Asus Zenbook A16 (2026) Review

Introduction

The Asus Zenbook A16 (2026) is one of the most important laptops to be released this year.

It’s one of the first to come with Qualcomm’s brand new 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip alongside 48GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. For good measure, Asus has also bundled a 16-inch 3K 120Hz OLED screen and a 70Whr battery with this laptop – all inside a light 1.2kg ceralumium chassis.

That makes this one of the lightest and most stylish 16-inch laptops out there, although it isn’t the only one. The likes of the LG Gram Pro 16 and Acer Swift 16 AI feel like prime competition for this Zenbook A16 (2026), not least when Asus is charging £2099.99/$1999.99 for this top-spec model, making it quite the premium option.

I’ve been putting this Asus laptop through its paces for the last couple of weeks to see if this is one of the best laptops out there.

Design and Keyboard

• Super lightweight for a 16-inch laptop
• Solid port selection
• Snappy keyboard and huge trackpad

The Zenbook A16 (2026) essentially super-sizes the old Zenbook A14 from last year, providing one of the slimmest and lightest laptops in this larger form factor. It carries over the excellent sandstone-type colourway, which is different to lots of other modern ultrabooks, and gives this laptop quite a stylish finish.

Asus has also employed its innovative ceralumium material that you’ll find on the Zenbook S 16 (2026), which combines the durability of ceramic with the lightness of aluminium for one of the more durable finishes you’ll find on a laptop today. The 1.2kg weight is also very light for a laptop of this size, and I’d even go as far as to say it feels lighter than that in-hand.

At its thickest point, the Zenbook A16 (2026) is 16.5mm thin, which drops to 13.8mm. That’s especially slender, although it hasn’t negatively impacted this laptop’s port selection as it can on rival devices. The left side houses a pair of 40-gigabit USB-C ports (although weirdly not Thunderbolt 4), a full-size HDMI and headphone jack, while on the right you get the sole USB-A port and a full-size SD card reader.

Open up the lid, and you’ll find a more compact keyboard layout, the same as on the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro and more modern large-screen MacBooks. The keyboard is a snappier one, with a short travel and a positive actuation that I found comfortable to use for day-to-day work.

Asus has also bestowed the Zenbook A16 (2026) with a huge glass haptic trackpad that’s one of the largest you’ll find on a 16-inch laptop, providing your fingers with a lot of real estate. It’s also smooth and slick to use with accurate tracking. 

Display and Sound

• Sharp, detailed OLED screen
• Bright, deep blacks, and excellent colours
• Okay downwards-firing speaker arrangement

Asus has given the Zenbook A16 (2026) quite the OLED screen, packing in a large 16-inch choice with a 3K (2880×1800) resolution and 120Hz refresh rate for lovely detail and smooth, slick on-screen action.

It comes with deep blacks and gorgeous contrast. with a measured 0.01 and 34100:1, respectively, to provide some serious dynamic range and make this a fantastic screen for a larger laptop. The 6600K colour temperature is also virtually perfect.

As an OLED panel, the fantastic colour accuracy is part and parcel of the package here. To be specific, we’re getting 100% coverage of both the mainstream sRGB and creative DCI-P3 gamuts, while Adobe RGB coverage at 94% is also excellent, making this screen an ideal pairing for both mainstream and more colour-sensitive workloads.

Asus quotes the brightness of the Zenbook A16 (2026)’s panel to be 500 nits in SDR, which I’d largely agree with, as my colorimeter measured 467.4 nits. There is DisplayHDR True Black 1000 support for supported content, to boot, for added vibrancy where warranted.

The speakers on the Zenbook A16 (2026) are downwards-firing, meaning that placing the laptop on a softer surface, such as a bed or sofa, can impact performance. They are nonetheless okay with reasonable clarity and an okay amount of low-end.

Performance

• Much beefier Snapdragon processor
• Improved integrated graphics
• Capacious RAM and SSD arrangement

The big thing with the Zenbook A16 (2026) is the fact that it’s running one of Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 chips, with my sample coming with the beefier Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, or the most potent Arm-based chip you can get in a modern ultrabook.

Qualcomm is touting major gains in both single and multi-core performance with this new 18-core chip, which I’d certainly wager is true in comparing it to laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite chip. 

We’re seeing some especially high single-core scores in Geekbench 6 that push this laptop into Apple Silicon territory for comparison, plus much-improved multi-core scores, too. The improvements in Cinebench R23 are slightly more modest and peg this laptop back a smidgen, but there are nonetheless some substantial improvements to be proud of in synthetic terms.

There is also a major improvement to the Adreno iGPU with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, that provided a doubling in the 3DMark Time Spy test score and brings it more into line with more recent iGPUs fitted to x86-based laptop chips from Intel and AMD. 

Gaming is technically plausible on the Zenbook A16 (2026) as a result, although the 28.24fps and 31fps at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal are an indication that there’s still some way to go before these Arm-based chips can go up against Panther Lake.

We’ve got a hefty 48GB of DDR5 RAM with this laptop to provide lots of headroom, plus a capacious 1TB SSD. Speeds here are pretty good, too, with tested reads and writes of 7101.27MB/s and 5739.05MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Copilot+ PC offers AI smarts
• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some compatibility issues, being Arm-based

The Zenbook A16 (2026) comes with Windows 11 and a reasonably clean install, too. There isn’t much in the way of bloatware with regard to an unwanted anti-virus or similar, although there are some pieces of software courtesy of Asus that come pre-installed.

There is MyAsus, which comes as part of the taskbar when you first open the Zenbook S 16. This is where you can check everything from battery level and enable battery care modes to choosing which type of workload this laptop’s network connection prioritises.

In addition, there is also GlideX, which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the Zenbook A16 (2026)’s screen to other devices wirelessly, or transfer files across the same network. You can also enable remote access to a mobile device, too. The Storybook app is designed as another means of organising photos and videos, using AI to recognise faces and file your photos for you, which is handy.

There is also enough AI horsepower from the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip inside to mark this laptop as a Copilot+ PC, providing access to Microsoft’s AI functionality for generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact. With the latest version of Windows 11, there is also the controversial Microsoft Recall feature.

Being Arm-based, the Zenbook A16 (2026) also has the problem of having minor issues with some compatibility. This is because Windows is traditionally run on x86-based systems, so to work on Arm, apps have had to be translated through Microsoft’s Prism translation software. For the most part, I had little in the way of issues with compatibility in running a range of benchmark software, as well as Photoshop and similar apps.

As with other Arm-based Windows laptops I’ve looked at, the PCMark 10 benchmark app doesn’t run fully, but that’s an issue we’ve seen on other Arm-based Windows systems. There have been reports that games such as Dirt 5 and some VPN apps also refuse to load from elsewhere, too.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 19 hours 17 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two to three working days

Asus has managed to fit a larger 70Whr cell inside the Zenbook A16 (2026), which, alongside the excellent efficiency that these Qualcomm chips have traditionally yielded, should result in great battery life for this laptop. To this end, Asus quotes this laptop up to 21 hours on a charge, which would make it one of the best choices for endurance.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running a video loop test, this Asus laptop lasted for 19 hours and 17 minutes. That’s close to the original estimate, and makes this one of the longest-lasting 16-inch laptops we’ve tested, beating out the likes of the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2026) and the Acer Swift 16 AI. The LG Gram Pro 16 remains the endurance king, though.

Asus has also provided a small, yet beefy 130W power brick with the Zenbook A16 (2026) that does a decent job of putting juice back into this laptop briskly, taking 44 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 95 minutes.

Should you buy it?

FAQs