The best laptops for you, from ultraportables to gaming machines, MacBooks to Chromebooks.
We test a wide variety of laptops each year here at The Verge, and many of them are very good. But you can’t buy them all. So I’ve done the very difficult (very difficult, trust me) task of selecting some of the best laptops you can get. Whether you’re looking for a Chromebook, a gaming laptop, a 2-in-1 convertible, an ultralight notebook, or something that’s a little bit of each, I’ve got multiple options for you here. These aren’t necessarily the best laptops of all time, but they are, in my opinion, the best laptops you can buy right now.
Our current pick for the best laptop is the MacBook Air M3. It’s a device that does just about everything right. While it’s certainly not perfect, there are no major flaws. It’s a great pick for productivity, browsing, and even light gaming.
It's getting harder to buy a bad laptop, but what separates the best laptops from good laptops is how they balance power, efficiency, portability, and comfort. A great laptop should have a fantastic keyboard and trackpad — after all, those are the two biggest reasons you'd choose a laptop over a smartphone or tablet. Its display should be easy on the eyes, bright, and sharp enough that you aren't distracted by jagged edges and visible pixels. It should be powerful enough for most anything short of intensive video editing and advanced gaming. It should be easy to carry around from place to place, and it should be able to last all day without needing to be plugged in.
Our other picks for the best laptops, Chromebooks, and 2-in-1s include the MacBook Pro 16 and the Dell XPS 13 with a Snapdragon X Elite chip. Check out the full list of best laptop picks below or our roundup of the best gaming laptops, if you’re looking for a powerful machine that doesn’t sacrifice portability.
The best laptop
CPU: M3 (8-core) / GPU: M3 (8- or 10-core) / RAM: 8GB, 16GB, 24GB / Storage: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB / Display: 13.6-inch or 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display, 2560 x 1664 or 2880 x 1864 , 60Hz, no touch option / Dimensions: 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches or 0.45 x 13.40 x 9.35 inches / Weight: 2.7 pounds or 3.3 pounds
The Apple MacBook Air M3 is the best laptop for most people — Mac users, of course, but also the platform-agnostic or anyone who wants a no-fuss, straightforward machine that doesn’t bombard them with advertisements or bloatware. It’s a productivity laptop that can do a bit of everything, and it now comes in a 15-inch version for those who like their laptops a little larger. It’s hard to find another laptop that offers this kind of combination of performance and battery life in a thin and light chassis.
Despite losing its way around the mid-2010s, Apple has a long history of sending quality MacBooks to market, and the Air M3 is no different. A smooth, almost ethereal trackpad, check. Chiclet-style keyboard that makes typing feel like a dance, check. Fast Wi-Fi adapter, color-rich display, 1080p webcam, and MagSafe charging, check. The Air M3 wasn’t made for heavy gaming, video editing, or 3D modeling or for those who want more than two USB-C ports, but for nearly everyone else, it’s a great option.
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Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
It’s absolutely worth spending an extra $100 to get the Air M3 over the MacBook Air M2, which Apple still sells. It’s about 16 to 18 percent faster than Apple’s M2 chip, and the storage on the 256GB configurations is up to twice as fast. The new Airs also support two external displays with the lid closed, which is another improvement from the previous generation. The speakers on 15-inch Air M3 are vastly superior, especially on the low end. You can actually hear the bass, whereas on the 13-inch, it’s nearly nonexistent. If you opt for the midnight colorway in either model, keep a microfiber cloth handy. The amount of fingerprints it collects turns the chassis into a CSI’s playground.
We recommend upgrading the MacBook Air M3 to at least 16GB of memory. It will improve the laptop’s ability to multitask now and will give you a few extra years of service down the line. (Important since you’d have to buy a whole new laptop to upgrade the memory.) 256GB of storage is easier to get away with, given the plethora of cloud and external storage options available, so if you can only upgrade one thing, make it the memory. You get an automatic GPU bump when you do, anyway.
Read our review of the Apple MacBook Air M3.
Best Chromebook
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 5 115U / GPU: Intel UHD / RAM: 8GB, 16GB LPDDR5 / Storage: 256GB, 512GB / Display: Touch 14-inch FHD 1920 x 1200, 60Hz IPS with stylus support, 340 nits / Dimensions: 12.35 x 8.84 x 0.71 inches / Weight: 3.21 pounds
Like last year, Acer’s newest Chromebook Spin is the best Chromebook we’ve seen so far in 2024 — and it’s still part of the Plus line of Chromebooks, which now have Google Gemini features integrated with ChromeOS. It also comes with a 12-month subscription to the Google One AI premium plan, which includes 2TB of cloud storage space.
The Core Ultra 5 115U is slower than last gen’s Intel Core i5-1335U (the Ultra has eight cores with clock speeds up to 4.20GHz, while the Core i5 has 10 cores and goes up to 4.60GHz), but the Ultra Core has an NPU, which means it’s better suited for running AI-related tasks on-device. The new Spin Chromebook also supports the current LPDDR5 memory standard, which is faster than the previous generation in the 2023 Spin 714.
Acer upgraded some of the connectivity port options, too. The Spin 714 now has two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, instead of two USB-C 3.2 ports, for much faster data transfer and power delivery.
Best Snapdragon X Elite laptop
CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 / GPU: Qualcomm Adreno / RAM: 16GB, 32GB, 64GB LPDDR5X (soldered) / Storage: 512GB, 1TB, 2TB / Display: Non-touch 13.4-inch FHD 1920 x 1200 120Hz, 500 nits or touch 13.4-inch QHD 2560 x 1600, 500 nits or touch 13.4-inch OLED 2880 x 1800 60Hz, 400 nits / Dimensions: 11.62 x 7.84 x 0.58–0.60 inches / Weight: 2.60–2.62 pounds
Out of all the Snapdragon Copilot Plus PCs we recently tested, the Dell XPS 13 has the best price to performance ratio. Both of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7s we tested also stood out (one of which had the same Snapdragon chip as the XPS 13), but Dell offers more balanced configuration options. Want 32GB of memory and 1TB of storage? Dell charges $1,600 while Microsoft charges $2,000. Dell also lets you mix and match more of its memory and storage options than Microsoft; it doesn’t tie a specific configuration to one chassis color.
The XPS 13 configuration we tested goes for $1,800, but you can save $500 by downgrading the OLED touchscreen to a non-touch 1200p display (and the refresh rate doubles to 120Hz). You get the same processor with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage space instead of the base 32GB of memory that comes with the OLED configuration, but 16GB is plenty for most people. (Dell does give you the option to upgrade the memory and storage if needed.)
Like the rest of Dell’s new XPS lineup, the Qualcomm XPS has the same “zero-lattice” chiclet keyboard, a borderless trackpad that blends into the chassis, and a “capacitive touch function row,” which is Dell’s take on the (RIP) 13-inch MacBook Pro touch bar. While I wasn’t thrilled with how it felt to type on the XPS 14’s keyboard, I liked it way better on the XPS 13. The keys felt less springy, and I didn’t hit the tilde (~) key every time I tried to hit the escape key thanks to the same keyboard being in a smaller chassis.
The best 16-inch Windows laptop
CPU: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 / GPU: Radeon 890M, Radeon 880M / RAM: 32GB, 24GB / Storage: 1TB / Display: touch 16-inch 2880 x 1800, 120Hz OLED with stylus support, 500 nits peak HDR / Dimensions: 13.92 x 9.57 x 0.47 ~ 0.51 inches / Weight: 3.21 pounds
The 16-inch Asus Zenbook S 16 is the best-looking, best-performing laptop we tested over the summer; it’s also so thin and lightweight you wouldn’t know it just by holding it! It can handle a little bit of everything, from emails to graphic design work, and it tackles gaming surprisingly well for a laptop without a separate graphics card. It’s miles ahead of what any Copilot Plus PC can do, too, including the Intel Core Ultra laptops we’ve recently tested. It’s a lovely, catch-all device.
There are only two Zenbook S 16 models as of now. The $1,700 one comes in gray with AMD’s flagship Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip and 32GB of memory; and the $1,400 model comes in white with the lower-tier AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and 24GB of memory. Otherwise, they are identical. Both feature OLED touch displays with a native 2880 x 1800 (3K) resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, stylus support, 1TB of storage, and the same ports / Wi-Fi adapter. Everything but the Windows version. (The more expensive model gets Home, the cheaper one gets Pro.)
One of the Zenbook’s niche but interesting features is that you can allocate up to 75 percent of the laptop’s total memory to the integrated graphics. Doing so can boost frame rates in games a smidge, but it really comes in handy for complex 3D rendering or anything else that needs a lot of graphics memory to process. At just 11 hours, its battery life doesn’t last as long as similar laptops we’ve tested, such as the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge and Dell XPS 14, but it’s a small trade-off. There’s currently no other Windows laptop that offers as much performance and versatility in a 16-inch chassis for the price.
Read our review of the Asus Zenbook S 16.
The best laptop for high-end gaming
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D / GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 / RAM: 32GB / Storage: 1TB / Display: 17-inch IPS QHD, 240Hz display, 3ms, 300 nits, 100 percent DCI-P3 / Dimensions: 15.55 x 11.1 x 1.11 inches / Weight: 6.51 pounds
The ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D is big. It’s loud, it’s garish, and it’s flat-out the fastest gaming laptop we’ve tested. Thanks to its AMD Ryzen 9 79045HX3D processor, it leaves models with the same top-tier RTX 4090 graphics card and Intel’s fastest CPUs in the dust. It can run many of today’s AAA titles at 1440p with triple-digit frame rates.
The Scar 17 X3D has a 17-inch 2560 x 1440 240Hz screen with G-Sync, oodles of ports, a pleasant keyboard, and RGB galore. At over six and a half pounds and 17 inches on the diagonal, it’s your classic high-performance, barely portable gaming laptop.
Its webcam is potato, battery life is exactly as bad as you’d expect from everything we just listed, and it’s expensive, but for now this is the high-water mark for gaming laptops.
For more down-to-earth performance and price, you can also get the ROG Strix Scar 17 with an RTX 4070 for about $1,800 or with an RTX 4080 for about $2,900.
Read our Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D review.
The best MacBook for photo and video editing
CPU: M3 Pro, M3 Max / GPU: M3 Pro, M3 Max / RAM: 18GB - 36GB (M3 Pro), 36GB - 128 GB (M3 Max) / Storage: 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB / Display: 14.2 / 16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR, 3024 x 1964 / 3456 x 2234, adaptive refresh up to 120Hz, no touch option / Dimensions: 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 / 14.01 x 9.77 x 0.66 inches / Weight: 3.5 / 4.7 pounds (M3 Pro), 3.6 / 4.8 pounds (M3 Max)
If you need more power for intensive creative work — like 3D rendering and working with ultra-high-resolution photos and video — the MacBook Pro is your huckleberry. Both the 14- and 16-inch models are available with powerful M3 Pro or M3 Max processors. There’s also a 14-inch Pro with a plain-old M3 processor, but it’s kinda weirdly positioned and most people shouldn’t get it.
Processors (and the new space black color option) aside, the MacBook Pro has remained largely unchanged since 2021. It has a bright, beautiful, color-accurate, high-definition screen with HDR and adaptive refresh rate up to 120Hz; amazing speakers, a comfortable keyboard and trackpad; and a good port loadout: three Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C 4 ports, plus HDMI and an SD card slot. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is a few hundred dollars cheaper than the 16-inch, but aside from the very lowest processor options, most configurations are available in either size, so pick whichever works for you.
In our benchmarks, which test a variety of creative tasks including encoding, playback, and export time, the MacBook Pro 16 did better than any laptop we’ve ever used — the only other machines that have come close to matching this thing in some of our benchmarks are high-end desktop PCs. The battery life is also record-shattering. The top-of-the-line 16-inch M3 Max model lasted around 18 hours in our most recent testing, with no battery-saving features enabled.
Most people who need more power than a MacBook Air — including pro photographers —will be fine with an M3 Pro model, which starts at $1,999 for the 14-inch with an 11-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 18GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD. The 16-inch starts at $2,499 for a 12-core CPU, 18-core GPU, 18GB of memory, and 512GB SSD. The Pro chip can be configured with up to 36GB of memory and a 4TB SSD, at the usual absurd Apple markups, and it supports up to two external display
