case in my experience.

It seems to be both scratch and fingerprint-free at the end of the testing process.

Then there are little touches. I’m not sure the included faux leather travel pouch will provide a ton of protection if push comes to shove. But it is a stylish way to store and transport the device, while also providing a little extra shielding, however minimal.

Finally, the display is a very good-looking, 16-inch, 3k, OLED screen rocking a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 120Hz refresh rate. At this size, 3K is unbelievably sharp. Brightness is solid too, peaking at 1,100 nits, and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio should make those blacks pop. Some versions feature a touchscreen, but that wasn’t present on the exact model I reviewed.

I found watching movies and TV on the Zenbook a particularly pleasant experience. The speakers are also perfectly fine, though you may have a better time with a decent set of headphones.

Design Score: 8.5/10

Asus Zenbook A16 inputs: The quality of the keys balances out the touchpad

This is a bit of a personal opinion thing, but I’m not one for large central touchpads. While they’re certainly popular enough to be a common feature, especially on higher-end laptops, they’re just not for me.

As a writer, I tend to use the keyboard an awful lot. As a result, I find typing while avoiding the massive touchpad pretty difficult. I can do my best to keep my hands in a less-than-ergonomic position, but still, I’ll find some part of my anatomy glancing at said touchpad and redirecting my text output to wherever the cursor happens to be floating, which breaks my flow somewhat.

It’s irritating enough to make me use a Bluetooth mouse and just disable the touchpad when possible. If you enjoy a big touchpad, it’s probably not an issue for you. But if you write a lot, it’s something to be aware of.

Despite the trackpad issues, I do like the Zenbook’s keyboard. As it’s attached to a 16-inch laptop, it’s a very comfortable size. You won’t find your fingers struggling to find the right keys, even if they’re pretty large.

More importantly, it’s very comfortable to use. It isn’t “semi-mechanical” like some higher-end laptop keyboards, but the key presses are soft and well cushioned with a good amount of travel. The keys themselves feel as if they have the same soft, ceramic-like coating as the laptop does in general, which I found pleasant.

This was my daily driver for over two weeks, and I wrote a lot. It pays the bills. Thousands of words were written on this test unit at that time, and it was honestly better than my regular laptop.

Usability Score: 7/10

Asus Zenbook A16 performance: You get a lot of power for everyday tasks

I did far more than just type on the Zenbook A16. Sometimes I need to edit videos, and anyone who has used the likes of DaVinci or Final Cut Pro knows this isn’t something you can just do on every laptop.

Traditionally, this is one of the reasons Macs tend to dominate in the creative sphere. They’re great for video editing. Alternatively, people could opt for a gaming laptop, which is traditionally heavy, lacks any real battery life, comes with a bulky power supply, and gets hot enough to singe your fingers should you be silly enough to use the keyboard when it’s working.

The Zenbook A16 handles video editing very well, and many programs actually have an ARM-based variant or at least of their programs or at least native ARM support. That allows chips like the SnapDragon X2 Elite to get the most out of the editing software, generally making things run faster and more smoothly while preserving battery life.

While you should really stick to the ARM-specific version of the software, I chose to give the processor a bit of a workout and did a fair amount of video editing on the standard Windows version of Da Vinci Resolve. Despite not being optimized, the program booted and ran smoothly, despite the task involving a large amount of 4K footage.

As far as gaming is concerned, this isn’t really a gaming laptop, but it will run the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 on low settings without issue. Where it really stands out is in processor-based games, and you can run the likes of Football Manager 24 with an exceptionally large database. You can probably do that with Football Manager 26 too, though I wouldn’t want to sully the review by including that frustratingly buggy, unfinished mess.

Performance Score: 9/10

Asus Zenbook A16 charging and battery life: A lot to talk about

You have two USB-C ports available, and either can be used to charge the device. It comes with a 130-watt charger, which is pretty hefty overall. The charger is an all-in-one unit, rather than a block and a wire.

But it is USB-C, so if you’re someone who just has a cable plugged in on your desk and just wants to use that for everything, ASUS has not crushed your dreams. I tested the laptop with both a 100-watt and a 65-watt block and cable combo. Both worked perfectly well, though a “slow charging” warning did crop up when I used anything less than the provided power pack.

In terms of charging times, you’re looking at around an hour to go from 30 to 90%, though this varies depending on what you’re using the laptop for and what mode it’s set to while plugged in with the provided charger.

That 90% may also be enough to last you all day.

The Zenbook has a 70 Wh battery, which is pretty average as far as laptops go and somewhat underwhelming on paper. In reality, the battery life on this thing is monumental. ASUS has claimed over 21 hours of use on battery, though with standard use, I was getting closer to 16 hours.

Obviously, there are ways to drop that drastically. Certain games and other intense activities will pull battery life down below three hours. Basically, anything that relies heavily on the chip’s built-in GPU will hit the battery quite hard. But 4k video playback, web browsing, and general writing made the battery seemingly last forever.

This isn’t meant to be a gaming laptop; it’s a productivity laptop, and ASUS seems to have gotten the best of both worlds from it. They’ve kept the battery size and overall device weight pretty low while achieving almost class-leading battery life. It’s genuinely one of the Zenbook A16’s best features, and particularly handy when working on the go.

Battery Score: 10/10

Asus Zenbook A16 software: It’s built for people who are sick of paying for ChatGPT

While the Snapdragon X2 Elite chip is remarkably quick and power-efficient, it does have a second purpose. That kind of architecture, which pops the RAM and GPU right on the same chip as the CPU, is ideal for running local AI.

As a result, 9B local models like Gemma9b are lightning fast when run through programs like Ollama. It can also run local AIs at this level without absolutely tanking the laptop’s battery life. If you do want to use a bit more juice and memory, it can comfortably handle anything up to a quantized 35B model without sacrificing any stability.

That gives you a ton of power locally, especially if you set up something like Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, which is generally seen as the best all-rounder at this level. Microsoft CoPilot is also a thing, but like most Microsoft products, it’s utterly terrible. Anything over this may run, but you’re basically maxing out your memory to get it going, so any context window you manage to wrangle will be minuscule.

I don’t have any exact benchmarking for this, but I have messed around with local AI a lot, so bear with me. Performance-wise, it will run a lot of the stuff people are buying RTX 4090s and 5090s for, albeit at a lower speed. That RAM is giving you a ton of bandwidth, but you will lack the sort of GPU acceleration you get from Nvidia’s cards. On the other hand, a 4090 is far from portable, and the card alone costs more than this laptop.

If you’re tempted to dabble with local AI models, then this will give you a lot of wiggle room before you inevitably end up dumping a few grand on a Mac Studio like everyone else seems to be doing. This alone is a reason to consider the Zenbook A16, but remember it’s also a bit of a sideshow. This thing is a work laptop first and foremost.}

Local AI Usability Score: 8/10

Asus Zenbook A16 Durability and Warranty 

In terms of warranty, customers get a standard one-year coverage against manufacturing faults and defects. Asus also offers a year of accidental damage protection, covering spills, drops, and power surges, if you register the device online within 60 days of purchase.

As far as durability goes, it is a very light and thin laptop, which means it isn’t the most robust-feeling thing in the world. There is certainly a little flex in the very thin laptop lid and screen. While I didn’t destructively test the Zenbook, my real-world testing did involve tossing it in a backpack (both with and without the protective pouch) and traveling with it.

Despite said backpack being tossed in the trunk of a car, rolling around in a footwell, and braving a few aircraft overhead compartments, the Zenbook did just fine. There isn’t a scratch on it. So it seems durable enough to survive normal daily and work use.

Should You Buy It? 

It’s a hard time to buy anything electrical, with memory prices still through the roof. However, if you need a work laptop in the $1,600 to $2,000 range, you can do a lot worse than the Zenbook A16.

The new chip from Qualcomm is an absolute game-changer, stretching out both battery life and general usability. It makes local AI actually usable, and should only improve as Microsoft rolls out a few further updates.

The Zenbook A16 also tackles pretty much all work tasks with genuine ease, up to and including video editing.

It’s designed to rival MacBooks rocking Apple’s very solid M5 chips. But not everyone likes Mac’s OS, or Apple’s ecosystem. It’s definitely proven itself to be a solid alternative to Apple’s offering, so if you have similar needs but prefer Windows, then this is a solid choice for you.

Beyond that, it ticks all of the boxes. Enough grunt to handle pretty much anything beyond excessive 8K video editing, exceptional battery life, a comfortable feel, great portability, and a very good-looking screen.

Why Not Try…? 

An obvious competitor to the Zenbook A16 is Apple’s current lineup, though nothing Apple has seems to match or beat it at a similar price point. The base MacBook Air is a few hundred dollars cheaper, but it only has 16GB of RAM, lacks an air-cooled processor, and has around half of the storage too.

Apple’s 14 and 16-inch options with an M2 Max or M2 Pro chip both outgun the ASUS Zenbook A16 when it comes to raw specs. But they also come in at up to double the price if you want the same 48GB of RAM.

Anything currently using Intel’s Panther Lake chips, or AMD’s Ryzen AI Pro, could also be seen as a direct competitor to this laptop.

How We Tested

I used this laptop as a daily driver for over two weeks. This included some travel, where the laptop was forced to rely on its battery, along with some time working at home, where it could be plugged in. I connected to WiFi and worked in cafes, on planes, and in hotels. I did not work outside at any point, though plenty of my testing was in bright environments with lots of natural light.

In addition to regular work, I used the Zenbook for light gaming, entertainment, and general web browsing, alongside a bit of video editing, as well. In short, I tried to go through everything someone may expect a work laptop to do.