If I’ve sent you this, you probably asked me for advice on buying a new laptop.

Before everything else, congratulations! Laptops really do make personal computing feel more personal, and you’ll finally have something you can carry anywhere (apart from your phone, of course).

I’ll not waste any more of your time, though.

Think it through. - The Major Questions

1. What do you need it for?

This is the question you should spend the most time on.

While everyone has a vague idea of what they want to do, it’s far too abstract to narrow down specifications for. Choose specific applications or techniques.

  • Tier 1 - Low Compute: I need it for note taking, browsing the web, some movie watching.
  • Tier 2 - Faster’s better: I’d like to code on it, do some light photo editing, do some data analysis, and multitask a little. Maybe a little light game.
  • Tier 3 - Maximum Performance: I’d like to edit 4K/8K video, work on 3d modelling in Blender, play the latest games, compile large codebases, work on AIML and run models locally.

You’ll probably find yourself somewhere in these three, or in the middle of these.

2. What’s your budget?

This is perhaps the biggest question you should answer. Budget dictates everything. Compute is expensive, and with modern pricing, it almost seems like a luxury. Your budget dictates your choices, and more importantly, your compromises.

3. Know the compromises.

Personally, I categorise laptop featuresets into 3 main categories:

Computational Power
Media Experience
Battery Life

Usually, you get 2 out of the 3. Assume that you have to choose between the two, and make the choice.

As of when I’m writing this, the overlap is really only managed by Apple Silicon MacBook Pros. That said, if you have a really high budget, you can get close to the mystical overlap.

4. What’s your pièce de résistance?

pièce de résistance - the most important or remarkable feature.

There’s usually one thing you maximise for too! Many people want a touchscreen, for example, while some others would like all day battery life. Choose the luxury you’d like to have. This is usually the thing you’re willing to allocate a larger piece of your budget to compared to the others, because it really matters to you.

5. What’s your portability requirement?

This is mostly about the physical characteristics of the device - weight and size. If you carry a device around quite a bit, you need to decide what you’re comfortable with, what fits in your bag, and even in your hand. I personally find a 15”/16” perfectly portable, but many do like a 13”/14” more.

This is one thing I’d recommend visiting a physical store for, to decide what suits your personal requirement better.

I’d like to add one caveat though - bigger laptops usually have bigger batteries and better cooling due to space.

The Finer Details

1. What OS do you prefer?

While the default answer is (sadly) Windows, you might have a preference to either MacOS or Linux as well. This will dictate your hardware choices; apart from the obvious Mac-only limitation for macOS, Linux usually has better support from some manufacturers more than others. (Looking at you, Hewlett Packard.)

Depending on the applications you use, how comfortable would you be switching from one to another?

Most vendors (except Apple, obviously) ship with Windows by default, so if that’s your choice, you don’t have to think a lot about it.

2. How sensitive are you to quality?

Now this might sound absurd, but audio and video quality is almost a thing you train yourself to notice the difference of quality in. Most people are really unaffected by it, and if that’s you, that’s quite nice. You’ll save a lot of money not worrying about display/speaker technology at all.

(Just to clarify, it’s almost a GOOD thing to not be that sensitive.)

3. What (and how many) ports do you need?

Usually, the ports you’d use are USB-A, USB-C, and HDMI. Most laptops come with at least 2 of those 3, if not all 3, but your mileage may vary depending on the specific laptop.

USB-C is just a connector, though, and has a plethora of linked specifications (based on power delivery, display output and data transfer speeds), so keep an eye out for that.

Headphone Jacks (3.5mm AUX out also helps, especially if higher impedance is available), and engineers might require specific ports for specific tasks.

Try to ensure you still have a free port or two even when all your accessories are plugged in for daily use.

4. What do you want from your inputs?

Keyboards and mice matter quite a bit. The very basic questions you should answer are:

  • Do you use the trackpad often?
  • Do you need a numpad?

5. Aesthetics

Do looks matter to you? Do you want your keyboard to have a backlight? Do you want your laptop to have some illumination?

6. Repairability

A laptop is a device you’ll use for a long time, so how repairable/modular do you need it to be, and what is the minimum warranty you expect?

Some Opinions

Many of these opinions are derived from the state of computing at the time of writing, which is the end of 2025.

MacBooks are surprisingly good now.

Apple has, with their own custom chips, redefined the value proposition for their laptop lineup. While the memory and storage pricing is still a tad appalling, their hardware is very well rounded in terms of experience, and the MacBook Pros are one of the first devices I know of to satisfy the holy grail of a great media experience, extremely long battery life, and great performance to go with it (plugged in OR on battery, which is more impressive than you’d think.) They’re not very repairable, so that’s a risk, but they make for great devices. Consider a Mac*.

*There is, however, a caveat. Macs run MacOS and the chips are based off of the ARM architecture (unlike x86, which is found on most devices); therefore, running a windows app isn’t particularly trivial on them. They have their own app ecosystem, but the architecure difference might affect you.

Breathe some life into your laptop with Linux

Microsoft has been hard at work making Windows a terrible Operating System, shoveling their cloud services, privacy-risking insecure AI services and their first party applications at the user, and you deserve better. Windows makes your device feel slow even if it really isn’t. There’s a few more years of life left in it, and save your device from the junkyard using Linux. I’d recommend ZorinOS if you’re starting, as it’s super familiar too.