Best Student Laptop 2025: Top picks for college and university

The Acer Aspire 14 AI might come across as a bit of an odd choice, owing to the fact it doesn’t necessarily take pride of place at the top of our other ‘best laptop’ list – that honour goes to a laptop further down this list.

Instead, we’ve picked this Acer option as the best Windows laptop for students owing to it simply being a great all-rounder, prioritising function over form.

For instance, the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor inside provides solid performance for basic productivity tasks such as web browsing and typing up notes and has the potential to push on to more intensive tasks. It also comes with some beefier integrated graphics that mean you could dabble in creative tasks such as photo or video editing if you need to for your course.

Its 1920×1200 OLED screen offers good colours and decent detail for those tasks, along with exemplary black levels and contrast to add a little more pizzazz to displayed images. The Aspire 14 AI’s chassis is also light and portable, while coming with an exceptionally functional port selection at its modest price point.

What’s more, its 18 and a half hours of runtime in our testing makes it a seriously strong choice for when you’re out all day and you don’t want to have to carry a charger around. The keyboard and trackpad are also a bit of a mixed bag, although for the price, it’s only a minor complaint.

For the sub price tag, this Acer Aspire 14 AI is a fantastic Windows laptop that certainly takes it to much more premium rivals.

The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) is our top recommendation for a student laptop thanks to its fantastic performance, solid display and excellent battery life.

The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) has a well-made brushed aluminium design and is reasonably slender at 14.69mm. It’s on the heavier side for an ultrabook, but still more than portable enough to slot into a bag without much thought.

One benefit to its slightly larger size is the well-rounded selection of ports. This includes two USB 4 Type-C ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, a 3.5mm jack and a MicroSD reader.

We found the keyboard to be solid, offering snappy travel and a fingerprint reader for Windows Hello integration.

The 14-inch IPS touchscreen display has a QHD+ resolution and offers solid contrast, deep blacks and perfect temperature. The screen is vibrant and colour accuracy is decent, though below the level required for some creative workloads.

Performance from the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus chip is surprisingly brisk, and the 1TB SSD is great too, offering some of the best and fastest speeds of any laptop we’ve tested. Windows 11 comes with minimal bloatware, and there are some nifty AI features baked into some apps courtesy of that Snapdragon X Plus SoC. There’s also quick access to Microsoft’s AI assistant via the Copilot key.

The battery life here is excellent. We were able to get nearly two full working days out of the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) before reaching for the charger. Charging is decently fast too, with a full charge possible in about 75 minutes.

The Apple MacBook Air M4 is the brand’s latest and greatest offering yet, sustaining Apple’s immense reputation for offering sublime lightweight laptops that don’t half pack a punch.

The M4 chip inside offers some potent performance in our testing that makes it suitable for everything from web browsing and multi-tasking without even breaking a sweat to editing 4K video without much trouble. With this and the sustained optimisation of games for macOS, it’s even possible to use this latest-gen MacBook Air for a spot of gaming.

The base model has jumped up to 16GB of unified memory from the 8GB of older models to give more headroom for multitasking and intensive workloads, although if you’ve got more cash, you can always add more. The same goes for storage beyond the 256GB SSD fitted to the base model.

The move to the M4 chip also helps this MacBook Air yield even stronger battery life, which in our experience translated to getting through an intensive work day with around a third charge left in the device.

One area where things haven’t improved is that it retains the same 60Hz LCD screen, which, while decent, feels a tad long in the tooth against the other options here with high-res OLEDs. In addition, the port selection isn’t too great, so you’ll be carrying around a dongle with you for most of the day.

If you can get past these issues, though, the MacBook Air M4 is easily the most complete model in the Air lineup to date, and that’s why it earns a rightful spot here.

This laptop has a well-built plastic design that’s light enough to carry around on the regular, and to our great surprise, a lovely OLED screen that makes movie marathons an absolute delight. The large 15-inch should also make it easier to fit more text on your screen, which should be helpful for both essay typing and scanning documents.

The biggest issue with this laptop is that it’s not very powerful, falling behind the likes of the Surface Laptop Go 3 in our tests. But during our time with the laptop, we found it perfectly adequate for browsing the web, writing up essays and watching videos. As long as you’re not going to push it too hard – such as photo/video editing – the performance should be fine.

So if you’re looking for a supremely cheap Windows laptop with a top-notch screen, you’ll struggle to do better than the Asus Vivobook Go 15 OLED. The Surface Laptop Go 2 is another great cheap Windows laptop worth considering, but Microsoft is sadly phasing it out of stores, so you may only be able to pick it up second-hand in the coming months.

If it’s a lightweight device you want in both chassis and operating system, the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus is one of the absolute best we’ve tested.

ChromeOS has come on leaps and bounds since a few years ago, and remains an ideal operating system for a lightweight and productivity-focused use case, such as typing up notes, watching YouTube videos or even more so. This particular option is also a Chromebook Plus, which means you get some handy A features, such as the clever Magic Eraser tech from Google’s Pixel phones, as well as live translated captions and auto-framing and background blur tech for the webcam when in Google Meet scenarios.

The real benefit of this Samsung option is that it weighs just 1.17kg, making it one of the most portable laptops we’ve tested full stop – ideal for when you need to carry it from one side of campus to the other in a dash. The fact that Samsung has crammed a 15.6-inch OLED screen for more real estate and sublime definition is fantastic, too.

For good measure, you’ll also find a competent port selection, a snappy and tactile keyboard, and a smooth trackpad to make navigation a breeze. Its 10-core Intel Core 5 120U processor is also zippy for productivity tasks, and it posted some great scores in our Geekbench 6 test that push more expensive Windows devices such as the  Asus Zenbook A14. There is also a decent set of 256GB storage, and while the 8GB of RAM might seem stingy in 2025, it’s fine for the workloads you’re likely to undertake.

In a video loop test, it was also able to last for 15 and a half hours or so before conking out, giving you all-day battery life for when you’re away from the mains a lot. Against other premium student laptops that are a lot more expensive than this one, it’s brilliant.

The only caveat to this Chromebook is its higher price, and if that’s too prohibitive, then options such as the Asus Chromebook Plus CX34 can provide the fundamentals of a good experience for a bit less.

The Asus Zenbook S14 OLED takes the crown in our list of the best ultrabooks, so it makes sense that it wins out here, too.

The reason for this is that it features a smart and elegant design, complete with Asus’ innovative “Ceraluminum” surface that has been fitted to the most recent Zenbook S laptops, combining ceramic and aluminium for an immensely lightweight and durable finish to make for a wonderfully portable and svelte laptop for when you want to win style points with your friends. Ports are good too, with HDMI, USB-A and a headphone jack alongside two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports.

It comes with a 3K resolution OLED screen that wowed us with its pixel-perfect colour accuracy for both generalist and creative tasks, plus punchy peak brightness, inky blacks and excellent contrast and dynamic range. It also has a 16:10 aspect ratio to play nicely with modern workloads, and a 120Hz refresh rate for improving general responsiveness.

This Zenbook S14 OLED has an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V that we found to provide good performance, with especially strong single-core performance. Intel’s decision to remove hyperthreading from this generation of chips means that multi-core performance isn’t as strong as some AMD and Snapdragon-powered rivals. The ballpark performance here is between the M2 and M3 chips in recent MacBooks

This Asus laptop also has a capacious 72Whr battery, which in a laptop of this size is excellent. Combined with the efficiency of the Core Ultra 2 chip inside, it’s able to help this Asus laptop last for nearly 20 hours while video streaming, which is fantastic.

It’s only little things to watch out for with this one, such as a shallow keyboard that may not suit some, as well as an uninspiring 1080p webcam. With this in mind, the Asus Zenbook S14 OLED is the real cream of the crop for an ultrabook for students, although it comes at a bit of a price.

Suppose you’re likely to be working on creative projects, such as if you’re on a photography or media-type course that involves technical editing work. In that case, you’ll want a laptop with a dazzling screen and heaps of power – enter the Asus ProArt P16 (2025).

For the first part of that, we’ve got a large 16-inch 3K resolution OLED screen with some fantastic detail, plus deep blacks and vibrant dynamic range. Its colour accuracy is also virtually perfect, so it’s ideal for undertaking creative tasks that utilise those specialist gamuts. Being a 120Hz screen helps its general responsiveness, too.

As for its power, this laptop packs in an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with its 12 cores and 24 threads that make it a serious powerhouse, while the addition of an RTX 5070 GPU gives you enough oomph for those intensive loads and some gaming tasks, too. It essentially trades blows with Apple’s powerful MacBook Pro M4.

The ProArt P16 (2025) isn’t lacking elsewhere either, with a tactile keyboard and huge trackpad to make navigation a breeze, plus one of the best port selections you’ll find with a a range of USB-C, HDMI and USB-A ports The 10 and a half hours of battery life is fine for a laptop with this spec, although you will get better longevity further down the list with other options.

If it’s a proper laptop for content creation tasks you want, and you don’t mind the premium attached to it, this ProArt option is truly sublime.

Laptops with larger screens can be quite cumbersome to carry around, but if you’re on the go a lot and don’t want to sacrifice portability and more screen real estate, then the LG Gram Pro 16 seems like an ideal solution.

This laptop, being part of LG’s Gram line, has a penchant for being lightweight and portable; indeed, its magnesium frame contributes to both a durable and super light finish at just 1.2kg. There is some flexing under pressure, although not too much. At just 12.8m thick, it’s also slender, but still packs in a good port selection with a pair of USB4 Type-C ports, a full–size HDMI, two USB-As and a headphone jack.

The slightly larger chassis also lends itself to a proper full-size keyboard, complete with a snappy and short travel, plus a capacious trackpad for navigating and such.

You can spec this laptop with an OLED panel if you wish, although ours came with a high resolution IPS screen. It’s a 2560×1600 resolution 144Hz screen with variable refresh rate tech that delivers on a bright and punchy experience with decent depth and contrast alongside fantastic colour accuracy for an IPS panel to make it handy for both productivity and more creative workloads.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip inside provides decent performance with strong single-core performance in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests, although again, the lack of any hyperthreading befalls Intel with multi-threaded performance against AMD and Apple’s chips. There is also a fast 1TB SSD and plenty of fast DDR5 RAM headroom on hand with 32GB.

The Gram Pro 16 also wins out in this list for battery life, lasting for 21 hours and 10 minutes in the PCMark 10 battery test. This means it’ll easily last for two to nearly three days on a charge before needing to be plugged back in, and you can take it away with you and put endurance concerns to the back of your mind.

If it’s a portable big-screen laptop you want for lectures, classwork or otherwise, this LG Gram Pro 16 is a brilliant option.

Being both a gamer and a student can be a pricey affair, as you’ll likely need a console, laptop and TV to survive the semester. So how about combining all of those devices together to save on money? The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) is the perfect remedy, capable of doubling up as both your gaming rig and workstation with very few compromises.

Firstly, the G14 is shockingly lightweight for a gaming laptop, hitting the scales at just 1.7kg. Most gaming laptops are significantly heavier, making them unsuitable for porting around university. The optional Mini LED screen ensures fantastic picture quality too, which is important for watching movies and playing games.

Performance is plenty powerful enough to play all of the latest games. The intense graphics power here also opens up the opportunity for more creative pursuits such as editing video/photos and graphics design. The biggest issue here is battery life, with our tests seeing a result of just 3 hours and 20 minutes for productivity work. That could be a big issue if you’re working on the go away from a power mains.

Nevertheless, if you fancy the idea of owning a laptop that can fulfil the duties of both gaming and student work, then we strongly recommend the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023). Or if you want something cheaper, make sure to check out our Asus TUF Gaming A15 (2023) review as an alternative option.

If you want a MacBook on a budget, the MacBook Air M1 is a fantastic option. Though no longer available through Apple, the laptop remains available through a range of retailers for just £799, making it the perfect MacBook for any student.

The standout feature of the MacBook Air M1 is its Apple M1 chipset. The M1 took over the Intel Core i3/i5 in this laptop, enabling faster performance beyond what you might expect from Apple’s cheapest laptop. We found the laptop to be snappier even than newer laptops at the time, such as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 and the Dell XPS 13 Plus.

The five-year-old laptop has since been outpaced by the MacBook Air M2 and Air M3 models, plus the M4 mentioned above,  but you won’t find either at quite as low a price as the 2020 M1 model.

The design also feels a little outdated compared to the Air M2, though the display is sharp and bright enough for most use cases and the Magic Keyboard feels fantastic to type on.

App support is strong, with a growing number of native M1 apps available and Rosetta 2 ready to translate any stragglers from the x86 platform. We found that mainstream apps ran with no issue and you can even install apps from the iOS App Store.

Finally, the MacBook Air M1 has an impressive nine to 11-hour battery life with looped 1080p video lasting up to 12 hours on a single charge. This is another major upgrade granted by the custom M1 chipset and the laptop’s standby time is excellent, too.

The MacBook Air M1 delivers fantastic performance, battery life and app support without breaking the bank.

As far as we’re concerned, on top of the performance that you need to get you through your classes, the most important aspect of a student laptop is whether or not it’s portable enough to be easily carried from one end of the campus to the other. After all, with the amount of textbooks and snacks required to make it through the day, the last thing you want is to be bogged down by a heavy laptop. To that end, the Asus Zenbook A14 is the perfect option.

By using Asus’ ceraluminium material which is both lightweight and durable, the Zenbook A14 totals in at less than a kilogram on the scales so you’ll barely notice its presence if it’s chucked into a backpack or tote bag. It’s also just 13.3mm thick which is barely that much more than some of the USB-C ports on the side of the device.

Of course, the worry with any laptop that’s as slim and portable as this one, is that the battery life suffers as a result, but we’re glad to report that the Zenbook A14 has no such issue. In our battery test we were able to get the laptop to run for a whopping 20 hours and 47 minutes before it needed to be topped up, which is astonishing and more than enough to get you through two-days of use between charges.

Part of what allows for such strong battery life is the efficiency of the Snapdragon X chipset inside. This Arm-based processor is one of the fastest around which is why the laptop also benefits from top-level performance that can handle almost any task you throw at it. When jumping from one task to the next, the A14 moved at great speed without any signs of slowing down, and files from the 1TB SSD would load in next to no time.

Asus has also made sure to use the available space efficiently by creating a keyboard with tons of travel, and a large trackpad that goes almost all the way from the opening of the lid, to the bottom of the space bar. You won’t be caught short on ports either with two USB-C slots, one USB-A port, and a place to connect an HDMI cable and headphones.

As much as we love the Asus Zenbook A14 for its portability, there are some students out there who would no doubt be happy to trade some of that portability for a bit more power, especially where the display is concerned, and it’s here that the Acer Swift 16 AI comes into view. This is a powerful yet still portable laptop with a gorgeous display.

The moment you open up this laptop, it’s hard not to be mesmerised by the 16-inch 2.8K OLED panel. Not only does its larger amount of space make the process of side-by-side multitasking a great deal easier, but the clarity of its resolution ensures that everything you look at is crisp.

When you decide that it’s time to call it a day, the OLED technology makes the latest films and TV shows look even better with a level of contrast that really draws you into darker sections of a scene whilst giving vibrant colours the space they need to really pop. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to use their university laptop as their main device for both work and entertainment.

Powering the show is the super powerful Intel Core Ultra 5 chipset which made short work of our benchmarking tests. In fact, its high performance in PCMark 10 is a solid indicator of just how well this laptop facilitates everyday web browsing and working between multiple apps. The speedy 512GB SSD also means that you’ll have plenty of room to store those all-important course files locally so you can rely on them at a moment’s notice.

Because of the power that Intel’s chipset brings to the table, the Swift 16 AI (as its name implies) provides quick access to Microsoft Copilot Plus. Having a fully featured AI assistant that’s always ready at the press of a button is a huge help for bouncing ideas around when you’re stuck on a project.