At CES, I did what you’re not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It’s a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster. But to my surprise, aside from 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 the flagship chips from Qualcomm’s upcoming X2 processor family, sporting 18 cores — six performance and 12 efficiency. In the A16, it’s paired with a massive 48GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and a nice 2880 x 1800 / 120Hz OLED display. There’s no price yet, but Asus rep Anthony Spence tells The Verge it might land around $1,599.99 or $1,699.99 — in the range of a higher-spec 15-inch M4 MacBook Air or an entry-level-ish 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro.
First things first: As a pre-production model, this Zenbook A16 is not ready for benchmark testing. And bugs cropped up quickly. To name a few: Windows Hello face unlocking never worked, and the laptop unexpectedly went to sleep mid-use a few times a day. Thankfully, it woke up and resumed where I left off within seconds every time. These are obviously disconcerting problems, but it’s pre-production hardware running a Canary build of Windows 11 26H1 that’s exclusive to Snapdragon X2 laptops. I certainly felt like that canary sometimes, but I expect the issues should be solved on final hardware and software. (If not, I’ll be yelling about it in an eventual review.)
But despite the bugs, the A16’s performance was very good. It was the only computer I used during the holiday break to prewrite many CES news embargoes, and it was snappy from the start. It 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 that level of multitasking shouldn’t be a big lift for this chip and that much RAM. The bigger test was editing photos in Lightroom Classic, especially using it on the go in Vegas at CES — where I occasionally had to do lightning-fast edits of 50-megapixel RAW images shot on my Sony A1 camera.
I brought the Zenbook with me to CES, but I also brought the M5 MacBook Pro as a fallback. I was ready to carry both, or drop the A16 in favor of the MacBook if needed, but on day one I took a chance and left the MacBook in my hotel room. I brought the Zenbook from my Razer waifu briefing to CES Unveiled, where I mostly shot picturesfor colleagues. The Snapdragon X2 chip was snappy when editing through the 70-ish photos I shot while under that time crunch.
At times, using Adobe Lightroom Classic on the Zenbook felt like the speed I’m used to with Apple’s chips. RAW images were quick to import from the built-in SD card reader — something I wish all laptops had. I could quickly cull through pictures in the Library module, and making quick brightness and color adjustments in the more demanding Develop module was also fast. The only time things slowed was when I took a more heavy-handed approach to color adjustments (because CES lighting is dreadful), 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) worked out great with the A16. But on the following days I shot hundreds more photos. I had a bunch of appointments and briefings, like my chance to photograph the Lenovo Legion Pro rollable gaming laptop concept, and various mini missions to hunt things down on the show floor — like Asus’ Wi-Fi 8 router concept. That’s when it started bogging down a little bit.
Lightroom Classic started leaving me hanging between adjustments and taking whole seconds to load full-res images. But that’s how Lightroom gets sometimes on Windows, and even sometimes on Macs, if you’re trying to work fast and haven’t rebooted in a while to let it clear cache or optimize the catalog.
On my last full day at the show, I was more judicious about closing Lightroom between edit sessions and not leaving unnecessary apps open in the background. The Zenbook went back to feeling like a nimble editing machine. When showing my colleague Sean Hollister photos from my stroll across the Las Vegas Convention Center show floor, I could tell he was surprised with how quickly I was flipping through high-res shots.
I’d still pick a MacBook Pro for high-demand photo editing, but the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme helped this Zenbook A16 feel more MacBook-like than most other Windows laptops I’ve used — especially because the bulk of this was on battery power. Like M-series Macs, Snapdragon X laptops offer the same performance on battery and wall power. Intel and AMD processors typically offer noticeably lower performance on battery power. We’ll have to see if it’s the same story with the upcoming Intel Panther Lake and AMD Gorgon Point chips. Getting equal performance on a charger or off makes a huge difference when you’re editing on the fly, which is part of why I’ve always preferred editing on Mac laptops over Windows.
If this first taste of the Snapdragon X2 processors is an indication, Qualcomm’s new chips should once again impress with performance and battery life — but, if it matters to you, they’ll likely still falter with gaming (they’re like Macs in that way too). Many games remain incompatible, and graphically demanding ones that actually run, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil 4 (2023), are workable but look quite rough.
Despite those shortcomings, I think the Asus Zenbook A16 shows lots of promise for a thin-and-light Windows laptop with good performance. Though, if price estimates hold true, that performance won’t come cheap. I’m excited to see what a final review unit can do, as this buggy pre-production model already got me through the trenches of CES — a tricky gauntlet for any laptop.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge