![[The AI Show Episode 148]: Microsoft’s Quiet AI Layoffs, US Copyright Office’s Bombshell AI Guidance, 2025 State of Marketing AI Report, and OpenAI Codex](https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/hubfs/ep%20148%20cover%20%281%29.png)
![[The AI Show Episode 146]: Rise of “AI-First” Companies, AI Job Disruption, GPT-4o Update Gets Rolled Back, How Big Consulting Firms Use AI, and Meta AI App](https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/hubfs/ep%20146%20cover.png)
.jpg?#)
_Prostock-studio_Alamy.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale#)
After a tariff price hike, our favorite laptop from CES 2025 is on sale for the first time
The Asus Zenbook A14 is on sale for $799.99 at Best Buy through May 26. That's 20% off its $999.99 MSRP and its best price ever.
SAVE $200: Normally $999.99, the Asus Zenbook A14 (Snapdragon X Plus, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) is on sale for $799.99 at Best Buy through May 26 — a 20% savings and its best price to date.
This year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was packed to the gills with impressive and innovative laptops, including one with a rollable screen and another made from oysters. But it was the Asus Zenbook A14, a lightweight 14-inch Copilot+ PC, that wound up taking home our Best of CES 2025 nod for the category: "It's effectively an Asus Zenbook Air," we wrote, "combining a feathery form factor with a long battery life," a durable, scratch-resistant chassis, and a reasonable starting price of just $899.99.
At least, the Zenbook A14 was supposed to start at $899.99. Tariffs bumped the base configuration up by $100 to $999.99 this spring, so we've been patiently waiting for it to go on sale ever since launch. This week, it finally happened.
Now through Monday, May 26, the Zabriskie Beige ZenBook A14 with a Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB of memory, and 512GB of storage is marked down to $799.99 at Best Buy during its Memorial Day sale. That's 20% off the laptop's new MSRP (or 11% off its original starting price), which is its biggest and only discount to date.
We haven't put the Zenbook A14 through the full paces of our laptop testing process just yet, but I briefly checked out its construction at CES and ran it through a CPU performance benchmark at home. It's impressed me on both fronts so far.
The Zenbook A14 has a bright 16:10 OLED display, a clicky keyboard, and a neutral-toned, smooth matte-texture chassis made from a magnesium-aluminum alloy that Asus calls Ceraluminum. Not only is it durable and 100-percent recyclable, but it's also amazingly light. At just 2.4 pounds (or 0.3 pounds lighter than a 13-inch M4 Apple MacBook Air), the base Zenbook A14 is great for travel and on-the-go work.
The Zenbook A14 isn't quite as fast as a current-gen MacBook — it's more on par with the M3 models — but it's peppy for its price point, securing a multi-core score of 11,256 in Primate Labs' Geekbench 6 performance test. That makes it the fastest sub-$1,000 Windows laptop we've ever tried. (I'll also add that it's faster than both Intel Core Ultra Series 2 models I've tested this year, both of which cost at least $1,850.)
I'm most excited to test the Zenbook A14's battery life: Asus has it rated at up to 32 hours per charge, which would mean it lasts about nine hours longer than our current battery life champ. (That would be the 13.8-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor.) Laptop manufacturers' listed battery lives tend to be hyperbolic, but even if the Zenbook A14 surpasses the 20-hour mark in practice, I'll be wowed.
