Best Laptops of 2026: Top Picks Tested by CNET

I’ve awarded three laptops an Editors’ Choice award in recent months, starting with the MacBook Neo in March. With a premium MacBook look and feel at a much lower price, and enough performance for most people, the Neo is the best under-$700 laptop you can buy right now. Next, the Asus Zenbook A16 took home some hardware for its leading application and AI performance that comes wrapped in an incredibly thin-and-light-yet-rigid design. And most recently, the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 earned an Editors’ Choice for its head-turning design and mix of strong performance and long battery life. Beyond these award winners, I have favorites across a broad range of categories, from sleek, long-lasting ultraportables to high-powered gaming and content creation machines.

What is the best laptop overall?

The new MacBook Neo is the perfect laptop for student budgets, and the MacBook Pro is better suited for creators who need the added power and have the money to get it. In between, the MacBook Air offers an ideal balance of power, portability and price. That’s why the MacBook Air is still CNET’s pick for the best laptop for most people. But I think if you are eyeing a MacBook Air, I say you go big or go Neo.

My favorite Windows laptop is the OmniBook Ultra 14. It offers a choice of Intel Panther Lake or Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 processors, and I tested both. I lean toward the Qualcomm model, but there are reasons to side with Intel. In either case, the laptop offers strong overall performance, long battery life and a fabulous design.

If you value battery life above all else, then the HP OmniBook 5 14 is the pick. Based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processor, it won CNET’s Editors’ Choice and Lab Awards for pairing a stylish design and OLED display with record-setting battery life at a great price.

Intel has responded to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processors making laptop headlines with the release of its Core Ultra Series 3 processors, developed under the name Panther Lake. The Dell XPS 14 was one of the first Intel Panther Lake laptops I’ve tested, and it made a big first impression with an unprecedented combination of power and efficiency. Not only does it provide all-day battery life on the level of Snapdragon X laptops, but it also delivers capable 1080p gaming performance from the integrated Intel Arc B390 GPU.

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Best laptops of 2026

What I’m testing next

I’m currently testing a bunch of Lenovo laptops, including the mainstream Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11, premium Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 and HP’s budget OmniBook 3 16. Look for these reviews in the coming weeks.

Other laptops we’ve tested

HP OmniBook 3 16: Powered by a Snapdragon X chip, HP’s budget 16-inch laptop can run for nearly a day and a half on a single charge. It’s also fairly portable for its size and elegant for its price.

Lenovo Yoga 7A 2-in-1 16: This 16-inch 2-in-1 pairs Ryzen AI performance with a gorgeous OLED touchscreen, but integrated Radeon graphics and some cut corners keep it firmly in “prosumer” territory.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x: For its portability and daily productivity, it’s a winner. Potential Windows-on-Arm issues and modest graphics chops, however, keep it from being a true all-arounder.

Dell XPS 16: It costs as much as Nvidia RTX models but lacks RTX graphics. Still, the XPS 16 is a strong overall performer with a thin-and-light design.

Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: It’s a sleek and solid OLED laptop but forces some compromises.

M5 MacBook Air Review (13-Inch, 2026): Go big or go Neo.

GeekBook X14 Pro: Geekom’s first laptop is impressively thin and light but battery life disappoints. And I detest the touch pad.

Lenovo IdeaPad 5i 16 2-in-1 Gen 10: Lenovo’s low-cost, 16-inch two-in-one is a versatile machine, but it forces you to live with more than a couple of compromises in the design.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Aura Edition: Centered around a gorgeous 16-inch OLED display, this fantastic Yoga laptop provides the performance and build that graphics pros demand.

Microsoft Surface Pro (12-inch): The 12-inch version of Microsoft’s detachable two-in-one will suffice for most users, but getting nickel-and-dimed by optional accessories that feel quite necessary is annoying.

How we test laptops

The review process for laptops consists of two parts: performance testing under controlled conditions in the CNET Labs and extensive hands-on use by our reviewers. This includes evaluating a device’s aesthetics, ergonomics and features with respect to price. A final review verdict is a combination of both objective and subjective judgments.

We test all laptops with a core set of benchmarks, including Primate Labs Geekbench 6, Cinebench 2024, PCMark 10, a variety of 3DMark benchmarks (whichever can run on the laptop), and our own battery life test where we continually stream a YouTube video until the battery dies. If a laptop is intended for PC gaming, we’ll also run benchmarks from Shadow of the Tomb Raider,  Guardians of the Galaxy, The Rift Breaker (CPU and GPU), Assassin’s Creed Shadows and F1 24.

For the hands-on, the reviewer uses it for their work during the review period, evaluating how well the design, features (like the screen, camera and speakers) and manufacturer-supplied software operate as a cohesive whole. We also place importance on how well they work given their cost and where the manufacturer has potentially made upgrades or tradeoffs for its price.

The list of benchmarking software and comparison criteria we use changes over time as the devices we test evolve. You can find a more detailed description of our test methodology on our How We Test Computers page.

Best laptop brands

Apple’s MacBooks are the most popular laptops and for good reason. They offer excellent build quality and leading performance and battery life ever since Apple introduced its M series processors in 2020.

The top two brands on the Windows side are Lenovo and HP. Both offer a wide variety of models, from thin-and-light ultraportables to larger, more powerful models for gaming content creation. Lenovo’s ThinkPads have long been a favorite among business laptops and its Yoga models are usually highly rated two-in-one laptops.

HP is in the middle of a branding transformation. It’s ended its Pavilion, Envy and Spectre laptop brands in favor of OmniBook consumer models and EliteBook business models. Its Omen brand will continue as the home for its gaming laptops. I liked the first OmniBook laptop I reviewed and look forward to testing more.

For a budget laptop, Acer and Apple have great options — each dominates our best budget laptop list. Acer makes great low-cost laptops and budget gaming laptops and Apple’s MacBook Air can usually be found for less than $1,000 where it’s a great deal. And the older M1 model costs even less.

Factors to consider when shopping the best laptops

There are a ton of laptops on the market at any given moment and almost all of those models are available in multiple configurations to match your performance and budget needs. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with options when looking for a new laptop, it’s understandable. To help simplify things for you, here are the main things you should consider when you start looking.

Price

The search for a new laptop for most people starts with price. If the statistics that chipmaker Intel and PC manufacturers hurl at us are correct, you’ll be holding onto your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a little to get better specs, do it. That stands whether you’re spending $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less upfront with an eye toward upgrading memory and storage in the future. Laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making components easily upgradable, so again, it’s best to get as much laptop as you can afford from the start.

Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design from higher-end materials or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things add to the cost of a laptop. I’d love to say $500 will get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that handles average work, home office or school tasks is between $700 and $800 and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming is upward of about $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 MacOS do the same things (save for gaming, where Windows is the winner), but they do them differently. Unless there’s an OS-specific application you need, get the one you feel most comfortable using. If you’re not sure which that is, head to an Apple store or a local electronics store and test them out. Or ask friends or family to let you test theirs for a bit. If you have an iPhone or iPad and like it, chances are you’ll like MacOS, too.

In price and variety (and PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you’re getting a MacBook. Apple’s MacBooks regularly top our best lists, the least expensive one is the M1 MacBook Air for $999. It is 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 as little as a couple of hundred dollars and come in all manner of sizes and designs. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop we’d give a full-throated recommendation to but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email and word processing, they exist.

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

Size

Remember to consider whether having a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with a 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 factors into battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. Keep in mind other physics-related characteristics, such as an ultrathin laptop isn’t necessarily lighter than a thick one, you can’t expect a wide array of connections on a small or ultrathin model and so on.

Screen

When deciding on a screen, there are a myriad number of considerations, like how much you need to display (which is surprisingly more about resolution than screen size), what types of content you’ll be looking at 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 the screen can display. Although other factors contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density usually means a sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at DPI Calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can also find out what math you need to do there.) I recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.

Because of the way Windows and MacOS scale for the display, you’re frequently better off with a higher resolution than you’d think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller — to fit more content in the view — on a low-resolution screen. This is why a 4K, 14-inch screen may sound like unnecessary overkill but may not be if you need to, say, view a wide spreadsheet.

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

Processor

The processor, aka the CPU, is the brains of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer a staggering selection of mobile processors. Making things trickier, both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, like power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know what type is used. You can head over to Intel or AMD for explanations so you get the performance you want. Generally speaking, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.

Apple makes its own chips for MacBooks, which makes things slightly more straightforward. 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 its M-series chipsets in Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with an eight-core CPU and seven-core GPU. The current models have 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 a 38-core GPU. Again, generally speaking, the more cores it has, the better the performance.

Battery life has less to do with the number of cores and more to do with CPU architecture, Arm versus x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus PCs we’ve tested offer better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Graphics

The graphics processor handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what gets displayed, as well as speeding up a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the names imply, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.

Because the iGPU splits space, memory and power with the CPU, it’s constrained by the limits of those. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but doesn’t perform nearly as well as a dGPU. There are some games and creative software that won’t run unless they detect a dGPU or sufficient VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing and other nonspecialized apps will run fine on an iGPU.

For more power-hungry graphics needs, like video editing, gaming and streaming, design and so on, you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on the Xe-branded (or the older UHD Graphics branding) iGPU technology 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 running applications and it can fill up fast. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which in conjunction with a slower disk can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered onto the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it’s soldered and can’t be upgraded.

Some PC makers will solder memory on and also leave an empty internal slot for adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the laptop’s full specs online to confirm. Check the web for user experiences because the slot may still be hard to get to, it may require nonstandard or hard-to-get memory or other pitfalls.

Storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops. Faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops and can make a big difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally speedy, and cheaper laptops typically have slower drives. If the laptop only comes with 4GB or 8GB of RAM, it may end up swapping to that drive and the system may slow down quickly while you’re 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 bolster a small internal drive. The exception is gaming laptops: I don’t recommend going with less than a 512GB SSD unless you really like uninstalling games every time you want to play a new game.