Asus Zenbook A14 Review — A Cheat Code for Work & Creation?

It’s hard not to slip one of Asus’ Zenbook models out of a laptop sleeve and not be impressed by its slick design. The Taiwanese company has been delivering the goods with its work-and-creation-centric laptops for a while, and the A14 is the latest entry in the range that brings some stellar features and tweaks to what we’ve come to expect from the brand.

Firstly, the Zenbook A14 (UX3407) is one of the lightest laptops on the market, weighing in at just 980g thanks to its all-Ceraluminum chassis. You can grab this thing with two fingers and pull it out of the laptop sleeve with ease (although, we wouldn’t recommend that unless you have fantastic insurance or like to live on the edge). Anyway! It’s extremely light and portable, making this 14-inch laptop feel more like a mini-notebook, despite being a more-than-capable size for any type of work.

The body itself has a matte finish that’s satisfying to the touch, leaves no fingerprints or smudges, and just generally helps with manipulating the laptop around. It’s also pretty hardy, durable, and doesn’t feel as if will explode with the slightest of bumps.

It’s just a generally really great-looking and feeling laptop, which, isn’t the most important aspect of a reliable work tool, admittedly, but is an overlooked element by many brands, who opt for cheaper materials. It’s a simple product philosophy to follow: if it feels good and is easy to use, you will use it more.

Regarding the internals, the A14 features a 14-inch FHD OLED NanoEdge display that delivers vibrant colors and deep contrasts, a Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 Processor, a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU to handle AI tasks, 32GBs of RAM (LPDDR5X), 1TB hard drive, and a decent 3-cell Li-ion battery that can give you some decent hours of activity. We got a full working day out of the laptop doing fairly low-level tasks.

It’s obviously also got all the bells and whistles with an HDMI port, 3 USB ports, and everything you need, but one of the more interesting additions is the inclusion of a dedicated AI button on the keypad. This activates Asus’ Copilot+ integration, which is essentially the company’s own generative AI offering similar to that of ChatGPT or the likes, although a bit more integrated into the application you’re busy with.

Copilot+ can help you do things like edit an image with prompts rather than tinkering around with the tools, summarise a wall of text, help you find specific files on your PC, or translate a video in real time, amongst other things.

Asus leans even further into the AI abilities on the A14 by using the IR camera to offer facial recognition for logging in and out of your laptop, along with a variety of other security and functionality features. It’s all pretty cool and nicely integrated, and having a native, dedicated AI assistant is helpful as opposed to using a suite of other third-party options that undoubtedly complicate and drain your laptop’s RAM.

If you’re looking for a sleek and sophisticated laptop, and love the use of AI to make your job a little easier, the Asus Zenbook A14 is the obvious go-to. It’s got all the modern aesthetic finishings you’d want paired with some solid hardware, with AI tricks injected into the experience without feeling superfluous. It does come with a hefty price-tag of R29,999, but to help someone’s business or creative endeavours to flourish, it’s not that big of a price to pay.