Asus Zenbook A16 (2026) Review: Savor the Power, Ignore the Beige

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7/10

Open rating explainerInformationWIREDBreathtaking performance. Light and amply portable. Outstanding OLED display. Better compatibility than before.TIREDDated styling, with a generally cheap feel. Battery life has taken a huge hit. Keyboard is very weak. Touchpad is too large for comfortable use.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme—debuting in the new Asus Zenbook A16—is giving the company's Snapdragon X laptop chips a much-needed kick in the pants, with a big focus on further boosting performance in both general applications and graphics. Qualcomm has also been hard at work improving compatibility across applications, with more and more apps now running natively on the platform instead of via emulation. To achieve all this, however, battery life had to take a hit.

The upshot is that Qualcomm is no longer positioning Snapdragon X as a budget alternative to Intel and AMD but rather as a superior chip all around, calling the X2 Elite Extreme series “the fastest, most powerful and efficient processors for Windows PCs,” like the Zenbook A16—faster than most Apple machines, too.

Both Elite and Extreme

Photograph: Chris Null

The first-generation Snapdragon X has been the little chip that could since its release in 2024. The selling point is its unique ARM design, delivering performance that exceeds expectations relative to the price. Not only that, but Snapdragon systems were the first to be certified by Microsoft to provide sufficient horsepower to complete AI tasks effectively. And battery life is stellar, too.

So, what's not to like? Well, early compatibility problems slowed the initial uptake of Snapdragon X, and the CPU’s integrated graphics performance turned out to be pretty terrible. And to date, powerful onboard AI features just haven’t proven important, as most AI workloads are still being done in the cloud. With the second-generation X2, Qualcomm set out to deliver on the original promise of faster performance.

But what exactly does “faster” mean? As with most claims in the PC computing space, it’s all about the benchmarks. On the Zenbook A16, the tests I ran indeed showcased exemplary performance from the X2 Elite Extreme, in some of the most widely used benchmarking tools, namely Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024. (I don’t have enough competitive Cinebench 2026 results to make wide comparisons yet on that benchmark.)

The performance boost on Geekbench is particularly striking, with the A16 scoring 50 to 100 percent faster than competing systems from AMD and Intel. It’s even faster than the Apple MacBook M4 Pro, the last Mac for which I have comparable benchmark scores. However, that Mac did beat the Asus on the Cinebench benchmark, but not by much, and the Asus now stands solidly in second place in my testing archive.

Graphics performance is much better than in previous generations of Snapdragon X chips, with frame rates quadrupling on average, depending on the test. That’s a dramatic and much-needed improvement for the CPU, and while no one will accuse the A16 of being a gaming rig, it does at least make for a workable experience with less taxing games and graphics-heavy workloads.

Beige Belies Performance

Photograph: Chris Null

I’m happy enough with how the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme performs to sign off on its performance claims, but there’s a lot more to the Zenbook A16 than its CPU.

Under the hood, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E94100 CPU is complemented by 48 GB of RAM and a 1-TB SSD. The 16-inch touchscreen offers a solid resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels, and it’s incredibly bright. A weight of 2.9 pounds is impressive (if not unheard of) for the 16-inch category, and at 0.65 inches (at its thickest), it has a svelte, quite portable carrying experience. Asus’s Ceraluminum technology (now with added magnesium) is used in the machine’s lid, base, and keyboard frame. That helps keep it thin and light, though when adjusted or touched, the screen shimmied more than I expected.

The A16 is admittedly uninspiring to look at and work with, not just because the new Ceraluminum gives it a decidedly plasticky appearance, but also because the choice of “Zabriskie Beige” as the sole color option. It's subjective, but I don’t think I’ve ever longed for a black chassis more.

Port selection is fine, with two USB-C ports supporting USB 4, a USB-A port, a full-size HDMI jack, and an SD card reader. One of the USB-C ports is needed for charging via the included 130-watt adapter, which is impressively tiny. The system will charge more slowly via lower-wattage adapters, but I didn’t clock any performance slowdowns when connected to one.

Photograph: Chris Null

The keyboard isn’t a strong point on the A16; the keys barely depress when struck, making touch-typing unenjoyable. Compounding input issues, the enormous touchpad consumes seemingly half the palm rest. It is simply too large for my taste, and I had to awkwardly angle my hands to either side to type without my palms inadvertently hitting the trackpad.

The OLED screen, on the other hand, is quite lovely—extremely bright and colorful, with responsive touch controls. (However, note the aforementioned comment about a modest bounciness when tapped.) The Dolby Atmos-compatible speakers have plenty of power, and they’re especially capable of drowning out the fan when it kicks in. I was happy to see that the A16 stays reasonably cool even under heavy load, and that the fan begins to spin at a restrained whirr only after running sustained, high-stress workloads for 10 to 15 minutes. The thermal upgrades on the A16 (which channels cool air through the keyboard) appear to have been a dramatic success.

Power at a Price

Photograph: Chris Null

What has taken a clear toll during the upgrade to a more capable CPU (and brighter screen) is battery life. Last year’s Snapdragon X systems could be relied upon for up to 20 hours of run time. But at full brightness, the A16 barely topped 9.5 hours with a full-screen YouTube playback test. That destroys one of Snapdragon’s long-running benefits; today, this system offers battery life barely any better than a typical Intel or AMD device.

I didn’t encounter any real compatibility issues with the Snapdragon X2 aside from a handful of benchmarks that wouldn’t run at all—par for the course and mostly unchanged from the Snapdragon X. For its part, Qualcomm says the only major app that isn’t fully supported is Autodesk’s CAD suite, but an update is in the works.

I also can’t complain at all about real-world performance. The A16 performed as admirably as its benchmarks would suggest on anything I threw at it (short of AAA video games). If you’re using this machine for standard content production, web browsing, and knowledge work, I fully expect you’ll come away impressed, even dazzled.

All of which leads us to a more complicated final analysis than I had initially expected when I unboxed the laptop. At $1,700, the Zenbook A16 is far from inexpensive, and spec-for-spec it is roughly in line with what you’ll pay for similarly equipped 16-inch laptops with Intel or AMD CPUs—though the ongoing RAM shortage makes it tough to judge anything too harshly on price at the moment.

The real play for this machine is ultimately all about performance, and if you want one of the fastest mobile experiences on Windows hardware today, the Asus Zenbook A16 is worth a strong look. Just don’t look too hard, lest the absolute beige of the laptop put you right to sleep.

$1,999 at Asus$1,700 at Best Buy