GoKawiilCNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.
8.5 / 10 Score Cnet Score CNET provides expert, unbiased reviews of products and services. When we assign a score, we use a scale of 1-10. Each product we score is evaluated by criteria specific to its category with most assessing pricing, quality, features and performance. Read more on: How we test Asus Zenbook A16 $1,700 at Best Buy Pros Leading application and AI performance
Thin and light, yet has a rigid design
Huge OLED is crisp, smooth and bright
Good sound from six-speaker array Cons Lackluster 3D performance
Meh mechanical touch pad
No room for internal expansion
Beige = boring
Laptop manufacturers have thrown around the term "AI laptop" for the past couple of years with great frequency, hoping to cash in on the buzzword (buzz-acronym?), grab attention and boost sales. According to CNET's laptop survey from last summer, however, AI is way down the list of motivating factors -- only 1 in 10 laptop buyers is choosing a laptop based on its AI capabilities. If you're among this minority, then the Asus Zenbook A16 is the laptop for you. It's not marketing fluff to call the Zenbook A16 an AI laptop -- and a great one, at that. Based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor that has a neural processing unit with 80 trillion operations per second, this laptop offers unrivaled on-device AI performance.
For the other 90% of laptop shoppers who care more about general performance, battery life, screen quality and the size and weight of the system, the Asus Zenbook A16 has a lot going for it in each of those areas, too. It's fast with non-AI tasks, offers good battery life, has a beautiful 3K OLED display and is the lightest 16-inch laptop I've ever tested. (It weighs less than 3 pounds!) And Asus's unique Ceraluminum material allows the laptop to be incredibly thin and light while also extremely rigid.
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