Best laptops for writers on a budget? The LG Gram 14Z980 is the best ultrabook out there right now. It manages to cram three USB 3.0 ports (including USB-C), a microSD card reader, and an HDMI port into a tiny, lightweight frame. Despite the name, the LG Gram 14Z980 weighs a fraction less than 1kg. Despite the slender build and lightweight frame, battery life, processing power and overall performance is exceptional. The LG Gram 14Z980’s display is also impressive, offering decent maximum brightness, and respectable colour space reproduction. Netflix and YouTube looks fantastic. With the LG Gram covering 94.9% of the sRGB gamut, designers ought to be able to work easily on this too, though the low Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 colour gamut scores of 67.5% and 70.6% mean this isn’t one for photographers.
It’s worth repeating that price: $1,799 for a Prestige 15 (model A10SC-010) with the aforementioned Core i7-10710U chip and 3,840-by-2,160-pixel display; 32GB of memory; a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive; Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics; and Windows 10 Pro. The MSI can’t match the eight-core Core i9 processor available in the Dell or Apple or the ultra-high-contrast OLED screens offered by the XPS 15, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme, or the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition, but it costs a lot less. Our XPS 15 test unit was $2,649; our Acer ConceptD 7 was $2,999; and our Razer Studio Edition was $3,999. In addition to the 2.3GHz (4GHz boost) Ryzen 7 3750H CPU and Radeon RX 5500M graphics, my Alpha 15 test unit (model A3DD-004) features 16GB of dual-channel memory, a 512GB PCIe solid-state drive, Windows 10 Home, and a one-year warranty. Its 144Hz full HD display with AMD FreeSync is unique to this configuration; the $899 model (A3DD-003) drops the refresh rate to a still respectable 120Hz.
While the entire laptop category has gotten slimmer, there’s still a market for larger “classic” desktop-replacement laptops that blend premium design and function. Desktop replacements aren’t quite as easy to cart around as smaller ultraportables, but these 14- and 15-inch laptops offer everything you need in a day-to-day PC. They have bigger displays, as well as 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 budget systems to the more mainstream 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution, up to the 3,840-by-2,160-pixel resolution found on high-end multimedia laptops intended for graphics professionals. Read extra info at best laptop for architecture.
We’ll cut to the chase: the Apple iPhone 11 Pro is one of the best smartphones money can buy if you’re shopping at the premium end of the market. It’s also the most advanced iPhone the Apple has ever released, driven by a brand new A13 Bionic processor. Pair this with a larger battery and several power optimisation smarts baked into iOS 13 itself, and you have an iPhone that can last all day without having to be hooked up to a power outlet – and that’s with heavy usage. Be frugal with the device, and you could easily squeeze two days out of it. But the headline act is the tri-camera. Notably, the third sensor is a wide-angle lens, bringing a 120-degree field of view, which is ideal for landscapes. The other two remain largely unchanged, with two small but impactful updates – the telephoto lens now has a larger aperture, letting in 40% more light, and the wide-angle sensor now has 100% focus pixels, which essentially means it’s better at focusing in low-light.
The Asus VivoBook Flip 14 has 64 GB of speedy eMMC storage, a good-enough Intel Core m3 processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a bright, 14-inch screen with a 1920×1080 resolution. Its keyboard and trackpad are comfortable and responsive, and while the case isn’t as we’d like, it’s still of better quality than other laptops in this price range. But the VivoBook Flip’s 4 GB of memory is a bit limiting, its battery won’t last a full day like the Chromebook’s, and like all Windows laptops, it comes with a lot of bloatware. Choosing a budget laptop is tricky, because you’ll find dozens—even hundreds—of configurations at a given time. Their prices fluctuate constantly, too, and companies release and discontinue models with no warning. If our pick isn’t available, you should look for the following specs in an all-purpose budget laptop: seventh- or eighth-generation Intel Core i3 or i5 processor (they’ll have model names that start with i3 or i5 and end with 7xxx or 8xxx), 6 GB or 8 GB of RAM, a solid-state drive, and a 1366×768 or better screen resolution.
Having a dedicated graphics card (GPU) means that a laptop has its own dedicated graphics chip inside, unlike integrated graphics which are built in to the processor and far less powerful. Dedicated graphics have their own memory (RAM) and are significantly faster, offering up to (and sometimes even more than) 20x more performance than their integrated counterparts, depending on model. You need a dedicated GPU if you intend on using your laptop for gaming, video editing, rendering or design work. Popular graphics cards include NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX and GTX ranges, as well as AMD Radeon cards such as RX560X. See more information at https://top3beasts.com/.
