The 11 best Windows laptops to buy amid RAMageddon

Haley Henschel

The 2026 Asus Zenbook A14 is the best general-purpose Windows laptop for most people needing an attractive, lightweight, fast, long-lasting, and affordable everyday driver. It's also my first choice for folks looking for the best MacBook Air alternative.

I loved the original Zenbook A14 from 2025, and this year's model is even better. I challenge anyone to find a speedier, longer-lasting, and better-made Windows laptop for well under $1,500.

A new Snapdragon X2 Elite CPU adds some extra pep to its step. It can now keep up with modern MacBooks in both basic single-core and demanding multi-core scenarios, something only two other Windows laptops can claim. (That would be the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 and Asus Zenbook A16, below, which also run on Snapdragon X2 chips.) It's actually slightly faster than the M5 MacBook Air in multi-core tasks like light video editing, which is nuts. It beats 91 percent of all the laptops in our testing database on this metric, including much pricier models meant for gamers and creatives.

The new Zenbook A14 also comes with a massive 80-TOPs neural processing unit (NPU) that can chew through local AI tasks. That's double Microsoft's TOPs requirement for Copilot+ PCs.

The Zenbook A14's stamina got even better this year, too. It lasted 27 hours and 36 minutes in our battery life benchmark, a video rundown test, which makes it our fourth-longest-lasting laptop of all time. For reference, last year's model couldn't compete with same-gen MacBooks and died just before the 22-hour mark.

The Zenbook A14's chassis is still made from a unique material called "Ceraluminum," which is durable, scratch-resistant, textured matte (almost like pottery), and remarkably lightweight. The base configuration I tested weighs just 2.4 pounds, but doesn't feel fragile. It comes in a modern-organic "Zabrinskie Beige" finish that's embellished with metallic, jewelry-like accents — a nice change of pace from your standard silver PC. Other highlights include a creamy keyboard, a silky touchpad, and a bright, vivid OLED display.

The 2026 Dell XPS 13 is the best Windows laptop for those with strict budgets but luxury tastes. It's also a great choice for people with more basic workloads — think casual tasks like web browsing and watching movies. I count K-12 students as part of that crew. (High school students ages 16 and up can save $100 on it through Nov. 2.)

Mashable's full review of the Dell XPS 13 is coming soon.

Dell has been cranking out some beautiful laptops this year (see: the 14S and XPS 14, below), and its new new XPS 13 is no exception. With a spiffy all-aluminum chassis, backlit keyboard, glass touchpad, and sharp, bright, smooth touchscreen, you'd never know it only costs $700 just by touching or looking at it. This is the MacBook Neo of Windows laptops, offering the most premium PC experience at the budget price point.

The XPS 13's display, in particular, is the kind of component that's shocking to see on a laptop this cheap, and one that makes it perfect for entertainment. (I've been having a ball binging old Don Bluth movies on it lately.) It's nicer than the screens on most other budget laptops and even some that cost far, far more. For comparison's sake, the $1,350 Asus Zenbook A14's non-touch OLED display is more colorful but less smooth and sharp.

A real compact cutie, the XPS 13 measures less than a foot across and weighs 2.2 pounds (only slightly more than the featherlight Acer Swift Edge 14 AI). A younger student won't have any trouble hauling it to class in their backpack.

The XPS 13's Intel Core 5 320 chip is fine for an entry-level processor. In simple single-core workloads, it runs a tad faster than the entry-level Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip powering the HP OmniBook 3 16, our battery life champ. In more intensive multi-core scenarios, its performance is comparable to that of a very, very nice Chromebook chip. Don't push it with intensive software or heavy multitasking — the base model only has 8GB of RAM — but it can certainly handle simple activities like checking emails and typing up documents.

I'll update this guide soon with the final results of the XPS 13's battery life test. Dell has it rated for up to 17 hours of streaming per charge.

Our reigning battery life champ, the HP OmniBook 3 16 is a mid-range, big-screened Windows laptop that will appeal to on-the-go workers who hate being tethered to outlets. It's best-suited for those who don't need a ton of processing power.

Read Mashable's full review of the HP OmniBook 3 16.

I love seeing people's reactions when I tell them that this 16-inch laptop ran for over 40 hours before dying. Forty hours! That number is so high it seems fake. Only two other Windows laptops we've tried have surpassed the 30-hour mark. (That would be the new Dell 14S, below, and last year's OmniBook 5 14.) Moreover, the latest MacBooks are capped at about 21 hours per charge. We've known for a while that Snapdragon X-powered laptops offer great battery life, but this one's is stupidly good.

Design-wise, OmniBook 3 16 is a basic silver laptop. Its IPS display isn't super sharp, but it's huge and punchy. I actually thought it was an OLED display at first. Its comfy island-style keyboard is an almost-perfect mix of snappy and cushy, almost like it's trying to do an impression of one of Lenovo's premium thocky keyboards. I love that its backlighting doesn't cost extra, like it did on the OmniBook 5 14. It also doesn't suffer from the same rattling trackpad issue. It has a pretty average weight, but it's relatively thin for its size.

My testing unit cost $1,629.99 on HP's website — a steep price for a partially plastic laptop with an entry-level CPU. However, it came with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, which is overkill for most everyday users. You can safely bump that down to 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD, or even 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD, depending on your needs. (It starts at $999.99.) Try to buy it on sale, when it becomes a better value than usual.

College students who need or prefer Windows will appreciate this laptop's decadent screen and featherlight build. It'll hardly take up any space in your backpack.

Read Mashable's full review of the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI.

The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is a beautiful, remarkably portable notebook that's easy to tote across campus. It comes in at just 0.37 inches thick (at its thinnest point) and 2.18 pounds, making it the sleekest laptop we've ever tried. It's 0.06 inches thinner and 0.22 pounds lighter than the Asus ExpertBook Ultra. Compared to the 13-inch MacBook Air, which has a smaller footprint, it's 0.07 inches thinner and over half a pound lighter. Acer somehow worked in an HDMI port, two USB-A ports, and two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, too.

The Swift Edge 14 AI comes in a pearly white finish with gold accents that gives it a unique, modern-minimalist look — and as an added bonus, it's very good at resisting fingerprints. Mashable contributor and reviewer Sarah Chaney noted that its chassis felt very sturdy, which surprised her given its svelteness. She also appreciated the "velvet-like" feel of its keys; Acer said its keyboard has a first-of-its-kind "soft-touch" UV-cured coating.

The Swift Edge 14 AI isn't nearly as fast or long-lasting as the Asus Zenbook A14, but it gets you twice the RAM, more storage, and a luxe 120Hz 2.8K OLED touchscreen for only $150 more. (At $1,500, this is a very fairly priced laptop.) It also runs on an x86-based Intel chip, so you don't have to worry about possible ARM compatibility issues with software needed for your coursework. Its battery life is still pretty great for an Intel laptop, offering almost 21 hours of use per cycle. You probably won't need to charge it during an all-nighter.

The new Asus ExpertBook Ultra is a great bet for business users who need an ultraportable PC that does basically anything. Preferably, you'll pay for it with the company card.

The ExpertBook Ultra is a mind-boggling laptop — an impossibly light, impossibly thin machine with the best display I've ever seen, over two shifts' worth of battery life, and just as much brawn as an entry-level gaming laptop. It has virtually no flaws, aside from a muddy webcam... and a sky-high price, though it feels mostly warranted all things considered.

Its design is striking. It has a magnesium-aluminum chassis with a matte "Nano Ceramic" coating that's scratch- and finger-print resistant. It only weighs 2.4 pounds and measures 0.43 inches thick at its thinnest point, yet it's solidly made and packed with ports. (There are even double-sided Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports for convenient charging.) It has a velvety haptic touchpad and an island-style keyboard with a UV coating that prevents its keys from looking greasy. A pulsing LED lighting effect appears on the bottom of the display when it starts up, which gives it a futuristic vibe.

Speaking of that display: I just adore it. It's a rich OLED touchscreen with a crisp 2.8K resolution, a peak brightness of 1,400 nits for HDR content, a 30 to 120Hz variable refresh rate, and a matte finish that prevents distracting glares and reflections. It's my new five-star standard.

Given its sleekness, it's amazing that Asus was able to cram so much power into the ExpertBook Ultra. It runs on the new Intel Core Ultra X7 385H chip, which is a decently strong single-core performer but a standout in multi-core scenarios. If you're working through a huge Excel file on a Teams call, for example, it'll feel just as fast as a MacBook Pro. A wind tunnel-like thermal design with big fans that spin slowly keeps it surprisingly cool and quiet all the while.

The Core Ultra X7 comes with the Intel Arc B390, a very capable integrated graphics card. iGPUs aren't normally much to shout about, but this one is on par with a lower-end discrete GPU. If you crank on AI upscaling tech like Intel XeSS Super Res 2.0, the ExpertBook Ultra can run AAA games at 1080p well above 100fps. (I used it to play CyberPunk 2077 in my testing.) On a laptop this lean, that's actually kind of wild.

The new Dell 14S is a solid backup to our top pick, and it's one of the best laptops for college students. This budget laptop is a great pick for general users who care way more about battery life and build quality than performance and portability.

The 14S is the best Dell laptop for most people, IMO. My review unit with the Intel Core Ultra 7 355 chip outperformed the base configuration of the premium XPS 14 (below), lasted much longer, and felt just as nice for a fraction of the price. While the Asus Zenbook A14 is way faster, lighter, and a better value overall, I still think the 14S is worth shortlisting if you're looking for a slick, long-lasting mid-tier option geared toward everyday productivity. It's most competitive when it's on sale for close to $1,200.

The 14S performs similarly to the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI, which has an upper mid-tier Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU that's a generation older. It's not especially zippy — the Zenbook A14 is 36 percent faster in single-core tasks and 70 percent better in multi-core ones — but it's certainly fine for regular computer work that doesn't involve hungry creative apps. Its battery life is much more impressive at 34 hours and 29 minutes per charge. It's the second-longest-lasting laptop we've ever tested.

The 14S feels just as sturdy as the XPS 14, and it has more ports. I actually prefer its island-style keyboard to the XPS model's lattice one. Its speakers and mic were both above-average compared to those on other Windows laptops I've tried. My review unit was kitted with a 1200p OLED touchscreen, which was a little dim and glary but otherwise very lovely. You can save $50 by trading the touchscreen for an anti-glare finish, which is probably a smart move.

The new HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is the Windows laptop I would choose if I wanted something just as fast as our top pick, but a little more eye-catching and sophisticated. In this hypothetical scenario, I could also afford to spend a bit more and didn't care as much about battery life.

This OmniBook is a looker. HP gave it a makeover for 2026, slimming down and sleekening its design with shiny squared edges that flare subtly in the back to make room for its ports. (I am so happy to report that its weird corner port cutouts are gone.) It measures 0.42 inches thin, but looks even skinnier because of how its base tapers outward. I tested a Qualcomm configuration that came in a chic stone blue hue; the Intel ones are available in Eclipse Gray and Silk Sand, aka dark gray and light beige. All of them have an anti-smudge finish. It's super modern-looking, but not too obnoxious for the office — a very "quiet luxury" laptop.

HP equipped the OmniBook Ultra 14 with a 2.8K 120Hz OLED touchscreen, and it looks just as amazing as you'd expect given those specs: super detailed, rich, bright, and silky-smooth. It also comes with a haptic touchpad and a lattice-style keyboard that perfectly match the rest of its chassis. The latter felt a bit mushy to me, but I liked how quiet it was. You won't cause a commotion in a coffee shop if you're zestily typing away on it.

My review unit ran on the Snapdragon X2 Elite chip, so it performed just as well as the Asus Zenbook A14, which has the same processor. (It's another strong MacBook Air competitor.) It just has a slightly worse but still very good battery life of 20 hours and five minutes.

The revamped Dell XPS 14 is a terrific option for well-heeled shoppers who want an extremely elegant and well-made PC — one that looks just as good as an Apple laptop, maybe even better. The upgraded Intel Core Ultra X7 configuration is the best MacBook Pro alternative I've tried.

In one of the best tech comeback stories of recent memory, Dell revived and refined the minimalist XPS 14 for 2026. It's thinner and freed of past design burdens like a capacitive touch function row. It's more polished than before and more pleasant to use. It's also newly configurable with a gorgeous 2.8K OLED touchscreen (optional, but highly recommended). In short, its build quality is better than ever — you can see and feel the attention to detail in its construction.

I tried out two different variants of the XPS 14: the base model with an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 CPU and a 2K IPS display ($2,000), then an upgraded model with an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H CPU and the sharp OLED touchscreen ($2,900). The former had a much better battery life but lackluster performance and a duller picture. Overall, I thought the upgraded version did a much better job of justifying its premium price tag. (If you are leaning toward the base model, I would look into the Dell 14S instead, above.)

That Core Ultra X7 358H chip has impressed me in just about every laptop I've tried it in so far. It's not quite as fast as Apple's M5 chip in single-core scenarios, but among x86-based CPUs in Windows laptops, it's one of the snappiest for basic tasks. It's even better in multi-core workloads, vying with the latest MacBook Pro and even some recent gaming laptops when taxing apps are on the docket. It's paired with an Intel Arc B390 iGPU that behaves like an entry-level discrete GPU, so you can play AAA games on this bad boy, too.

The Core Ultra X7-powered XPS 14 only lasted about 10 hours in our usual video rundown test, which is well below our current 14-hour median for the Windows laptop category. However, you should get more juice out of it when it's not looping a video: The OLED touchscreen can dip from 120Hz to 20Hz for static content.

I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.

Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it's super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren't nearly as compact.

This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it's very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)

Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn't have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn't a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.

The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It's a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can't draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.

If the Swift X 14 is out of stock when you go to buy it — its availability has been spotty lately — look into the Acer Swift X 14 AI, which is the same laptop with an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU and RTX 5060 graphics. It's less powerful and doesn't last as long, but $300 cheaper and still apt for heavy workloads.

The Asus Zenbook A16 is an amazing choice for on-the-go professionals who want a blazing-fast laptop with a big, bright OLED touchscreen for multitasking.

Our top pick's bigger brother has an upgraded display and even more power. It's the first laptop on the market with the top-end Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, and it cruises. It can keep up with the M5 MacBooks in single-core tasks and handily beats them in multi-core ones. It's the second-fastest laptop we've ever encountered in our 10-plus years of reviewing laptops, after the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro chip that started at $2,499. (The newer M5 Pro and M5 Max models are even faster, though we haven't tried them ourselves. They're also prohibitively expensive.)

What's more, the Zenbook A16 is configured with a whopping 48GB of memory. It got a $300 price bump over the summer and now costs $2,000, but in this day and age, that's still a reasonable price for a turbocharged laptop with more-than-ample memory.

While the Zenbook A16 comes with the same 80-TOPS NPU as the Zenbook A14, its huge RAM stash makes it even better for running large language models (LLMs) on-device. You don't get quite as much battery life here, but 16 hours and 26 minutes is pretty good for a laptop this large and speedy.

I like that "large" doesn't translate to "bulky" here. The Zenbook A16 only weighs 2.87 pounds, making it the lightest 16-incher we've ever tried. Its design is very similar to that of the Zenbook A14 — thank you, Ceraluminum — but it has a better OLED display with added touchscreen capabilities, a smoother 120Hz refresh rate, a sharper 2.8K resolution, and a higher maximum brightness of 1,100 nits for HDR content. There's also an extra SD card slot on its side.

DIYers, tinkerers, and anyone sick of buying a new laptop every few years will love the modular, repairable Framework Laptop 13.

This unique Windows laptop is much more expensive than other models with similar specs and performance, but it has the advantage of being infinitely upgradable and repairable. It's the closest thing you can get to a buy-it-for-life laptop and a gateway drug to the right-to-repair movement. You can configure it from scratch or go with a pre-built model.

If you've never had an innocent Geek Squad repair appointment turn into a several-hundred-dollar fiasco, you may not care much about at-home fixability, but it's a massive deal. You can swap out the Framework Laptop 13's motherboard, memory, storage, keyboard, and display all by yourself, and it's super easy to do. I have zero prior PC building experience, and after putting together an IKEA shoe cabinet a few months ago, I can confidently say that assembling the Framework Laptop 13 is a simpler process. Everything snaps or screws into place so cleanly.

Its port situation is especially brilliant: You can take your pick of expansion cards and swap them out as necessary. No more dongles!

I originally reviewed a model with an Intel Core Series 1 processor in mid-2025, right around when Framework released an AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series version with an upgraded thermal system, WiFi 7, and an updated keyboard. The company sent me those new components to test, along with an optional 2.8K 120Hz matte display it launched the year prior. I'm delighted to report that I installed them all myself without breaking anything. I didn't notice a huge difference with the keyboard, but my entry-level AMD system ran much cooler than its Intel counterpart and offered drastically better single-core performance. I'd also recommend the nicer display; it's visibly crisper and smoother than the regular 2.2K 60Hz option.

The laptops we review get put to work as our primary computers. This includes trying any unique software or use cases they support. We also subject all of our loaners to a multi-app/tab stress test and Primate Labs' Geekbench CPU test, which measures their performance in common tasks. Gaming laptops get put through additional graphical benchmarking.

To gauge a laptop's stamina, we conduct a battery rundown test that involves playing a looped 1080p version of "Tears of Steel," a short open-source Blender movie, at 50 percent brightness and 50 percent volume. Ideally, we hope to get at least 16.5 hours of battery from regular Windows laptops and five hours from gaming laptops. (They're notoriously power-hungry.)

As we're using a laptop, we zero in on certain components to evaluate its build quality. These include the display, keyboard, touchpad, webcam, speakers, and ports. We also assess its overall aesthetic and portability.

We determine the ultimate value of a laptop by comparing its performance, design/build quality, and battery life to other laptops with similar pricing, specs, release dates, and use cases. We consider any accessories it comes with, any upgrades from its predecessor(s), and its future-proofing.