We tested 75+ laptops to find the best Windows laptops of the year

Haley Henschel

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

I loved the original Zenbook A14 from 2025, and this year's model is even better. It's a very well-rounded ultraportable with a very fair MSRP. I challenge anyone to find a faster, longer-lasting, and better-made Windows laptop for the regular retail price of $1,349.99.

A new Snapdragon X2 Elite CPU adds some extra pep to this 14-incher's step. It can now keep up with modern MacBooks in both basic single-core and demanding multi-core scenarios, something only one other Windows laptop can claim. (That would be its 16-inch sibling, the Asus Zenbook A16, below.) It's actually slightly faster than the M5 MacBook Air in multi-core tasks like light video editing, which is nuts. It beats 92 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 third-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 vivid OLED display.

The Acer Aspire 16 AI from 2025 is the best cheap Windows laptop for frugal shoppers who need a competent laptop that costs well under $1,000. It's especially ideal for casual users with basic workloads, as well as those who like a bigger (but not too heavy) laptop for entertainment.

This long-lasting big-screener doesn't sacrifice too much for the sake of its $700 price tag. It offers mostly amazing specs for the money — and even beats pricier laptops on this list in some small ways. It's my favorite MacBook Neo alternative... for now.

The Aspire 16 AI runs on an entry-level Snapdragon X CPU that can hold its own. (You'll find the same one in the $1,629.99 HP OmniBook 3 16 I tried, below.) It's not very snappy in single-core workloads like web browsing, which is where Apple's Neo really shines. But in multi-core scenarios like light video editing, the Aspire 16 AI can spar with some premium Windows laptops powered by the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip; that's an upper mid-range processor, albeit an older one. It's our fastest laptop under $900 on that point.

The Aspire 16 AI lasts for over 17 hours on a single charge, beating our current median runtime for Windows laptops by well over three hours. It outlasts 72 percent of all the laptops in our existing testing database, including the Dell XPS 14, the Asus Zenbook A16, and the Framework Laptop 13 (all below).

The Aspire 16 AI has a plastic keyboard deck, but it doesn't look too cheap. It has a really nice 1200p touchscreen with an anti-reflective finish and a 120Hz refresh rate. (Our top pick, the Asus Zenbook A14, lacks the latter.) I put it right next to my 2021 MacBook Pro to compare their displays, and while the Aspire 16 AI's picture wasn't nearly as crisp, its colors were just as punchy. The Aspire 16 AI's port selection is also excellent. An HDMI port and microSD card, on top of two USB-C and USB-A ports, are boons for peripheral-happy users. (The $2,899.99 XPS 14 doesn't have anything other than USB-C ports.) It's pretty lightweight for a laptop of its size, too. It weighs 0.23 pounds less than the OmniBook 3 16 and 1.28 pounds less than a 16-inch MacBook Pro.

The best laptops for college students should be lightweight and portable, have long-lasting batteries, a display that can handle both work and entertainment, and a ton of ports.

And that's why last year's Lenovo Yoga 7 14 is still a fantastic pick for students of all ages, or really anyone who wants a nice, well-priced 2-in-1.

Students will appreciate this 14-inch convertible's lightweight design, all-day battery life, and affordable price.

Its build quality impressed Mashable contributor Sarah Chaney, our reviewer. It has a premium all-aluminum chassis that's "solidly constructed despite weighing practically nothing," she wrote. It comes in at about three pounds and measures 0.6 inches thin, so your average textbook dwarfs it. It's packed with ports, including an HDMI port, a microSD card slot, and double-sided USB-C ports for convenient charging. Chaney also gushed about this hybrid's clacky, almost mechanical-feeling keyboard with adjustable backlighting, which gives it an expensive feel. Its OLED touchscreen is a little more muted compared to those on other models, but it's still a step up from an IPS display in terms of vibrancy. Plus, you can flip it all the way over on its hinge to use it like a tablet.

On the performance front, the Yoga 7 14 is solid for the money. We didn't record a single-core score when we ran it through our usual Geekbench 6 performance benchmark. However, another Windows laptop we tried with the same upper mid-range Ryzen 7 AI 350 CPU scored pretty dang well; in basic workloads, it rivaled pricier x86-based Windows machines meant for creative work and gaming. (It probably trails the ARM-based Asus Zenbook A14, a single-core overachiever, by about 20 percent.)

In more intensive multi-core workloads, the Yoga 7 14 falls about right in the middle of our database's pack. It's not a performance beast in this regard, but it's more than fine for everyday productivity and light multimedia work. If you need a super-powerful x86-based laptop with a dedicated GPU to run AutoCAD and other demanding specialty software, go with the Acer Swift X 14, below.

The Yoga 7 14 offers an above-average battery life of nearly 18 hours on a single charge, so you won't be panicking if you forget to bring your charger to a study session.

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

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 one other Windows laptop we've tried has surpassed the 30-hour mark. (That would be 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 punchy and huge. 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.

The OmniBook 3 16 has a pretty average weight, but it is very thin for its size. At 0.58 inches thick, it's slightly slimmer than every other laptop on this list save for the featherweight Acer Swift Go 14 AI and the Dell XPS 14, below. (It actually matches the latter in thinness.)

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 for $1,259.99, or even 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD for $999.99, depending on your needs. A 16GB RAM/1TB storage model is also sold on Amazon for $1,099.99.

I highly recommend the new Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop that can run the most demanding apps. If you want a great MacBook Pro alternative, it's also my top pick in that regard.

Most professional photo and video editors and graphic designers need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $1,999.99 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 striking OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking.

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 fact, it's the fastest sub-$2,000 Windows laptop we've tried when it comes to that kind of usage. 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.)

For what it's worth, I also tried a $1,699.99 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. (The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn't compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech.) It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is a solid number for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.

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, sadly, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad; it functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.

Frequent travelers, commuters, and deeper-pocketed students will appreciate this featherlight Windows laptop, which will hardly take up any space in your backpack or carry-on bag.

The 2025 Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is a beautiful, remarkably portable notebook that you can take with you anywhere. It comes in at just 0.37 inches thick and 2.18 pounds, making it the thinnest and lightest laptop on this list by a lot. Compared to the 13-inch MacBook Air, which has a smaller footprint, it's 0.07 inches thinner and over half a pound lighter. "It feels like one of those paper laptop models you'd find sometimes at big-box stores," noted Chaney, our reviewer. Acer somehow worked in an HDMI port, two USB-A ports, and two USB-C ports, both of which support Thunderbolt 4 for zippy data transfers.

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. Acer said its keyboard has a first-of-its-kind "soft-touch" UV-cured coating, and it was another highlight for Chaney. It "does feel really luxurious under my fingers," she said, calling out its "velvet-like" feel and "pleasant clacky sound."

The Swift Edge 14 AI isn't nearly as fast as the Asus Zenbook A14, but it gets you twice the RAM, more storage, and a nicer 120Hz 2.8K OLED touchscreen for only $150 more. It also runs on an x86-based Intel chip, so you don't have to worry about ARM compatibility issues. (Its battery life is pretty great for an Intel laptop, offering almost 21 hours of use per charge.)

Asus' brand-new 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 and a great price. Its hulking NPU and generous RAM make it my No. 1 choice for AI work, too.

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 handily beats the latest M5 MacBooks in both single- and multi-core tasks. 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.) The Zenbook A16 is configured with 48GB of RAM to boot, making its $1,699.99 price tag feel like an absolute bargain.

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

I also 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.

The Alienware 16X Aurora is my top pick for PC gamers who want a powerful, premium machine at a reasonable price (so probably most PC gamers). It's also a good pick for those who don't like stereotypically flashy gaming laptops.

Dell's powerful but demure mid-range gaming laptop features a dreamy keyboard and an incredible 240Hz matte display with an optional OLED upgrade.

The 16X Aurora I tested comes in around $2,000 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, and it delivers excellent performance for the money. M5 MacBooks still beat it in basic single-core workloads, but it handily beats them in the most demanding multi-core settings. (It's the fourth-fastest laptop we've ever tried in this regard.) Plus, its RTX 5070 GPU can run graphically intense AAA games like Cyberpunk 2077 well above the recommended 60fps without the aid of any AI upscaling tech, even at its native 1600p resolution — that's stellar. This thing is a monster even when it's not completely maxed out.

The 16X Aurora lasted five hours and 40 minutes in our battery life benchmark. That may not sound like much, but it beats our current median for gaming laptops by almost two hours. (Gaming PCs generally have pretty terrible stamina because they're such beastly performers.)

I don't see the 16X Aurora's design being very divisive, as gaming laptops' aesthetics can sometimes be. It's bathed in a dark navy blue color called "interstellar indigo," and its only accent is an iridescent Alienware logo on its lid. Its top and bottom panels are made from smooth aluminum; it holds onto fingerprints but has an otherwise premium feel. My hands flew over its clicky island-style keyboard, which includes a numpad. Its touchpad is plastic like the rest of its keyboard deck, but it felt nice and smooth.

My absolute favorite thing about the 16X Aurora is probably its display. It has a 240Hz refresh rate, a crisp 2.5K resolution, vibrant colors (even if you forgo the OLED upgrade), and an easy-on-the-eyes matte finish. It makes for a really comfy viewing experience.

The revamped Dell XPS 14 is the best option for well-heeled shoppers who want an elegant and well-made Windows laptop — one that looks just as good as a MacBook, maybe even better. Conversely, long battery life shouldn't be high on your priority list with this one.

Can a laptop be sexy? One look at the new XPS 14 and you'll say, "Absolutely, yes." In one of the best tech comeback stories in recent history, Dell revived and refined its minimalist XPS machines for 2026. The new models are thinner and freed of past design burdens like their capacitive touch function row. They're more polished than before and more pleasant to use. Plus, their build quality feels better than ever. It seems like there was a lot of attention to detail in its construction.

One of my personal favorite additions to the XPS 14 is its new 2.8K tandem OLED touchscreen, which is an optional upgrade you can slap on any configuration. It's gorgeous, and it comes with the added benefit of having a 20Hz to 120Hz variable refresh rate. The XPS 14 only lasted about 10 hours in our usual video rundown test — well below our 14-hour median for the Windows laptop category — but thanks to this feature, you should get more juice out of it when viewing static content.

My review unit came with a higher-end Intel Core Ultra X7 358H chip, which has really 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 MacBooks and even some recent gaming laptops. When running demanding apps, the XPS 14 is faster than 85 percent of all the laptops we've tried in recent years.

What's also nice about that CPU is that it has Intel Arc B390 graphics. Integrated GPUs aren't normally much to shout about, but this one is comparable to an entry-level dedicated GPU, so light PC gaming is a go.

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 6, which measures CPU 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 14 hours of battery from regular Windows laptops and four 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.