Asus’ Zenbook S 16 Is the Well-Balanced Windows Laptop You’re Looking for

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.

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