There are many laptops on the market at any given time, and almost all of these models are available in various configurations to suit your performance needs and budget. So if you're feeling overwhelmed with choices when looking for a new laptop, that's understandable. To make things easier for you, here are the main points to consider when you start looking.
Price
For most people, the search for a new laptop starts with price. If the statistics that Intel chipmakers and PC manufacturers are telling us are correct, you'll be using your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to increase your budget a little to get better features, do so. And that makes a difference whether you're spending $500 or over $1,000. In the past, you could get away with lower upfront costs while counting on memory and storage upgrades in the future. But laptop manufacturers are increasingly moving away from easily upgradeable components, so again, it's best to buy as many laptops 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, more durable build quality, a smaller or lighter design with more expensive materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All this increases the cost of the laptop. I'd like to say that $500 will get you, say, a powerful gaming laptop, but that's not true. Currently, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks costs between $700 and $800, while a reasonable model for creative work or gaming costs around $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptop for less money.
operating system
The choice of operating system depends partly on personal preference and partly on budget. For the most part, Microsoft's Windows and Apple's MacOS do the same thing (except in games, where Windows is the winner), but they do it differently. If you don't need an OS-specific app, use the one you're most comfortable using. And if you're not sure what it is, go to the Apple store or your local electronics store and check them out. Or ask friends or family to let you test them out a little. If you have an iPhone or iPad and love it, chances are you'll love MacOS.
But when it comes to price and variety (and, again, PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you get a MacBook. While Apple's MacBook regularly tops our best-of lists, 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 have to consider older refurbished models.
Windows laptops can be found for as little as a couple hundred dollars and come in a wide variety of sizes and designs. Of course, we'd be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop that we'd give a full recommendation, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email, and word processing, they exist.
If you're on a budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is different from Windows; make sure the apps you need have ChromiumAndroid or Linux before you make the leap. But if you spend most of your time surfing the Internet, writing, streaming videos, or using cloud gaming services, they'll work for you.
Size
Be sure to consider whether having a lighter, thinner, or touchscreen laptop with better battery life will be important to you in the future. Size is primarily determined by the screen—hello, laws of physics—which in turn affects battery size, laptop thickness, weight, and price. And keep in mind other physics-related characteristics, for example, an ultra-thin laptop is not necessarily lighter than a fat one, you can't expect a wide range of connections from a small or ultra-thin model, and so on.
Screen
When it comes to choosing a screen, there are a lot of considerations: how much you need to display (which surprisingly has more to do with resolution than screen size), what types of content you'll be viewing, and whether you'll be using it for gaming or creative work.
You really want to optimize pixel density; that is, the number of pixels per inch a screen can display. While there are other factors that affect sharpness, higher pixel density usually means sharper text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen on Resolution calculator if you don't feel like doing the math, you can also find out what math you need to do there.) Typically, we recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch.
Because of the way Windows and MacOS scale to fit your display, you'll often benefit from 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 into the view—on a low-resolution screen. That's why a 14-inch 4K screen might seem like overkill, but it's not if you need to, say, view a wide spreadsheet.
If you want a laptop that's relatively color accurate, displays as many colors as possible, or supports HDR, you can't simply trust the specs—not because manufacturers lie, but because they usually can't provide the necessary context to understand what the specs they quote mean. You can find a ton of detail about considerations for different types of screen use in our monitor buying guides. general purpose monitors, creators, gamers and HDR viewing.
CPU
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, and Qualcomm is the new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer a stunning selection of mobile processors. Complicating matters is that both manufacturers have chips designed for different styles of laptops, such as energy-efficient chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know which type is being used. You can go to Intel or AMD websites with explanations to get the desired performance. Generally speaking, 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 easier. But as with Intel and AMD, you'll still have to pay attention to naming conventions to know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses its M series chipsets in Mac computers. The entry-level MacBook Air uses the M1 chip with an eight-core processor and seven-core GPU. Current models are powered by the M2 series processor, which starts with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU and ends with the M2 Max with a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. Again, generally speaking, the more cores, the better the performance.
Battery life has less to do with the number of cores and more to do with the processor architecture, Arm or x86. Apple's Arm-based MacBook and the first Arm-based models PC Copilot Plus that we've tested provide better battery life than x86-based laptops from Intel and AMD.
Graphics
The GPU takes care of all the work of driving the screen and generating the displayed image, and also speeds up many graphics-related (and increasingly artificial intelligence-related) operations. There are two types of GPUs for Windows laptops: integrated (iGPU) and discrete (dGPU). As the name suggests, 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.
Since the iGPU shares space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is limited by these limits. It allows the use of smaller and lighter laptops, but does not perform as well as a dGPU. In fact, there are some games and creative software that will not run unless they detect a dGPU or enough VRAM. However, most productivity programs, video streaming, web browsing, and other general applications will run fine on an iGPU.
For more power-intensive 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 based on iGPU technology under the Xe brand (or the older UHD Graphics brand) in its processors.
Memory
In terms of memory, we highly recommend 16GB RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data from currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After this, 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. Additionally, in many laptops the memory is now soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers report this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and not upgradable.
However, some PC manufacturers solder the memory and leave an empty internal slot for installing a RAM memory card. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or look up the laptop's full specs online to confirm. And check the Internet for user experience, because the slot may still be difficult to reach, require non-standard or hard-to-find memory, or other pitfalls.
Storage
You'll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster SSDs have all but replaced HDDs in laptops. They can have a significant impact on performance. But not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheaper laptops usually have slower drives; If the laptop only has 4 or 8 GB of RAM, it may switch to this drive and the system may quickly slow down while running.
Get what you can afford and you you'll probably need less than you think. If you need a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two in the future, or use cloud storage to support a small internal drive. The only exception is for gaming laptops: we don't recommend using an SSD smaller than 512GB unless you like deleting games every time you want to play a new game.
