The best laptops of 2024 – CNET

There are a ton of laptops on the market at any given time, and almost all of these models are available in multiple configurations to suit your performance and budget needs. It’s understandable if you’re overwhelmed with options when looking for a new laptop. Here are the main things to consider when you start looking to help make things easier for you.

Price

For most people, the search for a new laptop starts with price. If the stats we’ve been told by chipmaker Intel and PC manufacturers are true, you’ll be keeping your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a bit to get better features, do so. It depends on whether you spend $500 or more than $1000. In the past, you can get away with spending less money on memory and memory upgrades in the future. Laptop manufacturers are increasingly moving away from making components easily upgradeable, so it’s best to get as much laptop as you can afford from the start.

In general, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer screen, more solid build quality, a smaller or lighter design with higher-quality materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All this increases the price of the laptop. I’d like to say that $500 will get you a powerful gaming laptop, but it doesn’t. Currently, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks is between $700 and $800, and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming is around $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptop capabilities for less.

Operating system

Choosing an operating system is partly personal preference and partly budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS do the same thing (except in the game where Windows wins), but they do it differently. If there isn’t a specific app for the OS you need, go with the one you feel most comfortable using. If you’re not sure which one it is, visit an Apple store or local electronics store and try them out. Or ask your friends or family to let you try a little of theirs. If you own and like an iPhone or iPad, chances are you’ll like MacOS too.

When it comes to price and variety (and PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you buy a MacBook. Apple’s MacBooks regularly top our best lists, with the cheapest being 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 ones.

Windows laptops can be found for several hundred dollars and come in all sizes and designs. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop that we’d fully recommend, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email, and word processing, they’re available.

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

Size

Don’t forget to consider whether a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with good battery life is 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. Keep in mind that other physics-related features, such as an ultrathin laptop is not necessarily lighter than a thick laptop, you can’t expect a wide variety of connections in a small or very thin model, etc.

Screen

When it comes to deciding on a display, there are countless 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 that the screen can display. While other factors contribute to sharpness, higher pixel density usually means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at this address DPI Calculator (If you don’t want to do the math, and you can find out what math you need to do there.) I recommend a dot spacing of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.

Due to Windows and MacOS scaling for displays, 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 on a lower-resolution screen — to fit more content in the view. So a 4K, 14-inch screen might sound like an unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if you need to look at, say, a wide table.

If you need a relatively accurate color laptop that displays the most colors possible or supports HDR, you simply can’t rely on the specs — not because the manufacturers lie, but because they usually fail to provide the necessary context to understand what’s needed. means the properties they quote. You can find many details on considerations for different types of display in our monitor buying guides general purpose monitors, creators, players and HDR viewing.

Processor

The processor, or CPU, is the brain of the laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU manufacturers for Windows laptops, while Qualcomm is the new third choice Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer an amazing selection of mobile processors. Complicating matters, both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, such as energy-efficient chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will tell you which type is used. you can take place Intel’s or AMDs Sites for explanations to get the performance you want. In general, the faster the processor speed and the more cores, the better the performance.

Apple makes its own chips for MacBooks, which makes things a little easier. Like Intel and AMD, you’ll still want to pay attention to naming conventions so you know what performance to expect. Apple uses M series chipsets in Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with an octa-core CPU and seven-core GPU. Current models feature the M2 series of silicon, starting with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU and extending up to 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 CPU architecture, Arm and x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus computers we tested Intel and AMD offer better battery life than notebooks based on x86 processors.

Graphics

The graphics processor handles all the tasks of managing the screen and rendering, 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 the memory with the CPU.

Since the iGPU shares space, memory and power with the CPU, it is limited by their limitations. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but doesn’t perform nearly as well as a dGPU. There are some games and creative apps 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.

Video editing, gaming and streaming, design and more. For more power-hungry graphics needs, you’ll need a dGPU; There are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, while Intel offers some based on Xe-branded (or old UHD Graphics branding) iGPU technology in their CPUs.

Memory

For memory, I recommend 16 GB of RAM (8 GB is the absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for the currently running programs and can be quickly filled. After that, it starts switching between the slower RAM and the SSD. Many laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which combined with a slower drive can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, consider that it is soldered and cannot be upgraded.

Some computer manufacturers will flash the memory and also leave an empty internal slot to add a stick of 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 experiences, as the slot may still be difficult to access, it may require non-standard or hard-to-get memory, or other pitfalls.

Storage

You can still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster hard drives are replacing hard drives in laptops. They can make a huge difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheaper laptops usually have slower drives; if the laptop only has 4GB or 8GB of RAM, it can be replaced by that driver and the system can quickly slow down while you are working.

Get what you can afford, and 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 boost a small internal drive. One exception is gaming laptops: if you don’t like deleting games every time you want to play a new game, I don’t recommend going with an SSD smaller than 512GB.