The Best Laptops to Work and Play Wherever You Are

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition

Photo: Christopher Null

Other good laptops need to be considered

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Copilot+ PC) for $1,300: The first Intel-based secondary copper + PC (7/10, wired comment) We tested winners in all aspects, with excellent AI and graphics performance and some of the best battery life we’ve seen on Intel hardware. With its slightly weird 15.3-inch screen, it hits the high point without breaking the library, despite the large fan and the system may be bigger than you want.

ASUS Zenbook A14 priced at $1,100: This is one of the lightest laptops we’ve ever experienced, thanks to Asus’ dirt materials. Zenbook A14 (8/10, recommended online) is also the company’s first A-series laptop, which uses Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chipset, the weakest and said to be the most affordable in the Snapdragon X series. While this laptop performs well in terms of build quality, portability and good battery life, the chipset is tedious and only for average web browsing tasks, and the price is still too high to get your money.

Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED, $900: Unlike the Zenbook 14 OLED, this 14-inch machine offers an OLED panel for a reasonable price of under $1,000. vivobook s 14 (8/10, recommended online) Powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 Series 1 chipset, which has 16 GB of RAM and a 1-TB SSD. It can handle most daily tasks without any problem, although the screen may become brighter. The battery life is OK, with an average usage time of up to 12 hours. Unfortunately, the machine is a fingerprint magnet, so you will keep wiping it. It has many ports.

Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16 priced at $1,500: Dell’s two XPS laptops 2024 (7/10, wired recommendation) Targeting Windows users who are jealous of MacBook. The design, specifications and sizes are perfectly consistent with Apple’s products. The XPS 14 and 16 have gorgeous, stylish designs, very bright and sharp OLED screens (with 120 Hz screen refresh rate) and very quickly in daily tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to more intensive tasks, such as video editing, the MacBook’s benchmark runs circle around the XPS 14. The larger XPS 16, which uses the more powerful RTX 4070 graphics card, performs much better, but costs more than similarly powerful MacBooks. The XPS 14 and 16 are both exquisite, well-designed machines. While heavy gamers and video editors will want to look for most use cases elsewhere, they have enough capabilities. They are expensive for what you get, but if you don’t mind paying a premium price for top-notch build quality with a clean, eye-catching design, the XPS 14 and 16 are the sturdy laptops.

Acer Chromebook Plus 515 costs $399: Here is a 15-inch Chromebook Plus model (8/10, recommended online) has the same internal components as Lenovo, we recommend above. The battery life is a stable 8.5 hours of full-screen video playback time. ACER offers an HDMI 1.4 output jack instead of Lenovo’s MicroSD card slot, which can be a better choice if you often need to make a demonstration or otherwise use an HDMI port. There are smaller ones Chromebook Plus 514 ($380) That’s great, too.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, priced at $3,000: There are many places for love here (7/10, wired comment), but that price. Ouch. You can at least use the New Intel Core Ultra 9 185h processor (current top-level processors in Intel’s Core Ultra CPU lineup) and the NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4070 graphics card. The 16-inch AMOLED 2,880 x 1,800-pixel touch screen works and performs at work, which shocks everything else we’ve tested in the water. But that price.

Acer Swift for $1,000: This is very similar to our highest budget laptop, Asus Zenbook 14 OLED. We found that Asus is faster and has better build quality, but the Swift Go still offers great performance, especially considering the price (bearing the price (7/10, wired comment). It also has an impressive 15-hour battery life. The downside is the speakers, which are not very good, and overall, the body feels a little plastic. But this is the cheapest Intel Core Ultra laptop we’ve tested for a few dollars, so if the budget is tight, a quick GO will be worth considering.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x copilot + PC, priced at $1,200: Lenovo’s Svelte Slim 7x (7/10, wired comment) is not exciting, but it offers the best price to performance ratio for many copilot + PCs we’ve tested. Battery life and performance are outstanding, although the fans do tend to run loudly.

Microsoft Surface Laptop (7th Edition, 2024) at $1,600: Want a window laptop straight from the horse’s mouth? Purchase the seventh edition of the surface laptop (7/10, wired comment). Performance is as solid as battery life, and you’ll get a smooth 120 Hz display. This is too expensive for what you get. Read ours Guide to the Best Surface Laptops More.