ASUS Zenbook S 16 First Impressions

The ASUS Zenbook lineup has been one of the brand’s most popular models thanks to its slim and lightweight design. This makes it easy to bring wherever you are in the world. It may not be the most powerful, but it is more than enough to play some light games. More importantly, you can get stuff done without being burdened by carrying a heavy laptop.

At Computex 2024, ASUS decided to upgrade their popular lightweight laptops by giving it the benefit of AI technology with Copilot+ together with a new AMD Ryzen AI 300 chipset, and we got to try it out.

Specifically, we focused on the new ASUS Zenbook S 16, which despite being a 16-inch laptop, only weighs 3.31lbs (1.5kg). It is also just 0.43-inches thick, continuing to live up to the Zenbook ethos of being very portable. It is so thin, you wouldn’t expect that this laptop packs some serious performance.

On the outside, you might not think ASUS made any significant changes to the Zenbook S 16 as compared to its predecessors. It still features the minimalist design on the lid, with a few lines running across. At the top corner, you’ll find the ASUS Zenbook logo.

The lid itself is made out of “ceraluminum” as ASUS calls it, and it feels nice to the touch. It is smooth, and it doesn’t feel plasticky. The color choices look great too, but I personally liked the white colorway the best. It gives the Zenbook S 16 a more premium look, but I wonder if the color would fade or turn yellowish over time.

Flip it open, and you are greeted by a 16-inch 3K ASUS Lumina OLED screen. This being a Lumina OLED panel it looks great, and just watching the demo video, you do get nice vivid colors and deep blacks. You also have great viewing angles, making it nice for watching with friends. It is paired with a 6-speaker system tuned by Harman Kardon and features Dolby Vision Atmos, which we didn’t get to try at this time.

Moving on down, and we get to the keyboard. It’s not a full-size keyboard as with most, but it feels easy to use. The keyboard is properly spaced out, and feels nice to the touch. It is smooth and silent unlike and very soft, making it nice for typing.

But the biggest change to the keyboard would be the addition of the Copilot key on the lower right side. This automatically brings up Copilot on the display, which we’ll talk more about later on.

Below the keyboard, you get a larger trackpad, which I found is a great touch. According to ASUS it is 40-percent larger than its predecessor. We were told the trackpad also comes with smart gestures allowing users to adjust brightness, volume, and even skip time when watching videos. However, we weren’t able to try it out for now due to time constraints.

With the bigger trackpad, you also have more wrist space when you’re typing. Overall, it helps with the ergonomics of the laptop, making it easier to use especially if you are someone that works on the go or outside the office.

As with most Zenbook models, you do get a wide variety of I/O and ports. These include 2x USB-C ports, an HDMI 3.2 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and an SD card slot.

So on the outside, it looks like ASUS only made minor changes. But under the hood, the Zenbook S 16 is now powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 9 chipset with AMD Ryzen AI built in. More importantly it now comes with Microsoft’s CoPilot+ AI system. Depending on the model, you can order it with up to 1TB of internal storage and 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

Given the short time we had with the laptop, we didn’t really get to fully immerse ourselves with the AI functions of the laptop. But the feature that really caught our attention was the ability to generate subtitles and captions at the same time.

Imagine watching a video on YouTube, but the language is in Japanese. Unfortunately, there are no english subtitles too. That’s where the Copilot+ comes in. Just turn on the Copilot feature, and you will have the option to have it pop up at the top or bottom of the screen.

It uses the sound from the speakers to translate it as well, so you can’t watch it on low volume, muted, or with headphones. But still, it’s an amazing function that can make it easier for everyone to watch videos that are in a foreign language. For the time being, we were told it can only translate other languages to English, but not the other way around. However, in the future that will change.

During the presentation, we were told the AMD Ryzen AI chipset also helps a lot with gaming, and we can’t wait to try it out in the future.

So far we’re impressed by the ASUS Zenbook S 16, and we can’t wait for it to arrive in the Philippines. Once it does, we’ll do a proper review including benchmarks, gaming, and more. Be sure to stay tuned for that.