A surprise debut at last year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took home our "Best Laptop of CES 2025" award, and it ended up being one of our favorite (and most written about) device of the entire year.
• Start: Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026
• End: Friday, Jan. 9, 2026
• Where: Las Vegas, Nevada
• More info: Windows Central @ CES
I'm talking, of course, about ASUS' incredible Zenbook A14, which helped set the bar for thin-and-light Windows laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon. I loved the ASUS Zenbook A14 (2025) in my 4.5/5-star review, and now the laptop is being refreshed with a whole lot more power at CES 2026.
The latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 silicon is great, but the laptop itself isn't changing much. What's even more exciting is the new 16-inch version of this sleek device, which is arriving as one of the first to use Qualcomm's most powerful laptop chipset ever. I'm excited for this one.
The OG but better, and a new big sibling
First, let's get the simple stuff out of the way: ASUS didn't shake up the Zenbook A14 for 2026, which isn't all that surprising. The only major change is inside, where you can now equip the Zenbook A14 with the latest Snapdragon X2 silicon, including up to an 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite with an insane 80 TOPS NPU.
That means a massive increase in overall performance, especially for gaming and AI workloads. That's great, if not super exciting. I wish ASUS had also updated the 14-inch OLED display to be 120Hz instead of a measly 60Hz. That'll definitely hurt it in my final review.
The real star of the show is the new arrival to the family, though, and that's the ASUS Zenbook A16. It takes the same beautiful design, but scales it up to a 16-inch display with boosted firepower.
The Zenbook A14 is even better now, but the A16 is the real star of the show this year.
The new Zenbook A16 is among the very first laptops equipped with the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme SoC, an 18-core monster with a 5.0GHz boost, Qualcomm's most powerful GPU yet, and massively increased memory bandwidth compared to other Snapdragon X2 chips.
The Zenbook A16 also gets up to 48GB of super-fast LPDDR5X memory, an SD card slot, and a gorgeous 2.8K OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and up to 1,100 nits of brightness with HDR content. All of that, and it's still among the lightest 16-inch laptops, weighing less than 3lbs (or around 1.2kg).
I definitely tend to prefer more compact, 14-inch laptops, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't more interested in the 16-inch half of this Zenbook duo. This could end up being one of the best Windows laptops of the year, if the new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme lives up to the hype.
What do you think about the new ASUS Zenbook A16? Could it be your next laptop? Let us know in the comments below!
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