I confess, even as someone who likes to build big number-crunching desktops, that I like sleek and lightweight laptops even more. That’s why the Asus Zenbook A14 caught my eye at CES 2025. At less than a kilogram in weight and with 30+ hours of quoted battery life, it’s the platonic ideal of a road warrior notebook. And after a slight delay from its announced date, it’s now available to order from the Asus store.
The Zenbook A14 (model number UX3407) is so named because the lawyers wouldn’t let them call it the “Zenbook Air” for fear of Apple’s litigious wrath, according to the PR team. But you can see the resemblance if you’ve used a MacBook Air before, with its super-skinny and super-light design. At 2.16 pounds and just 0.63 inches thick at most, it’s self-styled as “the lightest 14-inch Copilot+ PC on the market.”
And while every little bit counts in those measurements, it’s the laptop’s understated finish that really drew my eye. The proprietary “Ceraluminum” coating on the entire body, including the keycaps, gives it a slightly stony finish that seems to repel fingerprints. Asus has been using this process for a while on its laptops, but I think this is the first one that’s covered in it so completely. It’s available in gray and beige colors.
The laptop is based on a Snapdragon X processor, and combined with its surprisingly roomy 70-watt-hour battery it can last for up to 32 hours on a single charge. That’s Asus’ estimation, though, so expect it to be much less if you’re doing anything except watching video. But even if you chop it in half on the assumption that you’ll be doing lots of intense tasks, it’s not unreasonable based on the size of the battery and the longevity of other Arm-based Snapdragon laptops we’ve seen over the last year or so. Just don’t throw any PC games at it and it should be fine.
Other highlights of the Zenbook A14 include a 1200p OLED screen, a full-sized HDMI port (plus two USB-C and one USB-A), and the usual IR webcam for Windows Hello compatibility. The only real downer on the spec list for me is that there’s no option for a touchscreen, though the lack of a digitizer component probably helped shave off a little weight, thickness, and battery life.
Michael Crider/Foundry
The debut model has 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 1TB of PCIe 4.0 storage, with a launch price of $1,100 on the Asus web store. It’s also listed at Best Buy, showing a shipping date for next week. Considering that an equivalent Surface Laptop retails for $2,000 (albeit with a slightly faster processor and a touchscreen), it seems pretty darn reasonable to me.
Asus says that a 16GB/512GB model of the Zenbook A14 will sell for $900, sliding under that crucial four-digit price point, sometime in March.
