The best laptop of 2024 – CNET

There are a ton of laptops on the market at any given time, and almost all of those models come in a variety of configurations to fit your performance and budget needs. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the options when you’re looking for a new laptop, that’s understandable. To make things easier for you, here are the main things you should consider when you start looking.

Price

For most people, the search for a new laptop starts with price. If chipmaker Intel and PC manufacturers’ statistics are correct, 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 performance, do so. This can be as much as $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could spend less up front, with the expectation of upgrading memory and storage down the road. Laptop manufacturers are moving away from making components that are easy to upgrade, so again, it’s best to buy the biggest laptop you can afford right away.

Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, more solid build quality, a smaller or lighter design with higher-end materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things add to the cost of the laptop. I wish I could say that $500 would buy you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. The best price for a reliable laptop that will handle average work, home office, or school tasks right now is $700 to $800, with a reasonable model for creative work or gaming costing more than $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more features or functionality from your laptop for less.

Operating system

Choosing an operating system is partly a matter of personal preference and partly a matter of budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s macOS do the same thing (outside of gaming, where Windows wins), but they do it differently. Unless you need a specific app for the operating system, choose the one you’re most comfortable with. If you’re not sure which one that is, go to an Apple store or your local electronics store and test them out. Or ask friends or family to let you test their devices for a while. If you have an iPhone or iPad and you like them, you’ll probably 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, but the cheapest is the $999 MacBook Air M1. It’s regularly marked down 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 a few hundred dollars and come in a variety of sizes and designs. Sure, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop we could recommend with full confidence, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email, and word processing, they exist.

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 app, Android, or Linux app before you commit. If you spend most of your time surfing the web, writing, streaming video, or using cloud gaming services, they’re a good choice.

Size

Be sure to consider whether having a lighter, thinner laptop or a laptop with a touchscreen and good battery life will be important to you in the future. Size is primarily determined by the screen — hello, laws of physics — which in turn affect battery size, thickness of the laptop, weight, and price. Keep in mind other physics-related features, such as an ultra-thin laptop isn’t necessarily lighter than a thick one, you can’t expect a wide range of connections in a small or ultra-thin model, etc.

Screen

When it comes time to choosing a display, there are a lot of things to consider: how much you want to display (which, as it turns out, depends more on the resolution than the screen size), what type of content you’ll be watching, 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 other factors affect sharpness, higher pixel density usually means sharper rendering of text and UI elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen with DPI Calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can also find out what calculations you need to do.) As a rule of thumb, we recommend a dot spacing of at least 100 pixels per inch (ppi).

Because of the way Windows and macOS scale for displays, it’s often better to go for a higher resolution than you might think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller — to fit more content into view — on a low-resolution screen. So a 14-inch 4K screen might seem like an unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if you need to display a wide spreadsheet, for example.

If you want a laptop with relatively accurate color, that displays the most colors possible, or that supports HDR, you simply can’t trust the specs—not because manufacturers lie, but because they usually don’t provide the necessary context to understand what the specs they quote mean. You can find a ton of detail on considerations for different types of screen uses in our monitor buying guides for general purpose monitors , creators , gamers , and HDR viewing .

Editor

The processor, also known as the CPU, is the brains of the laptop. Intel and AMD are the main manufacturers of processors for Windows laptops. Both offer a dizzying array of mobile processors. To make matters more difficult, 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 head over to the Intel or AMD websites for clarification, so you can get the performance you want. Generally speaking, the faster the processor speed and the more cores, the better the performance will be.

Apple makes its own chips for the MacBook, which simplifies things a bit. However, like Intel and AMD, you’ll still want to pay attention to the naming conventions to know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses M-series chips in its Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses the M1 chip with an eight-core CPU and seven-core GPU. Current models have M2-series silicon, which 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, generally speaking, the more cores, the better the performance.

Graphics

The GPU handles all the work of running the screen and generating what’s displayed, and it also speeds up many graphics-related (and increasingly AI-related) operations. In the case of Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated or discrete. As the names suggest, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory that it communicates with directly, making it faster than one that shares 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 it doesn’t perform as well as a dGPU. Some games and creative software won’t run if they don’t detect the dGPU or have enough VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing, and other non-specialist applications will run fine on an iGPU.

For more power-hungry graphics tasks like video editing, gaming and streaming, designing, etc., you’ll need a dGPU; only two companies make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel also offering Xe-branded (or older UHD Graphics-branded) iGPUs in its processors.

Memory

As 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 apps you’re currently running, and it can fill up quickly. It then starts to switch between RAM and the SSD, which is slower. Many laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which, combined with the slower drive, can make using a Windows laptop frustratingly slow. Additionally, many laptops now have their memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, you should assume it’s soldered and can’t be upgraded.

Some PC manufacturers solder the memory and leave the internal slot empty for adding RAM. You may need to contact your laptop manufacturer or find the full laptop specs online to confirm this. Check online for user experiences, as the slot may still be hard to access, may require custom or hard-to-find memory, or other pitfalls.

Storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and bigger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can have a big impact on performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheaper laptops tend to have slower drives; if your laptop only has 4GB or 8GB of RAM, you might end up swapping it for that drive, and your system could quickly slow down while you’re working.

Buy what you can afford, and if you need a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two in the future, or use cloud storage to bolster the small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: we don’t recommend getting an SSD smaller than 512GB unless you really like uninstalling games every time you want to play a new one.