With any luck, one of the 13 laptops on test will be your perfect work machine. But even if that isn’t the case, use these principles to find your ideal partner
1 A CORE CHOICE
Raw performance isn’t what it used to be. If you buy a laptop with a 12th or 13th generation Core processor inside then it’s likely to be fast enough to last you for years. (You can tell that it’s one of the more recent Intel chips through its name; for example, a Core i7-1165U is an 11th generation chip, a Core i7-1265U is a 12th gen chip.)
Although we didn’t see a single AMD-powered laptop computer in this test, don’t be put off from an AMD laptop that hits all your other key buying points. AMD’s recent Ryzen mobile chips are fast and power-efficient, and you’ll find them in many machines – often for better prices than their Intel equivalents.
If you need more power, choose a Ryzen 7, Core i7 or Core i9 with as many performance cores (P-cores in Intel’s case) as possible. Our feature table provides a detailed breakdown of how the processors in each our tested laptops compare.
One final note. Two computers with the same chip won’t necessarily perform identically. CPUs need to be kept cool to achieve their top performance, so a laptop with a spacious case and powerful internal fans will tend to run faster than one that’s designed to be as thin and light as possible.
2 RAM AND STORAGE
While more RAM is always welcome, most people will find that 8GB is plenty to keep Windows 11 running smoothly. More demanding users will benefit from 16GB of RAM, but there are few people who push their laptops so hard that 32GB of RAM is necessary.
We mention in the feature table if a laptop has the RAM soldered onto the motherboard. If it does, a chip failure after a few years will be enough to consign the laptop to landfill (we cover this more in the sustainability section). That’s why we prefer to have upgradable RAM. Some laptops also include a spare RAM socket, which is handy for upgrades, but see our comment about graphics, below.
For a business laptop, you may well find that 256GB of storage is enough. After all, you’re likely accessing data from the cloud these days, with a limited number of files synced to your local machine. Still, having 512GB of storage gives you that much more room for media.
While all modern laptops include SSDs, they operate at very different speeds
