is a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
Editor’s note: Amazon Prime Day kicks off on July 8th; however, if you want to get a head start on your online shopping, we’ve rounded up the best early Prime Day deals you can already get.
Buying the right laptop can be stressful. It’s likely one of the bigger tech purchases you’ll make, and there are a ludicrous number of models, sizes, form factors, and configurations to pick from. We review and test a wide swath of them here at The Verge, and we’re constantly considering what’s the best and who it’s best for.
Our overall pick for most people has been, and continues to be, the MacBook Air — particularly, as of March 2025, the M4 model. Unless you’re forced to use Windows for specific software needs or you fancy yourself a hardcore gamer, it remains the best option for the average user who wants something portable with excellent battery life and great performance for productivity tasks.
Though the MacBook Air is the easy recommendation for most people, that doesn’t make it the answer for everyone. What if you need more power for video or photo editing, or crunching large datasets? What if you prefer to run Windows? What if you play lots of games and want to take them with you? Or what if you just want something unique — or even, gasp, repairable? We’ve got some recommendations, including a Chromebook or two, a laptop with two screens, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and the Microsoft Surface Laptop with a Snapdragon X Elite chip.
What we’re looking for How we test laptops Collapse Just like everything The Verge reviews, our laptop testing is primarily based on real-world use. We do run synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench, Cinebench, and 3DMark to get quantifiable comparisons between CPUs and GPUs. But, ultimately, the number-crunching is only part of it. The rest comes from actually using a laptop in our day-to-day routine, which can involve everything from Chrome tabs and Google Docs to photo and video editing and graphically-intense games — both on battery and plugged in. Value Collapse All manufacturers offer configurations that cost a small fortune, but the best laptops are usually worthwhile even at their base level. Sometimes, we’ll recommend going beyond the base configuration for a little RAM, more storage, or a graphics card upgrade, but at a certain point the value proposition typically nosedives. Our goal is to find those sweet spots.If you’re buying new and spending $1,000 or more, you should be getting a machine with performance that meets your needs, and components like a trackpad, keyboard, screen, and speakers that are good to great. Remember, you’re likely to be using this device for many hours every day. And if any of a laptop’s core features are lacking, then something else — like a great price or excellence in another area — should make up for it. Performance Collapse How much performance you really need may be subjective, but the more headroom you have, the more a laptop can adapt to your evolving needs and the longer it can last before things feel sluggish. At the baseline, your laptop should be fast enough to do the things you use a laptop for, without feeling like it’s struggling on a daily basis. Any productivity laptop should be able to multitask with a bunch of browser tabs open while editing some spreadsheets or other documents. A content creation machine should be able to quickly churn through Photoshop files with lots of layers or a Premiere Pro timeline with plenty of post-processing. And a gaming laptop should be able to play the latest games with nice looking visuals and good frame rates (at least 60 fps, but ideally more on less graphically intensive games). Keyboard and trackpad Collapse The keyboard and trackpad are the main interfaces you use with any laptop, and they should be good, even in a desktop replacement you mostly use with an external mouse and keyboard. The whole point of a laptop is you can bring your work and play with you, so you’re relying on these built-in components at some point. A laptop with a bad keyboard and trackpad might as well be a penalty box.What makes a good keyboard and trackpad? It’s slightly subjective, but a quality keyboard should have a logical and efficient layout, enough key travel to make typing feel good and lower the risk of double-presses, and ideally be backlit for easier use in the dark. Any worthwhile laptop should have a good trackpad that easily delivers accurate clicks and swipes, with gestures for better multitasking. Trackpads often come in two styles: hinged at the top (like a piano key) or haptic (where it doesn’t actually move, and the haptic vibration you feel emulates a physical click). Either can be great when well executed. Screen Collapse In a perfect world, every laptop would have a large and bright OLED screen capable of displaying true blacks, with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 or higher and refresh rate of 120Hz (or greater). But a panel like that comes with heavy costs, both in money and often in battery life. Not every laptop can have that ideal setup, but any good one should be sharp with accurate colors, enough brightness for some outdoor use (typically that means 400 nits or greater), and free of annoying anomalies like ghosting or bad off-angle viewing. Aside from OLED, Mini LEDs also make a great laptop panel that can be a big step up from the more typical IPS display, and an even bigger step up from the dim TN panels on truly cheap laptops.Unless a touchscreen is essential to a laptop’s design (like one that converts into a tablet), they’re usually a nice bonus, rather than a requirement. Ideally they’d work with a stylus for more flexibility. MacOS laptops never have touchscreens, but they’re fairly common on Windows machines, Chromebooks, and some Linux laptops. Design Collapse Laptops are meant to be thrown in bags and taken out into the world, and they should be able to withstand some wear-and-tear. We expect a solid build that doesn’t feel creaky, cheap, or have lots of flex when picked up and handled. It should have a sturdy hinge that opens easily. A less refined design can be slightly forgiven if it’s made up for by a lower price or better-than-expected performance, but these should be devices that look and feel like they’re worth the money spent.We also take into account what a laptop is designed for, and if it meets those goals: an 18-inch desktop replacement is going to be heavy and less mobile; a 13-inch thin-and-light should be, well, thin and light. Battery life Collapse We expect most laptops we test to last at least eight hours of web browsing and office work. The harder a laptop works, the more power it uses, so we don’t expect to play games all day without plugging in, or render video for eight hours straight. But if a laptop can’t last a standard work day there’d better be a good reason. We use a battery rundown test that cycles through a large number of Chrome tabs with the screen set to 200 nits that gives us a 1:1 comparison to take into account. More importantly, we record how long the battery lasts over multiple days of regular real-world use — complete with the occasional video call and some music / podcast listening. Even if your machine is tethered to an outlet most of the time, great battery life and standby times makes life with a laptop much more flexible. Port selection Collapse We expect all laptops to have at least two USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 ports, preferably on separate sides for a little added convenience. They should be able to charge over USB-C, even if they also have a proprietary charge port capable of higher wattage. And while USB-A ports are a bit more nice-to-have than necessity, there’s absolutely no good reason not to have a 3.5mm headphone jack.More powerful, more expensive laptops (picture something over $1,000 and 14 inches or larger) should probably have an HDMI 2.1 port and card reader, or a good reason for not having them.
The best laptop
CPU: M4 (10-core) / GPU: M4 (8- or 10-core) / RAM: 16GB, 24GB, 32GB / Storage: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB / Display: 13.6-inch or 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display, 2560 x 1664 or 2880 x 1864 , 60Hz, no touch option / Dimensions: 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inches (13-inch) or 13.40 x 9.35 x 0.45 inches (15-inch) / Weight: 2.7 pounds (13-inch) or 3.3 pounds (15-inch)
Apple’s M4 MacBook Air is the best laptop for most people — Mac users, of course, but also the platform-agnostic or anyone who wants a no-fuss, straightforward machine that doesn’t bombard them with advertisements or bloatware. It’s a productivity laptop that can do a bit of everything. The 13-inch model starts with 16GB of RAM at $999, and it also comes in a 15-inch version for $1,199, for those who like their laptops a little larger. It’s hard to find another laptop that offers this kind of combination of performance and battery life in a thin and light chassis, especially at these prices.
Despite losing its way around the mid-2010s, Apple has a long history of sending quality MacBooks to market, and the Air M4 is no different. A smooth, almost ethereal trackpad, check. A chiclet-style keyboard that makes typing feel like a dance, check. Fast Wi-Fi adapter, color-rich display, and MagSafe charging, check. Those were also true on the previous models, but now with the M4 generation it also features the same 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam of the MacBook Pros, can use two external monitors with its lid open, and comes in a sky blue color (though it still looks silver in some light). And again, you get all this for less money than before.
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