The best laptops of 2024 – CNET

There are a lot of laptops on the market at any given moment, and almost all of these models are available in multiple configurations to suit your performance and budget needs. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the options when searching for a new laptop, that’s understandable. To help simplify things for you, here are the main things you should consider when you start your search.

price

The search for a new laptop for most people starts with price. If the statistics given to us by chip maker Intel and PC makers are correct, you’ll be keeping your next laptop for at least three years. If you can increase your budget a little to get better specs, do so. This applies whether you spend $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less upfront in order to upgrade memory and storage in the future. Laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making components easily upgradeable, so again, it’s best to get as much out of your laptop as possible from the start.

In general, the more you spend, the better the laptop. This could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer screen, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design made of higher-quality materials or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things add to the cost of the laptop. I’d like to say that $500 would get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Right now, a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks ranges between $700 and $800, and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming costs upwards of $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 part personal preference and part budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS do the same things (except in gaming, where Windows is the winner), but they do them differently. Unless there is an operating system-specific application that you need, choose the application that you feel most comfortable using. If you’re not sure, head to an Apple Store or local electronics store and test it. Or ask friends or family to let you test them for a while. If you have an iPhone or iPad and like it, you’ll probably like MacOS too.

When it comes to price and versatility (and PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you’ll get a MacBook. Apple’s MacBooks regularly top our best lists, and the least expensive is the M1 MacBook Air for $999. It’s regularly discounted to $750 or $800, but if you want a cheaper MacBook, you’ll have to consider older, refurbished machines.

Windows laptops can be found for a few hundred dollars, and come in all sizes and designs. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop that we’d give a full recommendation for, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email, and word processing, it’s there.

If you’re on a tight budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience from Windows; Make sure the applications you need have the file chromeOr Android or Linux before making the leap. If you spend most of your time surfing the web, writing, streaming video, or using cloud gaming services, it’s for you.

measuring

Remember to consider whether having a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with good battery life will be important to you in the future. The size is mainly determined by the screen – hello laws of physics – which in turn affects battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. Keep in mind that other characteristics related to physics, such as an ultra-thin laptop is not necessarily lighter than a thick one, you cannot expect a wide range of connections on a small or ultra-thin model, etc.

a screen

When it comes to deciding on a monitor, there are countless considerations: how much you need to display (which surprisingly has more to do with resolution than screen size), the types of content you’ll be watching and whether or not you want to display it. I will use it for gaming or creative work.

You really want to optimize the pixel density; That is, the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. Although there are other factors that contribute to clarity, a higher pixel density usually means sharper display of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen on… DPI calculator If you don’t want to do the math, and you can also see what math you need to do there.) I recommend a raster spacing of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.

Because of the way Windows and MacOS adapt to your display, you’re often better off with a higher resolution than you think. You can always make things larger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller—to fit more content in the display—on a low-resolution screen. That’s why a 14-inch 4K display may seem like unnecessary overkill, but it may not be if you need, say, to display a wide spreadsheet.

If you need a laptop with relatively accurate colours, displays as many colors as possible or supports HDR, you simply can’t trust the specifications – not because manufacturers lie, but because they usually fail to provide the context needed to understand what’s needed. The specifications they quote mean. You can find lots of details about considerations for different types of monitor uses in our monitor buying guides General purpose monitors, Creative people, Players and HDR display.

Processor

The processor, also known as the central processing unit (CPU), is the brain of your laptop. Intel and AMD are the two main CPU manufacturers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with their respective companies ARM-based Snapdragon. Both Intel and AMD offer an amazing range of mobile processors. Making matters more complicated, 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 which type is used. You can head to Intel or AMD Explanation sites until you get the performance you want. In general, the faster the processor and the more cores it has, the better the performance.

Apple makes its own chips for MacBooks, which makes things a bit clearer. As with Intel and AMD, you’ll still want to pay attention to naming conventions to know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses its own M-series chips in Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with an eight-core CPU and a seven-core GPU. Current models have the M2 series silicon that starts with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU and goes up to the M2 Max with a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. Again, in general, 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 vs. x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based MacBooks Copilot Plus PCs We’ve tested better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Graphics

The graphics processor does all the work of driving the display and creating what’s displayed, as well as accelerating a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of graphics processing units: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the names suggest, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that communicates with it directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.

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

For more power-hungry graphics needs, such as video editing, gaming, 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 its Xe-branded iGPU technology (or the older UHD Graphics brand) in its CPUs.

memory

For memory, I highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which, combined with a slower disk, can lead to a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. In addition, many laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and cannot be upgraded.

Some computer makers solder the memory and leave an internal slot empty to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact your laptop manufacturer or find the full laptop specifications online to confirm. Check user experiences on the web, as the slot may be difficult to access, may require non-standard memory, be difficult to obtain, or other risks.

storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a huge difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheap laptops usually have slower drives; If your laptop only has 4GB or 8GB of RAM, you may end up switching to that drive and the system may slow down quickly 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 in the future or use cloud storage to support a small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: I wouldn’t recommend using an SSD with less than 512GB unless you like uninstalling games every time you want to launch a new one.