I’m having a bit of an existential crisis here. I think I found the best laptop in 2025, but the thing is that spot has traditionally been held by the MacBook Air, at least since the M chips were announced, because this thing was pretty much like the main laptop a lot of people would recommend for productivity stuff. But I think it’s finally happened—this, my friends, might just be the Intel killer, the Windows MacBook Air, pound-for-pound best laptop you can buy this year. Let’s get into it.

Ultra-Lightweight Design and Portability

Doing all sorts of stuff with this thing, look how light it is. It’s lighter than the MacBook Air, probably the lightest Windows Copilot PC right now. Probably don’t want to show ASUS I’m doing this though. Look at that, wonder if I could spin—yeah, we’re not doing that. What you’re looking for from a laptop honestly depends on what kind of person you are. If you’re a gamer, then you’re looking for a fast GPU. If you’re into video editing, then you’re looking for performance. And when I’m not video editing or gaming, there are five main things I’m looking for—battery life, weight, screen, capability, as well as price. And on all of those fronts, historically, since the M chip at least, Apple has kind of had the lead there until Qualcomm came swinging.

I mean, we’ve all seen Windows on ARM before, right? And it wasn’t the best. You had to run apps on Prism emulation and that absolutely destroyed your battery life and performance of the actual laptop. But this time things are a little bit different. According to Microsoft, ninety percent of total app minutes spent by users are on native ARM applications. This is a huge jump up and improvement, and I mean we’ve seen this even with Apple’s M chip. Eventually, we got there, and now a lot of the stuff is running native—same thing now with ARM. I think Snapdragon is really well poised in order to tackle these things because a lot of these applications are now running natively on this laptop. Just taking a look at all the apps that I personally use on an everyday basis like Notion, Photoshop, Lightroom, OneNote, Google applications—all of that is native now. Even DaVinci Resolve for editing is native on ARM. Not to mention, a lot of us will end up using the Microsoft suite for a lot of the tasks that we do, and that runs fluently on this laptop. And Copilot, along with the NPU, runs really well. So, for most people, now we are finally at a no-compromise Windows ARM laptop for the most part.

One of the biggest things for me with this laptop is portability, and this laptop, I got to tell you, I had this thing in Vegas and it was an absolute game-changer. My experience with this thing was absolutely incredible. Now, fun fact—I actually had one of two models of this laptop available in all of Canada, so I really got to put this through its paces early. I thoroughly enjoyed my time working off this thing, and I got to say, I can definitely see this being a very popular laptop this year. This thing is ultra-light, it’s ultra-thin, and it barely takes up any space. I was able to work with this pretty much anywhere I wanted to—whether that’s chilling on the bed, or if I wanted to just kick back on the sofa after a long day, or even if I wanted to just properly lock in sitting at a desk.

Impressive Battery Life and Build Quality

The battery life, man, this thing literally lasted me the entire day through meetings, through photo editing, writing scripts, browsing, and everything in between. Sorry, sorry—no worries, I’m coming. Now, the first time I got to check this laptop out was at ASUS’s event in downtown Toronto, and my first reaction was that this thing looks way more premium than the price actually suggests. The build is made of something called S-aluminum. What’s that, you ask? Well, I’m going to let Hannah from ASUS explain it. Ceramic? Aluminum magnesium alloy? S-aluminum? It’s a Pokémon—look it up. I still don’t understand what it is, but here’s the thing. This thing is thirty percent lighter than aluminum or aluminium, and it is three times stronger than aluminum, which is kind of insane to think about—it’s almost like Wakanda technology. And the thing is, it also doesn’t pick up many fingerprints on the actual laptop, and using it, I wasn’t worried about scratches or anything.

Speaking of build, bro, the way they’ve made this hinge—oh, like, one finger open, bro, that was smooth. You got to admit that was smooth. I also quite enjoyed the typing experience on this. The keyboard is actually pretty well-built, and it just feels nice to type on. But I think even more so, the trackpad was what impressed me. The trackpad has this really nice soft-touch feel to it, and using it is very smooth, and it’s super responsive, so no issues there. By the way, you can actually connect this with one cable and do the whole thing where this is the Apple Studio display, and yes, it does work with that as well. I just have one cable going out, and it’s like charging my laptop, and I get to use an external monitor—so, if you didn’t want to do that, you could.

Performance, Thermals, and AI Capabilities

So let’s quickly talk numbers here. Intel’s Lunar Lake chip is fast, but the Snapdragon X chip on this laptop is actually faster in multi-core performance, which is quite surprising. And in battery life, this thing absolutely crushes. It’s hands down the best laptop for battery life that I’ve personally used—like, ever. I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but I’m not even kidding. Even with the MacBook Air and stuff, sure, I’d get a lot of battery life, be able to go through a day, no problem. This thing—I almost get like two days of usage, if not more, out of this thing and don’t have to worry about charging and stuff like that. You don’t get range anxiety with this, right? So, if you’re a student or you’re a professional or you’re traveling, then you’re going to be able to use this for your entire flight, for your entire day in class—don’t have to be seated next to a wall outlet.

Also, because this laptop is ARM-based, the thermals on this thing are amazing. The way that they’ve designed everything—the fans don’t make a lot of noise. Even during full load, if I’m video editing or doing basic stuff on DaVinci or Photoshop, the fans do sometimes spin up, but you can’t really hear them. I’d say overall, in terms of lightweight and thermals and everything, this thing is probably one of the best productivity laptops right now on the market.

The other big thing is AI. I know we’re kind of tired of hearing AI now—like, all the tech brands are just saying that word as their improvements this year and last year. But in terms of AI, this thing is actually really good because it does have the same NPU as the Snapdragon X Elite. You’re going to be crushing it when it comes to AI tasks—I’m talking about Windows Recall, Copilot stuff, and pretty much anything that you’re going to need to use AI for, this thing can do really well.

Is the ASUS Zenbook A14 the Best Laptop of 2025?

So, is this the best laptop to buy in 2025? If you want something ultra-compact, super lightweight, with an incredible OLED screen and all-day battery life, the ASUS Zenbook A14 is an absolute bargain at $1,299 USD. It really gives Apple a run for their money.