Written by Matt Elliott Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Reviews ethics statement How we test What to consider Price Statistically, youll hold onto your next laptop for at least three years. The current sweet spot for a reliable laptop to handle average work, home office or school tasks is between $700 and $800 and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming is upward of about $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges to get the best configuration you can for your money. Operating System Choosing an operating system is part personal preference and part budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple's MacOS do the same things but they do them differently. Unless there's an OS-specific application you need, go with the one you feel most comfortable using. MacBooks currently start at $999, so if you need a laptop for significantly less, its Windows. A Chromebook running on Googles ChromeOS is an excellent (and less expensive) alternative to Windows or MacOS if almost everything you do is in a web browser. They cant run Windows or Mac software. Size Remember to consider whether having a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with a good battery life will be important to you in the future. Size is primarily determined by the screen, which in turn factors into battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. Screen When it comes to deciding on a screen, there are a myriad number of considerations: size, resolution, what types of content you'll be looking at and whether or not you'll be using it for gaming or creative work. Higher resolutions are better for fitting more on a screen and look for a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb. If the color range is important, look for at least 100% sRGB, or better yet 100% DCI-P3. Processor Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops with Qualcomm emerging as a third option with its Arm-baed Snapdragon X chips. Apple makes its own Arm-based chips for MacBooks, which makes things slightly more straightforward. You'll still want to pay attention to the number of cores -- the more, the better -- to gauge potential performance as well as Intel x86 vs Arm. Graphics The graphics processor handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what gets displayed, as well as speeding up a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). Because the iGPU splits space, memory and power with the CPU, it's better for smaller, lighter laptops, but it doesn't perform nearly as well as a dGPU. For things like video editing, gaming, design and so on, you'll need a dGPU. Memory For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up fast. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and the storage drive, which is slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which in conjunction with a slower disk can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered onto the motherboard. Storage You'll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in many models. Not all SSDs are equally speedy, and cheaper laptops typically have slower drives. Get the size you can afford, and if you need to go with a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or use cloud storage to bolster a small internal drive. The one exception is gaming laptops: Get at least a 512GB SSD. Table of Contents Back to selection