Table of Contents
There are a ton of laptops on the market at any given time, and nearly all of them come in multiple configurations to meet your performance and budget needs. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the options when looking for a new laptop, that’s understandable. To make things easier for you, here are the top things to keep in mind when you start your search.
Price
For most people, the search for a new laptop starts with price. If the statistics fed to us by chipmaker Intel and PC makers are correct, you’ll be holding on to your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a bit to get better specs, do so, whether you spend $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less up front with an eye toward upgrading memory and storage in the future. Laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making components that are easily upgradeable, so again, it’s best to get as much laptop power as you can afford from the start.
Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design with more expensive materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things contribute to the cost of a laptop. I’d like to say that for $500 you’re getting a powerful gaming laptop, but that’s not the case. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks is between $700 and $800, and a decent model for creative work or gaming will cost upwards of $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models at all price points so you can get more laptop power for less.
Operating system
Choosing an operating system is part personal preference and part budget. Microsoft Windows and Apple’s macOS do largely the same thing (except for gaming, where Windows is the winner), but they do things differently. Unless you need an OS-specific application, pick the one you’re most comfortable using. If you’re not sure which one, go to an Apple store or local electronics store and try them out, or ask friends or family to let you try out theirs. If you have an iPhone or iPad and like it, chances are you’ll like macOS, too.
When it comes to price and variety (and, again, PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want macOS, get a MacBook. Apple’s MacBooks regularly top our best lists, but the cheapest is the $999 M1 MacBook Air. It’s regularly discounted to $750 or $800 , but if you want a cheaper MacBook, you’ll want to consider older refurbished models.
Windows laptops can be had for as little as a few hundred dollars and come in all shapes and sizes. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop we’d wholeheartedly recommend, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email, and word processing, they do exist.
If you’re on a budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience than Windows. Make sure the applications you need are ChromeAndroid or Linux app before taking the plunge. If you spend most of your time surfing the web, writing, streaming video, or using cloud gaming services, they’re a good choice.
Mate
Consider whether a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with good battery life will be important to you in the future. The size of a laptop is largely determined by the screen size, which affects the battery size, the thickness of the laptop, the weight, and the price. Consider other physics, such as that an ultra-thin laptop is not necessarily lighter than a thick one, that you cannot expect a wide range of ports on a small or ultra-thin model, and so on.
Screen
When choosing a display, there are a lot of things to consider: how much screen you want to display (which, surprisingly, has more to do with resolution than screen size), what kind of content you want to watch, and whether you want to use the display for gaming or creative work.
You really want to optimize pixel density, which is the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. While other factors contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density generally means sharper display of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at DPI Calculator (If you don’t feel like calculating it, you can also find the calculations you need to perform there.) As a rule of thumb, we recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch.
Because of the way Windows and macOS scale to the screen, you’re often better off with a higher resolution than you might think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution display, but you can never make them smaller — to fit more content in frame — on a low-resolution display. For this reason, a 4K, 14-inch display might sound like unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if, say, you want to view a wide spreadsheet.
If you need a laptop with relatively accurate colors, that displays the most colors, or that supports HDR, you can’t simply rely on the specs. That’s because manufacturers typically don’t provide the context necessary to understand what the specs they quote mean. You can find a lot of detail on considerations for different types of screen usage in our monitor buying guides for general monitors, creators, gamers, and HDR display.
Processor
The processor, also known as the CPU, is the brains of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the leading CPU makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm emerging as a third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer a staggering selection of mobile processors. To complicate matters, both manufacturers have chips designed for different styles of laptops, such as power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions let you know which type is being used. You can go to from Intel or from AMD sites for explanations so that you can get the performance you want. In general, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.
Apple makes its own chips for MacBooks, which simplifies things a bit. Like Intel and AMD, you still have to pay attention to naming conventions to know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses its M-series chipsets in Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with an eight-core CPU and a seven-core GPU. Current models use M2-series silicon, which starts with an eight-core CPU and a 10-core GPU and goes up to the M2 Max with a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. Again, in general, the more cores, the better the performance.
Battery life has less to do with core count and more to do with CPU architecture, Arm versus x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus PCs we tested delivered better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.
Graphic
The graphics processor handles all the work of driving the screen and rendering what’s displayed, as well as accelerating many graphical (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated and discrete. As the names suggest, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.
Because the iGPU shares space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is constrained by its limitations. It is suitable for smaller, lighter laptops, but does not perform nearly as well as a dGPU. There are games and creative software that will not run unless they detect a dGPU or sufficient VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing, and other non-specialized apps will run fine on an iGPU.
For graphics-intensive applications like video editing, gaming and streaming, design, and the like, you’ll need a dGPU. There are only two companies that actually make them: Nvidia and AMD. Intel also offers models based on its Xe-branded iGPU technology (or the older UHD Graphics brand) in its CPUs.
Memory
For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all of the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Many sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which combined with a slower drive can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers will state this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and non-upgradable.
Some PC manufacturers solder in the memory and also leave an empty internal slot to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or look up the full specs of the laptop online to confirm this. Check the web for user experiences, as the slot may still be difficult to access, the memory may be non-standard or hard to come by, or other pitfalls.
Storage
You can still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. Not all SSDs are created equal, and cheaper laptops tend to have slower drives. If your laptop only has 4GB or 8GB of RAM, it may switch to that drive and your system may quickly slow down while you work.
Buy what you can afford, and if you need a smaller drive you can always add an external drive or two or use cloud storage to bolster a small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: we wouldn’t recommend going for anything less than a 512GB SSD unless you’re really into deleting games every time you want to play a new one.
