How to choose a laptop in 2026

A laptop comes down to five things: processor, RAM, storage, screen and graphics card. Everything else is detail. And of those five, the one you notice most day to day isn't the processor: it's having plenty of RAM and a decent screen.

This table is the shortcut. Find the row that looks like what you're going to do, and ask for at least that:

Rough prices for new models in France. They shift every week, and sales bring them down a fair bit.

The marketing names — ultrabook, notebook, ultraportable — barely mean anything now: different manufacturers use them for different things. What really changes a laptop is what it was built for. At Kelaptop we split them into three groups, and each laptop is only scored against the others in its own group.

2-in-1s — the ones whose screen flips round or detaches so you can use them as a tablet — aren't a separate type: they're general-use laptops with a hinge and a touchscreen. They cost a bit more and weigh a bit more. Worth it if you're going to handwrite or draw; otherwise, no.

A recent mid-range processor is more than enough unless you edit video, compile code or play games. The names changed recently and that confuses a lot of people, so let's go brand by brand:

• Intel: the new ones are called Core Ultra 5, 7 and 9, and the basic ones Core 3, 5 and 7. The familiar Core i5 / i7 / i9 are still on shelves, but they're the previous generation.
• AMD: Ryzen 5, 7 and 9, with the newest ones carrying the Ryzen AI name. They tend to give you a little more for the same money.
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X: Windows on a phone-style chip. Outstanding battery life and no fan noise, but the odd older program, the odd game and the odd unusual peripheral won't work. If you depend on one specific piece of software, check it first.
• Apple M: MacBooks only. More on that further down.

The number — 5, 7, 9 — tells you the tier within its own generation, and that's where people get caught: this year's Core Ultra 5 beats an i7 from four years ago, even though the 7 sounds bigger. Watch the letter on the end too: U means low power (light and cool), while H and HX mean performance (hot, heavy and thirsty).

If you don't game or edit video or 3D, this section doesn't apply to you. The integrated graphics inside the processor handle Windows, a browser with twenty tabs, 4K video and household-level Photoshop without breaking a sweat. Paying for a dedicated card you'll never use is throwing money away, and you get the extra weight, the noise and the short battery life thrown in.

If you do game, the benchmark is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series: the 5050 for medium settings, the 5060 as the sweet spot on price, and the 5070 and up for high settings or higher-resolution screens. AMD has the Radeon RX line, far less common in laptops.

Two warnings that catch a lot of people out:

• The same card doesn't perform the same in two laptops. Each manufacturer feeds it more or fewer watts depending on what the cooling can take, so two machines both listing "RTX 5070" can be 20% apart. It usually appears on the spec sheet as TGP or graphics power.
• Check the card's memory. 8 GB is the sensible minimum today; with less, some current games quietly drop their texture quality.

The RTX Pro cards (the old Quadro line) are a different beast: they cost what they cost because they're certified for AutoCAD, SolidWorks and the like. For gaming they add nothing.

16 GB. That's the number. It's what you notice most in daily use and what separates a laptop that feels smooth from one that stutters every time you switch windows. RAM is where the laptop keeps whatever you're using open: the browser and its tabs, email, the video call, Spotify and a spreadsheet, all at once.

With 8 GB Windows boots and runs, but you're tight from day one and tighter every year. It only makes sense in Chromebooks or a very basic second machine. A Mac is different: 8 GB of unified memory is plenty for normal use (browsing, office work, video, video calls), because macOS and the chip make far better use of it than Windows; go to 16 GB only if you are going to edit video or photos seriously. 32 GB is for editing video, working in 3D, running virtual machines or keeping thirty tabs open without thinking about it.

One important thing to check before you buy: in today's thin laptops the RAM is soldered to the board and can never be upgraded. MacBooks, Snapdragon machines and plenty of Intel ultraportables are like this. With those, the RAM you buy is the RAM you'll have for the next six years, so don't come up short to save the price of a dinner out.

There's no decision left to make here: every laptop ships with an SSD. The old mechanical hard drives, slow and noisy, have vanished from new machines. If you run into one that still has a spinning drive, it's an old model clearing out stock.

So the only thing you're choosing is how much space:

• 512 GB: plenty for work, study and keeping your photos.
• 1 TB: the comfortable option. Non-negotiable if you game, because a single current title eats 80 to 150 GB.
• 256 GB: fills up fast. Only if you work in the cloud and keep nothing locally.

Speed barely matters: any current NVMe SSD boots Windows in seconds and you won't feel the difference between one and another. What is worth checking is whether there's a free M.2 slot for a second drive later on: it's the cheapest upgrade there is.

It's what you'll stare at eight hours a day, and where a manufacturer cutting corners shows up most. Four things:

• Resolution: 1920 x 1080 minimum, and 1920 x 1200 is better. That slightly taller shape (16:10) has become the standard and it's a real relief when you're working, because more of the document fits on screen. If you see 1366 x 768, walk away: that's a fifteen-year-old panel.
• Panel type: IPS is the safe bet, with good viewing angles and accurate colour. OLED is clearly better — real blacks, vivid colour, stunning contrast — and it has stopped being a luxury: it now shows up in mid-range machines, not just at the top. Its one drawback is that after years of displaying the same taskbar in the same place, it can leave a faint mark. TN panels, with washed-out colour and terrible angles, only survive at the very bottom of the range.
• Brightness: measured in nits. 300 is the minimum for a normal room; at 400 or more you'll see it fine even with a window behind you. It's the spec cut most often on cheap laptops and the one you'll resent most later.
• Size: 13 and 14 inches to carry it daily; 15 and 16 if it's going to live on a desk; 17 only if you're replacing a desktop and never moving it.

120 Hz makes everything look smoother as you scroll, and for gaming it's close to mandatory; on an office laptop it's a pleasant luxury that costs a little battery. A matte finish kills reflections, a glossy one gives punchier colour. And a touchscreen only makes sense on a 2-in-1: on a normal laptop hardly anyone ends up using it.

The hours the manufacturer promises are worthless: they're measured playing a video with the brightness turned down. The honest figure is capacity in watt-hours (Wh): below 50 Wh you're cutting it fine, from 70 Wh up you're comfortable.

What changes real battery life most, more than the battery itself, is the processor. Snapdragon X and Apple M machines last a full working day unplugged and barely ever spin up the fan. A gaming laptop is at the other extreme: two or three hours browsing, barely one while playing, and while playing it needs the charger plugged in to give you its full performance.

On weight: 1.2 – 1.5 kg (2.6 – 3.3 lb) is a laptop you carry daily without noticing. Past 2 kg (4.4 lb) you start thinking twice, and a 2.5 kg gaming machine plus its 700 g brick stays home after two weeks.

Check that it charges over USB-C too. It means your phone charger or any decent power bank can bail you out, and it's an enormous convenience.

It looks like a minor detail right up until one is missing. The comfortable minimum today:

• A USB-C port that does everything — charging and driving a monitor. If it's Thunderbolt 4 or 5 as well, a single cable gives you monitor, keyboard, network and power at once.
• A couple of USB-A ports, the familiar rectangular ones, for a mouse and flash drives.
• HDMI if you plug into borrowed monitors or TVs; an SD card reader if you take photos; a headphone jack, which some ultra-thin models have already dropped.
• Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 is the current standard, though you'll only feel it if your router is too.

Very slim ultraportables tend to come with two USB-C ports and little else. It isn't a serious flaw — a cheap adapter solves it — but better to know beforehand than after.

This is by far the decision that shapes how the laptop feels to live with, and the one that has least to do with the numbers on the spec sheet.

Windows

It runs on 90% of laptops and its great advantage is that everything works: any program, any game, any printer and whatever odd application your job depends on. There are Windows laptops at every price step, from the cheapest thing on the shelf to machines that cost as much as a used car, with service centres in every city and fierce competition between brands, which is exactly what drives prices down. New machines all ship with Windows 11: Windows 10 stopped receiving security updates in October 2025.

macOS and MacBooks

On paper a MacBook almost never wins on value: for what one costs you could buy a Windows laptop with more RAM, more storage and a dedicated GPU the Mac doesn't have. And yet plenty of people who know that still buy Macs. The reasons are real, they just don't show up in a spec table:

• Apple M chips sip power. That translates into a full day of battery, near-total silence because the fan almost never kicks in, and the same performance plugged in or not — a powerful Windows laptop throttles itself on battery to save power.
• The parts you actually touch. The MacBook trackpad still has no rival and makes you stop missing a mouse; the screen is good even on the cheapest model; the chassis doesn't creak; and you open the lid and it's awake instantly, with none of the ten-second fumbling so many Windows laptops do.
• macOS is simpler and stays clean. It doesn't come with the layer of preinstalled junk every brand piles onto its Windows machines, and it's still just as quick in year three.
• The ecosystem. If you have an iPhone, the integration — copy on the phone and paste on the Mac, answer messages from the laptop, everything in sync — is more addictive than it sounds.
• They last, and they resell. A four-year-old MacBook is still worth a good amount secondhand, and you get that part of the price back.

The downsides, which are just as real: adding RAM or storage at purchase costs a fortune and afterwards nothing can be touched; they're no good for gaming, because barely any PC game ships for Mac; and there are specific work applications that only exist on Windows. The entry point is high, too: there's no budget MacBook, and the cheapest one already costs what a mid-range Windows laptop does.

In short: if you want the most machine for your money, if you game, or if you need one specific program, Windows. If you value silence, low weight and endless battery and don't mind paying for it, Mac. And note that Windows has copied the trick: Snapdragon X laptops land in much the same place on battery and silence, with Windows in front of you.

ChromeOS

The Chromebook system. Cheap, quick, impossible to clog up and perfect for studying or as a second laptop for the sofa, as long as everything you do fits in a browser. If you need to install desktop programs, it isn't for you.

Two laptops with identical specs can feel completely different to use. This is where you see whether the manufacturer took it seriously:

• Materials: aluminium doesn't creak, the lid doesn't wobble when you nudge the desk, and it simply feels different. Good plastic is fine too; bad plastic gives itself away on the first touch.
• Keyboard: if you type a lot, it matters as much as the processor. A backlit one is convenient and also a good sign: it usually means that model isn't the bargain-bin tier.
• Trackpad: a big, glass, accurate one saves you carrying a mouse. A bad one means you'll always carry one.
• Camera: 1080p is the norm now, and the 720p ones still around look poor on video calls. Many also include face or fingerprint unlock, which you appreciate daily.
• Speakers: if they fire upwards, beside the keyboard, they sound far better than if they're hidden underneath.
• Noise: modern ultraportables barely start the fan; gaming machines, by contrast, sound like a hairdryer when you push them.

You'll see laptops advertised as "AI PCs" or "Copilot+", with an NPU and a TOPS figure. The NPU is a small chip dedicated to AI tasks that run inside the laptop: blurring the background on video calls, live captions, the odd photo filter and the Copilot features in Windows.

The practical truth in 2026: it's nice to have and not worth paying extra for. What most people actually use — ChatGPT, Copilot on the web, browser assistants — runs on the internet, not on your laptop, and works exactly the same on a machine without an NPU. Besides, every new processor already includes one: you don't need to go looking.

• Buying 8 GB of RAM to save money. It's the number one regret, and on many laptops there's no fixing it later because it's soldered.
• Looking only at the processor. An i7 with 8 GB and a bad screen performs worse, and feels far worse, than a Ryzen 5 with 16 GB and an IPS panel.
• Buying a gaming laptop for work. Twice the weight, audible fans, a battery that doesn't reach lunchtime, and you won't take it anywhere.
• Trusting the big number in the name. An i7 from 2020 loses to a current Core Ultra 5.
• Choosing by brand. They all have good ranges and bargain-bin ranges. You pick the model, not the logo.
• Forgetting the screen and keyboard. They're the two things you touch constantly and the two you can't change afterwards.

With all of the above you know what to ask for. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of models and comparing spec sheets by hand isn't realistic, so every laptop on Kelaptop carries two numbers that do the work for you:

• The value-for-money score, 0 to 10. It compares what the laptop offers against what it costs today, versus every other laptop of its own type currently on sale. It's recalculated daily, because a price drop raises the score on its own.
• The power rating, 0 to 100. It tells you how much machine it is in absolute terms, ignoring price.

You have to read them together. A 10 doesn't mean "the best laptop", it means "the most you can get for that money": a simple, cheap machine can score a 10 by being the best buy at its price. The power rating next to it is what tells you whether it's also enough machine for what you want to do. How the score is calculated, step by step, is explained on the Kelaptop Value-for-Money Score page.