Asus chose Milan Design Week as the springboard for its new high-end Zenbooks

In the airy 1920s arcade of Galleria Meravigli, a few minutes’ walk from the Duomo in central Milan, Asus is demonstrating what it bills as ‘Design You Can Feel’ – and design you can walk through.

The centrepiece of the Taiwanese tech company’s presence at Milan Design Week 2025 is ‘Willful [sic] Wonder’. Designed by Nassia Inglessis’s Studio INI, the installation comprises a long, narrow walkway, flanked on either side by silver, semi-transparent, angel-like wings that shimmer and flutter as a visitor walks through them.

That engaging tactility is reflected, literally and figuratively, in the material that frames Inglessis’ triangular panels: Ceraluminum. That proprietary Asus technology, four years in development and launched by the company last year, is the result of bonding a ceramic material to aluminium. (Note: to say it, Ceraluminum will bond less stickily to your tongue if you deploy the American pronunciation and spelling of ‘aluminium’).

Now, in Milan, the company is unveiling what we might call the ‘sexy usefulness’ of the material, the lightness of aluminium and the resilience of the ceramic combining to fairly wondrous effect on the new Asus Zenbook Signature Edition series of laptops.

Like ‘Willful Wonder’, the four laptops are a treat to the touch: warm, inviting and smudge-free. They’re lightweight and sliver-thin – any thinner and there’d be insufficient depth for an HDMI port. But tough, too, their resistance to fracture, ASUS claims, three times greater than the aluminium used for most laptops. They’re also resilient in other ways, with their batteries lasting a game-changing 22 to 26 hours on one charge.

Encased in four, bespoke, natural world-inspired colours, the new Zenbooks bring a covetable, personal-feeling sense of user engagement. That’s a feeling wholly absent with the standard and ubiquitous silver aluminium notebook computers, as favoured by most laptop-jockeys (guilty as charged).

These sleek pillows of portable kit are clearly nosed to post-pandemic working methods, where ‘hybrid’ is the name of the game. ‘We discovered a need for people to have a laptop where the battery can last much, much longer,’ says Travis Chen, senior director of ASUS Consumer Product Management. ‘But at the same time, to keep it super lightweight. Especially for commuters.’

As part of their design process, ASUS focus-grouped the needs of workers in Japan and South Korea. ‘There are lot of commuters in those markets,’ says Chen, ‘and they rely on mass transportation… We realised, especially for commuters in Japan, there’s a typical image of commuters [crammed] in [train and subway] carriages. So they really need a laptop that is light but at the same time durable enough for that type of scenario.’

‘That,’ he adds, ‘is the difficult part. Some competitors can make their laptops super-lightweight, but at the same time they need to [shorten] the battery life. Or some other manufacturers have super-long battery life, but also super-weight – maybe two kilos. So our R&D [team] spent a lot of effort figuring that out. We don’t want to sacrifice performance… and still keep it under one kilo.’

As for those warming, organic-feeling colours: HsuanWu Wei, associate VP, Asus Design Centre, explains that, again, emotion is a key quality baked into gear that users will likely be using all day, every day, carrying it with them like an extension of their fingers – but not, the company hopes, like a monkey on their back. ‘Besides the aesthetic, the spirit [behind] the product is very important,’ he says. ‘We have a slogan: “In Search of Incredible”. That means we never give up and are always looking for better things to service the end-users. That’s very important.’

Cue those horizon-expanding colours. With those careful chromatic choices, says Wei, Asus is ‘paying tribute to nature. In this process, we have been seeking… how we can resonate with nature? How can [an] object not only give you the function but also recall emotion?’

Hence the Asus Zenbook Signature Edition series laptops come encased in – or, even, elevated by – zingy names taking conceptual inspiration from real-world landscapes. The Obsidian Black is channelling the midnight-hued cooled lava fields of Geldingadalir in Iceland. The Pamukkale White evokes the ‘tranquil beauty of cascading terraces and mineral-rich waters’ in Pamukkale, Turkey. The Terra Mocha conjures the stirring deserts of the Wadi Rum. And the Luminous Blue just might, after a hard day bashing your keys, transport you to Vaadhoo Island in the Maldives.

Well, even from that packed underground carriage, the weight of our laptop barely registering in our backpack, we all can dream, right?

Asus.com, @Asus, Nassia-Inglessis.com, @Studio_INI