How to Buy a Laptop

The laptop market has undergone major changes in the few years, and there may be more confusion in the notebook aisle today than at any other time. Today's laptops encompass everything from featherweight ultrabooks that barely tip the scales at less than 2 pounds, to lap-crushing behemoths of 10 pounds or more.
But the regular laptop doesn't look the same, with dozens of convertible designs that rethink the standard clamshell to take advantage of touch interfaces. Some laptops double as tablets, with hinges that bend and fold, while other touch PCs are actually slate tablets that come with accessory keyboards for laptop-style use. There's simply too much variety in the laptop space for one size or style to fit every person's needs.
That's where this buying guide comes in. We'll brief you on all the latest styles and features, and parse the latest buzzwords and trends, helping you figure out which features you want, and how to find the laptop that's right for you.
Ultrabooks and Ultraportables
Walk down any laptop aisle and you'll notice that the selection of laptops has gotten dramatically thinner and sleeker. Intel has spent the last few years pushing ultrabooks, a breed of laptop that combines svelte lightweight designs with the latest energy-efficient hardware and long lasting batteries to produce a laptop that deliver productivity with the sort of portability that old bulky clamshell designs could never offer. Make no mistake though, ultrabooks are simply ultraportable that meet Intel's standards for certification.
Ultrabooks took the ultraportable category and refined it with industry wide standards governing everything from boot times to chassis thickness—no more than 23mm (0.91 inch) thick for units with screens smaller than 14 inches, and no more than 20mm (0.79 inch) for units under 13.3 inches. Dubbed ultrabooks, these wafer-thin systems represent a new vision for portable computing, a no-compromises laptop light enough that you'll forget it's in your briefcase, whose battery and storage let it resume work in seconds after being idle or asleep for days. Solid-state drives (SSD)—whether a full 128GB or 256GB SSD or, more affordably, a small one used as a cache with a traditional hard drive—give ultrabooks their quick start and resume capability. In the last year, these slim portable systems have gone from being the exception to the rule, with dozens of new ultrabooks, offered by every major PC manufacturer.
Most importantly, the slim designs ushered in by the push for ultrabooks has resulted in a general slimming down of the entire laptop category. Whether you're looking at ultraportables that are carefully designed to be sliver thin, or mainstream PCs and even gaming machines, the entire laptop category is thinner, lighter, and better suited to life on the go. The best of these ultraportables will still cost you a pretty penny, but the performance they offer is remarkable, and often comes with several high-end features to boot. Features like a 1080p touch screen, a full-size HDMI port, and more than 8 hours of battery life are commonplace these days. Premium laptops (with premium prices) now come with high-resolution screens, up to 3,840-by-2,160 at the top end.
Windows 8 and Touch
The most dramatic change to come to the PC in the last couple of years is Windows 8. If you haven't spent anytime with a new Windows PC of late, you may be a bit disoriented by the new interface which is tile-based and focused on touch instead of the traditional desktop. Windows 8 is meant to bridge the gap between laptops and tablets. It does that by introducing a new navigation scheme, a tile-based Start Screen that replaces the traditional Start Menu, and an app friendly software environment. There's more to Windows 8 than can be addressed in this buying guide, but the bottom line is that Windows 8 has brought the touch interface to the forefront. As a result, the majority of new PCs will also feature a touch screen, and those that don't will have features in place to provide similar functionality.
If you're in the market for a Windows 8 laptop, a touch screen is highly recommended. Even entry-level models in the $230 to $300 price range feature touch displays, and the Windows 8 user experience is dramatically more intuitive when using it with touch input. The one area where you won't see many touch screens is among gaming machines, where touch would potentially interfere with the precision control schemes needed on the gaming grid.
Hybrid Laptop Designs
This emphasis on touch has done more than encourage the adoption of touch screens. In a further effort to enter the tablet market while still meeting the needs of laptop buyers, a new category of laptop/tablet hybrid has emerged. These convertible-hybrid laptop designs can transform from laptop to tablet and back again, most opting for a folding design that flips the keyboard out of the way.
Other systems allow you to dock a detachable tablet PC with an accessory keyboard for laptop-like functionality. Some of these hybrid designs offer docking keyboards with secondary batteries providing all-day charge, while others opt for Bluetooth keyboards, forgoing the bulk of a docking hinge and connecting wirelessly.
Mainstream and Premium
While the entire laptop category has gotten slimmer, there's still a market for the desktop replacement and laptops that blend premium design and function. Desktop replacements aren't quite as portable as smaller ultrabooks, but these 14- and 15-inch laptops offer everything you need for a day-to-day PC. These larger laptops offer bigger displays, a broader selection of ports and features, and are one of the few categories that still offer optical drives. Screen resolutions run the gamut from 1,366 by 768 for inexpensive budget systems to the 1,920-by-1,080 resolution common to mainstream laptops, and up to the 3,200-by-1,800 resolution found on high-end multimedia laptops made for the graphics professionals.
Media and Gaming
There has been a lot of hand wringing among industry experts and pundits over the last several months as laptop and desktop sales have started to decline and tablet sales have expanded to fill the gap, but gaming PCs have actually sold more. For the gamer who wants top of the line performance, the combination of a high-end processor, a potent discrete graphics card, and a large high-resolution display is well worth the higher prices that gaming rigs frequently command. And boy do those prices run high—While an entry-level gaming laptop typically starts at about $799, prices can go up to and over $3,500 for a high-end system with multiple GPUs and the horsepower to play games at ultra-quality settings.
Before you drop a grand or two on a gaming laptop, however, you should know what you're getting for your money. Powerful quad-core processors are par for the course, with Intel Core i7 and AMD A10 chips pushing serious performance even for non-gaming applications. Discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD provide silky smooth graphics and impressive framerates. Some high-end rigs come with two GPUs, helping justify their high price tags. Additional features to watch for include high-resolution displays offering 1080p resolution or better, and hard drives that offer 1TB or more of local storage space, letting you store your entire game library on the machine.
Not all gaming laptops are hulking beasts, however. The sleek designs of ultrabooks have given rise to a new breed of portable gaming machine that puts gaming level performance into a more portable design. These gaming ultraportables draw inspiration from ultrabooks, and offer the same sort of thin dimensions and long-lasting battery life. But, just like other gaming rigs, this sort of performance doesn't come cheap, with gaming ultraportables running in the $2,000 range.