Early hands-on impressions: Asus Zenbook A16 with Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme

At CES, you do what you do no What I’m supposed to do: I brought a laptop into pre-production to use as my mainstay during a hectic event. the Gun not installed Meaning is the new arm-based Asus ZenBook A16. It’s a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than the 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Walking into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop powered by an unreleased processor seems like a recipe for disaster. But to my surprise, aside from the pre-production hardware glitches, I came away impressed.

The Zenbook A16 that Asus sent me for early testing has a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-94-100 chip. It’s one of Key chips From the upcoming Qualcomm Processor x2 Family, containing 18 cores – six performance and 12 efficiency. On the A16, it’s paired with a massive 48GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and a gorgeous OLED display with a resolution of 2880 x 1800/120Hz. There’s no price yet, but Asus representative Anthony Spence says Edge It may go for around $1,599.99 or $1,699.99 – in the higher spec range MacBook Air M4 15-inch Or entry level-ish MacBook Pro M5 14-inch.

First things first: As a pre-production model, the Zenbook A16 isn’t ready for benchmark testing. Errors appeared quickly. To name a few: Windows Hello face unlock never worked, and the laptop unexpectedly went into sleep mode during use several times a day. Fortunately, it woke up and picked up where I left off within seconds each time. These are obviously confusing issues, but these are pre-production devices running on the Canary version of Windows 11 26H1 this Exclusively for Snapdragon X2 laptops. I definitely felt like that canary at times, but I expect the issues will be resolved on the eventual hardware and software. (If not, I’ll scream about it in the final review.)

But despite the bugs, the A16 performed very well. It was the only computer I used while on vacation to write a lot of lockdown news at CES, and it was fast from the start. I had no problem handling my usual workload of dozens of Google Chrome tabs across two or three virtual desktops, writing in Google Docs and WordPress, messaging in Slack and Signal, and simultaneously listening to music in Spotify. But this level of multitasking shouldn’t be a big push for this chip and a lot of RAM. The biggest test was editing photos with Lightroom Classic, especially using it while out and about in Vegas at CES — where I sometimes had to make very quick edits to 50-megapixel RAW images taken with my Sony A1.

I brought the Zenbook with me to CES, but I also brought an M5 MacBook Pro as an alternative. I was willing to carry both, or drop the A16 in favor of a MacBook if necessary, but on day one I took a chance and left the MacBook in my hotel room. I brought my Zenbook from home Razer and Evo briefing For the unveiling at CES, where I was mostly Shot picturesFor colleagues. The Snapdragon X2 chip was fast when editing through the 70 photos I took during that time period.

At times, using Adobe Lightroom Classic on the Zenbook was almost as fast as what I’m used to with Apple’s chips. RAW images were quickly imported from the built-in SD card reader — something I wish all laptops had. I could quickly sort images in the Library module, and making quick adjustments to brightness and color in the more demanding Develop module was quick, too. The only time things slowed down was when I took a more aggressive approach to color adjustments (because the CES lighting is terrible), and especially when I used Lightroom’s masking tool with automatic subject detection.

So my first day at CES (which was two days before the show officially started) was great with the A16. But in the following days she was fired favorable More photos. I had a bunch of appointments and briefings, like my opportunity to photograph Lenovo Legion Pro gaming laptop conceptand various mini-missions to hunt down objects in the showroom – e.g Asus Wi-Fi 8 router concept. That’s when he started to stumble a little.

Lightroom Classic started leaving me hanging between edits and took seconds to load full-resolution images. But that’s how Lightroom sometimes works on Windows, and even sometimes on Macs, if you’re trying to work quickly and haven’t restarted in a while to let it clear the cache or optimize the catalog.

On my last full day at the gallery, I was more judicious about closing Lightroom between editing sessions and not leaving unnecessary apps open in the background. The Zenbook is back to feeling like a smart editing machine. When shown photos of my colleague Sean Hollister from My walk through the exhibit hall of the Las Vegas Convention CenterI could tell he was amazed at how quickly I was going through the high-resolution footage.

I’d still choose the MacBook Pro for high-demand photo editing, but the Snapdragon Like the M-series Macs, Snapdragon X laptops offer the same performance in terms of battery and wall power. Intel and AMD processors typically offer significantly lower performance in terms of battery power. We’ll have to see if it’s the same story with the upcoming Intel Panther Lake and AMD Gorgon Point chips. Having equal performance when using the charger on or off makes a big difference when editing on the go, which is part of the reason I’ve always preferred editing on Mac laptops over Windows.

If this first taste of Snapdragon Many games remain incompatible, and the ones that do run require graphics, e.g Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil 4 (2023), is workable but seems very difficult.

Despite these drawbacks, I think the Asus Zenbook A16 shows a lot of promise for a thin and light Windows laptop with good performance. However, if price estimates are correct, this performance will not come cheap. I’m excited to see what the final review unit can do, as a buggy pre-production model has already helped me get through the trenches of CES — a tough challenge for any laptop.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge