How we tested

You can’t judge a laptop by its appearance or advertised specs alone. As such, Mashable utilizes a thorough hands-on testing process to review and recommend the best laptops to our readers.

The bulk of this laptop testing happens as part of an everyday workflow wherein reviewers treat their testing units as daily drivers. We believe it’s important to see exactly how a laptop functions in a real-world setting, not in a lab, to accurately capture the user experience. 

We supplement these trial runs with industry-standard performance benchmarks. These are easily repeatable tests that produce scores we can use to quantify and compare different laptops’ processing power. We also put every laptop through a battery life test, which varies depending on the type of laptop. For gaming laptops, we tack on two additional benchmarks that measure machines’ graphical capabilities.

We record the findings of our testing in a rubric, and each laptop gets scored on a five-point scale on the basis of performance, design/build quality, battery life, and value. This rubric standardizes scoring across our laptop reviews and allows us to draw granular comparisons between models. A 0/5 is a flop that should be avoided at all costs, while a 5/5 is a laptop we can’t live without. Any laptop that scores a 4.5/5 or higher receives a Mashable Choice Award.

The highest-scoring laptops are featured in this guide to the best laptops. We also add them to our roundups of the best cheap laptops, the best Windows laptops, the best MacBooks, and the best gaming laptops as applicable.

Read our full laptop testing methodology.

What’s on deck

We’ll soon test the following laptops:

• The Asus ZenBook A14, a featherlight Copilot+ PC with a durable “Ceraluminum” chassis, an OLED display, and a ridiculous rated battery life of up to 32 hours per charge. I briefly checked it out at CES 2025, and it took home our Best of CES laptop category award.

• The Asus Vivobook S 15, a sub-$1,000 Copilot+ PC with a 3K OLED display, an RGB backlit keyboard, and a rated battery life of up to 19 hours.

• The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x (Gen 9), a handsome mid-ranger with an OLED touchscreen and a rated battery life of up to 23.5 hours.

I also have the base Intel-powered Framework Laptop 13 in hand for testing, but as mentioned up top, it’s temporarily unavailable for purchase in the U.S. because of tariffs. I’ll try it eventually after I work through the rest of my backlog, but if it scores well, I won’t make it a featured pick on this guide until U.S. shoppers can buy it again.

What we’ve tested lately (that didn’t make the cut)

I’m fresh off testing the Dell XPS 13 (9450), a 2024 Lunar Lake PC that’s the last of its kind. (Dell phased out the XPS series earlier this year.) It’s easily one of the prettiest and most stylish laptops I’ve ever gotten my hands on, largely thanks to its edge-to-edge design and the tandem OLED touchscreen display on my review unit: It’s luscious, bright, and finished with an Anti-Reflect coating that makes it immune to annoying glares. At 13.4 inches, the XPS 13 is an ultraportable stunner.

What’s more, the XPS 13 lasted over over 13 hours in our battery life test. That’s not an especially long runtime compared to other Windows laptops in our database, but it’s well above the category’s current median and solid for a machine with such a fancy display.

However, the XPS 13 over-prioritizes form over function in several ways that I found frustrating. Its zero-lattice keyboard is cramped, stiff, and topped off by an odd touch function row. Its fussy, fallible touchpad would click when I wanted to scroll and drag when I wanted to click, and I couldn’t feel its haptics even when I had them turned all the way up. Most egregiously, the XPS 13 only has two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports — there’s not even a headphone jack! (First, they came for our smartphones…)

The overall value prop for its internals just isn’t there, either. My mid-range Intel Core Ultra 256V loaner with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage costs $1,849.99. (Most Windows laptops and MacBooks we’ve tested in that price range are stronger performers with at least 1TB of storage, and some have double the RAM.) Granted, the XPS 13 starts at $1,199.99 if you scrap its tandem OLED display, which is an optional add-on, but I think that’s one of its biggest draws. I ultimately rated it a 3.8/5.

In January, I tested the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14, a 2-in-1 Lunar Lake laptop priced at $1,899.99 as tested (with an Intel Core Ultra 258V processor, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage). It’s an absolutely stunning machine with a colorful 3K OLED touchscreen display, a satisfying keyboard, a velvety touchpad, and a dark aluminum chassis that gives it a moody and elegant look. It also lasted an impressive 15 hours in our battery life test. That said, it has some baffling port placements, mediocre bottom-firing speakers, an oversaturated webcam, and disappointing performance benchmark results.

In a Geekbench 6 multi-core test, my OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 scored slightly lower than the M2-powered MacBook Air from 2023 and significantly lower than its own predecessor. That would be last year’s HP Spectre x360 14, which had a mid-range Core Ultra Series 1 processor as tested. I expected way more from a machine with Intel’s freshest upper mid-range CPU.

Ultimately, I rated the OmniBook Flip 14 a 4.4/5 — very respectable, but just short of being a Mashable Choice Award winner. It’s a flashy premium hybrid for splurgers who want a future-proofed laptop that won’t work very hard, but the zippier Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 feels like a better value for most people at $1,449.99 as tested.

If you’re choosing between the two HP models, I’m also tempted to recommend the Spectre x360 14 over the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14. It offers more power and better top-firing speakers for a comparable price.