On March 19, ASUS officially unveiled promotional materials for its Zenbook A16 notebook, which is powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip. In these materials, ASUS drew comparisons across various performance metrics with Apple’s M5 MacBook Pro. The data presented suggested that ASUS holds the lead in multi-core workloads, office productivity, and AI performance. However, certain testing standards employed by ASUS have ignited controversy. For example, in gaming performance tests, ASUS utilized a non-native macOS version of Diablo IV for the sake of comparison. This necessitated Apple devices to run the game through translation software, which led to performance degradation and created an unfair comparison environment.
Furthermore, ASUS has been accused of conflating the theoretical peak bandwidth of the system-on-chip’s unified memory (228GB/s) with external data transfer rates (153GB/s), a move that critics label as concept substitution. The promotional campaign also underscored performance advantages ranging from 1.26 times to 1.85 times in scenarios such as Geekbench 6.5 multi-core tests and Excel processing. ASUS emphasized its 18-core design in contrast to Apple’s 10-core.
At present, the Zenbook A16 featuring this chip has not yet been officially launched. Meanwhile, the Apple M5 MacBook Pro has experienced a $200 price reduction on Amazon, bringing its starting price down to $1,399.99.