12 Best Laptops of 2025, Tested and Reviewed

Best Laptop Overall The MacBook Air ( 9/10, WIRED Recommends ) has been terrific for years now, offering an incredible combination of performance, battery life, build quality, and portability. They’re fanless machines, meaning they’re the quietest laptops you can buy, and last year, Apple even upped the starting memory to 16 GB . There were still a couple of hang-ups, like lackluster external display support, but with the new M4 chipset, that has been addressed.

The M4 MacBook Air now supports two 4K external monitors right out of the box—and you can even leave your laptop lid open. Secondly, the M4 chip includes noteworthy capabilities, including significantly improved graphics and CPU performance, as well as the on-device AI processing we’ve come to expect in modern laptops to work with Apple Intelligence . The new, high-resolution 12-megapixel webcam is the cherry on top.



Apple even dropped the price of the larger 15-inch model ( 9/10, WIRED Recommends ), which starts at $1,199. Regardless of which size you get, it’s a pretty killer deal. Just be careful with the storage upgrades, as they get pricey.

Those changes (plus a pretty new blue color) make the MacBook Air the laptop most people should buy. It's not just the best MacBook, it's the best laptop. Read our Best MacBooks guide for more Apple recommendations.

Not a fan of macOS? Don't worry, we have plenty of options below. Best Windows Laptop The reality is that there is no such thing as a “best” Windows laptop. Every user needs something a little bit different.

More power. Better portability. All-day battery life.

Low price. And so on. Asus’s 16-inch dazzler ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ) comes as close as anything on the market right now to meet all those needs and more.

It’s got an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU and Radeon 880M graphics, plus a hefty 24 GB of RAM. In combination, they give the system considerably more power than most other machines in both its price and weight class, even on AI tasks like real-time translation and AI image creation. Better still is the laptop’s battery life.

With over 14 hours of running time, you won’t readily find this kind of longevity elsewhere on the market. With the Zenbook S 16, Asus has also rolled out a material used for the laptop’s chassis. Ceraluminum is the company’s name for a hybrid of ceramic and aluminum, which makes for an incredibly thin but very durable material that feels like plastic but has the rigidity of metal.

It’s only on the top lid for now, but it helps keep the laptop to a svelte 3.4 pounds. As an all-around workhorse, I love the machine, but if the 16-inch model is too large for your bag, the Zenbook S is also available in a 14-inch size, which sports the same gorgeous design and performance, just in a more compact package.

My only complaint is that Asus doesn’t offer a cheaper starting configuration with less storage or memory. Fortunately, Best Buy has been heavily discounting the 16-inch model, making it a killer deal. Best Budget Laptop Poor battery life and performance are common in budget laptops .

Once prices get below $800, companies tend to rely on slow, lackluster chips. The entry-level Snapdragon X processor from Qualcomm changes that for the better. It’s not as fast as the Snapdragon X Plus or X Elite, but the resulting battery life is almost as good, as tested on the Asus Vivobook 14 ( 6/10, WIRED Recommended ).

That’s a huge upgrade for laptops at this price. Now, $700 might not seem cheap, but this configuration comes with 512 GB of storage and 16 GB of memory. The Vivobook 14 is otherwise a fairly basic laptop—a bit thicker and blander than I’d want it to be—but with enough ports and a snappy keyboard.

The major downside is the display. The resolution is fine, but it’s dim, and the colors are pretty awful. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a laptop screen this poor, especially in color accuracy.

There’s no way around that, especially compared to laptops that are just slightly more expensive. But a snappy laptop with lots of storage and memory might be enough to overlook the screen woes. Best Laptop for Video Editing The MacBook Pro is the ultimate video editing machine.

In the fourth generation of Apple’s homegrown silicon, the M4 continues to push the performance envelope, pouring out the juice for the upper tier of power users that will take as much as they can get. Regardless of whether you choose the 16-inch or 14-inch size, the latest MacBook Pro ( 7/10, WIRED Review ) will probably look familiar: The iconic chassis hasn’t changed a bit, and that’s not a bad thing. The mini-LED screen is color-accurate and HDR-ready, and now even comes with the option for a gorgeous nano-texture screen that effectively reduces glare to nil.

It’s a perfect fit for video editors. There are plenty of ports too, even support for Thunderbolt 5 . But for video editors or content creators, it’s really about the performance.

We clocked the system up to 7 percent faster on CPU-centric tasks than the M3 Max from 2023, though the M4 Pro lacks the abundance of GPU cores that powered the M3 Max to record-breaking graphics frame rates. To save cash, you can still pick up a renewed M3 Max model on Amazon for a huge discount. If you want bleeding-edge video editing performance, the M4 Max has become the top dog.

Too bad the price will set you back more than a bit. This has always been the case with the MacBook Pro, but the M4 Max starts at $3,499 (or $3,199 for the M4 Max 14-inch model )—tough to swallow. Still, for professional video editors and content creators, it’s the laptop that will get you the performance you need most.

Best Compact Laptop The Dell XPS 13 has been a controversial laptop design for years, thanks to its lack of function row keys and “invisible” haptic trackpad. Setting that aside, it’s always been the best compact laptop you can buy. It’s not quite as thin as the MacBook Air, but its overall footprint is tiny.

It weighs only 2.6 pounds and measures 11.6 inches wide—perfect for coffee shops and flights.

Dell's most recent XPS 13 comes in two flavors: regular (Intel) and bubblicious (Snapdragon). I strongly suggest the Snapdragon unless you're a gamer. The combination of performance and battery life makes the Snapdragon XPS 13 the best XPS 13 I've tested.

It's good enough that I didn't care about the lost function keys or the edgeless trackpad, though those are divisive design choices to bear in mind. I tested the HD screen version (1920 X 1200 pixels) with a 60 Hz refresh rate , but you can upgrade to a 3K OLED (2880 X 1800) touchscreen for a little more. The keyboard is surprisingly nice to type on once you get used to it.

There's almost no space between keys, but they are very responsive and easy to type on. As for battery life, I averaged about 17.5 hours for everyday tasks, though this dropped to more like 14 hours when pushing the machine and around six hours when rendering 8K video.

That excellent battery life combined with the top–notch portability makes it the go-to laptop to travel with. — Scott Gilbertson Best Chromebook Do you think of a laptop as metal framing around a web browser? Consider a Chromebook with ChromeOS. Google rolled out a big upgrade called Chromebook Plus in 2023.

The “Plus” stands for better performance—faster processors, more memory, more storage, and better video cameras. Our favorite of the models we've tried is Lenovo's Flex 5i Chromebook Plus ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ). It's among the fastest Chromebooks we've tested for the money.

It features a 3.75-GHz Intel Core i3-1315U CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of flash storage. The Flex 5i has two USB-C ports (one is used for charging) plus one USB-A port.

You also get a microSD card slot for expanding the storage capability, making this a good choice for those who don't want to keep everything in the cloud. The 14-inch touchscreen uses a 2-in-1 design, making it ideal for media streaming. As on most Chromebooks, the screen isn't the best, with mid-level brightness and a standard 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution.

Read our Best Chromebooks guide for more recommendations. Best Linux Laptop Not into Windows 11? Try Linux. System76's Lemur Pro ( 9/10, WIRED Recommends ) is a thin, light 14-inch Linux laptop that strikes the best balance between power and portability.

It's based around an Intel Core Ultra 5 processor with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 500-gigabyte SSD. You can configure the Lemur Pro with a Core Ultra 7 chip if you want more power, as well as up to a whopping 8 terabytes of storage and 56 GB of RAM. The port selection is good, with one USB 3.

2 Type-C port, 1 Thunderbolt 4 port , two USB-A ports, a 3.5-mm headphone/microphone combo jack, a microSD card reader, and HDMI 2.0.

The battery life is fantastic, lasting all day in most use cases, and the keyboard is pleasant enough to type on. It's not the best for gaming or video editing, but for everything else, this is a beast of a Linux machine. Read our Best Linux Laptops guide for more recommendations.

Best Repairable, Upgradeable Laptop Most laptops don’t let you upgrade or replace basic things like RAM or storage. So, if you want to buy a laptop you can keep for five, maybe 10 years, look no further than Framework's Laptop 13 or 15 ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ). The user-repairable and upgradable Framework Windows laptop comes in many flavors (it's Linux-friendly too), but we're fans of the DIY build options, which allow you to assemble the machine yourself, screwing in SSD, RAM, screen bezel, and even more.

The intuitive system is incredibly easy to use and even works as a great teaching tool for young DIYers. There’s even a hot-swappable, extensible port system that lets you add and remove ports according to your needs. I originally tested the 13th-gen model, but the newer Intel Core Ultra Series 1 or AMD AI 300 models should offer better performance and battery life.

And that’s where the true benefit comes through—these can be purchased through Framework’s marketplace to upgrade the internals without needing to scrap your entire laptop. It’s a more affordable and more sustainable way to keep your laptop up to date. We'll be testing the new 2025 model soon .

A Dual-Screen Dream Machine Asus has refined its Zenbook Duo again for 2025, further cementing its position as the best dual-screen laptop. Dual-screen laptops all work about the same way: Instead of a keyboard, you’ll find a second 14-inch display, giving you two full displays on which to work. You can use that display as a touchscreen, pop a magnetic physical keyboard on top of it and simulate a standard laptop, or break the components apart so the two screens sit side by side (or one above the other) with the keyboard fully separate.

The sky’s the limit, and Asus’ upgrade to the new Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU mostly improves performance across the board vs. the 2024 edition of the machine, particularly on graphics and AI tasks. The 32 GB of RAM, a 1-terabyte solid-state drive, and 2,880 X 1,800-pixel resolution screen remain standard, all of which will be plenty for most users.

The best upgrade, however, is what Asus has done for battery life, more than doubling the run time to nearly 14 hours when streaming video to a single screen. No longer tethered to a power outlet, the Duo now makes the case all the more effective that two screens are better than one . A Big-Screen Budget Gaming Rig With a screen that measures 17.

3 inches diagonally, Acer’s Nitro 17 ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ) offers the largest screen you can comfortably tote with you, even with an oversized bag or backpack. Not that we’d recommend it: At 6.3 pounds, this is a laptop that best moves from desk to desk rather than from country to country.

What you lose in portability, however, you gain in power. This AMD- and Nvidia-equipped monster can chew through anything you throw at it: video games, AI jobs, and, yes, even spreadsheets. Features like tunable color backlighting on the keyboard and endlessly tweakable system settings (including things like fan speed control) make this a hacker’s dream system, though you’ll need to stay close to a power outlet, as the full-tilt experience will drain the battery in less than three and a half hours.

The price is what seals the deal for us: You can often find it for under $1,000, and you won’t get a better price for performance from any other laptop on the market. Best 2-in-1 Laptop The Lenovo Yoga 9i ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ) immediately earned its street cred upon launch in 2020, making a name for itself as one of the most versatile laptops on the market. These 2-in-1s— or convertibles—are distinguished by their ability to fold completely open and then keep on folding until the screen is flat against the underside of the laptop.

This lets them do double-duty as a tablet or be folded into various shapes for use as a presentation device. Lenovo’s 2024 edition of the Yoga 9i edges out our previous favorite, the HP Envy x360, though nothing much has visibly changed with the device of late. Rather, it’s a boost under the hood courtesy of Intel’s Core Ultra CPU and a better 5-MP webcam that provides an all-around better user experience than ever.

A trio of USB-C ports and one USB-A port provide ample connectivity if you want to spread your wings. The only real issue? Battery life is surprisingly low, so don’t stray too far from a power outlet. Read our Best 2-in-1 Laptops guide for more recommendations.

Best Laptop for Students I don’t normally recommend tech that is four and a half years old. In almost all cases, you should be able to find something newer that’ll last longer. But the M1 MacBook Air ( 9/10, WIRED Recommends ) was a special laptop, and unlike many other MacBooks, it’s been kept around at a discounted price.

Walmart has been selling the M1 MacBook for $649, a few hundred bucks cheaper than its original MSRP. While the M1 isn’t as impressive as it used to be, it still gets great battery life and has sufficient performance for an average student, so long as you’re not studying to be an engineer. Despite its age, the M1 MacBook Air has a few things you won’t find in other laptops at this price.

The battery life, build quality, trackpad, and display quality are all a big step up over most $649 laptops, especially when you consider its portability. There are downsides, such as the limited external display support, port selection, and internal storage. But for a student who wants a MacBook or a solid starter laptop for school, the M1 MacBook Air is still the best option.

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