Asus’ ZenBook S14 Treads A Fine Line Between A MacBook Air & MacBook Pro
The new notebook starts at Rs 149,990 which is somewhere between a new MacBook Air with the M3 chipset and the M3 Pro powered MacBook
Armed with Intel’s latest silicon, the Lunar Lake (Intel Core Ultra 200V series processors ) system on chip, ASUS seems to have a killer new notebook in town, called the ZenBook S14, which weighs just 1.2Kg and measures in at 1.1cm. At Rs 1,49,990, the new Asus laptop is expensive, but it treads a fine line between a MacBook Air, which is a darling laptop for the non-gamer types and, by recent accounts, has become the world’s most popular premium laptop in the world, and the MacBook Pro or any other big daddy Windows notebook, which comes with a feisty new graphics accelerator. The secret sauce here is, of course, Intel’s new Lunar Lake Core Ultra 7 series 2 chip, which, off the record, even Asus executives have admitted is exceptionally good, as they deferred their preference towards it over the new ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite-based model that Asus released, which is heftier, thicker, and less capable than the S14, enthused by what many industry insiders believe is Intel’s last throw at the dice as its stock plummets in the US.
But before I get into the weeds of the capabilities that this new Lunar Lake chip brings to the fore, the core fundamentals of the notebook are fantastic. It gets this ceramic-coated finish on the lip, which looks very neat in the white finish and kind of tacky, personally, I’d say, in the grey, which reminds me of a dirty floor with a coarse marble chip finish. But this lid can be lifted easily with a single finger to expose a gorgeous 14-inch OLED screen, which has a 3K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. The screen is quite glossy, though, which could be an issue. You get a really clicky chiclet-style keyboard and a massive trackpad, which will rival the one on a MacBook Air 15-inch in every sense of the way, be it size or functional nuance.
If you’d check out the sides of the notebook, there will be twin USB Type C ports on the left flanked by an HDMI port, which is literally carved to the micron to fit the anorexic chassis at 1.1 cm. On the other side, there is a USB Type A connector. With the chassis is a massive battery, leading Asus to claim a ginormous battery life stat of 27 hours, which is bonkers.
But the star of the show is Lunar Lake, which, if it holds up to its claims, will reinvent what one expects from a notebook. Intel has been on a path to reinvent the x86 architecture, which has existed since the 60s — and this process started with Meteor Lake last year, which was its biggest architectural change, and Lunar Lake takes another step forward, which now makes Intel’s chips truly walk the talk. This excitement was palpable from the Asus executives, who have already been taken aback from the response the copilot AI PC era has brought forth, with Qualcomm’s new ARM-based silicon taking the fight to Apple on the premium segment for a Windows audience.
Intel claims this Core Ultra 200V series processors chipset has(have) the world’s fastest mobile CPU (core) and the beefiest integrated GPU, which will allow it to smoke the competition in terms of all-around performance table stakes without requiring discreet silicon from Nvidia or AMD. On top of this, there is a new NPU in the house, which alone accounts for 47 TOPs, with the overall system deploying 115 TOPs on the table (for the configuration Asus is announcing today). Intel has also forgone traditional technologies that it had invented, like hyper-threading, which, in recent times, has been fraught with security and efficiency issues. It has also replicated what Apple has done with its chipsets called Apple Silicon by integrating the RAM on the same die as the processor, GPU, and NPU, which makes things faster and more power-efficient. So, you’re by default getting 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage, but you can’t upgrade if you feel this is not enough, though 32GB should be good enough for even power users, whilst Apple’s products start with a paltry 8GB RAM.
The big thing is the gains Intel has made with its ARC technology (graphics), which promises to run high-fidelity games quite smoothly without needing more graphics-centric hardware on the notebook. This also makes the notebook excellent for on-device AI processing, something Microsoft and Qualcomm have been talking up, and also for pro workloads like video and photo editing. And the overall system is so efficient that the battery life claim even blows away what Apple has proven with Apple Silicon — so even Asus is off the mark, it should be fine.
Of course, both Intel and Asus went about to re-emphasise the advantages of an Intel-based x86 chipset from a compatibility point of view for legacy users, especially gamers who have struggled to get all their apps running on Qualcomm’s new chip, as Windows for decades always ran on the x86 instruction set instead of the ARM one, which is why application compatibility, especially with games, has become an issue despite robust Windows on ARM translation technology called PRISM, which gamers have particularly not enjoyed. For this crowd, the Lunar Lake powered S14 definitely could make the cut.
