Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED reviewed: slim and sturdy

Not every laptop needs to look like the MacBook Air. Armed with great specs, great design, and a great screen, the Zenbook S 14 OLED could be as close to greatness as new laptops get.

Design

It’s been a few years since we checked out a Zenbook, but not much had changed in the design department.

Another of the many thin and light portable PCs found about the place, the Asus take on the category aims at getting the size down without a whole lot of extra design flourishes.

There’s a flat edge on each of the left and right sides coming down at a sharper angle measuring 1.1cm. Look closer and you’ll see the tray comes up with a lip, giving the Zenbook both an edge and a softness that makes it unlike anything else out there.

Angles are clearly the Zenbook’s friend, something Asus almost talks up with a lid pattern that no one else tries: lines adorning the top at various angles in a way no one will think your laptop is a competitor’s. This is certainly no MacBook Air clone, that’s for sure.

The materials holding it together still manage to be quite premium, using a combination of ceramic and aluminium that happens to be quite light, too. You can pick up the whole thing in a 1.2kg body, and it’ll barely make a dent in your backpack.

Features

Inside, there’s a decent spec list thanks to there being only one offering in Australia: the premium one.

You’ll find a second-gen Intel Core Ultra 7 processor matched with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage, Windows 11 Home, and even a MIL-STD-810H military spec’d design.

There’s your usual assortment of wireless features, covering 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, while the wired is covered using a two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-A rectangular port, one HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5mm headset jack.

Windows Hello uses an infrared camera with a Full HD web cam to help you log in to the system, and there are four speakers, as well.

Display

Beyond the Core Ultra 7 hardware, you’ll find another dose of something impressive in the screen with a 3K OLED display.

For those playing along at home, it’s a lovely 14 inch display sporting those lab-grown pixels that when switched off display black perfectly simply because they’re off. Those deep blacks lend themselves well to the display, which deliver beautiful colours in photos and movies, but also looks pretty nice with Windows productivity work, as well.

It’s also relatively quick, boasting a 120Hz refresh rate, plus a “3K” resolution not far from the 3000 in the name running 2800×1800. The screen also boasts support for 100 percent of the P3 colour gamut, making for both a lovely and relatively accurate (at least in a colour-metric way) display, something not every laptop will grant.

The screen should be an important part of any laptop owner’s experience, and in the case of the Zenbook S 14, it definitely is. This is a sexy screen. It even includes touch for all that’s worth (handy, but the screen doesn’t fold back, so you probably won’t use it in immense amounts).

In-use

Carrying the Zenbook S 14 is easy enough thanks to its thin and light design, but the keyboard and mouse both feel like they could be slightly better, or at the very least tweaked and improved.

There’s definite travel and you can easily get through several keystrokes with ease, but the keyboard feels plasticky at times and just needs to be that little bit better for our fingers.

But while the keyboard is usable, the trackpad is more frustrating at times. Another large rectangle of glass just like every other laptop out in the world, the Asus Zenbook S 14 feels difficult to push and use at times. It requires such a firm click that you’ll be pushing hard in all the right places, and about 50 percent of the time, the click will go through to the keeper.

It’s just not a great tactile experience, though it is one you can get used to. Consider touching to press as opposed to clicking, and steer clear from trying to press near the bottom of the trackpad, which is where we found the Zenbook S 14 struggles with clicks most of all.

You will find a degree of AI onboard here, something you can thank Windows Copilot+ for, meaning there’s some AI text rewriting, real-tine subtitles, and noise cleanup in video conferencing, too. There isn’t a heap of uses for AI just yet in Windows, but it will grow in time.

However, you can find Windows Hello’s infrared facial login to make life easier, with your face quickly getting you into Windows all too easily. Plus there’s a decent smattering of ports, more so than most thin and light laptops aim for.

With both Thunderbolt 4 and Type C USB (two of them) accompanying a standard Type A USB and an HDMI 2.1 port, you basically have three USB plus HDMI, as well as a 3.5mm headset jack. It is surprisingly more than most ultralights receive.

Performance

One area that does fare decently is performance, which sees the second-gen Core Ultra above the performance of the first generation in 2023’s Zenbook S 13, but isn’t quite where the first-generation was in either the Acer or Dell models we looked at last year.

In real-world terms, the Zenbook S 14 delivers acceptable performance for most things, and we spied virtually no lag as we used the computer for work purposes, writing and the like.

However, the benchmarks show the Asus laptop with a second-gen Core Ultra chip doesn’t exactly have a lead over the first-ten models, so don’t expect major leaps in performance.

There are minor changes to the speed, but it’s not a huge jump, and that’s much the same with regards to the battery.

Battery

On a technical level, Asus quotes the battery for the Zenbook S 14 OLED as being able to get up to 27 hours, which is impressive if true. The problem is that “27 hours” is really dependent on other factors, such as simply watching a Full HD video at a specific brightness level and not connected to any WiFi access point, meaning no internet access.

In short, if you’ve brought all your videos with you or cached a bunch in an app, and you’re sitting on a flight with wired headphones connected, you should theoretically find the Zenbook is able to handle the whole trip on battery alone, provided that’s all you’re doing.

However, since you’ll be connected to WiFi and the internet for most of what you use a laptop for, you can probably bet that the 27 hours being touted isn’t accurate.

From our tests, we found a battery life of between 6 and 12 hours was more likely, which isn’t terrible, but isn’t at all like the 27 hours being quoted.

While a battery life closer to 12 hours does at least mean “all day” for most workers, Asus has optimised things in a way where even if you don’t hit the full extent of your battery, you’ll at least be able to keep it going without a charge for a few days. Leave the Zenbook S 14 over the weekend with a good 40 percent charge, and you’ll be able to come back to it Monday with only a few percent lost in between. It means the laptop holds its own, and that’s a good thing.

Charging the laptop is also easy enough thanks to the support for Thunderbolt and Type C USB. Grabbing a spare USB charger is easy enough these days, and we always keep a hefty 200W charger on our desk for the variety of things that need it.

Value

Premium in just about every way, the Asus Zenbook S 14 also carries a hefty price tag, fetching $3399 in Australia. That is definitely not inexpensive, though given you’re getting premium performance in a pint-size design, we’re also not totally surprised.

That said, the price point is more or less spot on where other thin and light laptops of this breed are, with only a little more tacked onto the top for good measure.

Premium portable PCs tend to carry a high price, and the Asus Zenbook S 14 is no different in this regard. Competition from the likes of Dell also carries a similarly steep price, and so while $3400 seems like it’s a touch expensive, these days it’s also fairly normal.

Is the Zenbook S 14 expensive? A little. But is it worth it comparatively? You bet.

What needs work?

Despite that, there are still things we’d tweak, particularly the trackpad which is one of the weaker parts of the package.

It’s not that it’s an awful touchpad, but rather that it doesn’t match the rest of the premium package.

Like the Zenbook S 13 from a few years ago, it’s a weak spot and a blemish on an otherwise excellent package, similar to the slightly plasticky keyboard that’s a little better this time around, even if its trackpad is still lacking. The trackpad is bigger, sure, but the experience still isn’t great.

One of the positive changes is that you get gestures for audio and video control, but the downside is that these are hardly common or easy to recall. In fact, you may end up accidentally changing brightness while you were trying to scroll, something you’ll pick up on the next time you try doing it, and that’s because the gestures aren’t a recreation of anything remarkably familiar.

Whether that’s a problem of Windows being Windows or mouse gestures being more of a Mac thing, the end result means gestures for no reason on a trackpad that feels like it could be better in general beyond having gestures.

The other notably problem is the battery life, which is better than say 6 to 10 hours, but barely hits half the 27 hours Asus talks up. It doesn’t really even hit half, unless you do happen to have all your videos with you and plan to sit there mid-flight with no WiFi watching them.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

Premium and pricey, the Zenbook S 14 OLED offers much of what we turn to laptops to deliver. Slim and sturdy and sexy and ceramic, the military spec’d style makes for a laptop built to survive with you.

There are ways Asus could clearly improve things, such as better specs and a price that seems a little on the high side.

But if what you’re after is a premium PC that doesn’t resemble much else and yet packs in much of the quality, the Asus Zenbook S 14 is easily worth a look.