14 things to love about the ASUS Zenbook 14

ASUS South Africa recently gave us some time to check out the Zenbook 14 (UX3480) and, today, we’re going to bring you the highlights of that experience and point out the features that we took notice of during our time with the laptop.

14. An unboxing like no other

The ASUS Zenbook 14 comes in a very special box with a hidden mechanism: as you open the lid a lifting platform raises the laptop to meet you. It’s a really clever piece of packaging engineering that adds a sense of wonder to the occasion.

Once you’ve removed the laptop, the rest of the box’s contents are all separated out into neat compartments which includes a fast 68W charger and a laptop sleeve.

**13. Blue beauty **

While the laptop was still in the box on the raising platform, we got to appreciate the Arctic Blue colourway that ASUS South Africa had sent over. It’s a lovely shade of metallic blue that adds a lot of life to the laptop without making it too loud. You can enjoy this fun colour while still rocking it in a serious meeting or, well, anywhere.

Too blue for you? Consider the Komodo Coral option for a pop of colour inspired by the ocean, or the Zabriskie Beige which may be the standout with its bold take on the overlooked hue.

12. Ceraluminum

Finally getting the laptop out of that great packaging and we now have our hands on Ceraluminum. A unique material that ASUS has been cooking up for the last few years, it combines ceramics and aluminum alloys to create a material that has the best properties of its component parts. You get all the hardness and strength of these materials with reduced weight, on top of a very unique stone-esque texture that looks and feels like nothing else.

The top lid of the ASUS Zenbook 14 uses this material while the bottom is a more metal chassis which is refined for heat management.

11. Lightweight heavyweight

The result of the materials mentioned above is a laptop weighing in at just 1.1 kilograms.

This weight betrays the powerful internal components, including the Snapdragon X X1 26 100 Processor, Qualcomm Adreno GPU and 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM.

10. Just the right size

Laptop size is a personal preference but we have a soft spot for 14-inch options like this one. It’s the perfect size to get serious work done, no matter what the work is and no matter where you are. 14-inch laptops are some of the last holdouts of airplane productivity in the modern, super-cramped seats.

**9. Bigger than you think **

If you’re not a fan of 14-inch laptops like us, ASUS has maximised the space here by using a 16:10 aspect ratio, instead of the usual 16:9. The result is more vertical space and, we have to tell you, once you’ve gotten used to 16:10 you won’t want to go back.

The 89 percent screen-to-body ratio shows that ASUS is maximising space for this screen, which has a resolution of 1920×1200 and a 60Hz refresh rate. Even with that impressive ratio, there’s still a FullHD camera with IR functionality to make use of Windows Hello.

8. Keys for me

Once we’re inside of the aforementioned Windows, we get to do some typing and find ourselves surprised by this keyboard. We’re keyboard snobs and ASUS has somehow built in a long decently-long key travel of 1.7 millimetres, which beats out a lot of other keyboards which bottom out almost immediately. We have a slightly more aggressive typing style and this keyboard is great for people like us.

7. Touchpad talent

The close friend to the keyboard, no laptop is complete without a competent touchpad. The ErgoSense touchpad here is large, making the most efficient use of the space below the keyboard. It also has a satisfying, deep click and a range of Smart Gestures to access the laptop’s features instantly.

6. Crank the tunes

Laptops aren’t known for their audio capabilities, but this one makes use of multi-magnet dual speakers, as well as Snapdragon Sound architecture, to deliver more punch than you’d expect.

5. AI on tap

Packed with AI features and functionality from both Microsoft and ASUS, this laptop is smarter than the competition.

4. Plug me in

What we didn’t appreciate during the unboxing and setup -but later loved as we made a work setup – was the generous amount of I/O ports, especially given the size of this device. You get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C 9which both support display and power), one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, one 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack and one DMI 2.1 TMDS port

3. Space for all your stuff

As you use any device, you start filling up its storage. With 512GB of storage (on a super fast M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD), it will have plenty of space.

2. Still on the same charge

While doing everything we’ve discussed so far, we noticed that we still had a lot of battery. This is thanks to the large 50WHrs battery unit onboard, and the efficient but powerful CPU and GPU. Qualcomm, of course, cut its teeth in the super-competitive world of mobile phones, and it has proven itself the expert for power processors that are mindful of battery use. ASUS testing has shown that you can get more than 30 hours of use out of a single charge.

1. Available in South Africa now

South Africans usually expect for products to either not be available at all, or take months to get here. The ASUS Zenbook 14 (UX3480) is available right now on the ASUS South Africa online store as well as leading retailers around the country.

Arctic Blue Komodo Coral Zabriskie Beige

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