

Launching in October 2020 means that this model is still shipping with Intel's 10th generation Ice Lake platform, but the Core i5-1035G1 is a proper quad-core processor with HyperThreading support, built on Intel's 10 nm process. Displays are important, and Microsoft offers the taller 3:2 aspect ratio across their lineup which helps a lot with productivity tasks.

Microsoft's first entry on this list is their most affordable laptop outside of the education market, and the Surface brand continues to offer some key features to help it stand out from the competition. A few years ago, it was a challenge to find solid-state drives and IPS display panels in machines under $1000 but no longer. Entry LevelĮveryone has a budget, and if yours is $500 to $700 for a laptop computer, the good news is that there are quality machines at this price now. This guide will focus on Windows PCs only - if you are in the market for a Mac, you of course have to buy a Mac. Laptop Recommendations Holiday 2021Īs always, we’ll break the guide down into several segments to serve various markets, from low-cost, to mid-range, to high end. While Macs won't be covered in this guide – either you want an Arm-based Mac or you want an x86-based PC – it was still an important milestone in the laptop space and not one to be ignored. The big news of 2021 was Apple ditching x86 processors and beginning the process of moving their products to their in-house designs. Based on the Willow Cove cores and featuring a much-improved Intel Xe graphics solution, Intel's solution still provides excellent performance and efficiency for the PC laptop space. Intel, still basking in the glow of the Tiger Lake launch in late 2020 continues to feature the 11th generation Core platform that is now over a year old. Despite bumps from the COVID pandemic, the laptop ecosystem continues to flourish, delivering a bevvy of new products based on new platforms.įor 2021, AMD launched their very successful Ryzen 5000 series products (codenamed Cezanne) featuring the latest Zen 3 CPU cores paired with AMD Vega graphics.

With 2021 coming to a close, it is time again to look back at the laptop market. All numbers in the text are updated to reflect pricing at the time of writing. In our series of laptop buyers guides, here’s the latest update to our list of recommended laptops.
