The Best Laptop for Every Type of Person

Monica Chin, The Verge’s laptop reviewer, calls this one of the best laptops you can buy. It’s well built, it has a powerful processor, and a vibrant 13-inch screen with almost no bezel. Which means you’ll have a that extra bit of room on your 4K screen to move around windows, browse the web and play games. In their testing, the Verge recorded seven hours of battery life and three hours of light gaming. The keyboard and touchpad feel smooth and responsive, and it weighs only 2.8 pounds.

“The HP Envy x360 2020 is one of the best midrange laptops you can buy, thanks to its sturdy and compact build, chic convertible design, and excellent performance,” Chin says. It’s shockingly thin, and like the XPS 13, has almost no bezel around the screen, which looks futuristic as hell. It also has a touchscreen, in case you ever want to quickly fold over the keyboard and mark up docs or PDF files while on the go. The speedy processor means it can run intensive games like Overwatch and also handle heavy multitasking.

This is one of the best options for people who already have Apple products and like the Apple ecosystem. All of your Apple devices will seamlessly sync. At 1.2 kilograms, the Air is extremely lightweight. It has a clear Retina display, and a new and improved keyboard. (For the last few years Apple has been roasted for its annoyingly unresponsive keys, but the 2020 version of the Air’s keyboard is much more comfortable and responsive.)

Compared to the Air, Macbook Pros are a step up in power and storage capacity. They’re able to handle a lot of open windows and run multiple programs at once, and if you upgrade to the faster 1.7-ghz i7 processor, you’ll be able to easily manage audio, video, and photo editing. These laptops have bright screens and Apples new upgraded keyboards. They weigh about 1.4 kgs and have built-in speakers that won’t disappoint.

Chin considers the Surface 3 to be one of the most reliable laptops in the Microsoft Surface line up: “It features an outstanding keyboard and touchpad as well as a sturdy and attractive chassis that’s fairly portable at just 1.3 kilograms,” she says. “And it packs great everyday performance, with enough horsepower to handle Lightroom and Photoshop, and even graphic-intensive tasks in Premiere Pro.” The biggest complaint you can throw at the Surface 3 is the lack of ports. It has one USB-C port and another USB-A port which can be a drawback for some people. But overall the Surface 3 is a well-built machine for people that want a reliable Windows computer that can handle multiple tasks.

The XPS 17 weighs 2.1 kilograms, almost double the weight of the average laptop, but with that weight comes extreme computing capability. It’s a desktop in a laptop’s body, basically. “That system flew through gaming benchmarks and complex video work — and didn’t burn itself up in the process,” Chin says. It has an outstanding battery, lasting about a day on a single charge.

Alienware just sounds like the name of a company that makes great gaming computers, and it happens to be true. The brand is synonymous with powerful PCs that are capable of running games that require exceptional specs. In her story on the best gaming laptops, Strategist contributor Tobey Grumet Segal says “the M15 R3 is well balanced between performance and price, and it has a sleek design that includes a glowing LED ring on the back of the laptop and a RGB-backlit keyboard.” The M15 R3 also has an excellent display with a fast 144 Hz refresh rate, giving you smooth performance in even the most graphics-heavy games.

The Razer Blade Pro is a higher-end gaming laptop with a large 17.3-inch screen, a 120 Hz refresh rate, a top-of-the-line graphics card, and an available 4K and touch display. “Weighing in just over 2.1 kilograms, it comes with an RGB keyboard which adapts colour effects to whichever game you’re playing,” Segal says. It’s heavy and a tad expensive, but you’re probably not toting it around with you that often.

It’s a little small, with a 14-inch screen, but according to Chin, the ASUS Zephyrus is a powerful gaming laptop for a low price that can go blow for blow with some of the more expensive gaming laptops on the market. “It’s also quite light for such a powerful laptop, weighing just over 1.6 kilograms. Its battery life is also impressive for a gaming rig; we got almost nine hours of multitasking,” she says. Chin also praised its retro design and its ability to work perfectly as a business or multitasking laptop, so you can quickly jump from fixing spreadsheets to playing games.

“This laptop ran every popular title we threw at it at very playable frame rates,” Chin says. Although the G5 isn’t the sleekest looking, it’s the perfect gaming laptop for people looking to spend around £1,000. It also works well as a day-to-day laptop, with little noise from the fans, so you won’t think there’s a helicopter landing in your living room when you open too many windows, the way you can with some computers.

This 2-in-1 device serves as both a laptop and a tablet, thanks to its detachable keyboard and kickstand. It has a 10-inch screen and a battery life of more than 11 hours, and it weighs less than a kilogram. The processor is not designed for heavy lifting, so this laptop is better for people who are usually working on emails or documents, or streaming shows. Think of it as a tablet that’ll stand in for your regular laptop in a pinch.

The 2-in-1X360 is heavier than the Duet, weighing around 1.4 kilograms, but its screen is 3” larger — and feels even larger than that, thanks to the small bezel. What impresses Chin is it’s “full-size keyboard and spacious trackpad.” It also has impressive security features, including “both facial and fingerprint biometric authentication, so you can choose which way you prefer to log in,” she says.