The 13 Best Laptops of 2025 Reviews by Wirecutter

It comes with a choice of Nvidia RTX 5000 series GPUs, allowing it to punch well above its weight when it comes to gaming performance. Haley Perry covers all things gaming, and she recommends the best video games to play, the peripherals to play them with, and the laptops to play them on. Reliable performance, a spacious touch display, and long battery life make this model the best Chromebook.

More expensive and more powerful gaming laptops exist, but we’ve found they typically run too hot to the touch or don’t perform well enough to justify their increased prices. You can’t get a perfect laptop for less than $500; at this price you make serious trade-offs in click here performance, display quality, and sturdiness. In this price range, Chromebooks tend to be faster, have better build quality, longer battery life, and superior screens, keyboards, and trackpads.

The Yoga 7i has fast performance, terrific battery life, a vivid OLED touchscreen, and a 360-degree hinge. Smartphones may have captured much of our screen time, but sometimes a task calls for a real computer — and for most people, that means a laptop. For school and office work like creating spreadsheets and editing video, there’s no good substitute for a decent keyboard and a spacious screen. But which laptop you should get depends on what you’ll use it for and (of course) how much you can spend. These tests provide us with a clear understanding of the battery longevity for each laptop. On the performance side, we use a combination of real-world tasks and synthetic benchmarks to determine the laptops’ capabilities.

It keeps the laptop feeling nice and light as well, despite having a relatively large 16-inch display. If you’re after a laptop that will really turn heads when you whip it out, then this is the machine for you. The Dell XPS 13 offers excellent day-to-day performance thanks to its new Intel Ultra Series 2 chips, which can handle day-to-day tasks with ease. You also don’t get some of the compatibility issues that the Snapdragon model suffers from, which while rare does mean that the Intel model is far more versatile. As with other Arm-powered laptops, the Surface Laptop 13-inch is incredibly power efficient, and that means that the battery life is excellent.

Avoid AMD processors such as the dual-core A9, as well as Intel Pentium or Celeron processors like the N4200 and N5000 — they’re unusable with more than a single open app. But to get a cheap laptop that doesn’t run like molasses, you have to make significant compromises. Most budget laptops are bulky and heavy with short battery life, and they tend to have low-resolution, low-quality screens. You have to be especially vigilant when shopping for a laptop in this price range to avoid slow or old processors, insufficient memory, and sluggish storage. Shopping for a laptop on a tight budget can be tricky because there are hundreds of variations with fluctuating prices and low stock — and most of them are terrible.

But Apple’s SSD upgrade prices are so high that, if you need more storage, you may want to consider cloud storage or an external SSD instead. As ChromeOS, which Chromebooks use as an operating system, isn’t as demanding a bit of software as Windows 11 and macOS, it means Chromebooks don’t need as high specifications – and that’s why they are often quite a bit cheaper than laptops and MacBooks. When I say ‘future-proof’ what I mean is that if you buy a laptop, you won’t need to upgrade or buy a new one for a long time. A laptop with old hardware might be cheaper, but if you feel the need to buy a new laptop after only a year or so, it’ll cost you more in the long run. For Chromebooks and modern MacBooks, a time of around 10 to 20 hours between charges should be expected.

Matt is TechRadar’s Managing Editor for Core Tech, looking after computing and mobile technology. Having written for a number of publications such as PC Plus, PC Format, T3 and Linux Format, there’s no aspect of technology that Matt isn’t passionate about, especially computing and PC gaming. He’s personally reviewed and used most of the laptops in our best laptops guide – and since joining TechRadar in 2014, he’s reviewed over 250 laptops and computing accessories personally. During his almost 40-year-long career in tech journalism, Lance has reviewed hundreds of laptops for TechRadar, as well as Lifewire, PCMag.com and more. If you’re looking for advice on whether or not a laptop is worth buying, there are few people in the industry with as much knowledge and authority as Lance. Our assessment includes examining a laptop’s design, with special attention paid to the aesthetics, portability, and overall comfort for everyday use.

Chromebooks also don’t come with bloatware (unnecessary, manufacturer-loaded software that clutters the computer and slows it down) which is a scourge on cheap Windows laptops. On Windows laptops, we recommend the latest Intel Core Ultra 7 or series chips or the AMD Ryzen 9 AI 370. Many manufacturers are still using last year’s RTX 40 series graphics, but newer models will have the RTX 50 series, which are more power-efficient and have more AI-enabled features.

Of course, there are some compromises here, especially when it comes to the chunky design, and gaming performance can’t match more powerful (and expensive) gaming laptops. However, if you’re on the hunt for a budget gaming laptop that doesn’t make too many compromises, then the Acer Nitro V 15 is the best laptop for you. If you’re looking for a premium thin and light laptop with cutting-edge features and best-in-class design, then the Asus Zenbook S 16 could be the perfect laptop for you. It’s our new pick for the best Ultrabook of 2025, thanks to an incredible design with parts of the body made from ceraluminum – a composite of aluminum and ceramic, making it easily one of the best-looking laptops we’ve ever tested here at TechRadar.