After a long time of resisting significant price drops, the Asus Zenbook S 16 has finally dropped down to $1,000, which is $500 off its retail price.
It’s normal for laptops to dip in price toward the end of their lifespan, close to when an update comes out. But the Asus Zenbook S 16 has held on. To be fair, it’s an extremely high-end Windows laptop, one of the prettiest to come out last year. It’s sleek, portable, and has a striking design. It even gets fantastic battery life, on par with a MacBook. Speaking of MacBooks, this Zenbook is the laptop I saw tech journalists traveling with more than anything else. Given how much tech they review, that’s quite an endorsement.
But the S 16 has always been hard for me to recommend when the cheapest model available was $1,500. I was always on the lookout for a more significant price cut, but it never dropped more than a couple hundred bucks. And even though it always came with 24 GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage, the price was a hard pill to swallow. Well, the day has finally come. It’s now down to $1,000 over at Best Buy as part of the store’s Presidents’ Day sale. That’s an incredible price for this much laptop.
Photograph: Christopher Null
Asus
Zenbook S 16 (UM5606)
The previously mentioned memory and storage still apply here, along with the 2880 x 1800 OLED display with a 120-Hz refresh rate. This laptop basically has every high-end feature you could imagine, but one of my favorite aspects is the ports. Despite the thin profile, the S 16 keeps all the legacy ports you might want, including HDMI, USB-A, and even a full-size SD card slot.
There is also a smaller, 14-inch model, but its discount is not as strong as the 16-inch model. It comes in at $1,300 right now, which is still a solid price for this configuration.
I should say that Asus has an update in the works for 2026 with the latest Intel chips, but it’s only coming to the 14-inch model. I won’t lie: Based on my testing, these CPUs will make a significant difference in performance—especially on the graphics front. But I have a feeling Asus will be selling this device for an even higher price for much longer, especially with the recent development around memory shortage.
While the Zenbook S 16 is certainly the best deal at Best Buy for its Presidents’ Day sale, I would also recommend the Asus Zephyrus G14, which is also $500 off. This configuration comes with a powerful RTX 5070 Ti graphics card and is one of our favorite gaming laptops.
