Loving husband? Devoted family man? My tombstone will say He Saved 50 or 60 People From Buying the Wrong Laptop—not the highest honor, but I can claim to have learned a few things after decades of testing and reviewing for PCMag and other outlets. I’ve watched laptops grow from barely functional super-calculators into elite desktop replacements, workstations, and gaming rigs. I’ve seen innovations that transform the way people work (Lenovo’s Yoga convertibles) and ones that make everything worse (the old Dell XPS webcams that looked straight up your nose). As I retire from a long career of tech journalism, I’ve separated the laptop features you genuinely need from ones that don’t live up to the hype.
Along the way, I’ve learned that high prices and whizbang specs don’t always translate to real productivity. (Sure, Microsoft 365 is nice with a 20-core CPU and 32GB of RAM, but talk to us geezers who used AppleWorks with 128K.) My lists of invaluable and unnecessary laptop items may not match yours, but they might open your eyes to what truly matters.
To Begin With: My List of Laptop Keyboard Demands
Before separating the laptop wheat from the notebook chaff, let’s establish some ground rules for the most divisive topic and users’ primary interaction with laptops: keyboards. Not all of us are accountants who need numeric keypads (which are sometimes awkwardly squished, even on 16-inch or larger laptops). But we can all agree on a few things.
1. Cursor Arrows: Inverted-T, Yes. Single Row, Hell No
To begin with, let’s be clear that “Up” is a full-size key located above an identical full-size “Down” key, which both sit between the full-size Left and Right arrow keys—got it?
Half-size, hard-to-hit Up and Down arrows stacked between full-size Left and Right keys are an abomination that I’ve excoriated in approximately 1,100 HP laptop reviews, plus more than a few from other manufacturers. (I think Apple originated this sin, but it has restored its honor and changed its ways.) You’ll thank me the first time you need to navigate a long document or a giant spreadsheet.
2. Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down: Only Real Keys Will Do
Maybe it’s because I spend most of my day word processing, but I can’t live without these cursor-control shortcut keys. Laptops that foist them off as a key combination (onto the Fn key plus cursor arrows) are a pain. Chromebooks that expect you to alternate between Search+Up, Alt+Down, and Ctrl+Search+Right are even worse.
Memo to manufacturers: This is how you keyboard—inverted-T cursor arrows; dedicated Home, End, Page Up, Page Down; and Ctrl, then Fn, at bottom left. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
3. Put the Right Keys in the Right Corners
For one more keyboard-layout rant before I move on, the “Ctrl” key belongs in the lower left corner, with the “Fn” key to its right, not vice versa. I’ve praised Lenovo laptop keyboards as the best in the business, but the company came to this crucial realization only last year.
Also, the Delete key belongs at the top right, not pushed leftward to make room for the power button or something else. I don’t want to unlearn muscle memory to avoid accidentally turning off my laptop.
Underrated Laptop Features: Essentials for Any Well-Rated System
As you can tell, I’m obsessive about small features that significantly impact power and convenience. Let’s enumerate some more underrated but essential laptop items.
4. Don’t Short My Ports: USB-A and HDMI Still Matter
Apple and Dell have led the way in limiting laptop connectivity to only Thunderbolt 4 ports. It makes systems a few millimeters thinner, and it’s excellent that USB-C ports have no right side up or upside down. But they aren’t handy for much besides charging cell phones, wireless keyboards, and mice. (Yes, you can find Thunderbolt docking stations and disk arrays, thanks for reminding me.)
Why would anyone use a USB-C-to-DisplayPort dongle when you can just plug a monitor into an HDMI port? What are we supposed to do with all our USB-A flash drives? What was Dell thinking when it released notebooks without even an audio jack? Until you’ve had to live the dongle life, you may not realize how underrated the humble HDMI and USB-A are.
Apple’s MacBook Air M3 has a MagSafe charging port. Yay! It has two Thunderbolt 4 but no USB-A or HDMI ports. Boo! (Credit: Brian Westover)
5. Give Me a Webcam That Works for Work
It’s 2025 and past time to boycott any manufacturer that still sells laptops with crappy 720p webcams. You should consider 1080p resolution a bare minimum for video calls in this age of remote work, and more vendors should be like HP, which has taken the lead in providing 5-megapixel or sharper cameras.
Come to think of it, another thing we shouldn’t do in 2025 is stick duct tape or Post-It notes over webcams that don’t have sliding privacy shutters or on/off switches. The pandemic moved these components from second-banana consideration to starring roles. They’re not going back into obscurity.
6. Power Move: An Ambidextrous AC Adapter Is Best
More and more laptops nowadays have power plugs or bricks with USB-C rather than proprietary barrel connectors, which is fine. It’s especially fine when such systems have charging-capable USB-C ports on both their left and right edges, so you can arrange the charging cord as you like and keep it out of the way if you’re using a mouse. (And, let’s be honest: Sadly, gaming laptops are the thickest and heaviest around, but having ports at the rear is even better for reducing cable clutter.)
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7. A Topnotch Top Row Is, Um, Key
Thank heavens for Fn+Esc (Fn Lock) and the option to toggle the F1 through F12 keys to shortcuts such as volume and brightness controls instead of their Windows defaults. (Bet you can’t name any except F1 for help, though I still use F12 for Save As in Word.) Smart laptops add handy functions such as microphone mute or launching Windows Settings; dumb ones still bother with media play/pause or next/previous CD track—or, shudder, an emoji menu.
Yes, this is a desktop Logitech Wave Keys keyboard, but the top-row icons are noteworthy: Volume and microphone mute, good. Smiley-face emoji, bad. Same applies to laptops. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Overrated Laptop Features: These Are the Things I Can Do Without
Actually, the emoji key reminds me—I look forward to reading your favorite underrated features (or dissents) in the comments. But how about overrated or useless laptop design choices? Believe it or not, I have pet peeves besides compromised page keys.
8. Hoity-Toity Screens in Ordinary Machines
Design professionals appreciate mobile workstations with Pantone-certified displays, but I confess: I don’t pay attention to Eyesafe or other blue-light-reducing screen labels. To paraphrase George Washington reaching for his spectacles, I’ve gone gray in the service of technology and am now going blind.
And HP Sure View and other laptop screens with built-in privacy filters don’t work. OK, technically, they do. They discourage your airplane seatmate from sneaking a peek at your spreadsheet by making the screen so dim you can’t see it yourself.
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At that, they’re more useful than IMAX Certified displays. Do you know what IMAX Certified means? A few more pixels at the top and bottom of Marvel movies on Disney+. Big whoop.
9. SD and microSD: The Slots That Time Forgot
Flash-card readers are cool for cheap Chromebooks that need ways to expand their limited eMMC storage. But because most of us have ditched digital cameras for smartphones, those slots have lost their value as file-transfer media or the last heirs of floppy disks. You’ll seldom use these slots unless you’re a photo pro who needs to swap cards from your DSLR into your laptop for fast bulk file access. Bluetooth utilities like Windows Phone Link, Mac AirDrop, or the excellent Google Quick Share do the job better.
Most owners of the Alienware m16 R2 will use its two USB Type-A ports often. Its microSD slot, not so much. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
10. Haptic Anything: C’mon, Give Me a Real Button
Lines from laptop reviews are rarely carved for posterity in granite, but I’d like to be remembered for “On-screen virtual keyboards suck eggs and are tools of the devil.” Add to that Apple’s Touch Bar. Likewise, the skinny strip that replaces mouse buttons above touchpads on some Lenovo ThinkPad Z models. Whether it’s laptops, washing machines, or cars’ climate controls, trading good old pushable buttons for fussy touch panels, touch strips, or “areas” is never a smart idea.
11. Carrying Sleeves: Like Laptop Pants Without Pockets
Asus bundles these fancy fabric envelopes with a few of its notebooks. A nice gesture, but they’ve always struck me as useless. When am I going to be carrying a laptop and nothing else? Where am I supposed to put the AC adapter—strap it to my ankle? Have you ever heard of a briefcase? Sleeves may seem like a nice throw-in, but I bet you’ll seldom use yours.
12. AI Anything: Worse Than Worthless
Now, to leave you with some words of warning. These days, a growing number of notebook advertisements, boxes, and store displays say “Now with AI!” This offer is only narrowly preferable to a laptop festooned with early aughts levels of bloatware or the number 666.
I’m not a Luddite; I’ve made a living celebrating tech for 43 years. I don’t miss the days we had only three TV channels, and visiting the Library of Congress required traveling to D.C. instead of reaching into one’s shirt pocket. But I hate that social media has put the drunk at the end of the bar on a level with Walter Cronkite, and I hate that AI has opened a Pandora’s Box of suck—factually wrong reports illustrated with pictures of smiling seven-fingered mutants.
Before you kids get off my lawn, let me say that assistive AI, which helps you do things, shows real promise. But generative AI—tech that promises to do things for you—hasn’t even matched cryptocurrency, which is at least useful for crime. As Ed Zitron has eloquently written, every company participating in the generative AI bubble is losing billions and trashing the environment to produce complete crap.
Awkward, non-inverted-T arrows; fake Home, End, and Page Up/Down; and a Copilot key? Maybe there are worse things than an emoji key after all. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Generative AI is a scam and a delusion, and Acer putting a squiggle on its laptop touchpads that lights up when running an “AI app” doesn’t change that. Do you want Microsoft to ram Copilot down your throat (raising Word and Excel subscription prices in the process)? Or Google with Gemini? Or Apple Intelligence? We need to just say no. We must scream it, then hang on for the inevitable market crash.
About Eric Grevstad
Contributing Editor
