Choosing the best laptop is a largely subjective decision that comes down to your primary use cases, your preferred operating system, and your budget. In other words, there’s no such thing as a universally best laptop.
This is an annoying fact of life for both laptop shoppers and those of us doling out “best laptop” recommendations, since we can’t make custom judgment calls for everyone in need of a new machine. (I would love to, but I’ve got a thing after this.) However, I can confidently point you in the right direction of some standouts that I and other members of the Mashable team have vetted and approved.
Our top picks
As of February 2025, Mashable’s top laptop overall is the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, a sophisticated Copilot+ PC with incredible performance, an unrivaled battery life of nearly 23 hours, and some fun AI features, if you’re into that sort of thing. Note that Microsoft recently announced an Intel version of it that may appeal to users wary of Windows on ARM for app compatibility reasons, but it’s a business-oriented model with a significant markup.
For card-carrying members of Team Apple, we think the best MacBook for most people is the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air, a sleek, peppy notebook with a scrumptious keyboard and closed-lid support for two external displays. We also recommend the 16-inch, M4 Pro-powered MacBook Pro as the best laptop for photo and video editing — it’s stupid fast, beautifully made, long-lasting, and configurable with a stunning nano-texture display.
The best laptops we’ve tried further include several hybrid devices. Our 2-in-1 frontrunner is the Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 (Gen 9), a solid performer with a gorgeous 2.8K OLED display, a rotating soundbar, and a superb webcam. Creative professionals may be better served by the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2, a sturdy convertible with a unique pull-forward design that can turn it into an easel, while heavy multitaskers should look into the 2024 Asus Zenbook Duo. It features two OLED displays, performs well for its price point, and includes accessories like a stylus and a detachable keyboard.
For those on a budget, the Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 (Gen 9) is our newly crowned “best cheap laptop” under $1,000: It’s a 2-in-1 Copilot+ PC with ample power for everyday tasks, a good amount of ports, and a starting price of $899.99. It replaces our previous pick, the $799.99 Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3, which has a premium, ultra-portable design and an excellent keyboard but dated internals and a lousy 720p webcam. (It’s still a passable option for brand loyalists with tight purse strings, but don’t buy it unless it’s on sale.)
The best cheap laptops for 2025: 6 models under $1,000 that we tested and approved
If you’re trying to spend less than $500, look into the HP Chromebook Plus 15.6-inch: With a large, colorful display, cool everyday performance, and some useful AI features, it’s the best Chromebook we’ve tried.
Finally, we think the Alienware m16 R2 leads the pack among the best gaming laptops we’ve used. It’s a super snappy mid-ranger that’s capable of being toned down for everyday use when you’re done playing Cyberpunk 2077.
After spending countless hours reviewing laptops across popular brands, we’ve decided to recommend these models because they’re well-made, powerful enough for their respective use cases, and priced fairly. At the very least, we think they can be useful archetypes within different categories of computers. Don’t start from square one if you don’t have to, you know?
What’s on deck
We’re currently trying the Dell XPS 13, a Lunar Lake PC with a tandem OLED display. (It’ll be the last of its kind: Dell is phasing out the XPS name.) We’ll also soon review the latest Framework Laptop 13, a popular modular and repairable laptop with a Mashable Choice Award-winning predecessor. I’ll update this story once our testing is complete.
Further down the pipeline is the Asus ZenBook A14, an all-new MacBook Air competitor with a durable “Ceraluminum” chassis and a ridiculous rated battery life of up to 32 hours per charge. I briefly checked it out at CES 2025, and it took home our Best of CES laptop category award. Suffice it to say, I can’t wait to put it through the paces of our full testing process.
What we’ve tested lately (that didn’t make the cut)
I recently tried the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14, a 2-in-1 Lunar Lake laptop priced at $1,899.99 as tested (with an Intel Core Ultra 258V processor, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage). It’s an absolutely stunning machine with a colorful 3K OLED touchscreen display, a satisfying keyboard, a velvety touchpad, and a dark aluminum chassis that gives it a moody and elegant look. It also lasted an impressive 15 hours in our battery life test. That said, it has some baffling port placements, mediocre bottom-firing speakers, an oversaturated webcam, and disappointing performance benchmark results.
In a Geekbench 6 multi-core test, my OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 scored slightly lower than the M2-powered MacBook Air from 2023, our current favorite budget MacBook, and significantly lower than its own predecessor. That would be last year’s HP Spectre x360 14, which had a mid-range Core Ultra Series 1 processor as tested. I expected way more from a machine with Intel’s freshest upper mid-range CPU.
Ultimately, I rated the OmniBook Flip 14 a 4.2/5 — respectable, but not quite a Mashable Choice Award winner. It’s a flashy premium hybrid for splurgers who want a future-proofed laptop they won’t work very hard, but the zippier Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 feels like a better value for most people at $1,449.99 as tested.
If you’re choosing between the two HP models, I’m also inclined to recommend the Spectre x360 14 over the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14. It offers more power and better top-firing speakers for a comparable price.
Read on for Mashable’s in-depth guide to the best laptops of 2025. FYI: We’ve listed the pricing and specs of our testing units, which may not apply to each laptop’s base model.
How we tested
Mashable staff subjected all of the laptops on this list to rigorous hands-on testing, which involved inspecting their build quality and using them as part of an everyday workflow for several weeks at a time. This included working in different kinds of documents, checking emails, watching videos, taking photos on their webcams, participating in video calls, listening to music (via Spotify), playing games (if possible), and experimenting with any unique features or use cases they claimed to support.
Additionally, all of the laptops featured here were made to run industry-standard benchmark software. We run these benchmarks because they replicate real-world tasks to produce scores we can use to easily compare different laptops’ performance. We recently started implementing these benchmarks in our testing, and you can expect to see them in all of our new laptop reviews going forward.
Performance benchmarks
We evaluate a laptop’s overall performance by running the appropriate version of Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6. (That would be macOS for MacBooks; Windows for Windows laptops, including gaming laptops; and Android for Chromebooks.) This test measures CPU performance in a handful of common tasks, and we record the resulting multi-core score. The higher the score, the better.
To get a sense of gaming laptops’ graphical prowess, we also play Cyberpunk 2077 on them. We picked this game because it’s a graphically intense Triple-A title that pushes many systems to their performance limits. If the laptop has a discrete/dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card (as opposed to an integrated GPU that’s built into the CPU), we play Cyberpunk once with its DLSS tech off and again with DLSS on using the High preset without ray tracing. This tests the machine’s raw GPU power and its performance with AI upscaling, respectively.
We follow this up with 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark for gaming PCs and record their scores. Again, higher is better.
Battery life benchmarks
We look to see about 11 to 12 hours of battery life in the MacBooks we test, with 15-plus hours being exceptional, and nine to ten hours in the Windows laptops we review, with 12-plus hours being ideal. Gaming laptops are a different story: They only need to last at least two hours per charge to get our approval, earning extra brownie points for reaching the four-hour mark. Meanwhile, eight hours is our baseline for Chromebooks, but nine to ten hours is best.
We’ve assessed laptops’ stamina a couple different ways in the past. (More on that shortly.) On the Alienware M16 R2, Asus Zenbook Duo, and Surface Laptop Studio 2, we ran UL Solutions’ PCMark 10 battery life test. This benchmark has the laptop complete a series of apps and functions until it conks out.
To test the battery life of the HP Chromebook Plus 15.6-inch, we used the respective portion of Principled Technologies’ CrXPRT 2 benchmark.
Lastly, we conducted a video rundown test on the Apple MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Surface Laptop 7, Lenovo Yoga 9i 14, and Yoga 7i 14 that involved playing a looped 1080p version of Tears of Steel, a short open-source Blender movie, at 50 percent brightness.
In order to standardize our battery life testing methodology, we will only be using the Tears of Steel rundown on all MacBooks and Windows laptops from here on out. We’ll stick with PCMark 10’s battery life test for all gaming laptops and CrXPRT 2’s test for Chromebooks.
Final thoughts
After evaluating a laptop’s hands-on performance and benchmark testing results, we make our final recommendations based on whether we think they offer a good overall value for the money. A too-expensive laptop will sometimes get a pass if we think it looks and works so great that it’s worth the trouble of finding it on sale.
It bears mentioning that these aren’t the only laptops we’ve tried — we’re constantly testing and assessing new models across different categories, and many don’t make the final cut. With that in mind, you can expect this guide to evolve on a pretty continuous basis. We’re always on the lookout for new top pick contenders.
