The Best Laptops of 2026

I wish I could tell you to hold off on buying a laptop in 2026, but I know—for many people out there—that’s just not possible.

Today’s spiking cost of memory, driven by the rush for AI data centers, has caused a cascade of price hikes in nearly every aspect of the PC industry . For everybody who needs to replace their PC now, you’ll have to do even more work than normal to ensure you’re getting exactly what you need at a price you can afford. At the very least, you’re spoiled for choice. Today’s laptops are getting excessively good, with devices using the whole spectrum sporting Intel, Qualcomm, and Apple M-series chips promising excessive battery life and strong performance across the whole gamut of shapes and sizes.

The problem is that you will find laptops that cost $2,000 today that would be priced at hundreds of dollars less just a year ago. The spike in memory costs means that the most powerful devices with the highest-end components are experiencing the worst inflation. Devices with Nvidia RTX 50-series laptop GPUs are excessively expensive, but many of the lightweight devices sporting the more performant Intel chips are similarly costly.

This list tries to take into account the obscene prices of today, but up to a point there’s no way to avoid rampant inflation. You can sit back and wait for some future day when RAM prices are no longer out of control, but you may have to face the fact that major memory makers could keep prices high going into 2027 or beyond .

With all that in mind, you need to take extra care to analyze exactly what you need from your laptop. Most people don’t need anything more powerful than a low-end Mac or PC that can surf the web and run Spotify when done with work. There are several sub-$1,000 laptops still available today, and some of them are pretty dang good for their price.

Just be sure to avoid any Windows 11 PCs with 8GB of RAM . For potential MacBook users, the 8GB MacBook Neo is your starting point with its surprisingly deft mobile-first chip. We’re seeing more Intel Wildcat Lake PCs hit the scene to compete with Apple at the sub-$1,000 price point as well. In either case, all mobile designs are a juggling act. You can find some laptops with both strong battery life and strong performance, but those may cost you thousands of dollars. You may be more invested in a pretty and bright OLED screen for watching all your favorite streaming content, but—again—you should expect to spend more for the privilege.

For this year, your choice of processor is really a contest between Qualcomm and Intel. While AMD promoted its Ryzen AI 400 series back at CES, we’ve seen few examples of PCs with these chips available for sale. Excluding Apple and its benchmark-crushing chips, the PC contest rests between Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon X2 platform and Intel’s latest Panther Lake for lightweight laptops. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Snapdragon X2 Plus chips rank high on CPU performance but lose to Intel for the sake of graphics tasks. Any ARM-based PC will inevitably create issues with legacy drivers and software. However, Qualcomm has significantly improved app compatibility since 2024.