There are dozens of laptops on the market at any given time, and almost all of those models are available in multiple configurations to suit your performance and budget needs. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the options when looking for a new laptop, it’s understandable. To help make things easier for you, here are some important things to consider when you start looking.
Price
Most people’s search for a new laptop starts with price. If the numbers Intel and the PC manufacturers are throwing at us are correct, you’ll be holding on to your next laptop for at least three years. If you can stretch your budget a bit to get better details, do it. And that’s whether you’re spending $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you might get away with spending money upfront with an eye toward improving memory and storage in the future. But laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making things that are easily upgradeable, so again, it’s best to get as much laptop as you can afford from the start.
Generally, the more money you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better, faster performance components, a better display, stronger build quality, a smaller or simpler design from higher-end materials or a more comfortable keyboard. All these things add to the cost of the laptop. I’d like to say that $500 will get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Currently, the sweet spot for a mid-range, home office or school laptop is between $700 and $800 and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming costs over $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models at all price points to get more laptop for less money.
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 games, where Windows wins), but they do them differently. Unless there is an OS-specific app you need, go with the one you feel comfortable using. And if you’re not sure what that is, go to an Apple store or local electronics store and check them out. Or ask friends or family to let you check out theirs for a while. If you have an iPhone or iPad and love it, chances are you’ll love macOS.
But when it comes to quantity and variety (and, again, PC games), Windows laptops win. If you want macOS, you get a MacBook. While Apple’s MacBooks always top our best-of-the-best list, the least expensive is the M1 MacBook Air at $999. It’s regularly discounted to $750 or $800, but if you’re looking for a cheap MacBook, you’ll have to consider the old refurbished ones.
Windows laptops can be found for as little as a few hundred bucks and come in all sorts of sizes and designs. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop that we could give a full recommendation on, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email and word processing, they’re there.
If you’re on a tight budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience than Windows; make sure the apps you need have a Chrome, Android or Linux app before making the change. But if you spend most of your time surfing the web, writing, streaming video or using cloud gaming services, they’re a good fit.
The size
Keep in mind whether having a light, thin laptop or a touchscreen laptop with good battery life will be important to you in the future. Size is determined primarily by the screen — hello, the laws of physics — which in turn translates into battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. And remember some aspects related to physics, such as an ultrathin laptop is not much lighter than a thick one, you can not expect a wide connection in a small or ultrathin model and so on.
The screen
When it comes to deciding on a screen, there is a lot to consider: how much you need to display (more surprising in terms of resolution than screen size), what types of content you will be viewing and whether you will use it for gaming or creative work.
You really want to increase the pixel density; that is, the number of pixels per inch that can be displayed by the screen. While there are other factors that affect sharpness, higher pixel density generally means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen in the DPI Calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can figure out what calculations you need to do there.) We recommend a dot height of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.
Because of the way Windows and macOS scale the display, you’re often better off at a higher resolution than you might think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can’t make them smaller — to fit more content in the view — 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, say, to view a wide spreadsheet.
If you need a laptop that’s relatively color accurate, displays as many colors as possible or supports HDR, you can’t just trust the specs — not because manufacturers lie, but because they often fail to provide the context necessary to understand what the description they’re quoting means. You can find a ton of information about considerations for different types of screen use in our monitor buying guides for general purpose monitors, creators, gamers and HDR monitors.
The processor
The processor, also known as the CPU, is the brain of the laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as the third new choice with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer an impressive selection of mobile processors. To complicate matters further, both manufacturers have chips designed for different styles of laptops, such as energy-efficient chips for ultraportables or fast processors for gaming laptops. Their naming convention will tell you what type is used. You can head to the Intel or AMD sites for specifications to 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 makes things a little more straightforward. But, like Intel and AMD, you’ll still want to pay attention to naming conventions so you know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses M series chipsets in Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with eight CPUs and seven GPUs. The current models have M2 series silicon starting with eight CPU and 10-core GPU and going up to M2 Max with 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. And, generally speaking, the more cores it has, the better the performance.
Battery life has less to do with number of cores and more to do with CPU architecture, Arm vs x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus PCs we tested offered better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.
Pictures
The graphics processor handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what is displayed, as well as speeding up many graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) tasks. In Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: 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 constrained by the limitations of that. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but isn’t nearly as efficient as a dGPU. In fact, there are some games and creative software that won’t run unless they get enough dGPU or VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing and other non-specialist applications will run well on the iGPU, however.
For other power-hungry graphics needs, such as video editing, playback and streaming, design and more, you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that do it, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering another based on the Xe brand (or the old type of UHD Graphics) iGPU technology in its CPUs.
Memory
For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB is the absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for the applications that are currently running, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slow. Most laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which combined with a slow disk makes for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, most laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is sold and cannot be upgraded.
However, some PC makers will sell the memory and leave an empty internal slot for adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or get the full specifications of the laptop to confirm. Also check the web for user experience, because the site may be difficult to access, may require unusual or hard-to-find memory or other pitfalls.
Storage
You’ll still find cheap hard drives in budget laptops and large drives for gaming laptops, but fast solid-state drives haven’t replaced all hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. But not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheap laptops often have slow drives; if the laptop only has 4GB or 8GB of RAM, it may end up switching to that drive and the system may slow down quickly while working.
Get what you can afford, too you probably need less than you think. If you need to go with a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two down the road or use cloud storage to back up the smaller internal drive. The exception is gaming laptops: We don’t recommend going with a 512GB SSD unless you really like to download games every time you want to play a new game.
