Introduction

The Asus Zenbook S 16 (2026) feels more of an iterative upgrade against its hugely impressive predecessor.

I loved the Zenbook S 16 (2024) so much that I nearly considered purchasing one as my main work machine, although I couldn’t give up macOS that easily. Nonetheless, it seems like Asus has rolled its sleeves up a little with this refreshed model, with it packing in one of AMD’s revised Gorgon Point APUs (the Ryzen AI 9 465 in this instance), plus it’s got a slightly different look to it, and there’s a new 16-inch OLED panel to get excited about.

This new model is going straight up against the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro as a large-screened, premium ultraportable laptop for those who want or need the luxury of a bigger panel without sacrificing on style. It also carries a beefier price tag of £1699.99, meaning it’s a little behind Samsung’s choice there, too.

I’ve been putting the Zenbook S 16 (2026) through its paces to see if it can keep its crown as one of the best laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• More generic and minimalistic look
• Slender, with a capable port selection
• Snappy keyboard and huge trackpad

The stylish ceraluminum chassis was one of the main reasons I fell for the older Zenbook S 16 model as much as it did, with its blend of ceramic and aluminium to create a very durable and surprisingly lightweight laptop for its size. That material is back for this new 2026 iteration, and it helps this laptop look and feel fantastic in hand, with a reassuring weight and slender chassis that oozes class.

One area of this 2026 model I’m not as keen on is the redesigned lid, though. Asus has opted for a more minimalistic approach to the Zenbook S 16 (2026)’s design, choosing to ditch the etched lines on the lid and replace them simply with ‘Asus Zenbook’ lettering in the middle.

It tips the scales at just 1.5kg, making its mass identical to the previous model. For a large 16-inch ultrabook, it’s especially portable, and very competitive with Samsung’s offering in this regard.

Asus also hasn’t changed the solid port selection the Zenbook S 16 (2026) comes with, which is a good thing. In spite of being just 11mm thin, it comes with a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports, a USB-A, HDMI, full-size SD card reader and a headphone jack.

Opening the lid reveals a centred small form factor keyboard that’s similar in layout to the current crop of MacBook Pro models. It’s a snappy and tactile offering, with just the right amount of key travel, plus it has some sharp white backlighting for after-dark working.

The Zenbook S 16 (2026) is also bestowed with a huge trackpad, the same as the old model was, which feels slick and smooth under finger, and gives your hands a fair amount of real estate to play with.

Display and Sound

• Sharp, detailed OLED screen
• Even brighter with more contrast than its predecessor
• Similar downwards-firing speaker arrangement

Asus has upgraded the Zenbook S 16 (2026)’s OLED panel to make it an even more dazzling prospect than the 2024 model. It remains a capable 16-inch 2880×1800 resolution panel with 120Hz refresh rate for sharp visuals with oodles of detail and rather smooth motion and responsiveness.

The virtually perfect colour accuracy that this screen comes with is no surprise. To be specific, we’re getting 100% coverage of both the mainstream sRGB and creative DCI-P3 gamuts, while Adobe RGB coverage at 93% is also excellent, making this screen an ideal pairing for both mainstream and more colour-sensitive workloads.

There are deep blacks and gorgeous contrast, too, with a measured 0.01 and 31610:1, respectively, to provide some serious dynamic range and keep this as one of the best screens you’ll find on a 16-inch laptop. The 6800K colour temperature is pretty good as well.

Asus’ main upgrade for the Zenbook S 16 (2026)’s screen is that it has boosted the peak brightness. There is now a peak HDR brightness of 1000 nits against the older one’s 500 nits, plus uprated support for DisplayHDR True Black 1000. There is also a bump up in SDR brightness, as I noted with my colorimeter, with a peak of 434.3 nits, which is some 25% brighter than the peak of the old panel, for even punchier images.

The speakers on the Zenbook S 16 (2026) remain downwards-firing, meaning placing the laptop on a softer surface, such as a bed or sofa, can impact performance. They are nonetheless decent, offering solid clarity and body with an okay amount of low-end.

Performance

• New AMD Gorgon Point APU inside
• Reasonable performance
• Fast SSD and sensible RAM capacity

The main reason for Asus refreshing the Zenbook S 16 model for 2026 is the presence of some new mobile APUs from AMD, which are all the more important due to the successes we’ve already seen from Intel’s Panther Lake chips on the samples I’ve used.

My sample of the Zenbook S 16 (2026) came with AMD’s new Ryzen AI 9 465 chip, which is one of the higher-end models in the new ‘Gorgon Point’ generation of AMD’s mobile processors. It’s more of a mid-generation refresh of last year’s impressive Strix Point APUs with improvements such as higher boost clocks and faster supported memory, rather than an outright upgrade.

To this end, this Ryzen AI 9 465 chip has ten cores and 20 threads, with the cores being split between four full-fat Zen 5 cores and six more efficient Zen 5c cores. It’s a small deficit against the beefier Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 from last year’s model, which had 12 cores and 24 threads.

As such, the needle isn’t moved too much in synthetic benchmarks over the old model, with comparable scores in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 in terms of single-core oomph. Multi-threaded numbers are within the margin of error against the older chip, and there’s less raw power than the Panther Lake Core Ultra X7 358H inside the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro. Has AMD gotten too complacent for 2026?

AMD also hasn’t done anything to improve the integrated graphics on these new APUs, with this chip coming with the same Radeon 880M iGPU as its predecessor. It’s a respectable score in 3DMark Time Spy to provide a helping hand for more graphically-intensive creative tasks, although the 1080p gaming numbers with 20fps in Returnal, 19.82fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 42fps in Rainbow Six Extraction aren’t too great.

My sample came shipped with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM, providing a fair amount of headroom for multitasking and more intensive workloads, while there’s also a capacious 2TB SSD to get excited about for storin’ all kinds of stuff on. With measured read and write speeds of 7111.32 MB/s and 6727.37 MB/s, it’s a decently brisk one, too.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some pre-installed Asus apps
• Also comes with Copilot AI features

The Zenbook S 16 (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 on everything from battery level and enabling battery care modes to choosing which type of workload the Zenbook S 16’s network connection prioritises.

In addition, there is also GlideX, which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the Zenbook S 16’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 Ryzen AI 9 465 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.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 10 hours 10 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Asus has upped the battery capacity of the Zenbook S 16 (2026) with an 83Whr cell, which is a slight increase on the 2024 model. The last model had reasonable endurance, lasting for over 13 hours in our testing, so it makes sense to expect some form of improvement with this new model.

In putting it through the PCMark 10 Modern Office test with the brightness set to the requisite 150 nits, I was quite disappointed to find that this Asus laptop lasted for just ten hours and ten minutes. That’s three hours less than its predecessor, which means this laptop only just meets our general target for battery life.

For reference, the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro managed nearly double the runtime, while the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI hit nearly 16 hours on a charge. The result here is very comparable to the large-screen Acer Aspire 16 AI, with just five minutes separating the two laptops.

Should you buy it?

FAQs

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