It won’t get them into the carpool lane, but millions of workers are no longer alone when commuting between home and office: They have their laptops with them. Hybrid work—spending one or more days of the work week at home—has grown from a pandemic perk to a way to boost work/life balance while meeting that “your presence is requested” memo from your boss. That calls for a PC that can travel seamlessly from a cubicle desk to your kitchen table, while keeping you connected and your company’s data secure.
What should you look for when choosing a laptop for flexible work? In many cases, you won’t be doing the choosing: Your employer’s IT department will simply assign you a system to be used on both in-office and out-of-office days, along with rules such as not installing your own software and procedures for logging into the company network. End of article.
Other times, however, the choice will be partly or entirely up to you—you’ll have some say in navigating the vast array of notebooks and configurations available. That’s what we’re here to help with. Here, moving roughly from general to specific, is what you need to know when picking the most important tool in your hybrid working kit.
1. The Fundamental Foundation: The Choice of Operating System
Your IT department will almost certainly dictate your first laptop decision: whether to get a Windows or Linux laptop, an Apple MacBook, or a Chromebook. The four dominant operating systems or software platforms are arguably one biggie (Microsoft Windows) that’s widely used by most businesses, alongside three others that are used as an adjunct or an alternative, depending on the business type. However, each alternative has carved out a highly respectable niche, such as macOS for creative apps and ChromeOS for web-based workflows and Android integration. Moreover, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS can all run many Windows programs via solutions such as Parallels Desktop for Mac and Cameyo by Google.
Acer’s Chromebook Plus Spin 514 is a ChromeOS alternative for business and pros who rely wholly on the Google suite of applications. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
This article assumes you’re probably getting a Windows notebook, but its discussion of hardware features applies to all laptop families. (One key distinction: Apple, at this writing, still snubs the touch screens and 2-in-1 designs discussed below.)
2. Fit First: Choose a Laptop Size That Works Anywhere
All laptops, by definition, are portable to a greater or lesser extent, though some 18-inch models are better described as luggable. A seven- or eight-pound PC may be tolerable when carried only occasionally from room to room, but users who tote their laptops on a daily basis prefer what we call ultraportables—machines weighing three pounds or less.
Top Ultraportables We’ve Tested
These thin-and-light systems typically have displays measuring 14 inches diagonally (or close to it, like the 13.6 inches of Apple’s MacBook Air) and, for extended working sessions, are often plugged into external monitors for more screen real estate or working space. You might plug into a bigger panel at home, at the office, or in both places, and that could factor into whether you opt for a bigger laptop screen in the first place.
Dell’s 14 Plus is one of PCMag’s favorite ultraportables. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Laptops one size up from the 14-inch class are referred to as “desktop replacements,” featuring 15.6-inch, 16-inch, or 17-inch displays. At four or five pounds, you won’t be able to ignore them inside a briefcase, but their screens are easier on the eyes for long sessions without a monitor, and a good compromise between a flyweight and a juggernaut.
Note: While your choice these days will probably come down to a 14-inch versus a 16-inch laptop, there are outliers or exceptions to every rule. The 17-inch-screened LG Gram 17, for example, weighs only 3.1 pounds, though our reviewer found it sacrifices some performance for its remarkable lightness. PCMag’s reviews and roundups will keep you abreast of your options.
3. The Specialized Set: 2-in-1s, Workstations, and Rugged Laptops
Speaking of exceptions, your job may steer you toward a category apart from the mainstream business laptops we’ll highlight here. If you rely on pen input—using a stylus to draw or design, mark up documents for review, or scribble handwritten notes—you might trade the traditional clamshell design for a 2-in-1 laptop that can serve as both a laptop and tablet.
These come in two flavors: convertibles whose screens flip and fold back-to-back with their keyboards, and detachables that can jettison the keyboard altogether for a true tablet experience. There are even a couple of dual-screen models, like Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i, that can provide you with two displays using an accessory keyboard, or that utilize one screen as a keyboard. If you prefer using two panels for productivity but your part-time office space doesn’t afford you an external monitor, one of these special twin-screen laptops can help you avoid carrying a second, portable display back and forth.
Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i is a specialized, innovative twin-screen laptop for multitasking power users. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Another category of exceptional laptops caters to professionals in engineering, computer-aided design (CAD), 3D or CGI rendering, and deep data analysis: mobile workstations. Like their desktop counterparts, these are the most powerful and expensive PCs in their class, featuring cost-no-object processors and graphics accelerators, ample memory and storage, and the sharpest, most color-calibrated screens available.
They’re overkill for everyday office apps like Microsoft Word and Excel, but they justify their steep price tags with independent software vendor (ISV) certifications for the most demanding special-purpose programs—crunching through massive datasets, creating Pixar-quality animations, and handling tasks that would bring most notebooks to their knees.
For jobs that would reduce most notebooks to shrapnel, first responders and field workers rely on rugged laptops, heavily armored systems that perform in pouring rain and can survive being dropped onto rocky ground. We assume your commute won’t put your laptop in harm’s way, but perhaps your part-of-the-time work environment (say, a construction job site) might be rough-and-tumble. Even if not, you may also appreciate that many business notebooks meet the MIL-STD 810H standard—a little-bit-rugged certification against everyday bumps that happen in transit, as well as extreme temperatures.
4. Screen Gems: How to Pick a Hybrid-Work Display
We’ve discussed screen size as shorthand for overall laptop size, but there are other display aspects to consider. Today’s baseline is an IPS (in-plane switching) panel with a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels—known as full HD (FHD) or 1080p—although higher resolutions, such as 1440p (2,560 by 1,440) and 4K (3,840 by 2,160), are desirable. So is an OLED or mini LED instead of IPS screen—a former luxury feature increasingly found on affordable models, delivering higher contrast and more vivid colors.
Screen brightness, measured in nits (candelas per square meter), is another specification to gauge. A rating of 250 nits is a minimum, but sunnier screens with 400 nits or more are easier to see in brightly lit offices. Consider the conditions you’ll use the laptop in both at home and in the office. What’s bright enough for one might not suffice in the other.
Likewise, either a matte or a glossy screen can be better suited to the lighting where you’ll be toiling; brightly lit environs may be a challenge for a glossy panel prone to reflections. Gamers obsessed with fast-paced animation look for a high refresh rate (the number of times per second the screen is redrawn), but while one above the usual 60Hz can make video appear smoother, a high-refresh-rate panel is not critical for office apps unless you work in game development or certain creative fields.
The Acer Swift Go 16 is a desktop replacement with a dazzling OLED display. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Possibly more important to you: your screen’s aspect ratio, or horizontal-versus-vertical measurement, usually either 16:9 (as in the resolutions above) or a slightly taller 16:10 (stretching 4K, for instance, to 3,840 by 2,400 pixels). A few laptops and tablets have a squarer, more pad- or clipboard-like 3:2 ratio. Most users will be able to make do with any of these for everyday office work, but folks editing lots of word processing documents or performing other vertically oriented tasks may appreciate the greater up-and-down spread of a 3:2 or 16:10 panel. Also, if you plan to attach your laptop to a desktop or portable monitor, it may make sense to match the aspect ratio of the laptop to that of the monitor (or vice versa).
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By contrast, you’ll definitely need to decide whether you want a touch screen, mandatory for 2-in-1 pen input and handy if you’d rather select windows or tap and drag icons around the display rather than using the touchpad. Sometimes a laptop maker offers configurations of the same model in touch and non-touch versions, so be sure you know what you’re getting if you are keen on touch.
5. Connectivity Is Crucial: Check Off the Right Ports
Your new laptop will come with Wi-Fi wireless networking for connection to the internet and email—hopefully the latest and fastest Wi-Fi 7 spec, although settling for the Wi-Fi 6 or 6E that many budget and mainstream models use is no great shakes, under most circumstances. Short-range Bluetooth wireless is also standard for using peripherals like mice and headsets, and for swapping files with smartphones. It’s handy if you leave a set of peripherals at each work location, or want to carry your preferred wireless ones back and forth.
Not everything is wireless, however. Thin-and light laptops sometimes skimp on ports for plugging in accessories; some Apple and Dell machines offer only Thunderbolt 4 or USB Type-C ports, which may require clumsy adapters or dongles for connecting, say, an external monitor or a USB Type-A mouse. Combining those ports with full-size HDMI, USB Type-A, and (increasingly rare) Ethernet wired networking ports is a plus, as is a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Apple’s MacBook Air shows off its MagSafe power connector and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
A popular alternative to plugging multiple cables into your laptop is to plug the latter into a docking station, which provides an array of USB, Thunderbolt, monitor, and networking ports. Desktop peripherals stay connected to the dock, so you need to plug or unplug just one USB-C or Thunderbolt connection when arriving or departing with your laptop. PCMag regularly surveys docking stations for Windows and MacBook laptops.
Note, too, that your laptop’s AC adapter connector—sometimes a proprietary round plug, sometimes a USB-C port—may be its own port, or consume one of your USBs. On all late-model Apple MacBooks, you’ll see something different: a MagSafe connector, which attaches magnetically. Tripping over the cord will simply yank the cable loose instead of pulling your laptop to the floor. It’s not a singular reason to get a Mac over a Windows or other laptop, but it’s undeniably handy if your part-time workspace is a coffee table in the middle of the living room, or some other high-foot-traffic area.
6. Under the Hood: Choosing the Right Chips
You may be surprised to see a laptop’s central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) this far down the list, but high-end horsepower is really a necessity only for mobile workstations—there frankly aren’t all that many slow or sluggish new laptops these days, not even with the “3-class” (Intel Core 3 or AMD Ryzen 3) chips of budget machines.
Recommended by Our Editors
For a mainstream business laptop, a “5-class” processor such as one of Intel’s Core Ultra 5 or AMD’s Ryzen AI 5 chips will be sufficient, as will one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Plus or Snapdragon Elite CPUs. Qualcomm’s chips run on a variant of Windows, Windows on Arm, rather than x86 architecture. Most applications should run smoothly and efficiently on these models. If you tend to run applications outside of the usual browser, office productivity, and mainstream content-creation lot, you might want to do a bit of online research regarding their Arm compatibility before committing to a Snapdragon laptop. (Some Windows applications have native Arm versions; others run well in emulation; and a few less mainstream ones may have compatibility issues.)
Stepping up to a “7-class” processor will give you a snappy performance boost, while only hot-rod workstation shoppers need to consider a “9-class” chip. Similarly, for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, Apple’s in-house processors have evolved from M1 to M5. M5 is the leading edge, but the older M3 and M4 are still more than sufficient for almost all office-work purposes.
Do you need a laptop with a dedicated GPU such as Nvidia’s GeForce or AMD’s Radeon silicon? Unless you spend your entire workday in Adobe Photoshop or Premiere, or intend to play fast-twitch games after hours, the answer is probably no. Discrete GPUs are musts for gaming laptops and workstations, but the integrated graphics built into modern CPUs are perfectly fine for office apps and streaming video.
The Framework Laptop 16’s unique modular design makes upgrades easy instead of impossible. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Nor do you need to worry much about a processor’s advertised AI capabilities, neural processing unit (NPU), or rated AI TOPS (trillions of operations per second). For one thing, AI on personal computers is, ahem, a probable bubble that stresses the power grid to create iffy, derivative art and research you can’t trust without double-checking. For another, no laptop comes anywhere near the beefy AI-optimized GPUs of chatbot data centers. (Most users will not be running large language models off the boot drives in their laptops.) The local AI processing muscle of most laptops today can handle touted tasks such as background blur and noise reduction in videoconferencing; unless you’re actively involved in AI model work, you can safely run with any recent AMD, Apple, Intel, or Qualcomm chip.
You do, however, need ample RAM (system memory)—8GB is a bare minimum, 16GB offers superior multitasking, and 32GB is worth considering for serious Photoshop users or workstation-class tasks. The same applies to storage, in the form of a solid-state drive (SSD); 512GB is today’s baseline, while 1TB provides more headroom for images and videos. Much depends, in the storage vein, on whether you’ll rely largely on your office shared cloud storage (accessing files from your home working location, and your office cubicle, depending on the day) or if you need a roomy local data storehouse that comes with you. (Boot-drive capacities beyond 1TB tend to push up the price, and be associated with premium PCs.)
It’s rarely easy to expand laptop memory after purchase, so get the RAM you need up front first. (Also note that if you see a good deal on an uptick to 16GB or 32GB and you’re on the fence about it, act soon, as the cost of RAM is skyrocketing, expected to impact PC costs in 2026.) Storage, on the other hand, is easily bolstered or added later via USB flash drives and external SSDs (and on some laptops, a slot for SD or microSD flash cards).
7. Personal Preferences: Input Devices, Security Features, and More
You may not get to specify things like keyboard layout when picking a laptop for hybrid work, but most of us find some notebooks more comfortable than others—for serious word processing and spreadsheet navigation, laptops with real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys are more convenient than models that make do with a Fn (function) key plus the cursor arrows.
Similarly, while virtually all laptops feature a touchpad as a substitute for an external mouse, some users swear by the mini-joystick cursor controllers embedded in the keyboards of most of Lenovo’s ThinkPads (known as the TrackPoint) and some competitors. And after reading our description of AI, you can guess our opinion of the dedicated Copilot AI key that Microsoft has mandated Windows 11 laptop makers add to keyboards.
Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 is a lightweight business laptop with an exemplary keyboard. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
PCMag’s reviews include a video-playback measurement that’s a relative (repeat, relative) indicator of laptops’ battery life, an essential feature that’s difficult to compare when shopping. Real-world battery life varies wildly depending on what you do (word processing, surfing the web, running CPU- or graphics-intensive tasks) and how you adjust screen brightness, but happily most laptops nowadays will last through a typical workday using office productivity apps—and some marathoners can run for 20 or more hours on a charge.
Finally, though it isn’t strictly part of hardware selection, data security is paramount when accessing a company network remotely. Your IT department will guide you through the installation and use of multi-factor authentication, as well as drilling best practices into your noggin. (Rule No. 1: Just say no to email attachments!) Business PC vendors also prioritize security with offerings such as HP’s Wolf Pro Security suite on its enterprise laptops, or the SafeBIOS and SafeID features of Dell’s Pro line. Familiarizing yourself with these offerings is a plus.
With these tips, you’re ready to embrace the hybrid workstyle to impress your boss with your productivity on both office and home days. Remember, it’s all about balance.
About Our Expert
Eric Grevstad
Contributing Editor
Experience
I was picked to write PCMag’s 40th Anniversary “Most Influential PCs” feature because I’m the geezer who remembers them all—I worked on TRS-80 and Apple II monthlies starting in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly rivaled only by Brides as America’s fattest magazine. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine about using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semi-retirement, I can’t stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.
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