A good business laptop is snappy, offers great battery life, and has a few extra ports in case you need to plug into a meeting-room TV, or if a client hands you an older, USB-A thumb drive. If you are looking for all these in a laptop, then ASUS has something new to offer.

Lately, Intel has been going through a rough patch but perhaps the company’s latest chips will help score runs. Asus Zenbook S 14 comes with one of the best chips on a Windows machine — Intel Core Ultra 7 processor 258V.

You’re getting the best bang for your buck in terms of performance and this thing can even be better than its AMD counterparts at the moment.

Dazzling looks

There’s nothing to hate about the laptop — it’s thin, lightweight and forged out of this new material called Ceraluminum, a high-tech ceramic material. It’s scratch- and fingerprint-resistant and it’s good to see a company that’s usually focused on performance put so much thought into design because that impacts how you use the laptop.

The laptop can handle most AI tasks

How razor-thin are we talking about? It has a thickness of 1.1 cm and weighs as little as 1.2 kg. The chassis also incorporates 2,715 CNC-machined cooling vents in a geometric grille design for increased airflow, allowing the laptop to stay cool under intensive workloads, always maintaining peak performance.

On the inside we are greeted with a 14-inch 3K 120Hz OLED panel, so obviously you get all the benefits of display technology. It has nice deep and dark levels, the bezels are thin and it’s perfect to watch content on. There is a four-speaker sound system to deliver cinematic audio. For professionals needing to work on the go, the AI noise cancellation and the Full HD AiSense IR camera with AI features will ensure crystal-clear conference calls and video interactions.

Even the keyboard is quite comfortable to use and I like the absence of funky RGB lighting, giving the machine a clean look. There is a full-size trackpad with which you can control both the screen brightness and volume through gesture control.

The chassis is big and comfortable for you to rest the palms or wrists while you type.

Performance department

The hype around these new Intel laptops is performance. It will come out on top when compared to AMD chips. But I wouldn’t care much about benchmarks because real-world usage matters. The chip offers a great degree of power efficiency. Even after working the entire day, I am usually left with some charge. There have been few occasions when the fans ramped up and it’s mostly very quiet.

It comes with a thin 1.1-cm chassis housing an advanced 14-inch 3K ASUS Lumina OLED display and immersive four-speaker audio

Be it Photoshop, Lightroom, some Premiere Pro, going about office work… I can do all that I need to do without hitting a speed bump or sacrificing battery life.

Being super thin, many may ask about gaming. Most thin light laptops don’t handle AAA games well. A lot has changed since Apple went ahead with its own M series silicon and slim laptops can work far more efficiently than before. On the Asus laptop, most games run on high graphic settings, offering respectable frame rates. It’s a big improvement over many Intel chips.

Many may want to use AI-focussed tasks on the laptop. Yes, leading that Copilot life. The Intel Core Ultra series processors integrated the new NPU 4, delivering three times more TOPS over the most recent generation, up to 47 TOPs, to accelerate AI computations using very little power. Further, the new processors feature the Memory-on-Package design, allowing fast access to data and reducing latency, decreasing the overall power consumption of the system.

Make the call

There is a long-lasting 72Wh battery for extended usage. There are two USB-C ports, one HDMI 2.1 port, headphone jack, and one USB-A port, which is pretty much the width of the computer. The machine is responsive, booting up speedily and opening up apps without making me wait. If gaming is important, you better look at some more options from Asus. This is a machine that’s designed to perform for years and it can handle all the digital tantrums that come with office-related work. Asus Zenbook S 14 is a workhorse that can easily handle AI tasks.

For quiet and efficient performance, the machine is equipped with an advanced cooling system. This system features dual fans, a 0.7mm ultra-slim vapour chamber and a geometric grille design

At a glance

Device: Asus Zenbook S 14

Price: ₹142,990

High notes

Excellent battery life

Top-of-the-line display

Handles AI tasks very well

Stunning design

Muffled note

More focus on USB-C ports would have helped