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Key takeaways
- Asus announced the Zenbook A16 at CES 2026, a follow-up to last year's 14-inch.
- The Zenbook A16 weighs 2.6 pounds and comes with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme CPU.
- It's rounded out with a vivid OLED display, solid build, and marathon battery life.
Asus' Zenbook A14 was one of my favorite laptops of 2025, earning our Editors' Choice award and raising the bar for thin and light laptops with banger displays and marathon battery life.
Not content to rest on the success of the A14, Asus just announced a 16-inch expansion of the lineup -- the Zenbook A16 -- following up with what made the A14 great, but with Qualcomm's latest and greatest processor, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.
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Armed with a 16-inch, 3K OLED at 120Hz and 1,100 nits of peak brightness, the Zenbook A16 presents a gorgeous edge-to-edge display, spacious keyboard, massive trackpad, and attractive construction in Asus' proprietary Ceraluminum material. It's a gorgeous laptop that picks up where the A14 left off with a more substantial presence and a bump up in hardware.
The key principles are the same, though, and that includes an all-day battery. With the A16's 70Wh cell, Asus claims more than 21 hours of offline video playback and over 12 hours of web browsing on a single charge. With better overall power efficiency in the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, I expect some impressive battery life.
The Zenbook A16 also stands out as the only device to launch with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, featuring 80 NPU TOPS and a 5GHz clock speed, and 228GB/s memory bandwidth. It's paired with up to 48GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 2 TB of local storage.
The X2 Elite Extreme system-in-package features an 18-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU and Adreno X2 GPU, which Asus says is 9% faster in rendering 4K video than the Apple M5 chip, enabling creative graphics tasks on the A16's vivid OLED panel.
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As we saw last year, these chips run cool and quiet, with the A16 featuring two fans and a dual heat pipe in the chassis for whisper-quiet operation, even under a heavy load. It's impressive, considering the A16 is light: just 2.6 pounds (1.2 kg) -- a weight that's closer to most 14-inch laptops.
You've got a full range of ports here, including two USB 4 Type-C ports, an HDMI, USB-A, standard SD card reader, and an audio jack, along with support for Wi-Fi 7 for real-world practicality, including the ability to connect to up to three external monitors via either the HDMI port or the USB-C ports.
I was also glad to see the A16 carry over many of the thoughtful design elements of the A14, including the hinge, which Asus says is built around the principle of a torsion spring, allowing for smooth, one-handed opens while reducing screen wobble.
The Zenbook A14 got its fair share of upgrades this year as well. It was refreshed with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 processor for better performance and power efficiency, while retaining the same design and gorgeous Lumina OLED display.
Also: The new Asus ZenBook A14 gets a powerful upgrade - and fixes my biggest gripe
The Zenbook A16 will be available in two configurations: one with the aforementioned Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme CPU and a more entry-level configuration with the Snapdragon X chip, up to 32GB of RAM, and a toned-down OLED display at 60Hz and 2K resolution.
Asus has not yet provided pricing, but the Zenbook A16 will be available in Q1 of 2026.
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