It's only natural to wince when you think back to the spring of 2020. But among all the chaos and uncertainty of the time, you could've found solace in bagging an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 for the low low price of $1,050. That might look like a typo when considering today's "cheapest" model costs $3,600 when you buy directly from ASUS, but it's true. Even at Best Buy, you're talking $3,200 at the time of writing, with both prices representing more than a three-fold increase over the launch price.
That number looks all the more grim when you consider that inflation only accounts for about $320 of the increase. ASUS upgraded the G14's screen, chassis, and graphics between 2020 and 2025, adding about $750 to the sticker price. It then jumped by another $1,400 in a single generation as memory prices went to the moon and cheaper configurations were dropped from the U.S. lineup. Almost two-thirds of the price increase came this year alone.
In 2020, the base G14 paired a Ryzen 7 4800HS with 8GB of RAM, a GTX 1650 and a 60Hz 1080p display. Meanwhile, the $1,450 review configuration (which we, at the time, called ultraportable gaming done right ) had a Ryzen 9 4900HS, an RTX 2060 Max-Q, 16GB of RAM and a 120Hz screen. 7 inches thick. The Zephyrus line had only been around for three years at that point, starting in 2017 with the 15-inch GX501. That was a $2,699 machine, and the G14 brought it down to less than half that price.
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