It’s not even Black Friday yet, and you can pick up a seriously good M3 MacBook Air alternative for just $749. Intel Core Ultra 200 series chips are making a big impact in terms of huge gains in integrated graphics performance and battery life — making for some of the best Copilot+ PCs out there.
Right now, the Asus Zenbook S 14 is $200 off at Best Buy, which drops the price down to just $749. That’s a seriously good value for the money given what you get!
Why buy the Asus Zenbook S 14?
While the Asus Zenbook S 14 may not be my ultimate favorite Copilot+ PC, as you can find slightly better performance from Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite-armed systems, this notebook should still absolutely be taken seriously — especially at this price.
It all starts with how shockingly thin and light the Zenbook S 14 is. That premium construction using Asus’ own ceraluminum finish (weird name, but basically means ceramic-infused aluminum), feels so luxuriously premium in the hand while giving it a durable confidence. And the system weighs just 2.7 pounds.
Open it up and you’re immediately greeted by that stunner of an OLED panel, which packs a 3K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. Plus the keyboard and touchpad with edge gesture support for volume and brightness controls feels so good you’ll be scratching your head at how they managed to pack this into a notebook this tiny in dimensions.
And then we turn our attention to what is under the hood. If you are to look at your usual Geekbench scores, the Intel Core Ultra 5 Series 2 chip isn’t the biggest of upgrades. Getting rid of hyper-threading (a battery-intensive part of older CPUs that would speed it up in certain tasks) means you’ll see general tasks processed at roughly the same speed.
But Intel’s new chips are all about making tactical choices that greatly improve the most important reasons why people buy a laptop. Firstly, the battery life is so much longer — we rated it at over 13 hours. And second, the graphical capabilities of the built-in GPU paired with the vastly improved NPU for AI tasks means you can get even some of the heavier prosumer work done at pace (along with some shockingly good AAA gaming).
| Laptop | Battery Rundown Test (hh:mm) |
|---|---|
| Asus Zenbook S 14 (Intel) | 13:08 |
| Asus Zenbook S 16 (AMD) | 11:35 |
| Dell XPS 13 (Snapdragon) | 19:26 |
| M3 MacBook Air | 15:03 |
So in terms of whether you buy this depends entirely on your workload. If you need superior all-round performance, there are other options to look at. But if you’re looking for a thin and light with great graphics and even better battery life — all in a seriously premium shell — this is a top notch and affordable way to go.
