Asus Zenbook A14 review – For the mobile worker

If you’re the type who likes to travel light, whether that be on holiday or to the office, you’re probably aware that if you’re taking a laptop with you it is likely to be the heaviest thing in your bag. That seems to be Asus’ entire focus with the new Zenbook A14.

At 980g it is one of the lightest laptops we’ve reviewed, coming in under the 1kg weight of the Zenbook S 13 from 2023 while being nearly 50% thicker and a whole inch larger. Is that enough to justify its R30,000 price? Well, no, not on its own. But it is helped along by a few specs and features that make this laptop a decent contender.

All words are made up

You might not think a 20g weight difference is noticeable but if you’ve ever trudged around a convention with a laptop on your back you’ll know every gram counts. Asus has achieved a sub-1kg weight for the Zenbook A14 thanks to its ‘ceraluminum’ material. If that sounds made up we’d like to draw your attention to this paragraph’s subheading.

It is supposed to be ‘scratch resistant, shock resistant, smudge-free, and easy to clean.’ We’ll have to take Asus’ word for most of that; we didn’t get to drop-, scratch-, or shock-test it. But we did notice that fingerprints don’t overstay their welcome and are easy enough to wipe off.

Both the lid and the base of the Zenbook A14 are made from ceraluminum, which comes in one colourway – Iceland Grey. Other than the fancy coating, it’s devoid of most other design flourishes, apart from the small Asus logo above the power button.

It doesn’t have design flourish and can’t claim to be the thinnest laptop around but we thought that was an agreeable tradeoff for the decent selection of I/O ports. It comes with a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, two USB-C 4.0 Gen 3 ports, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack down the left side, while a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port lives on the right.

The physical input ports are complimented nicely by the physical input devices. The keyboard was inoffensive, though not our favourite keyboard we’ve seen lately. The trackpad, on the other hand, is generously spacious and features a few shortcut gestures which we took a liking to, even if they aren’t game-changing.

True colours

It is customary to expect fantastic visuals from an Asus laptop these days and the Zenbook A14 mostly provides. The 14in OLED display uses a 16:10 aspect ratio and sports a measly 1,920 x 1,200 resolution. It has a reflective coating that allows the vibrant colours and deep blacks of the OLED panel to shine through in all their slightly oversaturated glory. That also means you may have visibility issues if you’re trying to use it in the glaring sun.

If you’re into colour-sensitive work, the display won’t be what holds you back. The A14 offers full coverage of the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces. Although, out of the box, the native colour profile is a tad oversaturated, changing to one of the calibrated colour profiles will fix that.

While we didn’t have issues with the display’s response times – it’s an OLED panel, response times are almost never an issue – the relatively low resolution and paltry 60Hz refresh rate mean the Zenbook A14 doesn’t measure up to Asus’ other offerings.

That’s not entirely a bad thing, as a better display would have almost certainly increased the price. Not to mention the limited use case for a better-equipped screen in a productivity-focused laptop. Still, the tech is there. An upgrade to 90Hz would’ve been enough.

Snappy performance

As far as computational performance goes, the Zenbook A14 does alright with most light to medium workloads. The Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-78-100) powering our review unit offers similar performance to AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U or Apple’s M3 chip with ten GPU cores. With this particular Zenbook, you also get 32GB of non-upgradable LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD.

Performance will depend on what you’re trying to do. If your software of choice supports ARM natively, you won’t have any issues. The other alternatives are that the program or app will use the built-in x86 to ARM emulation layer, called Prism, in which case there will likely be a drop in performance – or it just won’t work.

We didn’t have an issue with compatibility during our day-to-day use of the Zenbook A14, apart from the PCMark benchmark not being supported. But then our day-to-day work didn’t include any heavy photo or video editing, which one might use Adobe Photoshop or Premier Pro for. Nor did it include much gaming.

As we said in our review of the Vivobook S 15, which sports the same Snapdragon chip at its core, your mileage will vary when it comes to the performance of the specific apps and games you’d like to use. It’s not Asus’ fault if your favourite video editor won’t open or doesn’t perform as smoothly. Shout at the app’s developer. But the list of unsupported apps has gotten smaller and is still shrinking as Snapdragon’s platform matures.

Still, a question mark next to your particular program makes taking a risk on a Snapdragon laptop difficult. We’d advise checking with the program’s website or customer support and/or your company if you’re unsure.

Marathon runner

Second to its impressive weight, the Zenbook A14’s next best feature is its power efficiency. In our battery test, we set the brightness to 50%, made sure it had a full charge, was using the ‘Balanced’ power profile, and left our favourite 24-hour YouTube video playing all night.

We’re used to waking up to a dead laptop and having to dig through the battery report to work out how long it lasted. With the Zenbook A14, we awoke eight and a half hours later to find it had only used 55% of its 70WHr battery. Extrapolating that, and under the same conditions, you can expect around 16 hours of video streaming on a full charge. That’s not bad compared to Windows laptops from just a few years ago but a far cry from the 28 hours Asus claims. But then Asus had different conditions for its battery test, so make of that what you will.

It also faired well running on battery during daily use. With the screen set to max brightness and a large second monitor and wireless gaming mouse connected, we set about doing Stuff things. That mostly included having far too many browser tabs open for word processing, a few spreadsheets, and streaming music. On a full charge and in the ‘Balanced’ power profile, it lasted a good four and a half hours before it hit 30% and the battery-saver mode kicked in. Recharging via the included 90WHr brick took close to two hours from 0% to full, being around 80% charged at halfway.

This being a Copliot+ PC, what with that NPU tucked away in the Snapdragon chip, means you have access to Windows Copilot+ features, like presence sensing. Asus also includes its own AI-powered features which were fun to play around with for approximately 20 minutes. Then, it was old and we got back to work.

It can’t all be good news, however. The speakers of the Zenbook A14 surprised us with how poor they were. They don’t get very loud, and they don’t sound very good. Maybe this is a drawback of having the chassis made from the ceraluminum, maybe we had a dud unit, or maybe the speakers just aren’t very good. Either way, you’ll probably want to use a headset.

Asus ZenBook A14 verdict

The Zenbook A14 finds itself in a weird position. It’s wonderfully light, has enough raw performance and power efficiency under the hood for most people, and the display is decent. If you’re particularly mobile, like having your laptop with you at all times, and don’t have a demanding workflow, the Zenbook A14 is an easy recommendation at R30,000. Just make sure you know where you stand with the compatibility of the programs you use and Windows on Arm.

But if you’re looking for an all-rounder, something just as at home playing games as it is web browsing and paging through spreadsheets, then you might find better value with something else. It’s also worth keeping in mind that Asus plans to bring another Zenbook A14 to South Africa before long, with a slightly weaker processor and less onboard memory. Its lower price could make it an even stronger recommendation but we’ll only know that after we spend some time with it.