Asus Zenbook S 16: MacBook slayer? — The new Asus Zenbook S 16

We don’t often look at new gadgets – smartphones, computers, tablets – at TechCentral, mainly because by the time we get to see new gear in South Africa, the US press has already covered most of what there is to say.

But when Asus sent over one of its new laptops – the Zenbook S 16 (model: UM5606) with OLED screen and high-end AMD AI processor – we made an exception. Why? The Zenbook S 16 is one of the first AI-powered laptops to be launched in South Africa, and it therefore provides a good indication of what’s to come from other manufacturers, and, indeed, whether AI PCs are all they are cracked up to be.

Although the Zenbook S 16 doesn’t get Microsoft’s “Copilot+ PC” branding – that appears to be reserved for now for devices running Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon Elite X chips – the machine appears to be as capable as ARM-based designs at on-device AI processing.

There are three striking things about the S 16:

Its beefy innards: An AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX CPU paired with a Radeon 890M GPU, 2TB of fast SSD storage and a generous 32GB of RAM. It also supports Wi-Fi 7 (not that this wireless networking standard is widely available yet);
A stunning OLED touchscreen display: The screen’s resolution is an excellent 2 880×1 800 pixels and, because it’s OLED, it looks gorgeous – zero backlit LCD bleed here. The 120Hz refresh rate – uncommon in laptops – helps, too; and
The unique material used in the laptop’s shell: Called Ceraluminum (it should probably be Ceraluminium for those who don’t speak American), it looks incredible. Our review model came in “Scandinavian white”, but there’s also a “Zumaia grey” option – where do they get these names?! The screen is razor thin but still feels durable.

There are the usual connectivity options you’d expect in a laptop of this class: the left side has a 3.5mm audio combo jack, two USB-C (USB 4) ports and an HDMI 2.1 port; the right side has a USB-A (USB 3.2) port and a full-sized SD card reader (yay!).

The Harman Kardon-certified speaker is also a revelation. With a large speaker grille above the keyboard, the audio produced by this laptop is very good, especially the stereophonics, though it’s not quite as good as you get from Apple’s high-end MacBook Pro models. It does, however, support Dolby Atmos and two-way AI noise cancellation technology. It’s very good for a package as thin and light as this — despite its all-metal chassis, it weighs just 1.5kg and is 1.1cm thick.

So, what’s it like to use? Thanks to the enormous trackpad – matching the size of the trackpads found on Apple’s MacBook line-up – it feels every bit a modern high-end laptop. It supports three- and four-finger gestures, too, and these are fully user customisable. The machine handles most tasks thrown at it with aplomb, with even complex image adjustments in Photoshop completing in no time at all.

The keyboard is spacious, too, and the keys are soft – perhaps slightly too soft – to the touch, but there’s no doubt this is a comfortable typing experience. You know when you have this machine on your lap that you’re using a premium device. The backlight is too bright even for office work, though – luckily, this can be adjusted.

The silicon powering the S 16 is excellent, and shows how the x86 world (well, AMD) has made significant strides in recent years in catching up to Apple Silicon. Based on AMD’s Zen 5 architecture, the 12-core processor offers up to 24 threads for enhanced multitasking performance. The AMD chip sips power in normal use, delivering exceptional battery life for web browsing, e-mail and document editing – and the grunt is there when it’s needed.

AI workloads

Tests by US publications show the Ryzen AI 9 chip with AMD XDNA neural processing unit (NPU) capable of 50 Tops (50 trillion operations per second) is more than capable of on-device AI tasks. Wired, for example, noted that the Zenbook earned “respectable scores” on both computer vision and Stable Diffusion benchmarks, the latter of which Wired’s reviewer was never able to complete successfully on a Snapdragon system.

“In real-world testing with Live Caption and Image Creator, my experience was generally acceptable. Throughout all this work, the laptop remained reasonably cool and very quiet: the fan was barely audible, even under heavy load. Based on my test results and comparing them to various Snapdragon machines, it seems like this machine should qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC designation,” wrote reviewer Christopher Null.

With excellent battery life that appears to match the best Apple has to offer in 2024 – the machine easily gets more than 12 or even 14 hours of average use before it needs to be plugged in – this is one of the best Windows PCs you can buy in the price category.

In short, Asus has delivered a winner. Will it win over the Mac faithful? Probably not. But for Windows users this is a great machine that comes very close to matching the best the fruity company from Cupertino has to offer and at a very competitive price point. If you’re in the market for a high-end Windows laptop that isn’t insanely expensive, you should check it out.