ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED Review: Nearly There
Our full ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED review after two weeks of testing: measured performance, battery figures, and whether it is worth £1099.
Priya Raghunathan
Where it lands
The ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED is ASUS's 2025 entry in a crowded laptops market, and at £1099 it is competing against some of the strongest hardware we have tested. After a fortnight of daily use, the headline is straightforward: it delivers a superb OLED panel for the money.
The one-line answer: Buy it for a superb OLED panel for the money. Think twice if this would bother you daily: a shallow keyboard.
In the hand
There is nothing experimental here, which is mostly to the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED's credit. The detail worth calling out is that a 3K 120Hz OLED at this price undercuts everything comparable. Against the rest of the laptops category it feels considered rather than novel.
What it can do
Our testing runs the same suite on every device so figures stay comparable across years. The figure worth quoting is Runtime: 12h 10m mixed use. That places it comfortably above average for its price bracket.
| Specification | ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED |
|---|---|
| Display | 14in OLED, 2880 x 1800, 120Hz |
| Chip | Core Ultra 7 258V |
| RAM | 32GB |
| Storage | 1TB |
| Battery | 75Wh |
| Weight | 1.2kg |
| Runtime | 12h 10m mixed use |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two working weeks as a primary machine, on battery wherever possible. Display at 150 nits, keyboard backlight off, the manufacturer’s balanced power profile, and the same browser profile with thirty tabs restored on every machine.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Battery life | A looped workday script — document editing, video calls, browsing — run to shutdown, three times, averaged. |
| Sustained CPU | A thirty-minute all-core render, reporting the settled clock speed rather than the boost figure. |
| Fan noise | Measured at 50cm from the display hinge during that render, in a room with a 28dB floor. |
| Chassis heat | Palm rest and underside temperatures after the render, since that is where it is actually felt. |
| Display | Brightness and contrast from a colorimeter, at the panel’s native setting rather than a boosted HDR mode. |
We deliberately do not report single-core burst scores, which almost nothing outside a benchmark actually produces.
The honest caveat: Sustained figures depend on ambient temperature. A warm room costs most thin laptops several percent.
What it does well
- A superb OLED panel for the money
- The best battery life of any Windows OLED machine we have tested
- A full port selection
Taken together, those strengths make it a natural fit for Windows users who want the MacBook Air experience.
Where it falls short
- A shallow keyboard
- Thin speakers
- The fan spins up readily
None of these are dealbreakers on their own. Whether they matter depends entirely on how you intend to use it, which is why the section below matters more than the score.
How it compares
The closest alternatives on price are MacBook Air M4 and Framework Laptop 13. All three have been through the same tests, so the figures below are directly comparable rather than collected from different reviews.
| Model | Price | Our score | Standout | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED (this review) | £1099 | 4 / 5 | A superb OLED panel for the money | A shallow keyboard |
| MacBook Air M4 | £1199 | 5 / 5 | Exceptional battery life | Only two ports, both on one side |
| Framework Laptop 13 | £1399 | 4 / 5 | Genuinely repairable, with labelled parts and captive screws | Poor speakers |
The MacBook Air M4 scores higher at £1199, so the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED has to win on a superb OLED panel for the money rather than on the total.
Is it worth the money?
At £1099 the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED undercuts the category average of £1471 by £372, against an average score of 3.8 out of 5 across the laptops we have tested. Its own 4 works out at roughly £275 per point. That is the straightforward case: above-average result, below-average price.
If the budget is the binding constraint, the Acer Aspire 14 AI at £649 is the floor we would still recommend — below that the compromises stop being ones you can live with.
Living with it
Two weeks in, the figure that stopped mattering was display — 14in OLED, 2880 x 1800, 120Hz is more than adequate and you forget about it by the third day. What kept surfacing instead was that a shallow keyboard, which is easy to shrug off in a spec comparison and harder to ignore at 6pm on a Friday. On the other side, a 3K 120Hz OLED at this price undercuts everything comparable turns out to be the sort of detail you only appreciate after living with the alternative.
Who it suits
Buy the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED if you are Windows users who want the MacBook Air experience. Skip it if this is something you would notice every day: a shallow keyboard.
Buy it if:
- Windows users who want the MacBook Air experience
- You want a superb OLED panel for the money
- You value the best battery life of any Windows OLED machine we have tested
Skip it if:
- You need a shallow keyboard to be a solved problem
- The MacBook Air M4 at £1199 already covers what you need
- You upgraded within the last two years — the gap is not worth the outlay
Verdict
Buy it for a superb OLED panel for the money. Think twice if this would bother you daily: a shallow keyboard.
Score: 4 / 5 · £1099 at the time of writing.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the laptops we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED Review: The Windows Air and ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED vs Razer Blade 16: Is the Razer Blade 16 Worth £1800 More?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
