Asus’ new ultra-light Zenbook A14 must be held to be believed

CES 2025

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Announced at CES 2025, the new Asus Zenbook A14 is one of those devices that can’t fully be explained without experiencing it yourself. The lightest version of the laptop weighs just 2.18 pounds. For reference, the 13-inch MacBook Air weighs more than a half pound more at 2.7 pounds, despite being the lightest of the best laptops you can buy.

But when it comes to the Zenbook A14, the numbers doesn’t do it justice. When I picked up this laptop for the first time, I was astounded by how light it felt. I experienced that strange sensation when an object is much lighter than your hand expects it to be. I held it in one hand effortlessly, balancing it between my fingers. It might not be the lightest laptop ever made, but for a modern 14-incher, it’s definitely breaking new territory.

Unlike ultra-light laptops in the past, the Zenbook A14 doesn’t feel flimsy either. The key to that rigidity is ceraluminum — a silly word that Asus made up to describe a very interesting new material. It’s been used in the lids of Zenbooks in the past, but this is the first time Asus has used it throughout the entire body of a laptop.

The Zenbook A14 also has a unique look. The laptop’s two color options are Iceland Grey and Zabriskie Beige, neither of which are painted. Instead, Asus says it uses different states of oxidation to achieve the shade.

Interestingly, this is a mid-tier laptop in terms of components, a bit like the MacBook Air. It has an OLED screen, but it’s just a 1920 x 1200 resolution screen with a 60Hz refresh rate. It also has options for the Snapdragon X Plus as a starting configuration. The company is trying its best to not cannibalize its premium Zenbook S 14.

But check out the pricing on the laptops. The $900 configuration, which will be sold exclusively in person at Best Buy (unfortunately), costs just $900, but it comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. That makes it far cheaper than even the previous-gen M2 MacBook Air when configured with the same amount of storage. The $200 upgrade to the configuration that will be sold online gets twice the storage and RAM, which is also a killer deal, but I wish that more affordable configuration were more widely available.

On top of that, Asus is somehow promising 32 hours of max battery life. You read that right. It’s in local, offline video playback, but still — those are bigger numbers than we’ve seen boasted by any other laptop right now.

Asus has always been a go-to company for the price bracket of under $1,000, and this new Zenbook A14 looks like it’ll push value even harder. Will it be the best budget laptop you can buy? We’ll have to wait until it launches on January 13 and review units get sent out.

Asus has also refreshed a number of other Zenbooks in the lineup. The base Zenbook is getting upgraded to both Intel Core Series 2 and AMD Ryzen AI 300. They’re priced similarly, but the AMD models come with a few downgraded features (such as a 60Hz screen and Wi-Fi 6E instead of Wi-Fi 7) and some extra RAM and storage to make up for it. Color options are the only other difference, with the Intel models coming in Jasper Grey or Foggy Silver and the AMD model coming in Jade Black.

These Zenbook 14 models aren’t as snazzy as the Zenbook S 14, which has slimmer bezels, a larger touchpad design, and thinner chassis. But in terms of value, they remain hard to beat.

Regardless, it looks as if the Zenbook A14 will be the cheapest model of them all with its starting price of $900 — but again, that configuration will only be sold in Best Buy stores. More importantly, there appear to be no Zenbooks that will be sold with 256GB as a starting storage configuration. That could limit how low the prices go, as older versions of the Zenbook 14 sometime dipped very low, despite offering compelling premium features such as an OLED screen.