As always, in the Laptop Best Buy Guide we look for the best laptops in three price categories. In addition to the budget laptop for 500 euros and a midrange model that can cost 700 euros, this time there is room for a thin & light within a budget of 1000 euros. We choose one or two recommendations in each category, along with a selection of alternatives that are mainly interesting in a certain area, such as size or gaming performance.
If you read the BBG more often, you will notice that we have tinkered with the design, following the test we did a few months ago. Later this year there will be even more changes to the content, but for now the structure is still the same as the previous editions.
There are a lot of great deals at the moment, but they are often not really new models. Apparently, manufacturers still have many old laptops in stock, which are not being sold due to decreasing demand after the pandemic. As a consumer, you can benefit from this. Inflation may be high for other products; in laptop land you only get more for less money, so you can even buy a laptop for 500 euros with a powerful six-score Ryzen 5 processor. It’s not that long ago that we had to scrape to find a dual-core i3 laptop for that price anywhere.
This BBG therefore still contains many devices with a processor from 2020, 2021 and 2022. Laptops with a newer CPU are now gradually coming onto the market, for example the thirteenth-generation Intel Raptor Lake processor in the new Samsung Galaxy Book3 series. At the Computex in Taipei that is now taking place, ASUS, Acer and MSI, among others, will be showing some new devices. More interesting is the demonstration of a laptop with Meteor Lake processor that Intel gave on the eve of the fair. The fourteenth generation processor has a completely new architecture with chiplets, including a neural processing unit for AI workloads and a few extra power-efficient cores for connected stand-by. Laptops with the new processors should be released later this year, Intel promises.