The Zenbook A16 is a bigger, bolder version of my favorite laptop of 2025

It’s been a little less than a year since I first saw the Asus Zenbook A14, a super-light, super-thin Windows laptop with incredible battery life. And it’s been six months since I bought one for myself (in fact I’m typing on it now). Apparently I’m not the only fan, because Asus is back with a bigger, bolder sequel: the Zenbook A16. 

With a sandy color and a distinctive “ceraluminum” material (which Asus is bringing to other Zenbook laptops this year), it’s obviously a relative of the A14. But this larger member of the family isn’t focused on the bare minimums. With a huge, high-resolution screen and more (figurative) power thanks to a newer Qualcomm chip, I get the impression that Asus wants to position this design as a competitor to the larger Surface Laptop and MacBook designs. 

The biggest upgrade, in both a figurative and literal sense, is the 16-inch screen. It’s still an OLED panel (a highlight of the A14, at that price and weight), but it’s now rocking a much better 2880×1800 resolution, allowing more breathing room for office tasks and browsing. And like the original design, it does without a touch component, for those who don’t need anything but a laptop and a pointer. I really like that, since that helps keep weight down and battery life up. 

That said, the spacious battery (70 watt-hours) isn’t any bigger for the new design. With a bigger screen and a more powerful chip, both drawing more wattage, it seems almost inevitable that the battery life of the A16 will be shorter. That was one of the best features of the A14, but Asus representatives told me that it was a priority to keep the weight down. 

Speaking of weight: 1.2 kilograms, or 2.6 pounds for those of us in less civilized countries. That’s only 20 percent more chunky than the smaller A14, for a significantly larger device. But that space isn’t wasted. You get six speakers spread out (strangely none of them straddling the keyboard like most laptops this size), plus a full-sized SD card slot, which wasn’t available on the A14. Other ports are identical, with two USB-C on the left side (booo!), full-sized HDMI, and a USB-A port on the right.

Asus might be most excited about the new chip powering this laptop, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, at least on the configuration being promoted at CES. That’s the top-of-the-line Arm chip with 18 cores topping out at 5GHz. That’s screaming performance for a thin-and-light laptop, though gamers or those who depend on specialized, high-end software might balk at anything but an Intel or AMD chip. You also get up to 48GB of DDR5 memory (if you happen to have won the lottery lately), but just 1TB of PCIe storage, according to the spec sheet. 

The biggest question for the Zenbook A16 will be the price, and Asus isn’t answering it, despite an “end of Q1 [2026]” release target. The original A14, which is also getting that X2 processor and no other major changes, really only became compelling to me when it went on sale. So I can’t imagine this one turning heads as an ARM-based laptop, especially if the RAM crunch drives the price too far above the $1500 mark. I can see this matching up well against the larger MacBook Air… less so for the MacBook Pro.