ASUS Zenbook A14 - Review

Normally, whenever we review laptops here, they are powerful beastly machines, designed to let you game at 120fps or render out 4K movies in a matter of moments. We do not spend a lot of time talking about the everyday use laptop, so why did the Asus Zenbook A14 appeal to me and did I find what I was looking for after spending a month or so with it?

I knew before even opening up the box that the laptop was in, was that it would be on the smaller side of things, as that is one of the selling points. But the size was not actually as small as I thought it was going to be, but that is a point in its favour. The size actually fell into line with most other laptops of that type, the daily use machines, so it didn’t take any sort of relearning to use it. The size also meant that on my lap or on my desk, everything felt like it was in the right spot and I appreciate that. As far as the design, it was basic, which is not a negative as sometimes the lack of complexity is a draw in and of itself. Something that I normally gloss over is the exterior of the laptops, unless they have something special about them. This does not have any special, but the material and colour combined to make something that was nice to look at, but more importantly kept clean when handled.

Now, no one buys a laptop to stare at it when closed, I mean you can, but defeats the purpose of it. So, how does it work when you have it all set up, thankfully it is pretty effortless. Ignoring the screen and keyboard for now, there are only 5 ports on the device and three of them are USB. On the left side of the device is a single HDMI, two USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone port, the right side contains a single USB-A port. My only gripe on the ports is that the two USB-C are on the same side, which is annoying once the left side fills in. As part of my tests, I hooked up the laptop to my espresso display via HDMI, so with that and USB-C for power, things looked a little lopsided. It is not the end of the world of course, but it was something that I noticed.

Back with the screen, while it was not a 4K display, it was an OLED display and that was surprising to me. It’s resolution topped out at 1920 x 1200, giving it a 16:10 aspect ratio and as such felt more like a Microsoft Surface laptop. In all the places I used the laptop, at home, on a train, in an office, the screen kept up with showing me what I was looking at, so you could say there were no glaring issues. Of course, as an OLED panel when I was watching YouTube or other media content, it was able to present some great picture quality, as long as the source was decent, so it is a great little device for that. The keyboard was great to type on, though I did find it a little to small for my liking, I am sure if it was my everyday device I would just adjust, but it is something to be aware of.

Now looks and specs are important to a degree, but what really matters is performance and here there is good and bad. The good is that for general use there are no issues, which is something I was hesitant on when I realised that the CPU was a Snapdragon X Plus. I am an Intel guy; I even try to avoid AMD due to reasons and Snapdragon in my mind is only for mobile phones. So, I was quite surprised that with multiple tabs open across two browsers, and Excel powering through some macros in the background, the laptop just kept working. I did try a few lower end spec games out, like Minecraft and while it did work, it was not ideal. Don’t get me wrong if this was your only option, you can get some gaming done, but it is not designed for it, thankfully Asus have laptops made for gaming.

Something that I have to point out as a concern was the Asus software. Now if this was my own personal machine that I had bought, anything that was pre-installed beyond Windows would have been removed. However, as this was a review unit, I left all of that alone and it caused me grief almost daily. Everyone knows Windows updates, those things that seem to happen at the weirdest times, well Asus have them beat, because it felt that almost every day they would find a new update to their software. So, would save my work and let it update and then the next day it had another one. I think across the few weeks that I had the laptop it had 8 updates, which is a lot and that worries me. Either Asus are pushing up mandatory updates daily or they are releasing broken software and neither is a good look. Now if I removed all that software, it may not have become an issue, but again this was a review unit and that was part of the process.

The last thing that I wanted to bring up was the battery, which has a promised total use time of ~30 hours, depending on what you are doing. Now for a few days I did a lot of web browsing, a few videos on YouTube and music through it and I would say I got close to 25 hours. When I tried doing the gaming tests, the battery did drop fairly quickly, but again this is not a laptop designed for that. As I got almost a full day of use from a single charge, I didn’t have to charge the device up that frequently, which is nice, but the better aspect was that the laptop charger was tiny compared to many of them. This is a great selling point alone, because it means the portable nature of the laptop is not actually impacted.

The only question that really matters is, how did the laptop go with the time that I had it. Honestly, it proved to be quite the little champion. It was able to do almost everything I asked of it, which was a bit at times and while a lot of modern games are a no-go, there are countless classic titles that would play fine. If I had to buy a new laptop tomorrow, this would honestly be up there as an option, if I were not a gamer or a graphic designer person. For a daily workhorse, this is a great machine, it has just enough ports to see you through, has a pretty spectacular outer shell and a screen that just works. The only reason to consider others is the price, for what you get it is a little high, but it should at least be on your shortlist.

The Score

8.5

Review unit provided by Asus

The Pros

Light, portable and decent power inside, makes for a great little machine

The case being made from Ceraluminum is a treat, as it looks fantastic

The Cons

The ports being mostly on one side feels a little unbalanced

While it can do most daily tasks, it can struggle with more advanced requests like gaming