The 5 laptop features worth spending extra on (and 3 that are mostly hype)

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET

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ZDNET's key takeaways

When shopping for a laptop, only pay for upgrades that enhance your experience.

Better displays, extra RAM, and dedicated GPUs are worth paying extra for.

Certain features, like touchscreens, may not be worth the money.

Buying a laptop is hard. There are hundreds of options available, and even after you narrow things down to a certain brand or model, you're faced with a dizzying number of configurations.

Take, for example, the HP OmniBook 3, a laptop I recently reviewed. My review unit came equipped with a Snapdragon X chipset. HP also sells versions with an Intel N10 processor and 4GB of RAM, the same processor with 8GB of RAM, another with an Intel N250 chip, and another with the Intel Core 3 N355. And that's just one laptop.

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