Whether you’re a student submitting homework, at work typing away at documents, spreadsheets or presentations, or you’re just someone who wants to access resources online and connect with family and friends, you want a laptop with the components and features you’ll need to get the job done. That means a great screen, a comfortable keyboard, and long battery life (and nice design doesn’t hurt, either!).
The laptop space is more competitive than ever. Windows machines come from many companies using silicon from three major CPU vendors: Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm (with rumors of Nvidia planning to enter the fray before long, as well). Apple, meanwhile, has a range of powerful and portable systems based on its own Apple Silicon.
Best Laptops You Can Buy Today
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The Best Laptop (and Mac) overall
The MacBook Air has been a go-to laptop recommendation for quite some time, thanks to strong performance, a fanless design, excellent built quality, and long-lasting battery life. With the version of the chip with M5, you get the benefits of years of hardware revisions since the Air’s last redesign with M2, including a minimum 16GB of RAM and a 12-megapixel webcam.
The M5 chip in the MacBook Air showed off excellent single and multi-core performance. In fact, it;s closest rival was the same chip in the MacBook Pro, which gets a boost because of an active fan.
That being said, the system can throttle under heavy workloads like rendering. But for most people’s typical tasks, including writing, editing, making spreadsheets, editing photos, listening to music, programming, and general multitasking, you’ll have a very powerful machine.
Apple has boosted the base MacBook Air’s price to $1,099, but it now starts with 512GB of memory. Given the price of components these days, the laptop is still a great value. If you want a Mac but don’t want to spend that much for it, you could take a step down to the entry-level MacBook Neo, starting at $599, as long as you’re willing to sacrifice on power, memory, ports, and a backlit keyboard.
Read: MacBook Air (M5) review
Best Windows laptop
The Dell XPS 14 is back, and while you might expect its performance or design to be the headlining feature, it’s the battery life that wows. With its base 1920 x 1200 LCD display, which has a variable refresh rate that goes all the way down to 1 Hz, it lasted 20 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test.
That’s not to say the battery life is all there is to like about this laptop. The 3-pound chassis is sleek, and Dell added a function row back to the keyboard, making it way easier to use over the touch bar of yesteryear.
If you’re OK with 12 hours of charge, more expensive models with a tandem OLED display have way better colors and more powerful Arc B390 integrated graphics.
That being said, both of them have a low-travel keyboard without space between the keys, which definitely tripped up my fingers, so you’ll need time to get your muscle memory going. And the starting price, at $1,600, is a lot to ask but is unfortunately common as the memory crisis rages on.
Read: Dell XPS 14 (2026) review
The best 2-in-1 convertible
A great 2-in-1 needs all of the features of an outstanding normal laptop, including a strong build quality, a great display, and a long battery life. It just also has to flip into a tablet.
The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is a premium convertible with a beautiful, 14-inch OLED touchscreen that is far more colorful than much of the competition. Even if you question the wisdom of a 2880 x 1800 resolution on a small display, the quality of the panel here can’t be denied.
Meanwhile, you also get strong build quality, a clicky keyboard, and pretty decent battery life. The 5MP webcam is good enough for professional video calls, and also comes with a privacy shutter. The Yoga also comes with a stylus in the box.
The “cosmic” blue color is fun, but still professional. There are some design quirks, like the fact that Lenovo has gone with round, shiny edges on some parts of the laptop while others are matte and flat. It’s a bit funky looking, but I was able to look past it.
There are a few downsides. If you do want to open the laptop for repair, it’s extremely difficult to get the bottom back on. And to open it in the first place, you have to lift up an adhesive rubber foot. Additionally, there’s a lot of bloatware on the system.
We tested this laptop at $1,499.99 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. The price has gone up since we tested it, but if you find it at this sale price again, it’s a great value.
Read: Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition review
Another great Windows clamshell
We can argue about how much the AI PC is really any sort of revolution, but there are still some strong ultraportables coming out. The HP OmniBook Ultra puts the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 in a sleek chassis with strong productivity performance.
HP is offering up decent battery life here, running for 12 hours and 52 minutes on our battery test. That’s not the best, but all things considered including the high-resolution display, it’s not bad. It’s also nice to see Thunderbolt 4 ports on an AMD system, which is exceedingly rare.
The experience is knocked down a bit by a significant amount of bloatware, but if you’re looking for a strong AMD laptop, the HP OmniBook Ultra is a strong competitor if you don’t mind doing some uninstalling.
Read: HP OmniBook Ultra review
The best budget laptop
If you’re looking for an affordable laptop, Apple does it best these days. The MacBook Neo starts at $599 ($499 with an education discount), but you rarely feel like you’re not getting enough – unlike most Windows laptops in this price range. The Neo has a premium, all-metal chassis, a bright, vivid screen, and a custom mechanical trackpad that lets you click anywhere. And yes, you get all of macOS running on what was formerly an iPhone chip.
The quality of the 13-inch chassis and screen are key here. You’re not getting something plastic. You’re not getting something low-resolution, and you’re not getting something dim. You also get a great webcam for this price range, and the system stays remarkably cool. There are some niceties you sacrifice, however. Apple has gone without a backlit keyboard. And the two USB ports aren’t labeled, so you’ll have to remember which is the faster 10 Gbps USB 3 port (the back one) for backup drives and monitors, lest you end up with an error message.
I suspect that most people with light workloads — especially students and people using home computers doing a lot of work in the browser — won’t have too much trouble with the 8GB of RAM. That being said, 16GB systems can be found in the Windows world for a bit more money, though you’ll need to hunt for sales.
But if a premium laptop experience (including great build quality and a high-res screen) are important to you, Apple delivers that better than any Windows machine priced close to the Neo’s $599 starting price.
Read: MacBook Neo review
The Best Laptop for work
There are plenty of reasons why the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a classic. It’s thin design and strong build quality are beloved by ThinkPad diehards. The latest model, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), offers long battery life and great speakers.
Perhaps most critically, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers an excellent keyboard. Lenovo’s reputation was built on great typing experiences, so this is crucial. For those who love Lenovo’s TrackPoint, it’s still here, allowing you to move the mouse without ever taking your fingers away from the home row on the keyboard.
The latest version comes with Intel’s 13th Gen Core processors. We reviewed it with a Core i7-1355U, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD.
The one real issue we had is that the base screen could benefit from being a bit brighter. Those who want the most vivid experience can opt for an OLED panel, but at a higher price.
When shopping for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), keep an eye out for Lenovo’s frequent sales, as there’s often a deal available.
Read: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11) Review
The Best Windows Tablet
Microsoft may push the Surface Pro as a do-it-all AI machine, but the truth is it’s just a really nice, portable, slim PC that lasts a long time on a battery and includes a beautiful OLED display. It’s definitively one of the best Surfaces to date.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors offer enough performance to keep up with x86 competitors, making this one of the first Arm-based Surfaces that doesn’t feel like it’s lacking. Add on more Arm-compatible apps than ever, including the Chrome browser, and there’s far less to miss from previous Intel models. That’s not to say it’s perfect — there are still some gaming issues, as well as drivers for specialized peripherals that may need to be rebuilt for the new platform.
The 45 TOPS NPU powers some of Windows 11‘s Copilot+ features, like Cocreator, Live Captions, and Windows Studio effects. None of these are showstoppers, but they’re cool tricks.’
If you want a premium tablet running Windows 11, the Surface Pro is one of the only premium games in town. And that means paying a premium for a separate keyboard. But for those who love this form factor, the Surface Pro remains the best option out there.
Read: Microsoft Surface Pro review
A more powerful Mac laptop
The MacBook Air is a great starting point, but if you want an air-cooled processor and a few more features, the base MacBook Pro adds a few niceties. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts with an M5 processor, has three Thunderbolt ports (including one on the right side), and a beautiful micro LED display.
For those willing to spend an extra $150, there’s a nano-texture display option that is completely worth it if you ever use your laptop outside. The matte display looks excellent, and was great on desks near windows.
If you need the most power possible, we also reviewed the MacBook Pro with an M5 Max, including a 40-core GPU, a mix of Apple’s latest performance and super cores, and a blazing fast SSD.
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Both the 14-inch and 16-inch laptops offer great speakers and beautiful displays, but you will have to pay quite a bit for any storage or memory upgrades you want, and you won’t be able to make changes later.
Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5) review
Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) review
The Best Gaming laptop
Razer Blade 18 offers some of the strongest gaming performance we’ve seen in a laptop, but also features excellent design, comfortable features, and the latest connection standards. At $5,199.99 as tested, it sure should be good. It tops our list of the best gaming laptops.
The major highlight is the dual-mode display, which has two options: 3840 x 2400 at 240 Hz or 1920 x 1200 at 440 Hz. Those two choices (which you can switch between in Razer Synapse) is enough to showcase both intensive, graphics-driven games at high settings and esports where frames are more important than resolution and detail.
The laptop, packed with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU in our review configuration, outperformed the field in our gaming tests, especially at the lower resolution.Razer is one of the few laptop makers using Thunderbolt 5 ports (we’ve also seen them from MSI and Apple), so this system is ready to go if you’re using advanced peripherals or the fastest external storage drives.
Perhaps the biggest downside is that the Blade’s dual 2TB storage drives use PCIe 4.0 rather than 5.0. You won’t notice this in games or mainstream productivity, but if you want PCIe 5.0 speed for future proofing or 8K video editing, the Titan may still be the way to go. The Blade 18 does support PCIe 5.0 drives, if you want to upgrade to speedier storage in the future.
Read: Razer Blade 18 review
Quick Laptop Shopping Tips
✅ Get a good keyboard
Whether you’re using your laptop to browse the web, send emails, code, write, or do other productivity work, the keyboard is one of your primary ways of interacting with your computer. Get something with responsive keys that aren’t mushy. Low-travel is ok if the keys have the right feel to them, but the last thing you want to do is “bottom out” while typing. Ideally, you can try out a store model before buying.
✅ Consider what you need in a screen
At a minimum, your laptop should have a 1920 x 1080 screen. Some laptops offer 4K options, though it’s sometimes harder to see the difference at 13-inches or below. While 4K may be more detailed, 1080p screens give you much longer battery life. OLED screens are becoming far more common on laptops, with deep blacks and bright colors, but often at the cost of battery life. Right now, laptops with 16:10 screens are in vogue, though 16:9 is still popular. 3:2 is great if you want a taller screen that shows more of your work at a time, but it’s relatively rare. Additionally, more screens have been featuring variable refresh rates, allowing for smoother performance in some software, and longer battery life if you’re idling. Many premium laptops will up to 120 Hz.
✅ Some laptops can be upgraded
While CPUs and GPUs are almost always soldered down, some laptops let you replace the RAM and storage, so you can buy cheaper now and add more memory and a bigger hard drive or SSD down the road. But the thinnest laptops may not have that option, so buy with the future in mind. Some, like the Framework Laptop 13, are designed around being easily upgradeable. While gaming laptops are often upgradeable, more and more productivity systems have soldered memory, Wi-Fi chips, and sometimes even storage.
✅ Battery life is important
If you regularly use your laptop away from a power plug, aim for something that lasts for 12 hours or longer on a charge (gaming is an exception) at a bare minimum. But be wary of manufacturer claims, which don’t always use strenuous tests. Fast charging can help notebooks top you off even more quickly.
Finding Discounts on the Best Laptops
Whether you’re shopping for one of the best laptops, or just something that is good enough for your needs, you may find savings by checking out our lists of the latest Dell coupon codes, HP coupon codes, Lenovo coupon codes, Best Buy promo codes or Newegg promo codes.
