on the hunt Looking for a lightweight and budget-friendly laptop that won’t let you down? Best Buy has marked the Asus Zenbook A14 down from its usual $1,000 price point to just $550 for an early Black Friday deal. This featherweight laptop is a Windows CoPilot+ PC with a Qualcomm Snapdragon
-Reviewer-Photo-SOURCE-Christopher-Null.jpg "This Lightweight Laptop Is Almost Half Off 2")
Photograph: Christopher Null
Weighing just 2.1 pounds, this ZenBook is one of the lightest laptops we’ve tested so far, with most machines starting closer to 2.4 pounds, and only Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon comes close at 2.2 pounds. This is largely due to a material developed by Asus called Ceraluminum, which is a combination of ceramic and aluminum that is extremely light and very durable.
Like many of the laptops in the CoPilot+ range, the ZenBook has an FHD+ (1,920 x 1,200) resolution screen, but at least it’s an OLED panel, which is great news for those of you who keep your laptop on a coffee table to watch movies. Our reviewer Christopher Null ran a video playback test, and even with the screen at full brightness, the laptop managed to last more than 20 hours. This is truly an impressive feat, especially for such a thin and light laptop.
The heart of this machine is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus, a brand you’ll be more accustomed to seeing in mobile phones than Windows machines. Although this helps give you amazing battery life, the performance leaves a bit to be desired. While it’s perfectly fine for web browsing, Word documents and checking email, don’t expect it to do anything more demanding than playing the latest games or doing some light graphics work.
Qualcomm chips are slowly becoming a more attractive option for laptops, and if you’re trying not to spend a lot of money on a laptop, they’re worth a look. While gamers and video editors should look to our laptop roundup for more serious options, at just $550 the ZenBook A14 offers a surprising amount of value in a small package.