Want To Step Up Your Trigger? You Need To Read This First

Laptop PCs & Notebook Computers

For a good graphic design laptop, you'll want a modern processor from either Intel or AMD. When it comes to MacBooks, Apple has its own chip - the M1 - which performs brilliantly as well. We recommend an 11th gen Intel or AMD Ryzen 4000 mobile processor if you want to future-proof the laptop.

That has to do with the choices Intel made about its 12th Gen processor lineup. Intel has long been the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer and has operated without much meaningful competition for much of the past few decades. Only in recent years have AMD and Apple burst onto the scene with threatening, core-crammed competitors. For anything more demanding, you'll need to invest more money for discrete graphics like Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs.

These run the laptops through a series of workflows and application processes, many of which you’d find yourselves completing on a daily basis. For Mac laptops, PCMark 10 is not available, so Geekbench 5 was performed. If a laptop is gaming-capable, we run it through the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark to see how it’ll hold up against many of the best PC games. The M2 Air also adopts all of the modern niceties of the larger MacBook Pros, including the display. Apple’s Magic Keyboard feels as great as ever on the latest Air, and you get satisfying, full-size function keys for making quick adjustments — no dreaded Touch Bar here. Windows 10 notebooks $300 and up - Clamshells for cost-conscious users provide minimal specs for basic office work.

If you’ve read our standalone laptop, tablet or mobile phone reviews, these tests will be familiar. In our benchmark testing, we use a Klein K10 colorimeter to detect the brightness and sRGB color gamut of the laptop's display. For performance testing, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including Geekbench 4.3 and 5.0 and 3DMark professional graphics tests. Another draw of this amazing Samsung 2-in-1 is its built-in S pen as well as its touchpad, which has the ability to charge Qi-compatible devices. One downside of the laptop, though, is its shortened Shift key, which will take some time to get used to.

As mobile phones and laptops become ubiquitous in aircraft cabins, airlines have become vigilant for potential fires. You may have heard the announcement on flights asking passengers not to move their seats if they drop their phone, instead asking you to contact a crew member instead. This is to ensure the seat does not cause the battery to be pierced, which can quickly release smoke into the cabin.

Selecting the right amount of storage capacity for your laptop depends on storage space requirements and the speed of storage. As you can guess, the more storage you have, the more files you can store on your Laptop. However, unlike in the past when there were only HDD storage devices, there’s is a new kind of storage called the SSD. SSD is the newest and obviously, it has more advantages over HDD including faster rates of reading data.

And if you plan to use your laptop in a public, unsecured location, a security notch for fastening a physical locking cable is very useful. These fall into two types, the Kensington-cable style and the Noble-lock style. Make sure the notch type matches the kind of cable you intend to use to tether the machine to an immovable object.

Despite the availability of the new bigger and better M2 MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air is staying around and that's a good thing. As Apple's entry-level laptop it is still our go-to recommendation for a MacOS laptop for basic everyday use. It has great performance and long battery life -- up to 18 hours -- and is a solid choice for school or work. These standard plans are limited, so they won't cover accidents that stem from spilling a drink on the keyboard or dropping the system on the sidewalk.

There’s HDMI and Thunderbolt 4 support, in addition to a true SSD rather than a tiny amount of flash storage. If that type of Chromebook suits your needs better than a sub-$500 alternative, this is our favorite. If your needs are relatively simple and your targeted spend is much closer to $500 than $1,000, you can’t beat what this laptop has to offer.

That’s because of their premium warranty or support plans, enterprise-specific silicon focused on manageability or security, fingerprint or face-recognition login features, and more rugged build quality. Many modern laptops are slim on connectivity options, usually packing a handful of USB-C ports in addition to a microSD card reader and a headphone jack. Alternatively, you can pick up a USB-C hub to augment your Mac or Windows laptop’s connectivity options. While there are a number of factors to consider when choosing the right laptop, we advise that you start by figuring out how much display you need.