We’ve Spent Hours Testing Out Laptops to Find the Best Worth Buying Today

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The smartphone may be the centerpiece of our digital lives, but there are times when you still want or need a good laptop. Whether you’re working and need more control than a touchscreen can provide, or you’re playing games and need all the processing power you can get, we still use our laptops every day, and we bet you do, too.

But picking a laptop isn’t always easy. Comparing different models and configurations gets very technical very fast. Some of us love getting into the nitty gritty, but checking specs, sizes, and features can make your head spin if you don’t. When you find the right laptop, though, and everything clicks–few buying decisions feel quite as satisfying.

To help take the sting out of doing your homework, I’m here to walk you through every aspect of picking the best laptop for whatever you do day to day. Having tested my fair share, I’ve also made some recommendations to help you shop and bring home the right Mac or Windows machine.

The Best Laptops

• Best Overall: Apple MacBook Air M3

• Best Value: Acer Aspire 5 15 Slim Laptop

• Best for Creatives: Apple MacBook Pro M3 14-Inch

• Best for Gaming: Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

• Best 2-in-1: HP Spectre x360 (2024)

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The Expert

What to Consider in a Laptop

Processor

The central processing unit, or CPU, is effectively the brain of your PC. It’s the most important component in a productivity laptop and critical to any computer. Working in conjunction with your system’s memory and graphics chip, it does the “computing” to make your applications run. A better processor makes for a snappier, more powerful computer.

CPU performance breaks down into cores and speeds, which indicate how well it can run specific applications and/or handle many programs at once. For productivity laptops–all-around computers for work and daily life–we recommend looking for a CPU with at least six cores and a clock speed of 3.5 GHz or more. This will allow you to run multiple apps at a time without slowing down, such as Zoom, Microsoft Office, and a web browser. Games demand more power, so gaming laptops should have an eight-core processor with a speed of 4.5 GHz or higher to ensure smooth gameplay.

Graphics

Modern PCs come with some form of graphics processing unit (GPU), a dedicated processor to handle the heavy lifting of bringing games, videos and other high-resolution visuals to life. Laptop GPUs come in two forms: Productivity and budget-conscious laptops usually rely on an integrated graphics chip, which is built into the laptop’s CPU. Gaming laptops and powerful machines designed for creative work feature a discrete processor, which is more powerful but adds heft and drains power more quickly.

If you plan on playing games beyond Solitaire and Minesweeper, we recommend looking for a laptop with a dedicated graphics card to make sure your PC can make your games look sharp.

As you consider, it’s important to keep in mind that there are a wide range of graphics cards available. There’s a direct correlation between how much a gaming laptop costs and how well it will perform in games. If you’re unsure of the difference between two models, we recommend searching for performance summaries of each to ensure you choose the laptop that’s the best fit for you.

Memory

Your laptop’s memory, also known as RAM (Random Access Memory), determines how smoothly your PC runs, especially while multitasking across many applications. Too little memory will cause applications to load and run slowly, creeping along and possibly even pausing before it responds to your clicks.

As a rule, we look for 16GB across all laptops. If you’re looking for a basic, office-work-focused laptop, 8GB should be enough to get by without any hiccups. Conversely, gamers looking for a high-performance machine may want to bump their memory up to 32GB for the absolute best performance possible.

Storage

Storage refers to how much data your PC can hold in its hard drive. In 2024, the smallest hard drive you’ll find in most laptops is 256GB. That’s pretty small, so we only recommend it if you store most of your files and photos in the cloud. A 512GB hard drive should be enough for most people. As always, though, gamers should dream bigger: If you want to store multiple AAA games on your PC at once, look for at least 1TB.

Note: If you’re shopping for a Chromebook, keep in mind that they tend to have very small hard drives, because manufacturers expect you to save everything in the cloud, rather than on your PC.

Display

You’re going to spend a lot of time looking at your laptop’s display, so make sure that it’s well-suited to whatever you plan to do. When considering a display, first evaluate the resolution. Most laptops come with at least a 1920 x 1080 pixel display. (That’s 1080p, for short) On a smaller screen, that’s sharp enough for a crisp viewing experience. Large, high-end laptops offer higher resolution, up to 3840 x 2160 pixels, A.K.A. 4K. Outside of creative work like image and video editing or gaming, having a high-resolution will have minimal impact on such a small screen.

Among the cream of the crop, you may also find some OLED laptop displays. Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) screens control brightness pixel by pixel rather than with lights behind the screen or around the frame. Just like OLED TVs, the technology creates incredible contrast with inky, rich blacks and vibrant colors. If you plan to make your laptop your primary screen for gaming or movies, splurging for an OLED display makes a lot of sense.

Battery Life

If you plan to take your laptop on the go, you need to be sure that its battery can last as long as you need it to. Laptop battery life varies widely among different types of laptops, ranging from just a couple of hours to 10 or more. Generally speaking, gaming laptops offer very low battery life, while thin productivity machines offer the best. Of course, there’s plenty of room for variation from model to model, and many gaming laptops offer settings to extend their battery life when you need them to last longer.

While comparing the estimated battery life specs of different laptops, keep in mind that manufacturers usually provide the best-case scenario, and that your mileage may vary depending on what you’re doing. Streaming Netflix, for example, uses far less battery than jumping back and forth between productivity apps, and playing a game will burn through even the highest-rated battery very quickly.

If you find a laptop you can’t live without but the battery life falls short, don’t give up on it just yet. Though included power cords are often bulky and heavy, many laptops are compatible with smaller aftermarket PD (power deliver) chargers. You’ll need to check the wattage your laptop requires (usually 65W or 100W) but a good fast charger can reduce the hassle of plugging in wherever you go.

Weight

Weight is often the most underrated aspect of a laptop. While many laptops hover between four and five pounds, there are many others available that are both lighter and heavier than that range. Ultralight laptops like the Macbook Air, which are designed for work and school, tend to be lighter. As you might expect, gaming laptops tend to be heaviest.

In my experience, anything more than five pounds feels cumbersome. While your personal limit may be different, I’d recommend opting for a lighter laptop if you can do so without compromising on other specs. For gamers, it can be tempting to throw caution to the wind and just buy the biggest, fastest laptop you can afford. That’s a mistake: If you have to think twice about putting your laptop in your bag, you will probably find yourself leaving it at home and pining for a replacement before too long.

How We Selected The Best Laptops

To find and highlight the best laptops, I first considered those I’ve gone hands-on with over the last year. I’ve tested a number of them, using them as a daily driver for around two weeks each to get a sense of their performance in different tasks and how well they were designed. Three of those models made this list, including the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, and the Asus ROG Zephyrus 14.

I also consulted the tech editors of Best Products, including Senior Tech Editor Stefan Vazharov and Senior Commerce Editor Mike Epstein, for additional insights. In addition, I consulted reviews and materials from expert journalists across an extensive range of publications, including Tom’s Hardware, PCMag, IGN, TechSpot, and TechRadar. Synthesizing my own testing with my editors and fellow tech critics, I selected a lineup of the most popular, best performing laptops you can buy today.

Our Full Laptop Reviews

All things being equal, the Macbook Air has offered the best balance of processing power, features, weight, and battery life for most people who dabble in a little bit of everything. This is especially true right now, as the current version of Apple’s M3 chip offers incredible performance in an ultralight chassis.

In our review, editor Stefan Vazharov was very impressed by its performance. Not only did it load all of his apps instantly and deliver consistently smooth performance, it even allowed him to enjoy several visually impressive games with performance akin to a dedicated gaming console. The M3 chip won’t compete with expensive laptops centered on gaming, but that’s not the point.

The point is that it can play games, just like it can put its graphics chops to intensive tasks like 3D modeling and rendering 4K video and impress you with speedy render times. Under heavy load, the M3 can slow down a bit as temperatures rise, but it remains a remarkable example of why MacBooks have become such a staple among digital creators.

If you’re a student or looking for a laptop for work, the MacBook Air is destined to impress. With 18 hours of battery life, it's class-leading, and at only 3.3 pounds and 0.45 inches thin, it won’t weigh you down or take up too much space in your bag. Add to that a gorgeous Retina display, and you have the perfect jack-of-all-trades laptop.

Apple MacBook Air With M3 Chip Review

The Acer Aspire 5 15 Slim is designed for everyone but gamers, offering enough performance to drive any productivity app you can think of. As you might have guessed from the name, it’s very thin–just 0.71 inches– and weighs just under four pounds. That makes it a perfect go-everywhere machine, you’ll slide it into your bag whenever you leave the house, without even considering the notion that it might weigh you down.

For just over $500, this is a very affordable laptop that delivers solid performance and an intuitive design. Its biggest drawback is its battery, which should last up to eight hours, which means it may not last through a full day of work. Still, you get more than what you pay for with this laptop, making it a solid budget pick.

The MacBook Pro has been a staple choice for creatives for years, and the MacBook Pro M3 is the single best version yet. The more powerful MacBook offers an astounding 22 hours of battery life, even as it delivers the kind of top-tier performance you need for encoding video, processing photos, or other compute-intensive tasks.

The current line features Apple’s M3 Pro and M3 Max processors, which delivers 12 cores for the M3 Pro and up to 14 cores for the M3 Max, or up to six more than the M3 MacBook Air. For creative apps like Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, either offers a big step up in performance. Plus, this configuration has more than enough memory for multitasking heavy-duty apps like those found in the Adobe suite – a rarity among Macs.

If you’re used to Windows, you’ll need to learn the ins and outs of MacOS, but it’s well worth the effort. With Apple’s unique hardware and boutique design, it’s able to offer performance that defies the unusual limitations of such a slim and light design. Increasingly, syncing Apple computers with other devices yields additional benefits: The AirPods Max, for example, supports easy pairing with Apple devices and lossless audio compatibility.

The Apple MacBook Pro 14 is the compact creative powerhouse creatives need. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a device more deserving of “pro” status.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is a rare gem–a powerful gaming laptop with a well-rounded design that works well for everything. With a Ryzen 9 processor and Nvidia 4060 graphics card, it’s powerful enough to make big games run sharp and smooth or tackle major video editing tasks. It features enough memory and storage to service the vast majority of users for the foreseeable future, but you also have the ability to swap the RAM and SSD out if you’d like to upgrade. (That’s fairly rare and a big plus if you like to tinker.)

Its gaming performance is only one piece of what makes this such a good pick. Its crisp 3K (2880 x 1800p) OLED screen is downright gorgeous–almost on par with Apple’s much-lauded Retina Display, delivering fantastic contrast and HDR for games and movies. At only 3.3 pounds, it’s easy to carry throughout the day. When you do take it out, you won’t need to worry about attracting unwanted attention: Its minimal yet stylish design fits in with any setting. Thanks to its tactile, well-spaced keyboard, it’s a great choice for typing reports, emails or getting in a few rounds of Call of Duty.

The big downside here, as with all gaming laptops, is battery life. Its estimated 6-8 hour charge is very solid by gaming laptop standards, but won’t keep up with most of the non-gaming alternatives. That said, if you want a powerful Windows laptop for gaming and a well-rounded digital life, this is the move.

Convertible “2-in-1” laptops usually come with trade-offs, but the HP Spectre x360 doesn’t force you to make any tough choices. Aside from dropping the SD card slot, this year’s model is an upgrade in nearly every way. It has a powerful processor, plenty of memory, ample storage, and a truly stunning 14-inch OLED touchscreen that’s perfect for productivity and entertainment alike. This is the 2-in-1 laptop to choose for performance and play.

The new Spectre x360 features Intel’s new Core Ultra 7 processor, a high-performance chip that’s able to handle everything from multitasking browser windows to editing photos and video. It’s also designed to offer better performance with AI-driven tasks, which are set to become even more prevalent as time goes on. Just as importantly, it’s exceptionally efficient, allowing this transformer of a laptop to offer an impressive 13 hours of battery life.

It’s also a great fit when it’s time to relax. Its tablet mode is perfect for reading a book or streaming from Netflix. HDR content is a particular joy, thanks to its bright OLED screen. Its built-in Intel Arc Graphics processor even allows you to do some light gaming, so long as you don’t mind keeping the settings low. This is a top-flight productivity laptop that just happens to have a convertible form factor.

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is the right kind of daring. Taking the convertible “2-in-1” concept to its logical extreme, it replaces the keyboard half of the laptop clamshell with a second 13.3-inch touchscreen and offloads typing to a soft external keyboard. With two 2880 x 1800p OLED displays, the 9i becomes the ultimate multitasking machine: Like other 2-in-1s, it can shapeshift from a laptop to a tablet, but you can also use it as a dual-display PC setup. It’s the perfect choice for the driven worker who needs to work in two windows or apps at a time. (It’s also great for the procrastinating college student who wants to watch a little YouTube while they chip away at their homework.)

Unique laptop designs often feel half-baked since most software isn’t designed to take advantage of its unique feature set, but the 9i makes it easy to use the dual screens in a variety of configurations. The OLED screens are a pleasure to use in tablet mode, though it feels like a shame that the 9i lacks a proper graphics card to support high-end games that would take the best advantage of them.

I also appreciate that, unlike other laptops with unique form factors, Lenovo doesn’t force you to buy expensive, model-specific accessories: The 9i comes with a soft keyboard, stylus and case/stand, so you have all the tools you need. (Though we might recommend picking up a different keyboard–Lenovo’s is very portable, but not all that comfortable to type on.) The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i doesn’t come cheap, but it delivers a computing experience that you can’t get anywhere else.

Asus’ newest thin and light “ultrabook”–think the same form factor as the Macbook Air–features an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor with specialized hardware to enhance AI-related tasks like blurring out your background on Zoom calls or making it appear like you’re looking at the camera even when your eyes are elsewhere.

Even if you aren’t sold on the need for an AI chip, the Zenbook 14 delivers great power efficiency, snappy performance, and a beautiful OLED display in a package light enough to carry around all day. This is a machine made for the kind of everyday office- and home-related work most of us do every day: It makes short work of Microsoft Office and handles web browsers well. It isn’t going to break any performance records, but I’d never call it slow, either. In fact, it handles heavy-duty apps like Adobe Photoshop quite well and runs games about as well as one could expect of a laptop with integrated graphics.

If that weren’t enough, it also offers a truly impressive 14-inch OLED screen. It’s exceptionally high-resolution, bright, and vibrant for its size, making pictures and videos pop off the page. Battery life is also a big highlight: According to Asus, its battery should last up to 15 hours. My testing came close, with it routinely running through an 8-hour workday with juice to spare. If you need a lightweight laptop that sticks by you all day and all night, look no further.

Thanks to frequent sales that have brought its price below $750, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 has aged into one of the best, budget-conscious mini laptops you can buy. It doesn’t offer the highest tier specs, but sub-13-inch laptops rarely do: The priorities here are portability and reliable performance.

At only 2.5 pounds, the Surface Go disappears in a bag and stands ready to deliver whenever you need it, with up to 15 hours of battery life. It has a great tactile keyboard for typing out emails or reports. The screen is decidedly low-resolution, though you may not notice a difference since the screen is only 12.4 inches. All of this adds up to a convenient, easy-to-use laptop that makes for a great daily companion on your travels.

This particular model has been on the market for a while, and we expect an update to come soon. It won’t disappoint, but if you’re worried about having the latest model, it may be wise to wait and see if a new model is announced and an even better fit.

The life of a student is a mix of work and play, and that’s exactly what the Acer Chromebook 516 GE excels at. Acer designed this laptop around the concept of cloud gaming, but it’s a fantastic choice for any Chromebook fan, including students.

Chromebooks have become the de facto laptops of choice for students. They’re affordable, and because they come integrated with the entire Google Drive suite, students will never have to worry about losing a draft because they forgot to save. We like the 516 GE because it's significantly more powerful than other high-end Chromebooks around this price: That means apps and cloud productivity tools, like Google Docs will run better than ever.

While it does cost a bit more than you have to spend on a Chromebook, you’ll get big benefits if you’re willing to splurge a bit. It offers a large, 16-inch display, perfect for movies or gaming on the cloud. It also packs a great pair of speakers that are surprisingly full-bodied and has enough memory to run multiple services at once. And with 10 hours of battery life, it’s able to last through a typical school day with battery to spare.

I have to admit, it’s on the heavy side for a Chromebook, but the 516 GE still weighs less than the average Windows laptop. It’s a solid choice for schoolwork and for everything else you do as a student.

Q+A With Our Expert

What’s the most important component in a laptop?

It all depends on how you use your laptop. For everyday computing–word processing, email, using the web–your processor plays the biggest role in dictating performance. For gamers and creatives, the graphics card becomes just as important, if not more so, because it renders the visuals in games and ensures smooth performance in visually oriented apps. Beyond the CPU and GPU, you should prioritize memory and then storage.

Are gaming laptops good for work or school?

You can absolutely use a gaming laptop for school work or at the office. At its core, a gaming laptop is really just a high-performance computer. If it can play games well, it should handle most other tasks smoothly, too.

That said, gaming laptops are optimized for the demanding processing that games require, often at the expense of features and attributes that you may want in a work laptop. Gaming laptops are heavy, and they tend to have poor battery life, so you’ll probably need to find a place to plug in before the end of the work or school day. Also, many gaming laptops have “aggressive” aesthetics with sharp lines and bright RGB lighting that might be considered distracting in the workplace. That said if you want to play games, buy a gaming laptop.

How long should my laptop last?

Short answer: If you buy a new laptop that was released in the last year or so, it should remain capable for another 2-3 years and start to feel obsolete after around five years.

That is a very broad rule of thumb, though, so here’s the full-length answer: Everyone has their own breaking point for when they feel their laptop “needs” to be replaced. Your laptop might not break for 8-10 years, but its performance will start to degrade long before that. To maintain peak performance, there’s an argument that you should switch laptops every 2-3 years, but laptops are expensive, so we don’t necessarily recommend that for most people. The average person will probably start to notice a substantial dropoff in both speed and battery life, around 4-5 years, so we recommend most people switch around the five-year mark.

It’s worth noting that these windows get shorter if you buy a cheaper and/or older laptop. The slowdown you experience is caused, in part, by operating system updates (and more demanding games if you play). Investing in a newer, more powerful machine ensures that it runs snappy and smooth for a longer time.

Lastly, performing a little bit of maintenance on your laptop will also go a long way to slowing down the drop in its performance. Dust and debris make their way into the vents of notebooks over time, obstructing airflow and preventing the fans from cooling the hardware. When your laptop overheats, it can’t run as well and eventually will start to damage itself. You can prevent your laptop from overheating very easily, though: Just blow the dust out of the vents using compressed air or an air gun a few times a year, and you’ll make sure your laptop lives a long, cool life.

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