The best laptops of 2024 – CNET

There are many laptops on the market at any given time, and almost all of these models come in multiple configurations to suit your performance and budget needs. If you feel overwhelmed with options when looking for a new laptop, that’s understandable. To make things simple for you, here are the main things to keep in mind when you start looking.

Price

For most people, the search for a new laptop starts with price. If the statistics that chipmaker Intel and PC manufacturers are telling us 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, go for it. This applies whether you spend $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with less upfront cost with an eye toward upgrading memory and storage in the future. Laptop manufacturers are increasingly moving away from making components that are easily upgradeable, so again, it’s best to get as much laptop as you can afford from the start.

Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. This could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, stronger build quality, a smaller or lighter design with higher-end materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All these things increase the price of the laptop. I’d like to say that $500 will get you, say, a powerful gaming laptop, but that’s not the case. Currently, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average tasks for work, home office, or school is between $700 and $800, and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming is above about $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptop options for less.

Operating system

Choosing an operating system is part personal preference and part budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS do the same things (except for gaming, where Windows is the winner), but they do them differently. Unless there is a specific application for the operating system you need, choose the one you feel most comfortable using. If you’re not sure what it is, go to an Apple Store or local electronics store and test them. Or ask friends or family to let you test drive theirs for a bit. If you have an iPhone or iPad and like it, you’ll probably like MacOS too.

When it comes to price and variety (and PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you get a MacBook. Apple’s MacBooks regularly top our best lists, the cheapest being the $999 M1 MacBook Air. It’s regularly marked down to $750 or $800, but if you want a cheaper MacBook, you’ll want to consider older refurbished ones.

Windows laptops can be found for as little as a few hundred dollars and come in all sizes and designs. Of course, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop that we’d recommend wholeheartedly, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email, and word processing, they’re out there.

If you’re on a budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience than Windows; make sure the apps you need have a ChromeAndroid or Linux app before taking a step. If you spend most of your time roaming the web, typing, streaming video, or using cloud gaming services, they’re fine.

Size

Be sure to consider whether having a lighter, thinner laptop or a laptop with a touchscreen and good battery life will be important to you in the future. Size is primarily determined by the screen — hello, the laws of physics — which in turn affects battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. Keep in mind other physics-related features, like an ultrathin laptop isn’t necessarily lighter than a thick one, you can’t expect a wide array of connections on a small or ultrathin model, etc.

screen

When it comes to choosing a screen, there are countless considerations: how much you need to display (which is surprisingly more about resolution than screen size), what types of content you’ll be watching, and whether or not I’ll be using it for gaming or creative work.

You really want to optimize pixel density; it is the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. Although other factors contribute to sharpness, higher pixel density generally means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of each screen at DPI calculator if you don’t feel like doing math, and you can also find out what math you need to do there.) I recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.

Because of the way Windows and MacOS scale for the display, you’re often better off with a higher resolution than you think. You can always make things bigger on a high resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller – to fit more content in the viewport – on a low resolution screen. That’s why a 4K, 14-inch screen might sound like an unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if you need to, say, view a wide spreadsheet.

If you need a relatively color-accurate laptop that displays as many colors as possible or that supports HDR, you can’t just trust the specs – not because manufacturers lie, but because they usually fail to provide the necessary context to understand what the specs they quote mean. You can find a lot of detail about considerations for different types of screen use in our monitor buying guides for general purpose monitors, creators, gamers and HDR viewing.

Processor

The processor, also known as the CPU, is the brain of the laptop. Intel and AMD are the main manufacturers of processors for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm a new third option with its own Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer a stunning selection of mobile processors. Complicating 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 will let you know what type is being used. You can head to of Intel or of AMD explanation sites so you get the performance you want. Generally speaking, the higher the speed of the processor and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.

Apple makes its own chips for MacBooks, which makes things a little clearer. Like Intel and AMD, you’ll still want to pay attention to the naming conventions so you know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses its M-series chipsets in Macs. The base MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with an octa-core CPU and a seven-core GPU. Current models have the M2 series of silicon, which starts with an octa-core CPU and 10-core GPU and goes up to the M2 Max with a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. Again, generally speaking, the more cores there are, the better the performance.

Battery life has less to do with core count and more to do with CPU architecture, Arm vs. x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBook, and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus computers we tested offer better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Graphics

The GPU handles all the work of managing the screen and generating what is displayed, as well as speeding up many graphics-related (and increasingly AI-related) operations. There are two types of GPUs for Windows laptops: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the names suggest, the iGPU is part of the CPU package, while the dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates directly with, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.

Because the iGPU shares space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is limited by the limitations of those. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but doesn’t perform as well as a dGPU. There are some games and creative software that won’t run unless they detect a dGPU or enough VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing, and other non-specialized applications will run well on an iGPU.

For more power-hungry graphics needs like video editing, gaming and streaming, design, etc., you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some Xe-based (or the older UHD Graphics brand) iGPU technology in their processors.

memory

For memory, I highly recommend 16GB RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. Then it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Many laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which combined with a slower drive can result in a frustratingly slow Windows laptop. Also, many laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it’s soldered in and can’t be upgraded.

Some PC manufacturers will solder memory and leave an empty internal slot for adding RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the full specifications of the laptop online to confirm. Check the web for user experience, as the slot may still be difficult to access, may require non-standard or hard-to-obtain memory, or other pitfalls.

Storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster hard drives have pretty much replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheaper laptops tend to have slower drives; if the laptop only has 4 GB or 8 GB of RAM, it can eventually be replaced with this device and the system can slow down quickly while you are working.

Get what you can afford, and if you must go for a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two down the road or use cloud storage to support a small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: I don’t recommend using less than a 512GB SSD unless you really like uninstalling games every time you want to play a new game.