I found a laptop for creators that rivals the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but it costs half the price

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• The Asus ProArt P16 is on sale now at Best Buy for $1,699, which is $200 off the regular price.
• It pairs powerful hardware a suite of customizable options for creatives.
• The deep personalization requires engagement from the user, the huge trackpad won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and the ultra-glossy display tends to glare.

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Asus’ ProArt series consists of sleek laptops with high-end hardware for creatives. At the top of the line is the new AMD-powered ProArt P16, which exudes power and performance with a sleek, all-black form factor, giant trackpad with Asus’ proprietary DialPad, and brilliant display. 

I recently had a chance to go hands-on with the ProArt P16 and found it to be a highly capable machine with a lot of raw power, but one that also requires some customization and optimization to get the most out of it. Before I touch on that, let’s take a look at the hardware.

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The ProArt P16 comes with 32GB of memory and the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, a 12-core, 24-thread chip with a 50 TOP NPU. This strong core powers the device’s creative endeavors, whether video editing, using advanced animation or graphic design programs or simply multitasking with a handful of different apps and dozens of browser tabs.

One of the best parts of this laptop, however, is its display. The 500-nit, 3840 x 2400 resolution AMOLED touchscreen display delivers a crisp, bright picture and has a glossy, premium coating. Powered by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, it features DLSS 3 (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and support for ray tracing.

Although it is certainly capable of delivering a good gaming experience, it’s held back a bit by the 60Hz refresh rate, something that is part of the give-and-take of the device’s overall feature set. Asus’ decision to limit the refresh rate is a little disappointing, but it does keep the price point low and solidifies its intended use case as a creator-first machine. 

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In that vein, it comes with a stylus that feels precise and responsive, especially on the smooth, glossy display, which feels like a blank canvas beckoning you to sketch on. The pen on this laptop is good enough for artists and designers to use seriously, as all too often, they’re either too laggy or too barebones to justify using. Here, however, it’s snappy and responsive and comes with various capabilities that work in tandem with the DialPad to power customizable, single-click actions. 

I also appreciate that this laptop is not a 2-in-1. Convertible laptops are often forced to switch to tablet mode if you want to use them with a stylus, as pressing on the display in laptop mode pushes it down unless you’re supporting it with your hand. 

The ProArt P16 was designed with this in mind, as the display locks into place at its furthest angle. Instead of folding back from the pressure of the pen, it stays upright with a generous degree of bend. Just keep in mind that pushing back too hard will result in the front of the device lifting off of the desk. 

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The Asus DialPad is another unique feature that creatives will love to tinker with. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s a small, raised wheel on the trackpad that can be customized to activate different settings, like changing brush sizes in Photoshop or cutting, pausing, or rewinding in CapCut or Premiere. The DialPad’s small physical size makes activating and scrolling through the “wheel” fast and easy, especially for common features.

My only gripe about the DialPad was that it took a minute to set up. It came disabled on the laptop out of the box, requiring me to activate it with a specific gesture on the trackpad that isn’t obvious unless you look it up (you press the icon in the top right corner of the trackpad, then quickly slide diagonally down toward the middle of the trackpad). As one of this laptop’s premiere features, wouldn’t it make sense to a) have it work out of the box and/or b) feature an easy setup tutorial?

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Once it was activated, however, I quickly became a fan. I like how granular you can make the customizations, and it’s useful even beyond creative use cases. In fact, I found that some of the most handy cases were in productivity apps and in the browser, enabling quick functions during the workday for frequent actions. 

The other Asus programs that come with the laptop have varying degrees of usefulness, not to mention they were rather slow to fire up. Asus’ “Muse Tree“, for example, took an unexpectedly long time to install and get going. I had a chance to go hands-on with this app previously, and although it’s a very cool idea, I’m still on the fence regarding its usefulness. 

The high-end and satisfying keyboard has absolutely silent keys. Similarly, the trackpad is massive, extending from the keyboard to the edge of the device, and has a velvety matte texture. One downside is that I had some trouble getting it to function at a high capacity in a particularly cold office. If your hands are on the cold side, you might experience some slow responses. 

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This could potentially be adjusted with optimization, which is the other big thing I’d like to mention about this laptop. In my experience, Asus laptops across the board respond particularly well to optimization settings. The ProArt P16 is a perfect example of this; different profiles or settings parameters can drastically affect performance, ranging from battery life to speed and responsiveness.

This also applies to Windows updates, particularly when it comes to demanding workloads. When I first fired up this laptop, for example, its performance was noticeably worse until I went through the series of Windows updates for the OS, updated drivers, and followed up with the list of updates in the MyAsus app. 

The P16’s performance improved after I took the time to update it, and it was then optimized further once I got used to the DialPad and configured the trackpad and power profiles. 

All of this is to say that the ProArt P16, for me, was not a laptop that came ready to go out of the box but rather requires some personalization and attention to get the most out of it. This applies to its rich feature set, but it takes a moment to incorporate it into creative workflows. Ultimately, this is a good thing, as it encourages innovation on the user’s part to break out of cloned UIs and workflows that all look the same. 

Putting a more concrete number to its performance, in our benchmarking tests, the ProArt P16 placed somewhere in between the M3 MacBook Pro and the M4, although it should be noted that it’s more on par with the M3 than Apple’s latest M4 product.  

Lastly, let’s briefly mention the battery. This is a laptop with a powerful suite of hardware and a 16-inch AMOLED display, so I wasn’t expecting much going into my testing. However, I was pleasantly surprised at just how robust the battery is, especially when paying attention to power-saving settings. 

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With normal use and intermittent high-demand tasks, I easily got over 10 hours of battery life. However, with intensive creative tasks and heavy multitasking, you can expect around seven hours before connecting to an outlet. 

ZDNET’s buying advice

If you’re looking for a powerful laptop with solid hardware and a rich, dynamic feature set, I recommend the Asus ProArt P16 as a solid choice for advanced creators who want to challenge the status quo and enjoy tinkering with customization settings to maximize creative output. 

However, if you’re looking for an out-of-the-box creative powerhouse, I recommend the Apple M3 or M4 MacBook Pro. It has all the powerful hardware ready to tackle creative tasks and couldn’t possibly be easier to set up. If you like the ProArt P16 but want something a bit more accessible, Asus’ ProArt PZ13 is a more compact version at almost half the price.