Fear and blogging (and prerelease laptop testing) in Las Vegas

January 17, 2026 Antonio G. Di Benedetto

A beige Asus Zenbook A16 laptop sitting on a small one-person table at a convention center.
During a chaotic multiday event, I found myself working anywhere. And always in a rush.

At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster. But to my surprise, aside from pre-production hardware glitches, I came away impressed.

The Zenbook A16 that Asus sent me for early testing has a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-94-100 chip. It's one of the flagship …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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