A New Look for the Asus Zephyrus G14: A Sleeker, More Professional Design
3 min read
The Asus Zephyrus G14, a gaming laptop that has been a game-changer in the industry since its release in 2020, has undergone a major redesign at CES 2024. The new design is sleeker and more professional, with a thinner and lighter chassis and a more subdued aesthetic.
Once upon a time, the Asus Zephyrus G14 was a spritely whippersnapper of a gaming laptop that weighed just over 3.5 pounds and was powered by a monstrous AMD processor. Its retro aesthetic, with large, luxuriously comfortable keycaps and a keyboard font that evoked Johnny Rockets, set it apart from the sleek and smooth laptops that were becoming the norm at that time. The lid, covered with a unique dot matrix, was a curious but totally unique decoration that could be animated with LEDs, creating a funky and bold design.
The G14 quickly gained popularity and created a new category of gaming laptops with heavy-duty games running well on a 14-inch laptop with all-day battery life and a funky, bold design. It was a huge success for Asus, a near-consistent presence on Best Buy’s bestseller lists, and an anecdotal favorite among gaming laptops in the wild.
Fast-forward to CES 2024, and the G14 has been unveiled with a major redesign. The new design is much thinner and lighter, with a more professional and sleek aesthetic. The spaceship vibe is no more, and the dot matrix, exploding heads, and virtual fauna that it wrought are gone. The lid is now covered with a large, shiny slash that runs from the top left to the bottom right corners, with a series of RGB LEDs down the middle. The design is rounder, more polished, and prestige, and it looks, feels, and seems a heck of a lot like a MacBook.
The trend towards MacBook-like designs is not limited to the G14. Dell has also unveiled a major redesign of its XPS 15 and 17 laptops, which have lost their full-sized SD slots and physical function rows in favor of haptic touch buttons. The new designs are thinner and lighter, and they look and feel more like MacBooks.
While the pursuit of a MacBook-like design may be tempting, it’s important for manufacturers to remember that the MacBook is not just its look and feel. It’s much more. The MacBook’s success is due in large part to its category-topping performance and battery life. The G14, like the MacBook, has offered category-topping performance and battery life for several years.
The thinner and lighter design of the new G14 comes with costs. The laptop now caps out at an RTX 4070 graphics card, down from the RTX 4090 that the previous model could accommodate. The new G14 also has a smaller battery than its predecessor and a higher-resolution OLED screen. While the OLED screen is stunning, the smaller battery and higher resolution may impact the laptop’s battery life.
Manufacturers must be careful not to sacrifice the features that make their laptops unique and different in pursuit of a MacBook-like design. The pursuit of thinness, sleekness, and suaveness often comes with costs, such as reduced cooling capacity, disappointing performance, and frustrating keyboards.
The Asus Zephyrus G14, Dell XPS 13, and other major laptops that received redesigns at CES 2024 must strike a balance between design and functionality. They must offer the sleek and professional design that consumers are looking for while maintaining the performance and battery life that have made them successful. Only then will they continue to be the exceptional and different laptops that consumers have come to love.
