AS YOU SWIPE through this magazine, you’ll often be confronted by bulky amalgamations of metal and whatever the material they make circuit boards out of is. They’re heavy, they have bits that stick out, and they have colored lights and visible cables. They’re PCs meant for rendering polygons or housing large language models—not the sort of thing you can slip in a bag and take with you.
The Asus Zenbook A14 is extremely slippable. It’s remarkably light at just over two pounds, and even though there’s a full-size 14in OLED screen on the front, it feels like it’s smaller, like Apple has re-released its 11in line of MacBook Airs. It’s that market-sector-creating release that the A14 is targeted at. If there’s a Windows machine that can compete with the Air for slimness (the Zenbook is already ahead on weight, as the latest Air weighs 2.7lbs in its 13in form), then it’s this.
Inside, you’ll find a new, low-end variant of the Snapdragon X processor, with eight ARM cores instead of the 10 on the Plus and 12 on the Elite, and an integrated GPU that runs at about half the power. The X1 may be short on cores, but it’s just as feisty as any other Snapdragon we’ve tested, zipping through CPU-bound work. The Adreno GPU it’s attached to is less successful, making it hard to recommend as a laptop for heavy graphics work or gaming (though it might make an excellent streaming device, thanks to its OLED display and full-size HDMI port that you can hook up to a TV without needing an adapter), but that’s not really what this machine is all about.