Asus Zenbook A16 (2026) review: A genuine MacBook Air contender

Asus has gone big with the 2026 refresh of its Zenbooks, not least by being the first to market with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chipset, basically the most powerful consumer chip Qualcomm offers right now. It's a beast of a laptop under the hood, then, but a lightweight one despite that.

I've had the Zenbook A16 (2026) for a couple of weeks now, and it's impressed me in a fair few ways as I've tested it, albeit with a couple of caveats that are worth exploring. So, how does it stack up against the (Intel-shaped) competition in an increasingly competitive laptop scene? Keep reading to find out.

Price and availability

As mentioned, Asus has got to the market quicker than any other brand when it comes to shipping the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, but that doesn't mean it's free of challenges. The big one is in terms of pricing; the version of the Zenbook A16 that I tested comes in at £2,099.99 in the UK, which is far from small change.

It can be ordered now, having been up for pre-order for a little while, and should ship fairly quickly, although at the time of writing I don't have regional pricing from Asus – so you might want to pump the brakes and check in on what sort of price you're seeing in your region.

Design and specs

The Zenbook A16 is actually something quite new for Asus – it's been making the A14 for a little while, but scaling things up from 14- to 16-inches is a new approach. Of course, it's not news that some people want a bigger laptop display to work with, but it's still interesting that this is where the company is making new strides this year.

That said, this is one of those bigger siblings that really does look an awful lot like its smaller equivalent. The A14 and A16 have incredibly similar designs, but the A16 is just that bit bigger. The most impressive headline numbers here are in its weight and thinness.

The 2026 A16 weighs just 1.2kg, which is extremely impressive for a laptop of this size, and that makes it really, really portable. For context, the recently-launched MacBook Neo is actually slightly heavier, despite being a 13-inch laptop that's got a way smaller display.

A big part of this weight-shaving comes down to the laptop chassis, which is made from what Asus calls Ceraluminum, and it's been used in a fair few of its machines by now. It's a fused version of both ceramic and aluminium that, in all honesty, feels more like soft-touch plastic than either of those materials.

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It does have benefits in terms of scratch-resistance and durability, which is not to be ignored, but I can't help but feel like when it's kitted out with this kind of spec-sheet, it does let the machine down slightly, as it feels a little cheaper in the hand. It also has more flex than the machined metal that Apple favours, for example.

Still, the thinness of the machine brings us back to positive territory. Asus has stuck with the wedge shape that's brought it praise before, and the A16 is 13.8mm at its thinnest point. That makes it a dream to pack in backpacks and bags without feeling like your back is going to suffer too badly.

When closed, the laptop is nice and attractive, with a quite mature "Asus Zenbook" logo on the back of its display. The bottom has copious venting holes for cooling fans, too.

One edge of the laptop holds a USB-A port and an SD card reader, while the other has an HDMI port, two USB-C ports with power delivery, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. If you're wondering where the speakers are, they're on the bottom of the laptop in a stereo arrangement.

Opening the laptop up, you'll be greeted by that massive 16-inch display, and what a doozy it is. This is a beautiful 120Hz OLED panel, at 3K resolution (2880 x 1920) for genuinely pin-sharp details. It offers high dynamic range (HDR), too, and from a design standpoint, the bezels around it are impressively slim.

Above it, there's a webcam, while below there's another subtle Asus logo. That brings us to the keyboard, which is pretty expansive (although its compact version of the enter key is a small annoyance for me).

The amount of key travel is pretty decent, although I don't think the keyboard will win any prizes. The same goes for the very sizeable trackpad, which is mechanical rather than haptic – and has quite a lot of flex to it.

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Then there's the all-star component to consider: the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, a genuine beast of a chipset. That's the reason this laptop features 48GB RAM – it's packaged on the Extreme chip, to improve performance.

The Asus is the only laptop with the X2 Elite Extreme at the time of writing, and while you can spec it with the less powerful (but still mega) X2 Elite, the Extreme version is what the hype's all about.

This means there's no discrete GPU – the Qualcomm chip has an Adreno X2-90 integrated – and positions the laptop as one for enthusiasts or creators. Most people simply will not need either the AI-capable TOPS or the raw processing power that this thing can bring to bear. That makes the A16 a curious one to categorise, but all I can do is test it as I found it.

Performance and battery life

Let's stick with the Snapdragon chip at the heart of this laptop, since it's probably the single most interesting component in the machine. It is, unsurprisingly, an absolute beast.

I tend to leave the benchmarking figures to others on our sister sites, but I've been using the A16 for work tasks for the last two weeks, and nothing I've thrown its way has even remotely made it pause.

I've had dozens of windows open, including more than one with photo-editing tools waiting to be returned to, and multiple 4K YouTube videos at the same time – all of this hasn't made for any lag whatsoever, either when switching programs or using individual ones.

Frankly, much like Apple's Ultra versions of its own silicon, there's really no reason for most people to need the X2 Elite Extreme – it's overkill, in every sense of the word. If you do have a heavy creative workflow, though, this looks like a screamer of a chipset for those uses.

It also has impressive gaming performance at a time when Intel has managed to make big strides. I loaded up Cyberpunk 2077, a game that's been used countless times to see just how far integrated graphics can really go, and found it really rather variable.

The game struggled unless set to the "Low" preset at 1080p, at which point it was very playable – averaging 44fps in the benchmark test and therefore offering fairly decent responsiveness.

Swapping to my other benchmarking game, though, I found much worse news: Doom: The Dark Ages won't even launch as it stands, underlining the fact that Qualcomm's drivers and partnerships are far from universal, and you won't always know if a game will run until you find out it won't.

That's not great at this price, especially given it's a problem Intel's equivalent Lunar Lake chips simply don't have. Qualcomm's claims (like roughly 45fps from Kingdom Come: Deliverance II on Medium settings) are impressive, but they're also not exhaustive.

Still, don't get it twisted – with the majority of games in theory compatible right out of the gate, there's great gaming to be had here. Any asterisk at all is a little sub-optimal for a flagship chip, is all.

Battery life is, however, pretty exemplary from my testing. It has superb standby performance compared to some laptops I've tested, able to sit for a few days without any use and drop only a few percentage points. Don't underestimate how useful that is if you want a laptop that won't get used for hours every day!

The 70Wh battery felt like more than enough for all-day usage in my testing, in short, and got through a workday capably, provided I wasn't doing the above gaming testing throughout. Asus says you can get roughly 21 hours on a charge, and while that probably means with a light load, it still lines up broadly with what I found.

The display, meanwhile, was a star – and that's something I don't want to take for granted. I've used Asus' laptops before, and when they have a Lumina OLED, I tend to be impressed, and that's no different here. Just like on its dedicated gaming machines, this display is just so vibrant and impressively bright, but with the deep blacks that OLED tech unlocks.

While the keyboard isn't best-in-class, nor is the trackpad, this all adds up really nicely in terms of how the Zenbook A16 is to actually use. I found it a bit of a sleeping giant – a laptop with a beastly chip for when I needed it, but also a super straightforward Windows machine when I was doing more typical tasks.

Verdict

In the Zenbook A16, Asus has managed to make what I feel confident in labelling the least cumbersome 16-inch laptop I've ever personally tested – and one of the first that didn't feel inconvenient compared to a 14-inch alternative. That's a bigger testimonial than it sounds, but it was only slightly let down by the Ceraluminum finish that I can't quite vouch for.

Pricing is also an impossible-to-ignore factor, and it might mean that the showstopping Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chipset isn't a smart choice for the vast majority of people – it does bring hugely impressive performance (but spotty gaming coverage).

That makes what feels like a mainstream contender more niche in reality, but some of the step-down versions (and the A14, of course) are likely to be more unqualified winners. As it stands, Asus' 16-inch Zenbook is a sleek beauty – so if you're after Windows laptop in such a size, then the A16 is a surefire high-end option.

Also consider

As I've mentioned a few times in this review already, I think that for the vast majority of users, the new Zenbook A14 from Asus is probably a more sensible choice than the A16. It's super lightweight, cheaper, smaller and more convenient, but can still pack in the standard Snapdragon X2 Elite for oodles of power.

Alternatively, there's the ever-present spectre of the MacBook Air to consider. The latest M5 variant remains an absolute banger, and it'll last for years given how well Apple's chips are ageing. It obviously has gaming limitations of its own, but for a lifestyle laptop, it's hard to beat.