ASUS's Zenbook A14 Review: A Divisive Device
February 27, 2025
|
Will You Love It or Hate It?
Summary
Josh and I are torn over this laptop. I like it's long battery life and super light weight, but he dislikes its cheap look and feel. So, let's go through it!
Table of contents:
Summary: Great Battery Life and Divisive Build Quality
Josh and I both agree that at $1,100 this laptop is overpriced with what was meant to be a budget processor, the Snapdragon X. This processor also limits you to the ARM version of Windows which not all applications are compatible with. Where we disagree is whether it’s worth buying if it goes on sale. I feel that it’s great battery life and its featherweight chassis are big wins in a 14-inch form factor. Josh finds it looks and feels cheap and, even on sale, he would prefer to sacrifice those wins for a more premium feeling laptop. So, while this MacBook Air wannabe certainly has some high points for the right person, there’s still a lot of negative to cover.
Super Lightweight Chassis, but It Feels Cheap
Firstly, on the positives, this laptop is soooo light and airy. It weighs under 2.2 lbs, which is (almost) the lightest 14-inch laptop we’ve ever had in. The lightest would be the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but that one costs over twice as much. The way ASUS has accomplished this lightweight chassis is by making it completely out of magnesium alloy with a ceramic texture they call “ceraluminum”. This is a result of the same manufacturing process they used on the lids from the Zenbook S line, but those are made of aluminum with a more premium look and feel.
The A14 we have in is in a light gray color they are calling Iceland Gray, but you can also get it in Zabriskie Beige. It’s scratch and smudge resistant and I honestly feel that it looks quite nice, but as I said, Josh does not agree. I will give him the fact that you can definitely get more stylish laptops in this price range of around $1,000. However, both of us agree that the main downside with this chassis is that once you get your hands on it, it does feel cheap due to the material they’ve used. It even has a little deck and screen flex. Its hinges are also weak. When I was walking around with it the screen would flop backwards sometimes. This will matter if you plan on using your laptop on a bumpy plane or train. The X1 Carbon feels noticeably better built, and as I said it weighs a similar amount. Overall, I’d say the chassis achieves its goal of being incredibly light, but it does sacrifice a more premium look and feel to do so.
Low Resolution, Glossy Display
The display is not very exciting. It is a 14” OLED panel with a wide color gamut but it only has a resolution of 1920x1200 and its refresh rate is capped at 60Hz. So, content on screen won’t look as crisp and movement won’t look as smooth as on laptops with higher resolutions and refresh rates. It hits over 420 nits of brightness, which sounds decent, but it does have a glossy finish, which is a bit more reflective than I’d like. You may notice reflections in brighter areas like a coffee shop or next to a window, and its brightness is not enough to combat these. I found it enjoyable enough to look at and use in our reasonably lit office, but we tend to keep the blinds closed.
Low-Travel Keyboard
Next is the keyboard, which is another place Josh and I disagreed. I found its nice soft key texture enjoyable to type on, while he found it slippery. We both noticed that it picks up oils pretty quickly, though. It has a standard layout which means no miss presses and the 3-stage backlight was nice and bright. I’d say the biggest con of the keyboard is its 1.3mm key travel which had me feeling like I was hitting the bottom of the keyboard deck. I would have appreciated a bit more room.
Basic Trackpad
Then we have the trackpad, which isn’t very noteworthy. It’s pretty accurate and has a relatively quiet click, but it’s still mechanical. Its texture is also a little less smooth than we’d like. Taylor and I both tested it, and our fingers caught a bit when scrolling. Ethan and Josh did not notice this when they were testing it, so I think it varies from person to person. It also picks up oils worse than the keyboard which adds to this laptop’s cheap look. I wouldn’t mind this trackpad so much if the laptop was a bit less expensive but considering it’s starting in a price bracket against similar laptops with haptic ones like the MacBook Air and Surface Laptop 7, I would’ve liked to see one here.
Snapdragon X Processor Disappoints, But Brings Some Benefits
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X 26-100 is a cut-down version of the already low-powered X-Plus 42-100 chip. That one has poor single core and integrated graphics, and this new X CPU seems to struggle with the same things. So Josh and I agreed that the $1,100 sticker price for this laptop was too high for what its offering. Yes, this processor allows for great battery life, but it doesn't give you much else to work with.
Here you can see its low benchmark scores compared to competing laptops.
In the grand scheme of things, this is likely good enough for the type of user it’s intended for. I did our graphs on Office for a few different videos and never had any slowdowns or lagging issues. It’s good to keep in mind that there can potentially be big benefits of a lower performing processor because laptops with them can have less heat, fan noise, and better battery life.
Heat Isn't Bad, Fan Noise Is
When we look at a 10-minute Cinebench run in its highest performance mode, the keyboard deck stays cool, but it gets warm on the underside. It stacks up to be around the same or better than most of its competitors.
When it comes to fan noise, however, it is a clear loss for the A14 at 53 decibels. This is probably how it’s avoiding getting too hot.
This, again, is indicative of a worst-case scenario if you’re doing intense tasks on this laptop. For my light use of Office and web-browsing where I was running it on its default balanced mode, I never heard the fans going and it stayed cool 100% of the time.
Impressive Battery Life
When doing a 30-minute performance task on battery we only see it lose 25% of its battery.
When it comes to lighter tasks, like streaming a movie over Wi-Fi for 4 hours, the A14 still keeps about 3/4s of its battery, which is good but not as high as we expected. We are comparing it to some of the least power-hungry laptops on our list here and it still keeps up.
Lastly for battery tests, we like to look at how long it takes to drain the battery fully when playing a video back offline at 200 nits, which is an extremely optimized use-case. This test, as expected, gives us the most favorable results for the A14, it lasts nearly 20 hours, beating out its competing Lunar Lake Zenbook with a larger battery. The MacBook Air doesn’t do as well here, likely due to its smaller battery, but this is still good information for you to have if you plan to travel a lot with your laptop.
Horrible Graphics Performance
It’s terrible. It's not even compatible with TimeSpy, which is a Direct X 12 gaming benchmark we use on all our laptops to see how well they can handle light gaming.
In Wildlife Extreme, which is cross-platform and therefore available on MacOS, we see it do about half as well as modern processors. You can tell that Qualcomm cut the graphics power in half when they moved over from the X1-85 on the X-Elite chips to the X1-45 on the X and X-Plus. Apple does the best here with Lunar Lake close behind. The only chip doing about as poorly is the AMD Zen 4 in the Aero 13, which as we’ve said is a much older processor and it still beats the X CPU.
