Best business laptop for 2026

LAPTOP DEALS OF THE WEEK

Offers are selected by the CNET Group sales team and may be unrelated to this article.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Windows users get a true alternative to the MacBook Pro with HP’s premium consumer laptop.

HP OmniBook 3 16: Powered by a Snapdragon It’s also quite portable for its size and stylish for its price.

Lenovo Yoga 7A 2-in-1 16: This 16-inch two-in-one combines Ryzen AI performance with a gorgeous OLED touchscreen, but integrated Radeon graphics and some cut corners keep it firmly in “prosumer” territory.

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x: For its portability and everyday productivity, this is a winner. Windows-on-Arm’s potential issues and modest graphical improvements prevent it from being a true all-rounder, however.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11: The second-generation Snapdragon X2 chip in this slim laptop delivers truly impressive performance, but you’ll have to keep looking if you’re looking for solid graphics performance.

Dell XPS 16: It costs as much as the Nvidia RTX models but lacks RTX graphics. Nevertheless, the XPS 16 performs well overall with a thin and light design.

Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: This is an elegant and solid OLED laptop but it imposes some compromises.

Asus Zenbook A16: This is a true AI laptop among artificial imitators and also incredibly thin and light for its size.

Alienware 18 Area-51: This is a dazzling, sturdy (emphasis on “heavy”) showcase of laptop technology for deep-pocketed gamers.

MacBook Air M5 (13-inch, 2026) review: Go big or go Neo.

MacBook Neo review: It’s a real hit when it comes to a budget laptop, but life is too short to live without Touch ID.

Dell XPS 14: It’s great to see Dell bring back the XPS and do it with such style.

GeekBook X14 Pro: Geekom’s first laptop is incredibly thin and light, but battery life is disappointing. And I hate the touchpad.

Lenovo IdeaPad 5i 16 2-in-1 Gen 10: Lenovo’s low-cost 16-inch two-in-one is a versatile machine, but it forces you to live with more than a few design compromises.

Microsoft Surface Pro (12-inch): The 12-inch version of Microsoft’s detachable two-in-one will be enough for most users, but getting tarnished by optional accessories that seem entirely necessary is annoying.

HP OmniBook 5 14: Record-breaking battery life is only part of its charm. It also features a nice design, an OLED display, and ample RAM and storage, all at an affordable price.

The laptop review process includes two parts: performance testing under controlled conditions in CNET labs and in-depth hands-on use by our reviewers. This includes evaluating a device’s aesthetics, ergonomics, and functionality relative to its price. A final verdict in review is a combination of objective and subjective judgments.

We test all laptops with a core set of tests, including Primate Labs Geekbench 6, Cinebench, PCMark 10, a variety of 3DMark tests (depending on which ones can run on the laptop), UL Procyon Photo and Video (if supported), and our own battery life test. If a laptop is intended for gaming, we will also run benchmarks including Guardians of the Galaxy, The Rift Breaker (CPU and GPU), and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

For practice, the examiner uses it for their work during the examination period, evaluating how well the design, features (such as screen, camera and speakers) and software provided by the manufacturer work as a cohesive whole. We also value how well they work given their cost and areas where the manufacturer has potentially made improvements or compromises relative to their price.

The list of benchmarking software and comparison criteria we use changes over time as the devices we test evolve. You can find a more detailed description of our testing methodology on our How We Test Computers page.

There are a ton of laptops on the market at any given time, and almost all of these models come in multiple configurations to meet your performance and budget needs. If you feel overwhelmed with options when looking for a new laptop, that’s understandable. To make things easier for you, here are the main things to consider when you start looking.

Price

Most people’s search for a new laptop starts with price, and the price of laptops is rising. If the stats thrown at us by chipmaker Intel and PC makers are accurate, you’ll be holding on to your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to increase your budget a bit to get better specs, do so. This is worth whether you spend $500 or over $1,000. In the past, you could spend less upfront and consider upgrading memory and storage in the future. Laptop manufacturers are moving further and further away from making easily upgradeable components, so it’s best to get a laptop that’s as good as possible from the start.

Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer screen, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design from premium materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things add to the cost of a laptop. I’d love to say that $500 will buy you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Right now, the ideal price for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks is between $700 and $800, and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming tops out at around $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models across all price ranges to get more laptop features for less.

Operating system

Choosing an operating system depends partly on personal preference and partly on your budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS do the same things (except for gaming, where Windows is the winner), but they do them differently. Unless you need an OS-specific app, go with the one you feel most comfortable with. If you’re not sure what these are, go to an Apple Store or local electronics store and test them out. Or ask your friends or family to let you test theirs a little. If you own an iPhone or iPad and love it, chances are you love MacOS too.

When it comes to price and variety (and, again, PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you get a MacBook. While Apple’s MacBooks regularly top our best lists, the cheapest is the M1 MacBook Air for $999. It’s regularly marked down to $750 or $800, but if you want a cheaper MacBook, you’ll need to consider refurbished older models.

Windows laptops can be found for just a few hundred dollars and come in all sorts of sizes and models. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop that we’d give a full recommendation to, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email, and word processor, they exist.

If you’re on a tight budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience than Windows; make sure the apps you need have a Chrome, Android, or Linux app before taking the plunge. If you spend most of your time browsing the web, writing, streaming video, or using cloud gaming services, these are a good fit.

Size

Don’t forget to ask yourself whether it will be important for you to have a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with good battery life in the future. Size is primarily determined by the screen – hello, laws of physics – which, in turn, takes into account battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. Keep in mind other physics-related features, such as an ultra-thin laptop isn’t necessarily lighter than a thick one, you can’t expect a wide range of connections on a small or ultra-thin model, etc.

Screen

When it comes to choosing a display, there are many considerations to make: how much you need to display (which is surprisingly more about resolution than screen size), what types of content you’ll be watching, and whether you’ll use it for gaming or creative work.

You want to optimize pixel density; This is the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. Although other factors contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density generally means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any display on DPI Calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can also learn what calculations you need to do here.) We recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch (ppi) as a general rule.

Because of the way Windows and MacOS adapt to the display, it’s often better to use a higher resolution than you think. You can always make things bigger on a high resolution screen, but you can never make things smaller (to fit more content into view) on a low resolution screen. That’s why a 14-inch 4K display might seem like overkill, but that might not be the case if you need to, say, view a large spreadsheet.

If you need a relatively color-accurate laptop that displays as many colors as possible or that supports HDR, you can’t just rely on the specs. Manufacturers typically fail to provide the context necessary to understand the meaning of the specifications they cite. You can find a ton of detail on considerations for different types of display usage in our monitor buying guides for general purpose monitors, creators, gamers, and HDR viewing.

Processor

The processor, or CPU, is the brain of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the leading processor makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm a new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer an impressive selection of mobile processors. To make things trickier, both manufacturers offer chips designed for different styles of laptops, like power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know which type is used. You can go to the Intel or AMD sites for explanations to achieve the desired performance. Generally speaking, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.

Apple makes its own chips for MacBooks, which makes things a little simpler. Like Intel and AMD, you’ll still need to pay attention to naming conventions to know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses its M series chipsets in Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with an eight-core CPU and seven-core GPU. Current models feature M2 series silicon that starts with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU and goes up to the M2 Max with a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. Again, generally speaking, the more cores, the better the performance.

Battery life has less to do with core count and more to do with processor architecture, Arm vs. x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus PCs we tested offer better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Chart

The graphics processing unit (GPU) handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what is displayed, as well as accelerating many graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the name suggests, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.

Since the iGPU shares space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is limited by the CPU’s limitations. It allows smaller, lighter laptops to be used, but does not perform as well as a dGPU. Some games and authoring software will not run unless they detect sufficient dGPU or VRAM. However, most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing, and other non-specialist applications will run fine on an iGPU.

For more power-intensive graphics needs, like video editing, gaming and streaming, design, etc., you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies making them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on Xe branded iGPU technology (or the older UHD Graphics brand) in its processors.

Memory

For memory, we strongly recommend 16 GB of RAM (8 GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all data from running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Many laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which, coupled with a slower drive, can make the Windows laptop experience extremely slow and frustrating. Additionally, many laptops now have the memory soldered onto the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and cannot be upgraded.

Some PC manufacturers solder the memory and also leave an internal slot empty to add a RAM module. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the laptop’s full specifications online to confirm. Check the web for user experiences, as the location may still be difficult to access, may require non-standard or hard-to-obtain memory, or other pitfalls.

Storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives (SSDs) have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheaper laptops generally have slower drives. If the laptop only has 4 or 8 GB of RAM, it may end up switching to this drive and the system may slow down quickly while you work.

Get what you can afford, and if you need to opt for a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two later or use cloud storage to beef up a small internal drive. The only exception is for gaming laptops: we don’t recommend using an SSD under 512GB unless you really like uninstalling games every time you want to play a new game.