ASUS - Zenbook S16 16" 3K OLED Touchscreen Laptop - AMD Ryzen AI 9 465 2026 - 32GB Memory - 1TB Storage - Copilot+ PC - Antrim Gray

I’ve never owned an ASUS laptop before, nor a computer with an AMD processor, and I thought I would give this one a try since it came with the new Wi-Fi 7. I installed a Wi-Fi 7 router back in mid-2025 and have slowly been upgrading my digital devices to Wi-Fi 7. If you don’t want to read further, your take away is that I am very impressed with this ASUS Zenbook! It’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned. First, this laptop was shipped to me so well packed that it could’ve fallen off the delivery truck and still arrived undamaged. It was safeguarded in a retail box, which was fully suspended within a briefcase-style box, that was packed within a larger shipping box protected all around with brown packing paper! Probably, the only way you could damage it is by running a forklift fork right through the middle of the box. I was astonished that any company would pack its products so well. I immediately thought that a company that takes that much care in packing a product for shipping probably puts that much care, or more, into making the product. After unpacking, I used my desktop computer to go to the ASUS website and download the full 85-page user manual. The user manual recommended recharging the laptop for a full 3-hours before it is turned on. Which I did. During this time, I browsed through the user manual. I left it plugged in when I turned on, because I knew it was going to do a bunch of Windows and driver updates. By the way, it took me two days, using it off and on, to run the battery down to below 10%. It fully recharges in about three hours. The ASUS Zenbook connected easily to my home’s Wi-Fi. It quickly found my Wi-Fi 7 router and all I had to do was select it and provide the password. It has reliably reconnected each time I rebooted the laptop. Which was plenty while it was updating. No problems there. Since I have a Microsoft account, for the first time ever, I decided to let a new system mirror all my Microsoft settings. I think I will do that in the future because the installation process was seamless and painless. I love music and you need to know that this ASUS Zenbook has the finest speakers I’ve ever heard on a laptop. If you didn’t know that the music was coming from a laptop, you would think maybe I was playing the music through an external Bluetooth speaker. They are that good! Usually, laptop speakers are barely tolerable for voice and the laptop must always be connected to an external speaker for music. ASUS has definitely raised the bar for built-in laptop speakers! I hope other laptop manufacturers follow suit. I did connect to an external Bluetooth speaker to test the Bluetooth connection. The two devices paired perfectly with each other with no dropouts or delays or stuttering. The hour or so I was listening to music through a Bluetooth speaker was trouble-free. In addition to the audio port, one USB-A, two USB-C, and one HDMI port, I was happy to see that my ASUS Zenbook UM5606G 16” Laptop came with an SD card slot on the right side. That is a feature I thought was long gone because the last two laptops that I purchased only had USB-C connections which forced me to purchase external docks that offered a variety of popular ports. I hope this is the reversal of a bad trend. Did I mention that this laptop is thin? It is the thinnest laptop I’ve ever owned. I measured it and it is 7/16” of an inch thick. I didn’t weigh it, but it is light, very light. I remember using laptops in the early 1990s that were several inches thick and weighed about 13 pounds. You got real tired of lugging them around an airport. I don’t know if it is a combination of the camera and sensors along with the Windows 11 operating system, but this ASUS Zenbook has the ability to know when you walk up on it. I don’t mean the facial recognition login which doesn’t occur until you sit down and look at the screen. When you have walked away from the laptop, the screen will go dark, and the laptop will put itself in a standby mode. When you return and walk to within a few feet of the laptop, it will wake itself up and wait for you to sit down and look at the screen where the facial recognition software will log you in. This is a very fast computer boasting the latest generation CPU, the AMD Ryzen AI 9. It is also equipped with a 1 TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe 2280 Solid State Drive, the fastest style of SSD available. Together with the 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, makes this a very fast computer. I wish I had some way to test how fast it is, but the only metric I can give you is from the time I press the power button to the time it finished booting up and the facial recognition software has logged me in, is around 19 or 20 seconds! This is my first OLED display and once again I’m impressed with the vibrancy of colors and speed at which the graphics are displayed. I looked and found no dead pixels. The touchscreen display and its hinge seem to be well engineered because the screen doesn’t shake even with a light touch up near the top like when you’re using the ribbon menu in Microsoft Office products. The well-engineered hinge is stiff, yet not too stiff. I’m still able to open the clam shell lid easily. That’s an important point for me as I have a disability with my hands that affects my hand strength, touch sensation, fine motor control, and dexterity. Unfortunately, that brings up the one negative I have in this review but is not the kind of negative that would cost a star. Because this may only affect me and anyone who has hand strength issues. Thankfully a very small minority of the population. It will not affect someone with normal hands. I found that the touchpad was way too stiff for me to effectively issue a single or double click. I’ve used many other laptops whose touch pads are much easier to click and that’s why I mention it. It doesn’t have to be that stiff. This is only a critical factor for me when I use a laptop. Fortunately, the screen is a fine touchscreen and so I use it instead of the touchpad. Normally, I use an external mouse with a laptop, but this touchscreen is so good that I haven’t used an external mouse with my new ASUS Zenbook yet. The backlit keyboard is great when using the Zenbook in a lowlight environment. I absolutely love that feature because I frequently use a laptop while the wife and I are watching a movie. There are many other positive features that I could mention, but this review is already very long. To sum it up, I believe this is the finest laptop I have ever owned and I highly recommend it. I’m glad I finally gave ASUS and AMD a try. I am not disappointed.