Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) Review: A Well-Balanced Windows Laptop

Asus’ large push to reinvent its laptop tech has yet travel to fruition, and the Zenbook S 16 makes the institution a superior contender successful the midrange laptop space and beyond.

It’s possibly champion to commencement with the astir disposable upgrade: the chassis. Rather than relying connected the emblematic plan of metallic oregon plastic, Asus has invented a caller worldly called Ceraluminum, which it says is the effect of 4 years of enactment to harvester aluminum and a benignant of ceramic into a caller compound.

The details are analyzable and not wholly transparent, but fundamentally it bonds the 2 materials into thing that, successful theory, is stronger, lighter, and much resistant to deterioration and corrosion. Ceraluminum is utilized lone connected the precocious lid of the caller Zenbook S, but you’ll announcement it immediately. It looks similar integrative but has the rigidity of metal, and it’s casual to spot however bladed and airy it allows the surface and lid to be.

The laptop is disposable successful 2 colors: Zumaia grey and Scandinavian white. I received the latter, which is much of a silvery airy gray, portion the Zumaia enactment is precise dark.

The 16-inch show provides ample country for a spacious keyboard, though there's nary numeric keypad, leaving tons of dormant abstraction connected either side. The half-height arrow keys are offset, placed beneath the Shift button, making them much convenient to entree than those connected galore different laptops that cram them successful among everything else. I did find the keyboard enactment to beryllium a spot mushy, however. The keyboard backlighting is highly bright, and frankly excessively aggravated astatine afloat power. Lastly, the ample touchpad includes Smart Gesture support, which supports three-finger and four-finger shortcuts the idiosyncratic tin customize. Once you get the bent of them, they tin truly velocity up your work.

Under the hood, Asus has outfitted the Zenbook S 16 with the caller AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU (paired with a Radeon 880M GPU), 24 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. The touchscreen’s solution is simply a coagulated 2,880 x 1,800 pixels. Expansion ports are each side-mounted and see 2 USB-C connectors supporting USB4 (one is needed for charging), a USB-A port, HDMI output (full-size), and a full-size SD paper reader.