Review: Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024)

Asus’ big push to reinvent its laptop tech has finally come to fruition, and the Zenbook S 16 makes the company a serious contender in the midrange laptop space and beyond.

It’s perhaps best to start with the most visible upgrade: the chassis. Rather than relying on the typical design of metal or plastic, Asus has invented a new material called Ceraluminum, which it says is the result of four years of work to combine aluminum and a type of ceramic into a new compound.

The details are complex and not entirely transparent, but essentially it bonds the two materials into something that, in theory, is stronger, lighter, and more resistant to wear and corrosion. Ceraluminum is used only on the upper lid of the new Zenbook S, but you’ll notice it immediately. It looks like plastic but has the rigidity of metal, and it’s easy to see how thin and light it allows the screen and lid to be.

The laptop is available in two colors: Zumaia gray and Scandinavian white. I received the latter, which is more of a silvery light gray, while the Zumaia option is very dark.

Photograph: Christopher Null

The 16-inch display provides ample room for a spacious keyboard, though there's no numeric keypad, leaving lots of dead space on either side. The half-height arrow keys are offset, placed below the Shift button, making them more convenient to access than those on many other laptops that cram them in among everything else. I did find the keyboard action to be a bit mushy, however. The keyboard backlighting is extremely bright, and frankly too intense at full power. Lastly, the large touchpad includes Smart Gesture support, which supports three-finger and four-finger shortcuts the user can customize. Once you get the hang of them, they can really speed up your work.

Under the hood, Asus has outfitted the Zenbook S 16 with the new 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 resolution is a solid 2,880 x 1,800 pixels. Expansion ports are all side-mounted and include two USB-C connectors supporting USB4 (one is needed for charging), a USB-A port, HDMI output (full-size), and a full-size SD card reader.

Photograph: Christopher Null

As the name suggests, the new Ryzen AI 9 is designed to excel at AI-related tasks—and bring AMD at least within striking distance of the AI capabilities of the Snapdragon X Elite powering many Copilot+ PCs today. The jury’s still out on whether this has been successful, but my synthetic tests of the system didn’t disappoint. On general computing tasks, performance is in line with lower-end Snapdragon X Elite systems and even bested some Intel Core Ultra systems on the PCMark 10 benchmark (which Snapdragon systems can’t run).

The Radeon’s graphics performance is significantly better than Snapdragon systems on most tests, though Intel’s integrated GPU is still slightly faster. None of these options are suitable for serious gaming, but as with all of them, you may be able to get by playing some less aggressive titles on the Zenbook S 16. The good news is that, unlike Snapdragon systems, the Zenbook doesn’t suffer from any compatibility problems.

When it comes to AI-centric tests, the Zenbook did well, turning in respectable scores on both computer vision and Stable Diffusion–based benchmarks, the latter of which I was never able to successfully complete with a Snapdragon system. In real-world testing with Live Captions 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.

Photograph: Christopher Null

The Zenbook’s display is excellent. It’s bright without being blown out, and I didn’t have any complaints about the six-speaker audio system, which won’t fill the room but will work fine in smaller environments.

Perhaps my biggest praise is reserved for the Zenbook S 16’s battery. I scored over 14 hours of run time on this system during a full-screen YouTube video playback test, which blows almost every Intel-based laptop I’ve seen out of the water and even bested Asus’ own Snapdragon-based Vivobook S 15 by an hour. Never mind the new age of AI we’re entering, what about this new era of laptop longevity?

At 3.4 pounds and 19 millimeters thick, the system is light and svelte—though not record-breaking on either dimension—and the $1,400 price is on target given the overall performance level provided. If AMD can continue raising the bar on performance without sacrificing battery life, a system like this may be a winning option for users looking for a well-balanced best of all worlds—and Asus seems poised to deliver it.