The Best Laptops for 2021
A laptop won’t revolutionize the minutiae of your life the way a smartphone can. You can’t easily whip one out to kill time in the elevator, capture a breathtaking sunset, or pay for a cup of coffee.
But in the years since smartphones took on all these jobs, laptops have honed their own talents. Amazing battery life and breathtaking screens are now common if you look in the right place for them. The graphics muscle to play games at full HD is affordable. And those basic old-guard features that you won’t find on any mobile device, such as touchpads and full-size keyboards, tend to get better with almost every generation.
With great features, though, has come great fragmentation. Amazon, Newegg, and even your local electronics mega marts have a dizzying array of cheap laptops, gaming laptops, 2-in-1 laptops, Chromebooks, and ultra portables. Here at PC Labs, we review as many laptops as we can—hundreds each year—so we’ve seen pretty much every remix of laptop you can buy.
Buying one by looking at specs and speed feeds alone can be maddening, though. Which specific features, and which laptop class, are best for you depends on your budget and how you plan to use your laptop. It’s better to take a systematic approach when shopping. Let’s run through how to make a smart pick.
Assess Your Budget: How Much Do I Need to Spend?
Don’t care about cutting-edge design and powerful components? You might be satisfied with a cheap laptop. Today’s market is flooded with basic but full-featured models with list prices under $500. Shopping holidays like Prime Day and Black Friday, and actual holidays like Presidents’ Day, bring frequent sales, discounting some of these models even further. Most of them will handle word processing and email checking just fine, but they’ll struggle with other tasks, such as keeping many web browser tabs open at once.
The Best Laptop Deals This Week*
Dell Inspiron 14 5410 Intel i5 512GB 8GB RAM 14" Laptop — $549.99 (List Price $808.99)
Dell Vostro 14 5410 Intel i7 512GB SSD 14" 1080p Laptop — $899.00 (List Price $1,684.29)
Dell Inspiron 15 5510 Intel i5 256GB SSD 15.6" Laptop — $579.99 (List Price $768.99)
Dell XPS 13 Intel i5 256GB SSD 8GB RAM 13.3" Laptop — $749.99 with code 50OFF699
Lenovo Yoga 7i Intel i5 256GB SSD 15.6" 2-in-1 Laptop — $649.99 (List Price $849.99)
Increasing your budget to around $1,000 will unlock access to nearly all of the cutting-edge features modern laptops offer. These include slim, sturdy aluminum chassis, brilliant touch-enabled 4K displays, powerful processors and graphics chips, and batteries that will last all day and well into the night. The major caveat in this price range is that you’ll have to pick and choose which features are most important. You might be able to land a laptop with a beautiful 4K display or a cavernous terabyte of solid-state storage at this price, but probably not one with both. If your piggy bank has $2,000 or more, you can choose almost any combination of features you want. Even the most powerful laptop that money can buy, though, must still obey the laws of physics. Powerful hardware generates heat, and the cooling mechanisms that such components require take up space. Hardcore gamers who want a 17-inch display and a screaming-fast graphics processor that requires bulky cooling pipes and fans can’t expect to find it in a thin, light laptop.
Most laptops you’ll run across in-store or at your favorite online seller will run Windows 10 (unless the seller is named “Apple”), but Microsoft’s best-known product isn’t necessarily the best operating system for everyone. Thanks to the ascendance in recent years of Google’s Chrome OS up the ranks of budget laptops, there’s now an alternative to Windows at every price level. The tipping point for non-Windows laptops is around $1,000; above a grand, your main alternative to a Windows 10 machine is a MacBook; below it, it’s a Chromebook.
Today, laptops based on Chrome OS are the primary alternatives to budget-priced Windows 10 laptops. A Chromebook could be a fine, value-minded choice for someone who needs a laptop just to watch movies, create text documents, writes emails, and putter around in basic spreadsheets. With a Chromebook, the main features you will really need from your laptop are a decent screen and a comfortable keyboard, since cloud services like Google Drive can handle most of your storage and processing needs. And, if you still insist on key creature comforts, you can find mid-range Chromebooks with full-HD (1080p) displays and comfortable keyboards just as easily as you can find bargain-basement ones these days.
What's an Ideal Size and Weight?
Most people searching for a general-purpose laptop should choose one that measures about half an inch thick and weighs 3 pounds or less. In general, these are the maximum dimensions and heft a laptop can have for us to consider it ultraportable, and for most users, portability is the key to maximizing use and enjoyment.
Aiming for that weight and thickness, in most cases, will limit the laptop’s screen size to 13 or 14 inches, although a few models with 15-inch or larger screens now fit into the ultraportable category. At most of these screen sizes, you can find models in either the conventional “clamshell” laptop shape or a 2-in-1 convertible design. The latter has a hinge that rotates the screen 360 degrees so you can use it as a makeshift tablet or prop it up like a tent for watching movies.
What Kind of Laptop Screen Do I Need?
Laptop screens have grown denser over the past decade, packing more pixels into the same area. That enables crisper text, sharper onscreen images, and, often, better-looking colors. Display density is sometimes measured in pixels per inch (PPI), but the main specification that defines a laptop screen is its native resolution, which is expressed in horizontal by vertical pixels.
Most laptops that cost $500 or more have screens with at least “full HD” resolutions. Also known as “1080p” displays, they sport a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels (or in a few cases, 1,920 by 1,200) and typically employ LCD panels built on what’s known as in-plane switching (IPS) technology. IPS screens’ quality can vary, but they are best known for keeping the quality of the image high if you look at the screen from an oblique, or off-side, angle. Thin-film transistors (TFT), the other major screen type in modern laptops (and the kind often found in gaming-geared models), tend to shift colors or look faded if not viewed straight-on. That matters if you often share the contents of your screen with others—say when giving impromptu presentations.
Should I Get a Touch Screen?
To take advantage of the touch-screen support present throughout Windows 10 and Chrome OS, you’ll want to seek out a touch-enabled laptop, and perhaps even a digital stylus to write or draw on it. Some Windows 10 laptops come in both touch- and non-touch versions, so check the specifications on what you’re buying carefully. Glossy screens typically feature touch support, while most matte screens designed to filter out glare from ambient lighting do not.
Since many gaming laptops have matte displays, touch support is much harder to find among their ranks. Many gaming laptops above budget-level do offer high-refresh-rate screens, though. Hardcore gamers or esports hounds who are looking for silky-smooth visuals to give them a competitive edge will want to maximize the number of frames per second that their screen can display, and can do so by opting for a screen with a 120Hz or greater refresh rate.
Which Laptop CPU Do I Need?
Most $1,000 ultraportables use Intel’s Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs, or, less commonly, AMD’s Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 CPUs. All of these offer plenty of power for everyday computing tasks, but keep in mind that higher CPU model numbers typically indicate more processor cores, higher maximum clock speeds, and sometimes even multithreading. With multithreading, each CPU core can run two sets of software instructions simultaneously, instead of just one. Modern software is designed to take advantage of as many CPU cores as possible, so it can run faster on multithreaded chips.
Meanwhile, budget laptops typically use AMD’s A-series or Ryzen 3 processors, or Intel’s Celeron, Core i3, or Pentium silicon. These typically have just two or four individual cores. At the other end of the spectrum, high-end powerhouse laptops have Intel’s Core i9 or workstation-class Xeon CPUs, with as many as eight cores.
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