ASUS Zenbook A14 (UX3407) review: Don’t underestimate the power of the light side

For years and years, Windows laptops manufacturers looked to Apple and tried their best to copy what Apple produced.

Some nailed the aesthetic, but until the arrival of Copilot+ laptops last year, nobody was able to match Apple’s battery performance.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 is probably the sleekest Windows laptop I have ever used. It’s much, much lighter than the MacBook Air (980 grams vs 1.24 kg), offers exceptional battery life and has a gorgeous screen.

From a hardware perspective, it’s got almost everything you might want.

What is the Zenbook A14 offering?

The Zenbook A14 is the latest CoPilot+ laptop from ASUS, which uses the ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite chipset to deliver exceptional battery life.

The particular model I tested had the Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 Processor (42 MB Cache, up to 3.4GHz, 12 cores, 12 Threads) with a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU capable of delivering up to 45TOPS.

(There is a cheaper version, the UX3407QA, but for the purposes of this review I’m just going to talk about the UX3407RA I reviewed).

It had a Qualcomm Adreno GPU inside as well, which all adds up to a PC designed for portability and general use rather than intense gaming sessions.

The display is a 14-inch 1920 × 1200 OLED panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 60Hz refresh rate. It’s not the brightest screen at just 600 nits peak brightness, but the colour reproduction and detail is great.

My test unit had a 1 TB SSD, and 32 GB of RAM, though there’s also a 16 GB version.

On the battery front, the Zenbook A14 has a 70 WHrs battery, and offers a USB-A, HDMI 2.1, 3.55 headphone jack and two USB-C ports. The laptop supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity.

The keyboard and trackpad are comfortable and easy to use, with

What does the Zenbook A14 do well?

The first thing you notice when you take the Zenbook A14 out of its box is how light it is. Honestly, it’s almost offensive that Asus has managed to deliver a 14-inch laptop that weighs just 980 grams. It feels like an affront to the laws of physics.

The key to this lightweight design is in the material. Asus calls it “Ceraluminum”, which is too offensive a word to try to pronounce out loud, but ultimately offers a strong body resistant to scratches and shocks from being dropped, while also being smudge-free.

It feels a little plasticky in the hand at first, but you do get used to it. And given just how light the Zenbook A14 is, it’s well worth that momentary discomfort.

But the lightweight nature of the laptop is surpassed by the Zenbook’s battery life. The shift to Snapdragon processors for CoPilot+ laptops finally gave Windows machines the all-day battery Apple had been offering with its MacBooks.

The Zenbook A14’s battery is exceptional. ASUS claims 32 hours of life while running Full-HD video, which is an extraordinary number.

From my experience, the Zenbook gave me a couple of days of battery using it for general work things like email, browsing the web and writing up reviews. But it wasn’t as good when I tried pushing it a bit harder, which makes sense, right?

On the performance front, the Zenbook A14 does a perfectly reasonable job at most work tasks. But just don’t expect too much from it for things like gaming. Even if you can overcome the software compatibility issues (more on that in a bit), it’s just not designed to let you play high-performance games.

Minesweeper? Fine. But Call of Duty? Forget about it.

Here’s how it compares in GeekBench 6 benchmarks against other laptops we’ve tested:

What could the Zenbook A14 improve?

There’s a big software compatibility issue with the Snapdragon-powered CoPilot+ PCs. While you can obviously use Microsoft Office and web browsers, there’s a lot of Windows software that doesn’t play well with the CoPilot+ machines.

Some of those are games, obviously, but there’s other, more practical software as well. So before you put down your credit card on this laptop, make sure it will run all the programs you need it to.

The included charger is a 90W beast, which is designed to help you get the Zenbook powered back up. But given the lightweight, sleek design of the laptop, the black bulk of the charger feels out of place.

For a start, it’s almost half the weight of the laptop on its own. Why spend so much time creating an exceptionally lightweight laptop only to leave the charger a bulky mess?

I’m not a fan of the bulky brick in the middle of a charging cable design, either. Surely, Asus can deliver a way to put all the components wither into the plug (like Apple), or into the laptop?

Verdict

The arrival of CoPilot+ laptops powered by Snapdragon was a big shot in the arm for Windows machines. It allowed manufacturers to really push the limits of design to create lightweight models like the Zenbook A14.

The Zenbook A14 is sleek, comfortable to type on and has a gorgeous screen. It’s powerful enough for everyday tasks as well.

But there are a lot of app compatibility issues, so you should definitely make sure you can survive with limited apps before you spend your money.

For me, as much as I like the laptop itself, I could never buy one. Microsoft’s aggressive focus on integrating AI into the operating system, whether you like it or not, means I’ll probably never buy a Windows machine, anyway.

Behind the scenes

Compare the Zenbook A14 UX3407QA and the UX3407RA (tested) specs

ASUS Zenbook A14 vs Microsoft Surface Laptop 13.8-inch

If you’re curious how the Zenbook stacks up against Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 13.8-inch model, here’s what it looks like:

Tips and tricks

• Disable CoPilot: If, like me, you hate the idea of Microsoft pushing a crappy AI into your laptop, you can supposedly disable it through the Terminal. The instructions are on the Windows forum, but do so at your own risk.
• If you’re looking for a centralised list of apps that will work on ARM-based CoPilot+ PCs, this website appears to be fairly comprehensive. I can’t speak to its accuracy, though.

Additional thoughts

• It took me an hour to set up this laptop. A full hour. That’s not time I spent testing it – it’s the time I took waiting for the laptop to download updates and let me sign in to be able to use it. I find this approach from Microsoft offensive. If someone has just spent $2,500 on a product, they should be able to use it straight away. Download security updates in the background. Launch in safe mode. Whatever it is, don’t force someone to sit through 60 minutes of loading screens before they can use a product they bought.
• During the setup, I was prompted to use Recall, Microsoft’s offensive privacy-risk software. This review doesn’t really talk about that because there is no way in hell I would ever use it.
• While I appreciate that Recall is optional, that’s not the same situation with CoPilot. Microsoft’s decision to force AI into its core offering means that no matter how good this laptop (or any other laptop) is, I won’t consider buying it. It’s made infinitely worse by the never-ending series of popups encouraging me to use CoPilot.

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