hard to read this review, having in mind the review of macbook air m2... As an owner of this laptop (version with 185h) I cannot understand scoring criteria (unless it's + 10% bonus for apple).
starting from:
1) screen- air has great but ux3405 has oled + touch+ 120 Hz,
2) ssd- air pcie 3 vs pcie 4 in asus, I agree it's not great but still better. In mine, I replaced it for 2 tb superfast p41- can you do this in mac?
3) ram- both machines on board, asus 32GB, apple 16...
4) power efficiency - x86 processor can't compare to arm however, thanks to bigger battery, asus has very similar, the same or even better runtimes. In whisper mode, result would be even more beneficial for asus.
5) in every working mode (whisper, standard or performance), zenbook wins in Cinebench R15, in case of 185h- 10 runs in whisper mode gives result in range 2200-1500 points, better than the most of ultrabooks with intel p-serie CPUs... it is worth to mention that the noise level is very low during the test in this mode (I agree with author regarding some electronic noise-my device is also affected but it's not very annoying). in performance mode, CineR15 the best above 2500, loop stable above 2100...
6) noise- here apple wins but as I mentioned, in whisper mode zenbook is almost fanless while still performs very well. In standard mode-noise acceptable, performance is laud, but not as noisy as for example ux3402 i5 1240p
7) networking: zenbook wifi 6e 160MHz- air wifi 6 80MHz...
8) ports zenbook: 2 usbC/thunder, 1 usb type A, hdmi, audio jack- air 2 usb/thunder, audio jack, power...
9) build quality- both great
The only advantage air over this zenbook is noise level, but we should remember that whisper mode makes zenbook almost fanless. In asus, using fn-f keys combination you can enable extra power when needed.