Our goal was perfectly simple, to create a back-to-school laptop buyer’s guide. But recommending a laptop these days is anything but simple. Let me explain. This Dell Inspiron was the best laptop, as was this Acer Nitro, and this HP Spectre was too. That’s because the best $1,000 laptop is always going to be a $1,400 laptop on sale for $1,000. So instead of telling you what to buy, I’m gonna do you one better, and I’m gonna teach you how to buy a laptop so that you can shop with confidence and get a great deal on the right machine for you. We’re also going to include some honorable mentions to give you guys a good starting point, whether you’re looking for a thin and light or a mobile workstation. The most important thing to do is be honest with yourself and look for a laptop that excels at what you actually do, not at what you think you might like to do someday, maybe if you have time. So for most people, top-of-the-line components aren’t necessary, and a mid-range machine will not only save you some money, but it could be lighter, quieter, and last longer on battery. With that said, if you are looking for performance, I would start your search with gaming laptops. Even if you don’t game, they typically have the best cooling, fastest processors, and better upgradability than laptops that are marketed towards professionals or creators, on top of being priced more aggressively at almost every performance tier. As for the gamers out there, if your primary use is school or work, something with an RTX 4050 or RTX 3060 is gonna handle 1080p or even 1440p gaming in most titles, at least if you reduce the settings a little bit. Here are a couple of budget-friendly options, with any of these being worth picking up if you can find a good sale on them. Not everyone wants to turn down settings though, so intense gamers should buy something faster, right? Well, yeah, but it’s not that simple. In front of me are two laptops, one with an RTX 4070 and one with an RTX 4060. Guess which one of them is faster? Go ahead, I’ll wait. Yeah, it’s the 4060! See, these days, you don’t just worry about which GPU is in your laptop, you also have to worry about the wattage of your GPU. In this G14 here, that 4060 gets fed up to 90 watts of power, while the 4070 in this more professional-oriented Acer gets just 50 watts. To add insult to this confusing injury, laptop GPUs share almost nothing in common with their desktop counterparts with the same names, and the only way to break through this deceptive branding is to painstakingly test every single one of them. Thankfully, Jared’s Tech has done all the work for you. He tested a truly incredible number of games and GPUs, and has made this incredible resource for the community. And there’s more good news. If your idea of gaming is planting turnips in Stardew Valley, there’s a solid chance that you can completely forget about a dedicated GPU at all. Many recent CPUs can even handle AAA games. Speaking of, how do you choose the right CPU for your laptop? Well, if you simply want the best, it’s Apple. Yeah, you’re stuck with the notch in macOS, and whether the ecosystem is a feature or a bug is subjective, but their battery life is fantastic, and their M3 chips have single-core performance that is currently unmatched by Windows machines. Getting a MacBook does have a couple of problems. You can’t play many games, and they’re expensive, but if you’re a student or you don’t mind factory refurbished, there are deals to be found out there. On the Windows side, we’re going to start with AMD, whose mobile naming scheme is so bad that we made an entire video about how they are intentionally misleading consumers. Their most recent chips are the Ryzen AI 300 series, and these offer a small uplift in performance over the last generation, but with a huge improvement in efficiency, with our Ryzen AI laptop getting an additional three hours of battery life. You can watch our full review at the link down below, but the too-long-didn’t-watch is that if you can afford a laptop with a Ryzen AI 300 chip, you’re going to have a pretty good time. Moving back a generation, though, things get really confusing. Look at the Ryzen 5 7640U. The most important number in there is not the 7, but it’s actually the 4, which signifies that this CPU uses AMD’s Zen 4 architecture. So, you could be easily tricked into thinking that the Ryzen 3 7320U would be similar, but with a little bit less performance. But remember, I just said, the 7 means nothing. It’s going to be way slower because the important number is the 2. It’s using the Zen 2 architecture from 2019. Yikes! So, if you’re looking for a deal on a slightly older Ryzen 7000 or 8000 series chip, they can be good bets, but just make sure there’s a 4 in this spot, or that price better be really good. As for Intel, their new Ultra 100 series CPUs actually offer a tiny bit less performance than the 13th gen chips that they replaced, but with a big improvement in battery life, making realistically either a decent choice, depending on your priorities. In the coming months, Intel is going to be launching their Lunar Lake lineup, which they promise is going to be really, really good. But, okay, what am I going to do? Drive my Roadster 2 to the future mart and buy one? The hard truth is Intel’s a little behind on mobile right now, but not by so much that you should buy an AMD machine with a keyboard you hate versus an Intel one that’s more comfortable. And as long as the price is right, you can safely go back, I’d say to about 12th gen without missing out massively on performance or efficiency. Speaking of, we are not done yet because the laptop CPU market was just massively disrupted by Qualcomm and their Snapdragon X chips, which offer unmatched battery life with performance that is comparable to AMD’s Ryzen AI line. The only catch is that these are ARM processors, and if your application doesn’t run natively on Windows on ARM, you could be looking at a 30 to 50% reduction in performance if it works at all. We did a live stream where we tested a bunch of games on Snapdragon X and found that only about half of them worked. And it’s more than just games. Adobe Premiere works, but only the 2023 version at the moment, and other parts of the creative suite like After Effects are currently MIA altogether. So there are two groups of people then that these laptops could be great for. Users who know for sure that they’re going to be doing things in a web browser or just using common apps, always, or the geeks who love to be the first to test obscure programs on new hardware and then work with the dev team to resolve them. If you’re in either of those categories, hey, enjoy that laptop that you only need to plug in every few days. We really like the Surface Laptop 7, Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge, and HP Omnibook X, though we have a full video looking at over half a dozen different options, which you can check out down below. Of course, if you looked at all of those and thought, gee, there’s nothing really in my budget. That’s understandable, and there’s lots of options for you, especially if you’re willing to consider something unconventional. Chromebooks might not be very sexy, but will serve you very well if everything that you do can be done through an internet browser or through Linux apps. And they tend to be better spec’d for their price, thanks to manufacturers saving on the cost of a Windows license. On the Windows side of things, though, there are budget-friendly options as well, and Acer was kind enough to send us over a few machines ranging from $230 to $400 to see just how much performance you can get on their most basic models. The build quality of the $230 Aspire Go is surprisingly okay, but the Intel N100 processor that powers it is… Like, it’s not just slow. It’s struggling to do basic tasks. Meanwhile, the $300 Aspire Go with a Ryzen CPU is literally twice as fast for not that much more money, while the $400 Aspire 3 is not a huge upgrade in raw performance, but gets 16 gigs of RAM, meaning it can complete our full test suite and actually seems very worthwhile. It uses AMD’s older Zen 2 architecture, so neither performance nor battery life are going to be on par with the most modern machines, but it’s good enough to the point where the mediocre screen is more of a concern to me than the outright performance. If you have a little more to spend, this HP Pavilion Aero is currently on sale for $600, and the amount better it is is hard to overstate. Of course, all of this assumes that you need to buy new. If you don’t mind giving up things like warranties, you could save a significant amount of money. Universities and offices regularly sell surplus equipment that is pretty decent, just a couple of generations older. Here’s a listing from the University of Utah that has laptops for half of what they’re worth on the used market. Also, if you end up with a machine that seems slow, you could potentially give it a shot in the arm with upgrades to RAM, storage, and Wi-Fi. Just verify beforehand that these items are, in fact, replaceable by Googling laptop name Teardown. If you’re lucky, we’ll have covered it on short circuit, or iFixit will have a guide. Speaking of upgrading RAM, how do you know if you need to? Well, in 2024, 4GB of RAM is a complete no-go, and despite what Apple might try and tell you, 8GB really isn’t enough either, unless you’re my grandma. Hi, grandma. It is gonna slow you down. Our new starting recommendation then is 16GB, and that’s only really enough until you start getting into more professional video editing or scientific programs, at which point you’ll need significantly more. As for the exact amount, the most important thing is that however much you need, you’ll need to get it right now, because many newer machines do not support upgrading your RAM later. If the ability to upgrade is important for you then, look for a laptop that supports SODIMM or CAM modules. Thankfully, storage is simpler. Just get a 256GB SSD. If you plan on doing video editing, or you wanna install a bunch of games, then feel free to increase that number. But if your budget is tight, storage is probably the first place that I would try to cut costs, especially since it’s the most likely part of your laptop to be easily upgradable. And even if you don’t feel like cracking open your device, oh yeah, external SSDs are readily available, like the Armor 700 from Lexar. Just plug it into your laptop and boom, more storage. Don’t cut your storage budget too much though. A hard drive might be tempting, since it can give you a lot of capacity for cheap, but these days, it is not worth the performance hit at all. EMMC, even though it’s solid state, is actually a similar story too. It is dog slow compared to a proper SSD, and it’s considerably less reliable. So avoid it if at all possible. there’s a lot to consider. There are four main panel types, TN, OLED, Mini-LED, and IPS. TN is the technology of yesterday and should be avoided, while OLED and Mini-LED are the best if you can afford them. OLED excels in dark rooms, with its perfect blacks and unmatched contrast, but it might not get quite bright enough for well-lit rooms or outdoors. Mini-LED is the opposite, with exceptional brightness, making it punchy even in bright rooms, while sacrificing contrast in dark rooms, meaning your typical use case will determine which is best. IPS is your all-rounder, offering generally good viewing angles, color, and brightness, and with the extra benefit of being sometimes significantly more efficient. For instance, the IPS version of the Dell XPS 13 Plus got almost five hours more battery life than the P OLED version. Nice. Probably most importantly though, IPS is gonna be the most affordable, making it the right choice for most people. It doesn’t suck. Now, we mentioned brighter panels being better for outdoors, but how do you tell what’s bright enough? 200 to 300 nits will be fine for most indoor use, with 400 to 500 nits being required for outdoors, or 600 plus for a satisfying HDR experience. Be careful with some laptops that might be claiming huge numbers like 1,500 nits, because sometimes that number will only apply for a tiny bright spot on the display with a much lower brightness when the entire screen is bright. An often overlooked aspect of a display is the aspect ratio. For TVs, the standard is 16 by 9, but for laptops, the slightly taller 16 by 10, or even, if you’re crazy, 3 by 2, have become popular in recent years, and for good reason. This little bit of extra vertical real estate can be a big productivity boost for office or creative work alike, and it also tends to be a better fit in a laptop chassis, giving designers more room for cooling and large, comfortable trackpads. As for what resolution you need, we can use simple math to find the distance at which a panel becomes a retina display, which is Apple’s marketing term for the pixel density being high enough that you can’t see the individual pixels. Here’s the full breakdown per resolution, but the gist is that full HD is good enough. Quad HD will be noticeably sharper if you have good eyes, and 4K isn’t really worthwhile, especially considering those extra pixels can negatively impact battery life, and I care about battery life. No matter the resolution, increasing the refresh rate above 60 Hertz will be a worthwhile improvement. High refresh rate displays will have the biggest impact if you plan on gaming, though there are diminishing returns above 144 Hertz, and even non-gamers will benefit. Everything you do will feel smoother, be that photo editing, CAD, or even just making a new folder. I do that all the time. But like so many other nice things, it can negatively impact your battery life. One thing that may or may not matter to you is a touchscreen. I’m personally a fan of them. Maybe you aren’t, but the choice is up to you, unless you’re getting Apple only. The final factor to watch out for in your display is color. A wider color space or gamut means the panel can physically produce more colors, while a smaller color space can leave content looking dull and unsaturated. Color spaces can get a bit confusing since there are a bunch of different standards, but unless you know you need something else, aim for near 100% coverage of sRGB. That’s the standard the web uses. For those of you who do need more, graphic designers, colorists and like, you know who you are, you’ll need to be concerned not only with gamut, but also the accuracy of your display. A poorly calibrated display might show everything with a slight magenta or a blue hue. And this is usually caused by slight variations from panel to panel during manufacturing. So if you plan on doing color critical work, look into getting a laptop with a factory calibrated display. Something like an average Delta E 2000 of two or below is generally considered to be accurate enough, as that’s what the human eye can typically discern. Some laptops with excellent displays are the Dell XPS 13 Plus, MacBook Pro, Samsung Galaxy Book, HP Spectre, and Asus G14 and G16. I guess that would be G’s 14 and 16, whatever. Now for a rare simple choice, the trackpad. Ever since Microsoft introduced Windows Precision Drivers, almost all laptops come with a trackpad that will be accurate and not slow you down. Although the very best trackpads are large, glass-topped, and use force touch instead of a physical click. Standouts here include MacBooks and Windows devices with sensible trackpads like the Surface Laptop 7, HP Spectre, Dell XPS, and Lenovo ThinkPad Z series. What will almost certainly be more difficult is the keyboard. These can be very personal though, so the best way to confirm that you like one is just go to your local big box store and try out a bunch. The first thing to look for is that your hands physically fit. Some 13-inch devices won’t have a large enough palm rest for everyone, or maybe there are some sharp edges on a device that will bother only some folks who end up resting right on them. After that, check the chassis flex of the machine. Soft spots can throw off your typing. Then check how stable the keys themselves are. Press the edge of a key. It’s a fail if you can get the corner to go too low before the key actuates. And finally, just press a whole bunch of keys to see if there are any obvious differences in force required to press each one. The ones that we like the most are the HP Dragonfly Elite, Dell Latitude 9440, and Alienware gaming laptops, especially if you choose the optional Cherry switches. The last big things we haven’t mentioned are weight and battery. Weight is pretty self-explanatory. Lighter is nicer to carry around. Duh. But battery is more complex. The standard measurement for battery capacity is watt hours, but even with identical specs, you can end up with wildly varying battery life numbers since the efficiency of every single part in the chain and how the manufacturer has tuned each individual part plays a role. Adding insult to injury, laptop manufacturers’ battery life numbers are almost always comically overstated and often contradictory on the same webpage. All this is to say, get your battery life numbers from a reputable source such as ShortCircuit and try to use only battery life numbers from a single source for direct comparisons since everyone tests them slightly differently. Finally, there are a couple of nice-to-haves that you might want in a laptop. Plan on doing a bunch of meetings with your webcam? While Qualcomm’s recent CPUs currently support much better webcams than the rest of the CPU makers, even if not every single laptop that has a Qualcomm CPU has the best implementation. If you’re all about privacy, then look for a laptop with a hardware webcam and microphone toggle or even one of the rare machines without a webcam at all. For logging in quickly, look for a fingerprint reader or Windows Hello facial recognition. The latter in particular was a game changer for me. And of course, don’t buy anything until you know you can live with the IO. If a laptop has full-size HDMI, make sure it’s 2.1, not 1.4 and many manufacturers these days leave off USB-A ports, SD card readers and even headphone jacks in the name of a little bit of weight savings. I’m looking at you Dell. So if you liked this video, maybe check out our review of the Ryzen AI 300. Also make sure to hit like, get subscribed and maybe go to our forum and ask us directly, what laptop should I get? We will be in there and just have a great all day. See you later.