Over the past four years, the MacBook Air has been the primary driver of my computing duties. My prerequisites for finding a light, powerful, and reliable laptop that suits my digital nomad lifestyle often led me to the Apple Store, despite testing my fair share of Windows laptops over the years.
Things started to look promising when I tested my first Windows on Arm machines powered by the Snapdragon X series processors. After spending some time with the stunning Dell XPS 13 and Asus ProArt PZ13 tablet, I switched to the Asus ZenBook A14.
It’s the best anti-MacBook Air I’ve come across so far. But this stunning laptop has a lot going for it besides eyeball-grabbing looks. In fact, it eclipses the Apple rival in a few practical areas that make or break buying decisions. Plus, the price tag attached to the laptop in my home market is even lower than Apple’s machine, so there’s that crucial advantage.
It’s a breath of fresh air
By far, the best-kept virtue of the ZenBook A14 is its fantastic build and featherweight bulk profile. The ZenBook A14 is over 23% lighter than the MacBook Air. That’s no small feat, but you really need to hold this laptop in your hands to realize the sheer engineering excellence here.
You almost don’t feel the weight of this laptop in a backpack. It’s so thin and light that I exclusively carried it like a notebook everywhere I went. Asus has experimented with some bold laptop designs over the years, but for the ZenBook A14, it has taken a unique route to minimalism.
Complementing the looks is the material and the one-of-a-kind surface finish. The material is called Ceraluminum. Technically, a specialized alloy of Magnesium, this material is 30% lighter than aluminum, but nearly thrice as strong.
I was worried that this lightweight laptop wouldn’t be able to take mechanical stress or accidental bumps. I am particularly concerned about this aspect due to my on-the-move workflow. Moreover, every MacBook I have owned so far has suffered flattened corners, scratched paint, and scuff marks.
With the ZenBook A14, I haven’t seen any such battle scars so far. And I am sure it will fare a lot better owing to its US MIL-STD-810H military-grade build. The surface finish is another standout aspect. The trim I used had a beautiful cardboard-like color with a lovely matte texture over it.
It does a better job of avoiding smudges than my MacBook Air in its light blue shade. Asus says it performed a test entailing 18,000 sessions of rubbing to ensure that the surface color doesn’t fade off, so there’s that assurance.
Overall, this is one of the nicest-looking laptops out there, which also happens to be extremely light, yet surprisingly resilient. There is nothing quite like it in the laptop ecosystem out there.
A nice dose of practicality
One of the biggest wins that Asus landed with the ZenBook A14 is the focus on practicality. Despite its slim waistline, the laptop offers a pair of USB-C (v4.0) ports, a USB-A port with 10 Gbps output, and an HDMI 2.1 port. The Apple competition restricts users to a pair of USB-C ports.
It’s not just the number of ports that matters here, but also the versatility. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to plug in a much larger dock so that I could use my wireless mouse and keyboard while the MacBook Air was connected to an external device.
With the ZenBook, two of the most common types of peripherals — external screens and 2.4GHz wireless input — are independently covered. That means even if one of the USB-C ports is permanently occupied for power draw, the other one is still vacant for hooking up more devices.
I also love the keyboard. The keys are well spaced out, offer a springy feedback, and offer a decent amount of travel. In fact, I managed to hit a higher typing speed on the ZenBook A14 than I have achieved on my MacBook Air, the 13-inch Magic Keyboard, or even the Satechi SM3 Slim mechanical keyboard.
I just wish the button layout were a bit different, with just one Ctrl key in the far left corner. However, I quickly got used to this format within a day. The touchpad is also spacious and offers a proper physical click experience across each half.
Then we have the Windows Hello authentication system powered by an infrared camera array. It works just as well as the Face ID system on Apple hardware. I actually find it more convenient than having to reach out for a fingerprint sensor embedded in the power button.
I rely heavily on Passkeys for all my web log-ins, and some of the native Windows features, such as Recall, are also now locked behind biometric authentication. Even in a completely dark room where my face was lit only by the display at nearly 40% brightness, the face unlock worked flawlessly.
Delivers where it matters
The strongest leg-up that the Asus ZenBook A14 has over its Apple rival and a bunch of other x86-based Windows laptops is the screen. The laptop offers a 14-inch OLED display with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels. It’s a gorgeous screen, also happens to be less reflective than the IPS LCD panels on machines such as the MacBook Air.
It produces beautiful colors, deep blacks, and offers wide viewing angles. Thankfully, the bezels flanking it are also quite slim, and there is no notch to contend with. I only wish this were a faster panel, but for my day-to-day work, a 60Hz refresh rate works just fine.
Talking about workflow, this machine handled mine smoothly. All the apps that I require on a daily basis work without any stutters across the Microsoft 365 portfolio and Google Workspace ecosystems. Irrespective of whether they are now native on Arm or run atop the Prism emulation layer, the performance was usually without any red flags.
The dual-fan design definitely lends a hand, especially when Chrome was aggressively eating into the memory, while other apps such as Slack, Teams, Trello, Outlook, and Copilot were running in the background. Compared to the MacBook Air or the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Dell XPS 13, the Asus machine ran cooler
Single-core performance, thanks to the Oryon cores, is quite impressive. Under sustained load, however, the multicore performance takes a dip. The Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite fare much better, though their graphics performance still has some catching up to do.
Editing tasks across the Adobe suite run fine, and you won’t have much trouble editing full-HD clips across AV1 and H. 264 codecs. Technically, you can go up to 4K 60fps decoding and encoding at 30fps, but the system memory starts becoming a bottleneck and creative effects addition show signs of fatigue.
I tried editing a few short clips for social media, and things were mostly smooth. However, for some reason, Da Vinci Resolve kept crashing when I installed it for heavier workloads. An overwhelming majority of Adobe’s apps are now running natively on Windows, so you’re covered on that front.
What I loved the most was that the internal fans run pleasingly quiet in the default mode. Battery life is another aspect that I love about the laptop. I was able to easily get eight hours of sustained work, and idle power draw is also on the lower side.
For its target audience, this machine can easily last a full day. Asus also provides a neat battery care mode that limits charging to the 80% mark. Apple offers this battery health convenience on its newer iPhones, but not on the MacBook lineup.
On the software side, this is a Copilot+ machine, so you are getting meaningful benefits such as Live Captions, image generation and editing, native AI-assisted search, to name a few. Asus also offers its own set of touchpad and related shortcut customizations within the MyAsus app that come in handy.,
Overall, there is a lot to like about the Asus ZenBook A14. For my workflow, which is heavily dependent on the web and cloud-based applications, it got the job done without any major hiccups. But it’s the phenomenal build and breezy weight profile that truly won me over. And to such an extent that every other Windows laptop now seems boring to me.
