Asus finally revealed one of the first laptops with Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme CPU, and it already looks to be putting MacBook on notice in 2026.

With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, Windows 11 on Arm is finally catching up with Apple's M4 lineup, and potentially challenging M5.

While every gaming handheld around right now is an iGPU machine, no one is going to buy a general consumer laptop for gaming. Since Qualcomm doesn’t have a handheld, this makes the Snapdragon X platform’s lack of discrete GPUs even more obvious.

At CES 2026, ASUS expanded its ARM-based notebook lineup with refreshed Zenbook A14 models and the introduction of the all-new Zenbook A16.The latter stands out as ASUS’s first 16-inch Zenbook built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform and is set to receive exclusive access to the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme proce

ASUS is pairing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme with a 1.2 kg 16-inch Zenbook A16, promising big-screen portability, an 80 TOPS NPU, OLED at 120 Hz, and long battery life.

Snapdragon tablets focus on efficiency, long battery life and reliable performance, making them ideal for everyday productivity, entertainment and on-the-go multitasking without constant charging anxiety.

After the modest success of its first generation of Arm-based Snapdragon X processors, as part of Microsoft's Copilot+ AI PC ecosystem, Qualcomm continued to improve the architecture by launching the Snapdragon X2 Elite last September. And at this year's CES event, it's back again, this time with the more affordable X2 Plus range.