To achieve their more-affordable price tags, these cheaper options all make serious trade-offs-in shorter battery life, bulkier size, or more-limited functionality-and they’re not likely to last as long as our picks.
We also have more portable picks if you’re able to spend more, and for anyone on a tighter budget, we have less expensive options that are also well suited for younger kids who are learning remotely. Our top pick offers the best balance of all those factors for most high school and college students, whether they’re attending classes remotely or schlepping it to a physical classroom.
A laptop’s price-to-performance ratio is the most important factor, followed by battery life, size and weight, keyboard and trackpad, and good-enough performance. We test dozens of laptops every year, and for this guide we’ve rounded up the picks from our other guides that are the best for students.
But choosing the right laptop can be more challenging than writing a thousand words on Proust. College is expensive-including tuition, housing, and textbooks, not to mention food and other miscellaneous costs-so students need a reliable laptop that’ll last for years of taking notes, writing papers at 3 in the morning, and editing slides for a group project.
