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The Windows laptop guide: Spring 2015

There are a lot of really good laptops on the market today: but which one is the best?

Windows laptop guide, spring 2015

As time marches by and technology, driven by Moore's law, Dennard scaling, and other technological and material advances allow for ever greater miniaturisation, the standard workhorse computer continues to shrink. First it was the room-sized mainframe, then it was the minicomputer, then it was the desktop PC, and today it is the laptop.

Today's laptops are a solid blend of price, performance, battery life, and features. For heavy lifting, or where mobility simply isn't required, you can always turn to a desktop PC—but for the vast majority of users and usage scenarios, a decent laptop is more than enough. In the last few years we have seen the beginnings of a shift towards form factors that are even more mobile than laptops, too, with tablets and convertibles both offering almost-laptop-level performance in a more portable package.

The state of the art for Windows laptops

At the time of writing—May 2015—there is very much a standard template for a Windows laptop: You start with Windows 8.1, pick either a Core i, Core M, or Atom chip, and then decide whether you want a true laptop or some kind of hybrid (a convertible, laplet, etc.)

The CPU benchmarks above give you a good idea of the relative performance between Intel's state-of-the-art chips. The new Core M chips (Broadwell-Y) can just about keep up with the Core i (Broadwell-U) chips in some workloads, but Atom (Cherry Trail) is still some way behind the pack.

It's a similar story when it comes to the integrated Intel HD graphics across the three ranges:

Intriguingly, beyond the main CPU/GPU architecture, one other differentiator has started to rear its head: the storage technology and interface. Most modern laptops use an SSD attached to SATA 3, but some cheaper devices use eMMC and some high-end devices avail themselves of NAND flash attached to the PCIe interface. The benchmarks below show you the marked difference in read/write performance from these different storage techs.

AMD's upcoming Carrizo APUs may change things up, but Intel won't be sitting still either: Skylake should be out later this year, and all signs point to this particular tock (i.e. a complete microarchitectural redesign) being a notable one. Likewise, on the Atom front, Intel is on an accelerated development schedule: Willow Trail, Cherry Trail's successor, with a new Goldmont CPU and Skylake-class GPU, may finally be the chip that gives Intel the edge it needs in the tablet space.

Finally, and perhaps even more exciting than incremental hardware refreshes, is the upcoming release of Windows 10. A leak points to a July 21 release date, but we'll likely find out the official date soon. Windows 10 will provide a much-needed boost in usability and functionality for every laptop mentioned in this guide, but it will be hybrids and tablets that really stand to gain from features such as Continuum mode and cross-platform support for iOS and Android apps. All of the laptops mentioned in this guide will be eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 10 when it's released.

Two tranches: Ultrabooks and convertibles

With the exception of performance/enthusiast marques (such as Dell's Alienware brand), most laptop makers plough their creative and marketing juices into two distinct product lines. The first is usually some kind of Ultrabook: a laptop that can be configured to use a full-fat Core i5 or i7 CPU (and more recently the Core M, too); is reasonably thin and light; and has decent battery life, along with some other nice-to-have features. You will pay a significant chunk of change for a high-spec Ultrabook.

The second line is one that usually eschews performance in favour of another defining aspect, which today is normally flexibility. The overarching term for this type of device is hybrid, which encapsulates everything from detachable screens, through to clamshell designs with a 360-degree hinge that allows you to contort your laptop into a variety of positions including a tablet. Many of the most recent iterations of these flexible laptops come with some kind of low-power Core M or Cherry Trail chip at the helm, which allows for fanless and thinner designs.

How this guide was created

In creating this guide, we looked new laptops from the major Windows OEMs—Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus—plus Microsoft itself. This guide isn't fully exhaustive: there are thousands of different laptops on the market today, and it would be impossible to test them all. Think of this as a snapshot of the current laptop market, as of spring/summer 2015, much like our 2014 smartphone guide. If we have missed a laptop that should be on this list, let us know and we'll do our best to obtain a review unit and include it on this list.

In terms of testing methodology, we used and reviewed every laptop listed in this guide. We tested form, functionality, battery life, screen quality, and a plethora of other factors. Some aspects, such as keyboard quality or aesthetic appearance, are the subjective opinion of an Ars editor.

Another caveat: this guide will look at middle-of-the-market laptops. Like any kind of gadget or gizmo, you can spend thousands and thousands on a workstation-class laptop with a Quadro GPU and Xeon CPU, but almost no one does. Likewise, when we asked the manufacturers to send us some review units, we specifically asked for configurations that were representative of what most consumers might buy; you won't find any laptops in this guide with 24GB of RAM or a 2TB M.2 SSD.

At the end of this guide we will briefly discuss some other options at the extreme high end (workstations, gaming laptops) and low end (netbooks). In short, if you're looking to buy a laptop today, and you have somewhere between £500 and £1700 to spend, this guide will tell you which laptop, laplet, or convertible is for you.

Listing image by Richard BH / Sebastian Anthony

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