Asus’ big push The idea of reinventing its laptop technology has finally paid off, and the Zenbook S 16 makes the company a serious contender in the mid-range laptop space and beyond.
Perhaps it’s best to start with the most visible improvement: the chassis. Rather than relying on the typical metal or plastic design, 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 composite.
The details are intricate and not entirely transparent, but they essentially bind the two materials together into something that’s theoretically stronger, lighter, and more resistant to wear and corrosion. Ceraluminum is used only on the top lid of the new Zenbook S, but you’ll notice it right away. It looks like plastic, but it has the rigidity of metal, and it’s easy to see how thin and light it allows the display and lid to be.
The laptop is available in two colours: Zumaia grey and Scandinavian white. I received the latter, which is more of a light silvery grey, while the Zumaia option is very dark.
Photography: Christopher Null
The 16-inch display offers ample room for a spacious keyboard, though there’s no number pad, leaving plenty of dead space on either side. The half-height arrow keys are offset, located below the Shift button, making them more comfortable to access than on many other laptops that cram them in between everything else. I did find the keyboard action to be a bit mushy, though. The keyboard backlighting is extremely bright and, frankly, too intense at full power. Lastly, the large touchpad includes Smart Gesture support, which supports three- and four-finger shortcuts that the user can customize. Once you get the hang of them, they can speed up your work a lot.
Under the hood, Asus has equipped the Zenbook S 16 with the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU (paired with a Radeon 880M GPU), 24GB of RAM, and a 1 terabyte solid-state drive. The touchscreen resolution is 2880 x 1800 pixels. Expansion ports are all side-mounted, and include two USB-C connectors that support USB4 (one is required for charging), a USB-A port, HDMI out (full-size), and a full-size SD card reader.
Photography: Christopher Null