Whether you’re in the market for something affordable or a feature-packed laptop, your laptop has to do it all. With so many laptops on the market, it isn’t easy to choose because of all the fantastic features and options they come with. So, in this guide, we have made it easy for you to give you our best recommendations.
In this review, we have provided information for the best overall laptops, as well as our best MacBook recommendation, the best Chromebook option, as well as budget laptops can that can the job done.
Overview
- Dell XPS: 4.5 out of 5
- MacBook Pro 13-inch: 3.5 out of 5
- HP Chromebook x2: 4 out of 5
- Surface Pro: 4 out of 5
- Razer Blade: 4.5 out of 5
The Best Laptop: Dell XPS 13
Our Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Why Buy It: It’s reasonably priced, sleek, fast, and portable.
Who This Laptop Is For: Everyone, except gamers
What Is The Cost: Starting at $900 (USD)
Why Pick The Dell XPS 13:
The Dell XPS 13 (2018) caught our eye right off the bad with a blend of metallic exterior and white women-fiberglass interior. It feels very modern, sleek, and premium. The super-thin InfinityEdge bezel on the laptop is one of the highlights, making the device feel much more functional and smaller.
Dell offers the laptop in i3, i5 and i7 configurations. Starting at $900 for the 8th-gen i3 model, you can grab it for an affordable price. If you’re interested in going for the higher configurations, Dell offers the i5 and i7, both of which come with selections of solid state drives and up to 16GB of RAM.
The Best MacBook: MacBook Pro 13-inch (Without Touch Bar)
Our Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Why Buy It: You’re looking for the MacOS experience and don’t want to go for Windows.
Who This Laptop Is For: Anyone that’s willing to pay the premium price tag and wants to be in the Apple ecosystem.
What Is The Cost: Starting at $1,300 (USD)
Why Pick The MacBook Pro 13-inch (Without Touch Bar):
The MacBook Pro is a sleek and beautiful laptop created by Apple. Although it offers several features unlike other laptops on the market, such as the Touch Bar, they have issues of their own. This is why we recommend getting the non-Touch Bar version of the MacBook for not only a great experience but getting the best value for your money.
One of the most controversial moves recently made by Apple is the fact that they did a MacBook Pro refresh (2018) by bringing Intel‘s latest quad-core and six-core 8th-generation CPUs. The issue here is that only MacBook Pros with Touch Bar were upgraded and the versions without Touch Bar are still left with previous generation processors. This means that if you were to buy a MacBook Pro without Touch Bar, it will come with the 7th-generation Intel Core processors for entry-level models, and do not come with the quad-core version that provides great boost in performance.
We highly recommend staying with the non-Touch Bar version of the MacBook Pro, for now, until Apple decides to bring them up to speed with their Touch Bar-enabled counterparts. Hopefully Apple’s rumored affordable and redesigned MacBook Air will get a better recommendation.
The Best Chromebook: HP Chromebook X2
Our Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Why Buy It: You want to buy something that’s inexpensive, but provides a good built system.
Who This Laptop Is For: This appeals to students, people who need basic level of functionality, or anyone that wants a second laptop for relatively cheap.
What Is The Cost: $600 (USD)
Why Pick The HP ChromeBook X2:
The Chromebook x2 offers a new innovative and high-end premium Chromebook experience. It brings the laptop feel to your hands as well as a tablet-like experience, thanks to the detachable form factor, like the Microsoft Surface Book 2.
It’s well-built “Ceramic White” holding all of the components comes with the magnetic tabs that allow for a laptop-like experience so that it sits in your lap comfortably.
The device comes with a 12.3-inch IPS display at 2,400 x 1,600 (235 PPI), 3:2 aspect ratio, the 7th-generation Intel Core m3-7Y30 CPU, 4GB RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage. Don’t worry, this hardware is plenty fast for Chrome OS, and the Chromebook x2 takes good advantage of the hardware. To top it all off, the 48 watt-hour battery will keep you going for a full workday with some to spare.
Just remember that Chrome OS is designed around Google’s Chrome web browser, so it’s very clean and simple. It will run extensions and web apps, and allows you to expand functionality via Google Play Store.
The Best 2-in-1 Laptop: Surface Pro
Our Rating: 4 out of 5
Why Buy It: It offers a great tablet and laptop experience.
Who This Laptop Is For: Anyone that’s interested in having versatility and performance together.
What Is The Cost: Starting at $900 (USD)
Why Pick The Surface Pro:
Laptop-as-tablets experience is something that’s still relatively new in the market. If you’ve been skeptical of such experience, you may want to give the Surface Pro a try. The tablet is quite stylist, lightweight, and a powerful tablet that will do double duty and perform like a laptop. To be honest, you can think of it as a laptop with a detachable keyboard. It’s incredibly powerful that will do the things you can do on a laptop, such as run Photoshop or Illustrator, or even run a software program to edit videos. It can handle it.
No matter the configuration you choose to go with, when you buy the Surface Pro, it comes with the 8th-generation Katy Lake processor, so you’re well taken care of. In our benchmarks, the laptop performed quite a well by handling productivity tasks, snappy, and versatile. It’s a ultra-portable laptop with tablet-like experience.
The Best Gaming Laptop: Razer Blade
Our Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Why Buy It: It offers a great gaming experience on the go.
Who This Laptop Is For: Anyone that’s interested in having a great laptop with gaming capabilities.
What Is The Cost: Starting at $1,800+ (USD)
Why Pick The Razer Blade:
Our experience with the Razer Blade laptop has been unlike any other laptop. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like a gaming laptop at all. It’s quite light like the MacBook Pro, thin bezels, a world-class keyboard and touchpad, and comes equipped with a 15-inch display that’s absolutely gorgeous to look at.
While boasting a sleek design, it in fact is a gaming laptop that offers a gaming experience with respectable framerates. It comes equipped with a GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics card and an incredibly powerful processor that’s no slouch. In terms of its thermal system, Razer redesigned it to ensure that even though some throttling could occur, the Blade can play nearly any game at max settings. This includes titles like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that’s resource heavy.
The Razer Blade laptop is one of the best, elegant, and beautiful laptops we’ve seen as of late. Laptops like the Alienware 17 R5 or Predator Helios 500 may perform better than the Razer Blade, but for what you’re paying for, Razer Blade is definitely well worth every penny.
