The Asus Zenbook S16 goes beyond business

For years, the Zenbook line from Asus has always been top of mind when it comes to sleek yet powerful laptops for the corporate set. The 2026 Zenbook S16 has arrived and after spending a few weeks with it, it seems to live up to the reputation of previous Zenbooks.

Let’s start with the build. The laptop’s surface has an oxidized layer with a premium paint-like appearance and velvety feel. Called Ceraluminum, it gives the surface a very tactile texture and matte finish that is resistant to smudges and fingerprints.

The review unit came in Scandinavian White with a non-reflective surface that gives the laptop a more organic and natural look, rather than a machine-like facade. In practical terms, it gives users more grip on the device, making it less likely to slip out of their hands.

When closed, the Zenbook S16’s thickness is rather negligible at 1.1 cm. Its thinness, despite its size, can definitely get second looks. Even with its full-sized 16-inch screen, the 1.5 kg weight makes it easy to carry around in real-world scenarios such as tucked in a bag or backpack or carried around with its screen open.

An all-metal chassis gives a solid and robust feel. Opening and closing the unit is a very precise, effortless, and satisfying affair. For added confidence, the Zenbook S16 has a US MIL-STD 810H rating, giving it a military-grade level of toughness to an already ultra-premium build.

The 16-inch OLED HDR NanoEdge display supports up to 120Hz 3K resolution with 16:10 aspect ratio. The Lumina OLED screen lives up to its name with extremely vivid colors with HDR support and even PANTONE validation making it suitable for serious desktop publishing work.

The laptop also comes handy as a portable cinema with support for Dolby Vision. If you like watching without headphones, a six-speaker sound system with Dolby Atmos delivers rich cinematic audio.

In terms of physical ports, connectivity is not a problem with support for USB, Type-C, HDMI, card reader, and combo audio jack. For wireless, there’s tri-band Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4

Under the hood is a 10-core AMD Ryzen AI 9 465 CPU with 32GB RAM that gives the laptop more than enough power not just for daily talks but for compute-intensive duties as well. Although the unit does not have a discrete GPU, we ran some games anyway and was surprised at the result.

It’s definitely not an ROG series machine but it can run games at medium settings. While you won’t get a blazing frames-per-second number, the integrated Radeon GPU might be good enough for casual gamers.

Heavy AI users will appreciate the AMD AI Engine with XDNA 2 architecture-based neural processing unit. For general users, there’s the convenient integration of Windows Copilot AI productivity features.

Priced at P134,995, the Asus Zenbook S16 is definitely on the premium range but it’s well worth the price of admission for portable top tier performance and design. — Ed G. Geronia Jr.