The best Lenovo laptop of 2025

Lenovo sells a wide variety of laptops, and many models come in multiple configurations to suit your performance and budget needs. If you need help finding the right Lenovo laptop, we can help. Here are the main considerations to keep in mind when shopping for a new laptop.

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 spending less upfront 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 capability 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. Like other vendors, Lenovo constantly rotates laptop sales on its site.

Size

If you take your laptop with you to class or work or just to the local coffee shop most mornings, then you’ll want a smaller and lighter laptop; something with a 13-inch or 14-inch screen. If you’re buying a laptop for your home or work and don’t plan on traveling with it that often, then it might serve you well to get a larger 15-inch, 16-inch, or even 17-inch display that gives you more room to work. gaming and multitasking.

Display

When deciding on a display, there are many 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 you’ll be using it for gaming or creative endeavors.

You really want to optimize pixel density; it is the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. While there are other factors that 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.) We recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.

Because of the way Windows can scale 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 unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if you need to, say, view a wide spreadsheet.

Text and image edges may appear blurry on a lower resolution display. Look for at least a Full HD 1920×1080 pixel resolution – or 1920×1200 pixels for laptops with 16:10 aspect ratios, which are taller than traditional 16:9 widescreen displays and provide more vertical screen space to work with without significantly increasing the footprint. A Quad HD (QHD) resolution of 2560×1440 pixels (2560×1600 on a 16:10 display) will result in sharper text and images, and will probably be sufficient for a 13- or 14-inch laptop display—you don’t have to. i need a 4k display.

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 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.

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, STEM and design applications, and gaming, 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, we highly recommend 16 GB of RAM, with 8 GB being the absolute minimum. RAM is where the operating system stores all the 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 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 online for user experience, as the slot may still be difficult to access, may require non-standard or hard-to-obtain memory, or other pitfalls, including voiding the warranty.

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 8 GB of RAM, it can eventually be replaced with this device and the system can quickly slow down while you work.

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