It’s a new year so that means we get new stuff. Asus has wasted no time in bringing the Zenbook A14 to the South African market. Sporting a Snapdragon X Elite chipset and weighing in at 980g, Asus claims this is the “lightest 14-inch Copilot+ PC on the market.”
The company has achieved this through the use of what it calls Ceraluminum, “a sumptuously tactile material that’s 30% lighter and three times stronger than anodized aluminium.” We’ve seen previous Asus laptops made with this material, like the Zenbook S13. That too was rather light but the A14 takes the cake – which isn’t a lie, in this case.
Keeping calm with the Zenbook A14
In between all the Ceraluminum is a Snapdragon X Elite chipset. Announced towards the end of 2023, this chip is said to bring noteworthy gains to power efficiency. Asus claims the Zenbook A14 will provide “multi-working-day battery life” with the Snapdragon chip and the laptop’s 70Wh battery. It further boasts “over 32 hours of continuous video playback on a single charge.” We’ll need to get our grubbing hands on the thing before we know if that holds true.
This particular Zenbook will feature 32GB or DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD along with the chipset which makes for a fairly decent spec sheet. It gets even better when it comes to the display. Asus has slowly rolled out its OLED panels to many of its mid- to high-end laptop offerings.
The A14 joins the party with a 14in 16:10 FHD (1,920 X 1,200) OLED panel that boasts a screen-to-body ratio of 90% and a Display HDR True Black 600 certification. The refresh rate is capped at 60Hz, however.
Along the Ceraluminum-coated sides is a decent selection of I/O ports – a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, two USB-C 4.0 Gen 3 ports, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack lie on the left, while a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports lives on the right side.
The Asus Zenbook A14 is available from today on the Asus eStore and other retailers for R30,000.
