For the past couple years, I’ve noticed a weird bug on Apple’s Messages app – specifically to do with images. I’ve been hoping that Apple would get around to fixing it for the longest time, but they haven’t thus far. Essentially, if you send an AVIF image file on iMessage, it won’t render properly. AVIF is an increasingly popular image format, so it’s a little annoying. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’d be one thing if Apple just didn’t support the file format. But, for some bizarre reason, it shows in a small window, with no way of expanding the preview. As a result, you just have a really tiny image on your screen that you cant properly look at. It behaves this way on both iOS and macOS. You can even properly see the AVIF image in the Message send preview, so you’d never suspect anything prior to sending an image. It’d be one thing if Apple didn’t support AVIF at all, but they do. Apple implemented support for AVIF image files in Safari in iOS 16, over two years ago. I'm all for supporting as many file formats as possible, but I have to be honest, I've been an iPhone user for about 10 years now, a Mac user for much longer than that, work in the IT industry and I have never once encountered this avif format. View all comments For whatever reason, they just haven’t gotten around to supporting it in iMessage, even though the AVIF files are visible to users. There’s just no way to properly view them. This experience is weird, and I seriously hope Apple gets around to fixing it soon. AVIFs are supported in Safari and Photos, so there’s nothing stopping users from sending them on iMessage. They’ll never render properly, and you end up in a weird situation where you sent an image that isn’t viewable. It’s annoying. My favorite Apple accessories on Amazon: Follow Michael: X/Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Image by Getty / FuturismStudiesIn a blind taste test, thousands of self-professed "omnivores and flexitarians" were given meat substitutes alongside the real thing and asked to rate which was better — and their responses were pretty telling.As Vox reports, new results from a survey conducted by NECTAR, a nonprofit that researches "alternative protein" products, suggest that preferences for real or fake meat may be more in our minds than in our taste buds.When averaging out the results in sum, NECTAR found that their 2,684 subjects far preferred the animal "benchmark" products they were fed alongside fake meat products ranging from imitation bratwurst and burgers to ersatz pulled pork and deli slices.But accounting for the massive disparities in quality between brands — which anyone who suffered through the vegan pizza craze of the early 2010s can attest to — paints a very different picture.  When given unbreaded "chicken" cutlets from Impossible Foods, for instance, 60 percent of the survey's participants said it tasted as good or better than real chicken from Purdue — a wild finding for foods from an industry that has taken hit after hit in recent years amid meat industry disinformation campaigns.Experts who spoke to Vox iterated that when it comes to food, mind truly is over matter."People don’t just taste food in an objective way," Daniel Rosenfeld, a University of California Los Angeles behavioral scientist who specializes in plant-based food perceptions, told the website. He should know: in 2023, Rosenfeld co-wrote a study that found that so-called "carnists," or people who strongly believe eating animals is a human right, were more likely to expect vegan food to taste gross.When it comes to expectations regarding plant-based foods, societal norms play a big role in how people feel, the researcher noted. It's not hard to imagine, for instance, the average cisgender American man loudly ragging on fake meats and extolling the virtues of bacon. For those of us who've eaten stellar plant-based foods, it's also humorous to envision that same type of guy unwittingly enjoying a delicious fake meat burger without being told it's not from an animal."When social norms with a product get set in place, it's pretty hard to change that default," Rosenfeld said. "People like to just do whatever is a popular option. We’re very conformist by nature."Share This Article

Hints and answers for Connections for April 20, #679, Easter Sunday.

Star Wars Outlaws' next story update is coming on 15th May, 2025. Read more

By AJ Dellinger Published April 19, 2025 | Comments (0) | Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey DeSantis look on during a campaign stop with "DeSantis 2024" signs behind them © Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images The Hope Florida Foundation was supposed to be the kind of organization that would help Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ wife, Casey, build her resume for future political aspirations. It’s starting to look like it’ll sink them, instead. In the latest turn in the story of the charity-turned-trainwreck, a virtual board meeting for the DeSantis-backed organization was derailed by trolls who flooded the Zoom call with porn and Nazi symbols, according to a report from the Tallahassee Democrat. The meeting of Hope Florida Foundation’s leadership was scheduled for the morning of April 17, but, per the Tallahassee Democrat’s account, was quickly interrupted because the members didn’t know how to prevent audience members from sharing their screens. That led to folks hanging in the crowd stealing the show, displaying all sorts of unwanted content. The meeting was paused, and a “technical difficulties – please stand by” message was displayed while the admins tried (and failed) to get a handle on things before ending the affair altogether. When they tried to restart the meeting, it failed because, according to a pop-up message seen by people trying to join the second attempt, “Host has another meeting in progress.” So, about the “why” of that meeting, which did eventually happen six hours after its scheduled time, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The Hope Florida Foundation is in a bit of hot water. The organization, which was started by Casey DeSantis to reduce government spending on social welfare programs by replacing them with faith-based organizations and non-profits, is at the center of a probe over an allegedly illegal donation that is rapidly unraveling the board and even has Ron DeSantis trying to distance himself from his wife. It all started with a suspicious $10 million donation made to Hope Florida, which came from Medicaid care operator Centene. That big check was part of a larger $67 million out-of-court settlement between the company and the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. According to Politico, Centene was directed to put $10 million of that settlement directly in the coffers of Hope Florida Foundation, which may have amounted to an illegal transfer of funds that should have gone to the state. That $10 million was allegedly used by Hope Florida to help two organizations—Save Our Society from Drugs and Secure Florida’s Future—with their efforts to defeat a ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana in the state, which ultimately failed to garner the 60% support needed to pass last November. Those donations from Hope Florida to the groups were reportedly encouraged by Governor DeSantis’ then-chief of staff James Uthmeier, and, according to the Tampa Bay Times, those two groups went on to make significant donations to the political action committee controlled by Uthmeier, who was named Florida attorney general earlier this year. The web is already pretty tangled, and that’s just the start of it. Republican state representative Alex Andrade has accused Uthmeier and Hope Florida of engaging in fraud and money laundering, and they don’t seem to have any good answers for those accusations. In the initially hijacked meeting, Hope Florida president Joshua Hay admitted that he couldn’t account for the $10 million donation, nor what it was used for. “We have no monitoring procedures. We have no staff,” he said on the call. The developing scandal appears like it might put an end to Casey DeSantis’ political ambitions before they even start, as it was expected that she would launch her own bid to become Governor of Florida in 2026 after her husband’s second term comes to an end. Now, Ron seems like he’s making sure that it’s only her career that is over. Earlier this week, when asked about the situation at Hope Florida, DeSantis took the opportunity to throw his wife under the bus and back it up just to make sure he hit her. “I really had no ownership of this,” he told the media. “I didn’t devise it. She devised it. She set the vision. She executed the vision.” He did say that the organization has had “positive results,” but that seems like a cherry on top of a shit sundae that he served to her. Sure seems like he’s not interested in being the first man. That said, being an alleged fraudster is anything but a career-ender in Florida. Republican Rick Scott was the CEO of a company that was hit with the biggest fine ever for Medicare and Medicaid fraud, and he managed to win not just two terms as Florida’s governor but is still representing the state in the US Senate. There’s not much that is truly disqualifying down there. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Adam Kovac Published April 7, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published March 28, 2025 By Ed Cara Published March 20, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published March 5, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published February 27, 2025 By Margherita Bassi Published February 19, 2025

Burning The Candle Still bummed out about 2XKO's 10 character launch roster? Riot has heard you, and have tuned the development team to get "as many champs out as possible" 2XKO executive producer Tom Cannon has revealed the team has shifted to get champs out quickly, and the personal roster number that he'd be happy with. Image credit: Riot Games News by Connor Makar Staff Writer Published on April 19, 2025 Following the reveal that 2XKO will have only 10 playable champions at launch, and the negative reception to what is undoubtedly a smaller initial roster than expect, 2XKO's executive producer Tom Cannon has stated that the development team has shifted to further prioritise champion output and stated his own personal target character count: 24. Speaking to press, professional fighting game players and commentators, and content creators at the 2XKO community tour preview in France earlier this month, Tom Cannon said the following when asked by VG247 about the 10 character launch roster, what cadence of post-launch champ releases, and how many teams they currently having working on new champions at this time. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. "I can say that we have champions that we're working on that you haven't seen yet. I'll tell you for me a number that would feel better than 10, just as my personal opinion, is around 24. I think at 24 you're like, okay now there's enough to keep me going, and then we can add more and more. But as for what would be enough for me? Or rather, a good starting point? 24." "We're not close to that now, so we're going to work quickly to get to that point, and then we're going to keep going. The reason why I'm being a little cagey at this stuff is because honestly we're still getting better at this stuff. This is a new fighting game team, even though we've been at this for a little while, we're not on like version five of a franchise right? We're building this team as we go and we're learning how to do things. You're seeing the game get better, look better visually, and the character kits get more dialled in as, frankly, we're getting more familiar with the game and better at our jobs." "We do have multiple champions pods going at once, and have heard the feedback we got regarding the 10 champion launch roster. We know you want more and we're tuning the game team to make sure we can optimise for getting as many champs out as possible, while keeping the quality level high. Like, one of the reasons why we only have 10 champs is because we do have that high bar on quality. We don't want half the roster to be just the assist that you use. Every character is going to be someone's favourite character, and you should be able to play that character and feel like you have something that is legit." "But yeah, one of the top things we're talking about now as a team is the roster, because we know 10 is small, we know that we want more, we know that League is adding new champions. The discussions around who is next is also really fun, and it's something we're really passionate about, and it's a real priority for us." Cannon would not further elaborate on the planned cadence of champion releases post-launch, nor how many releases the team are hoping to get out to players once the game finally comes out, but the response he did provide does offer some insight into the team's reception to the 10 champion figure. Riot Games, a company that has built itself around live service game development, has experience in supporting games like 2XKO for long periods of time, even if the 2XKO team itself is relatively fresh to the ordeal. For now, as players in the Americas jump back into the game via 2XKO's second Alpha Lab test, the focus of the community is squarely on the game following wide-spread gameplay updates. With the game set to launch some time in 2025, we're still due three more character reveals before the 1.0 version of 2XKO is finally out there. Who do you think they'll be, and when do you think we'll see them? Let us know below!

It looks like humanoid robots have a long way to go before catching up with human runners. Beijing’s E-Town tech hub hosted what it described as the first world’s first humanoid half-marathon on Saturday, with 21 humanoid robots competing alongside thousands of humans. Bloomberg reports that the winning robot, Tiangong Ultra, was built by the government-backed research institute X-Humanoid and finished the race in two hours and 40 minutes. This would not be an impressive time for a human — the race’s winning male runner finished in one hour and two minutes, and it’s normal for casual runners to complete a half-marathon in (brag alert) under two hours. Tiangong Ultra needed human assistance to win — specifically a human who ran ahead with a signaling device on his back, enabling the robot to imitate his movements. (Most other robots were remote controlled, with human operators running beside them.) Every other robot needed at least three hours to complete the race, and only four robots in total managed to finish ahead of the four-hour cutoff time, according to Bloomberg. Some robots barely made it past the starting line — for example, Shennong tripped a human support runner, then slammed into a fence and shattered. At one point, Little Giant (the shortest competitor, at 30 inches in height), paused as smoke emerged from its head. The Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half Marathon featured robots built by Chinese companies, as well as student groups. (Unitree’s G1 robot fell at the starting line, but the company said a client had used the robot without its algorithms.) In order to compete, robots needed to have a humanoid appearance and run on two legs. They ran in a separate, fenced-off lane from the humans, with staggered start times to reduce the risk that they’d run into each other. Battery changes were allowed (Tiangong Ultra’s battery was changed three times), and substitute robots could even be swapped in with a time penalty. X-Humanoid’s Chief Technology Officer Tang Jiang told Reuters, “”I don’t want to boast but I think no other robotics firms in the West have matched Tiangong’s sporting achievements.”

Gymnastic dancing in Germany, 1943. Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesGetty Images Brief, intentional movement, known as exercise snacks or mindful motion, can dramatically improve posture, focus, stress resilience, productivity and mental well-being. However, framing movement as both medicine and a powerful tool for professional growth is a decisive step toward an optimal, innovative and consciously crafted way of living and thriving. Rethinking Movement: From Metrics To Mindfulness Mainstream fitness culture has long prioritized performance metrics (think calories burned, steps counted, reps completed) over the innate intelligence of natural movement. As a result, our relationship with physical activity has become increasingly transactional. The body is treated like a machine to optimize, rather than an ever-evolving living system to care for. However, a deeper, more restorative narrative is rising within the wellness space, one that positions movement not as a task to complete, but as medicine. This shift reframes human motion as a vital rhythm for well-being, performance and clarity. Rather than isolating exercise to a high-intensity hour, this mindful approach embraces the quiet potency of consistent, embodied movement as a daily anchor. From micro-movements and walking rituals to posture resets and breath-led flow, these practices are tangible, sustainable tools for peak performance. When practiced with awareness, movement becomes a form of somatic strategy: enhancing focus, regulating emotions and restoring cognitive bandwidth. For leaders, creatives and decision-makers, mindful movement may be the missing link between chronic depletion and sustainable excellence. This evolution in thinking is rooted in a timeless truth: the human body was never meant to be still. It was designed to move frequently, rhythmically and with intention. Purposeful movement nourishes not just muscles and joints but also the brain, the nervous system and the internal landscape that shapes how we respond to challenge and change. Mindful movement isn’t a pause from productivity. It’s the physiological foundation that allows it to flourish. The Rise of "Exercise Snacks" First coined by physiologists, exercise snacks refer to short bursts of movement, typically one to five minutes, that are strategically woven into the day. Think: a brisk stair climb between Zoom calls, a few yoga stretches before breakfast, or a quick round of squats at the top of each hour. These micro-sessions require no gym, no gear and no disruption, just intentionality. And the science behind them is compelling. A 2022 study published in Nature Medicine found that adults who engaged in just one to two minutes of vigorous, intermittent, lifestyle-based physical activity three times per day had a 49% lower risk of all-cause mortality. Even more striking, their risk of cardiovascular disease mortality dropped by up to 40%, despite not participating in structured workouts. The takeaway is both profound and accessible: the body responds to frequency, not just duration. These small, purposeful movements compound over time, shaping long-term health outcomes and sustaining the energy, focus and resilience needed to show up fully in both life and leadership. Posture And Mobility: Undoing The Sedentary Spiral Extended sitting does more than stiffen your spine. It compresses lung capacity, alters gait patterns and affects how the brain processes pain signals, to name a few. Researchers from the British Journal of Sports Medicine (2023) found that interrupting sitting every 30 minutes with just 3 minutes of movement improved spinal mobility and core engagement and reduced musculoskeletal discomfort. Mindful movements, such as tai chi, dynamic stretching or simply rotating the neck and shoulders, recalibrate posture by reconnecting the body to gravity and breath. This synergistic reconnection can be especially critical for knowledge workers who spend much of their day locked into digital postures and disconnected from bodily sensations. Mental Health And Stress Resilience To Move Beyond the Mind Movement doesn’t just alter how we feel physically. It alters brain chemistry. A recent meta-analysis published in The Lancet Psychiatry (2023) found that people who engaged in short, regular bouts of physical activity, particularly rhythmic, low-intensity exercises like walking, experienced a 26% reduction in depression symptoms. These movements activated the parasympathetic nervous system, downregulating cortisol while upregulating serotonin and dopamine. The study also found that movement positively impacted interoception, or the ability to sense internal states, which is foundational for emotional regulation and stress recovery. For individuals dealing with chronic stress or burnout, even five minutes of coordinated movement with breath can be a tremendous tool to reset the nervous system. In this context, mindful motion becomes not just a coping strategy but a therapeutic tool for daily optimal living at work and beyond. Cognitive Sharpness To Move Into Flow Movement and mental clarity are tightly intertwined. Emerging evidence from a 2022 review in NeuroImage showed that concise, sub-maximal movement increases cerebral blood flow, particularly in the prefrontal cortex—the region responsible for focus, decision-making and working memory. This may explain why many high-performing professionals and creatives report their best ideas come while walking, stretching or pacing. Thus, incorporating "movement breaks" into the workday can improve problem-solving capacity, reduce mental fatigue and improve task-switching efficiency. The movement-flow connection also reinforces one of the central findings in behavioral science: context shapes cognition. In other words, when a body is in motion, it gives the brain a different lens through which to process challenges, resolve conflict and innovate. From Fitness To Fluidity The emerging paradigm of movement isn’t about doing more but about doing it differently. When physical activity is distributed throughout the day and decoupled from performance pressure, it becomes more accessible, more intuitive and more inclusive. This shift reframes movement as something that belongs to everyone, regardless of age, ability or schedule. Gone is the all-or-nothing mentality that has long defined traditional fitness culture. In its place: a fluid approach to motion. Thirty seconds of breathwork upon waking. Two minutes of spinal mobility between meetings. A spontaneous dance break while the kettle boils. These micro-movements may be small in duration, but they are mighty in impact. Restorative, cumulative and essential to sustaining our well-being in an increasingly sedentary world. Crucially, they also hold the potential to address health equity. A 2023 review published in Frontiers in Public Health highlights how movement “snacks” and mindful motion practices can serve as low-barrier, high-impact interventions, particularly for individuals facing structural or economic limitations to accessing traditional exercise environments. The Future Of Fitness Isn’t Harder, Longer Or Faster It’s smarter. Simpler. And more sustainable. Yes, the science is compelling, but the real insight is deeply human: our bodies are always speaking. They signal when we’re stagnant, when we’re overstimulated, when we’re disconnected. And when we meet those signals with movement, no matter how subtle, we affirm our vitality, agency and capacity for renewal. Because movement is more than medicine, it’s a mirror. A daily reminder that health doesn’t reside in extremes, but in presence. Not in metrics, but in moments of lived-in experience. Not in performance, but in the quiet, intentional acts that reconnect us to our most elemental truth: we were made to move.

What just happened? Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have unveiled a flash memory device that breaks speed records once thought unreachable. Dubbed "PoX," the device can program data in just 400 picoseconds, or four hundred trillionths of a second, making it the fastest semiconductor charge storage device ever recorded. To put this achievement into perspective, PoX can perform 25 billion operations per second – surpassing the previous world record for similar technology by a factor of 100,000. The implications are profound, particularly for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence. As AI models continue to grow in complexity and scale, their soaring computational demands are pushing existing memory technologies to their limits. Traditional volatile memories like static RAM and dynamic RAM offer impressive speeds – typically writing data in under a nanosecond – but they lose all stored information when power is cut. The researchers developed PoX using graphene, a material renowned for its exceptional electrical properties. Non-volatile memories like flash storage retain data without power and consume significantly less energy than volatile counterparts, but they've traditionally lagged in speed – often requiring microseconds to milliseconds for data access. A research team at Fudan University, led by Professor Zhou Peng of the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems, set out to close this performance gap by rethinking the physical structure of flash memory. Rather than using conventional silicon, the researchers turned to graphene – a two-dimensional material celebrated for its remarkable electrical properties – and implemented a Dirac band structure. // Related Stories By leveraging graphene's ballistic transport behavior and precisely tuning the Gaussian length of the memory channel, they developed a mechanism they call "super-injection." This process enables an almost unrestricted flow of charge into the storage layer, effectively eliminating the speed bottleneck that has limited non-volatile memory for decades. According to Zhou Peng, the difference is staggering. "This is like the device working 1 billion times in the blink of an eye, while a typical USB flash drive can only work 1,000 times. The previous world record for similar technology was 2 million." The potential applications for PoX reach well beyond faster consumer electronics. In the realm of artificial intelligence, the speed at which data can be accessed and processed is a key limiter of overall computing performance. As AI models become increasingly data-intensive, storage systems capable of keeping pace with processors are critical. With its unprecedented speed and low power consumption, PoX could enable real-time processing of massive datasets while also curbing the energy demands of data movement, one of the major inefficiencies in today's AI hardware.

Asus Zenbook A14 MSRP $1,000.00 Score Details “The Asus Zenbook 14 is remarkably light and incredibly long-lasting.” Pros Thin and extremely light Comfortable Ceraluminum material Solid productivity performance Excellent battery life Great OLED display Attractive price Cons Lid is too loose Only one configuration available Table of Contents Table of Contents Specs and configuration Design Keyboard and touchpad Connectivity and webcam Performance Battery life Display and audio A really light laptops that still lasts a long time Sometimes, a company makes a laptop with a singular design goal in mind, such as making it as light as possible. The result can be a laptop that compromises in too many areas, such as a too-small battery or a construction that feels a little flimsy. Asus has introduced the Zenbook A14 that’s one of the lightest 14-inch laptops ever, and I was a little worried that it might suffer the same fate as some other really light machines. Recommended Videos Fortunately, it does not. It’s solidly built (with just one complaint) and it has a large battery that affords exceptional battery life, even with an excellent OLED display. The trick: Asus used a new material to achieve that light weight, along with the highly efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipset and a lower display resolution. The result is a laptop that looks and feels great, runs fast, and lasts a long time. Related  Asus Zenbook A14 Dimensions 12.23 x 8.42 x 0.63 inches Weight 2.4 pounds Display 14.0-inch 16:10 FHD+ (1920 x 1200) OLED, 60Hz CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 GPU Qualcomm Adreno Memory 16GB 32GB Storage 512GB SSD 1TB SSD Ports 1 x USB4 1 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 1 x HDMI 2.1 1 x 3.5mm headphone jack Camera 1080p with infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello Wi-Fi Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetoth 5.3 Battery 70 watt-hour Operating system Windows 11 on ARM Price $1,000+ Although there are several configuration options listed in the Asus materials, there’s only one configuration I could find that available to buy today. It costs $1,000, and it includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 14.0-inch FHD+ OLED display. That’s a good price for a well-configured laptop that has twice the storage of the Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4). It qualifies as a midrange price, while the laptop feels like it’s quite premium. So, it’s not a bargain, exactly, but you won’t feel like you spent too much money. Mark Coppock / Digital Trends The Zenbook A14’s primary claim to fame is its incredibly light weight, coming in at just 2.4 pounds. That’s not the lightest laptop we’ve seen, but it’s light enough for a 14-inch laptop that you’ll barely notice it in your backpack — and yet, to my surprise, it avoids feeling flimsy as lightweight laptops sometimes do. That’s thanks to a new “Ceraluminum” compound in the lid, keyboard frame, and base. Ceraluminum is the result of dipping aluminum in a bath and applying high voltage, a process that transforms the surface metal into what Asus describes as a “hard, ceramic-like layer.” And it certainly feels different. In fact, it felt weird to me when I first pulled it out of the box, but as I handled the Zenbook A14 a little more, I found myself liking it. And another plus is that the Ceralumium promises to keep the surface free of scratches and blemishes. For example, I couldn’t get it to hold onto a fingerprint no matter how hard I tried. The keyboard deck and chassis bottom are solid, and the very thin lid has just the slightest give under pressure. That’s pretty good, considering that some other premium laptops show the same and they’re not nearly as light. That Ceraluminum texture has a warm feel, too, and while the edges are a little sharp they didn’t cut into my wrists. The Apple MacBook Air 13 is a little more solid all around, but it’s also heavier at 2.7 pounds in spite of being a bit smaller and much thinner (o.45 inches versus 0.63 inches) with a 13.6-inch display. And maybe what’s most impressive about the Zenbook A14’s light weight is that there’s still a large 70 watt-hour battery inside, which as we’ll see pays some real dividends in longevity. Mark Coppock / Digital Trends I do have one complaint about the ZenBook A14’s construction: the hinge is too loose. The lid can be opened with one hand, which is great, but it also wobbles more than I like and falls backward when the laptop is lifted by the base. And, the hinge won’t support the lid when it’s any less than about halfway open, meaning it falls closed with a resounding snap. Asus did a ton of testing to verify that the laptop is robust, but even so it was a bit disconcerting. I wish the hinge was a bit firmer, and I wonder if maybe Asus needs to work on the design a bit. The reviewer’s guide has a paragraph on the “EasyLife” design, and I can’t say that my review unit’s hinge matches up very well. Aesthetically, the Zenbook A14 stands apart from some other Zenbooks I’ve reviewed. It has none of the geometric patterns you’ll find on many Asus laptops, and the Iceland Gray and Zabriskie Beige (?) color ways look nice but are wholly minimalist. There’s a roundness to the design that I like, and its thin display bezels contribute to a modern look. I still slightly prefer some other laptops in this regard, like the MacBook Air 13 and the HP OmniBook Ultra 14, but I have no complaints about the Asus. Mark Coppock / Digital Trends The keyboard is spacious enough, with a comfortable layout and large keycaps. The switches are light with a snappy bottoming action, but it lacked a bit of the crispness that I like. I got up to speed quickly enough and writing this review wasn’t fatiguing, but I’d rate the keyboard just a step behind Apple’s Magic Keyboard and the excellent version HP is using on its OmniBook and EliteBook lineups. The touchpad is reasonably large, and it’s a mechanical version with buttons that are quiet and snappy. As far as mechanical touchpads go, it’s fine, but more and more laptops are including haptic touchpads that I like a lot better. Apple’s Force Touch touchpad with its Force Click feature remains the best touchpad on a laptop today. Connectivity is good, with two fast USB4 ports, a USB-A port for legacy devices, and an HDMI 2.1 port. The biggest problem is that like most laptops today, the Zenbook A14 charges via USB-C and so you only have one of those ports available when plugged in. That’s not unusual, though, so it’s not really a ding against the Asus. I do prefer Apple’s MagSafe 3 connection on its MacBooks, which keeps all the ports available for use. Wireless connectivity is also one generation behind, which surprises me a little given the Qualcomm chipset. Mark Coppock / Digital Trends The webcam is a 1080p version, which has become the new minimum standard. More and more laptops are being released with higher resolution webcams, but this one is good enough for a quality image. The Snapdragon X chipset has a fast Neural Processing Unit (NPU) running at 45 tera operations per second (TOPS), which exceeds the 40 TOPS required for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC AI initiative. That means the Zenbook A14 can run the various Copilot+ AI features on-device with better efficiency. Asus also adds several of its own utilities that can utilize the NPU, such as its noise cancellation function and its StoryCube app for managing and enhancing photos and videos. Mark Coppock / Digital Trends The Zenbook A14 is the first Windows on ARM laptop I’ve reviewed in the last couple of months, and I see that the platform is doing fine. There are some incompatibilities that might trip up some users, but I haven’t run across any that would matter in my workflow. I think that for most users, Windows on ARM will be fully functional. And that’s a good thing, because the Qualcomm Snapdragon X lineup is fast enough for the most demanding productivity users, and that’s this laptop’s target market. And Qualcomm also focused on efficiency, a trademark of the ARM architecture that also shows up in Apple Silicon. My review unit used the Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 chipset, an 8-core chipset running at a max multi-core frequency of 3.2GHz that boosts to 3.4GHz single-core. That makes it the second-slowest Snapdragon X chipset and well behind the faster Snapdragon X Elite chipset with 12 cores and faster speeds. Its Adreno integrated graphics run at 1.7 TFLOPs, which is also the slowest in the lineup. It’s up against Intel’s Lunar Lake chipset that’s also aimed more at efficiency. Note that all of the results listed are in each laptop’s “performance” mode. As we can see in our benchmarks, the Zenbook A14 was faster than Lunar Lake but not as fast as the Snapdragon X Elite. That’s to be expected. It fell even more significantly behind in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark, where Lunar Lake’s Intel Arc 140V graphics did better. The conclusion is that the Zenbook A14 is a very fast laptop for demanding productivity workflows, but it won’t impress in gaming or creative tasks that depend on a fast GPU. Cinebench R24 (single/multi) Geekbench 6 (single/multi) 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Asus Zenbook A14 (Snapdragon X Plus / Adreno) 108 / 690 2436 / 11242 3262 Acer Swift Go 14 AI (Snapdragon X Plus / Adreno) 107 / 716 2413 / 11388 3231 HP OmniBook X (Snapdragon X Elite / Adreno)101 / 749 2377 / 13490 6165 HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V / Intel Arc 140V) 116 / 598 2483 / 10725 7573 Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Core Ultra 7 258V / Intel Arc 140V) 109 / 630 2485 / 10569 5217 Asus Zenbook S 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V / Intel Arc 140V)112 / 452 2738 / 10734 7514 MacBook Air 13 (M4 10/8)172 / 854 3751 / 14801 7827 Mark Coppock / Digital Trends As I mentioned earlier, the Zenbook A14 manages to be very light while packing in a large 70 watt-hour battery. That’s plenty for a 14-inch laptop, and when you consider the highly efficient Qualcomm chipset, it bodes well for longevity. Even better, Asus made just the right compromise with the display, offering a great OLED panel but keeping the resolution down a bit. The result is some of the best battery life I’ve seen from a Windows laptop. The best machines in our comparison group use IPS displays, such as the Qualcomm-based Acer Swift Go 14, meaning that the Zenbook A14 does a great job of offering up a quality visual experience that nevertheless lasts for a long time. This is potentially multi-day battery life, depending on your workflow — something that, until recently, only the MacBook Air 13 with Apple’s incredibly efficient Apple Silicon processors could boast. Web browsing Video Cinebench R24 Asus Zenbook A14 (Snapdragon X Plus) 15 hours, 4 minutes 21 hours, 55 minutes 1 hour, 32 minutes Acer Swift Go 14 (Snapdragon X Plus) 15 hours, 29 minutes 21 hours, 38 minutes 1 hour, 42 minutes HP EliteBook X G1a (Ryzen AI 9 HX 375) N/A 7 hours, 27 minutes 1 hour, 27 minutes Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 (Core Ultra 5 226V) 12 hours, 50 minutes 19 hours, 30 minutes 2 hours, 18 minutes HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V) 11 hours, 5 minutes 15 hours, 46 minutes 2 hours, 14 minutes Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Core Ultra 7 258V) 14 hours, 16 minutes 17 hours, 31 minutes 2 hours, 15 minutes Asus Zenbook S 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V) 16 hours, 47 minutes 18 hours, 35 minutes 3 hours, 33 minutes Microsoft Surface Laptop (Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100) 14 hours, 21 minutes 22 hours, 39 minutes N/A HP Omnibook X (Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100) 13 hours, 37 minutes 22 hours, 4 minutes 1 hour, 52 minutes Apple MacBook Air (Apple M4 10/8)16 hours, 30 minutes 20 hours, 31 minutes 3 hours, 47 minutes Mark Coppock / Digital Trends As I just said, Asus chose a display that compromises between quality and sharpness. It’s a 14.0-inch 16:10 FHD+ (1920 x 1200) OLED panel, meaning it’s not as sharp given the screen size as the more common 2.8K variety, but unless you pay a lot of attention you might not notice. I’m a writer who loves sharp black text on a white background, and OLED provides the contrast while 2.8K provides the sharpness. But I suspect that most people won’t notice the lower resolution nearly as much as they notice the inky blacks and dynamic colors. According to my colorimeter, the display enjoys the usual spectacular OLED quality. It’s bright at 411 nits, well above the 300-nit standard we’ve had for years. Blacks are perfect, and so contrast is extremely high. Colors are wide at 100% sRGB, 97% AdobeRGB, and 100% DCI-P3, and they’re incredibly accurate at a DeltaE of 0.88 (1.0 or less is considered excellent for any use). If you don’t demand the sharpest text, you’ll love this display. It’s great for every use including productivity and creative work (although the performance doesn’t quite keep up here), and media consumption including high dynamic range (HDR) content looks great. The audio isn’t quite as impressive. The dual downward-firing speakers are loud, but there’s some distortion when turned all the way up. And the lack of bass is palpable, with the clear mids and highs coming across as a little tinny. You’ll want to use a pair of headphones for more than just the occasional YouTube video, and the MacBook Air 13’s quad speaker setup is a lot better. The Zenbook A14 kind of grew on me the more I used it. At first, it just felt kind of weird, with a surface that wasn’t quick like plastic but wasn’t quite like metal, either. But the more I handled it, the more I liked it. All the work Asus put into its Ceraluminum material wasn’t wasted. I wish the hinge was tighter, but that wasn’t at all a dealbreaker for me. And I love that even though it’s very light, it still got class-leading battery life with solid productivity performer. It’s right up there with the MacBook Air 13 (M4) which is saying something. If you’re looking for a 14-inch laptop that you don’t need for gaming or video editing, then you really need to give the Zenbook A14 some serious consideration. Editors’ Recommendations