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Almost every laptop claims to be thin, but few are among the true lightweight elite. "Light" has come a long way: At PCMag, we've been reviewing PCs since 1982, when "portable" meant suitcase-size. Here, we've gathered today's best light laptops from dozens of contenders across all categories: business, gaming, 2-in-1 convertible, and more. Our collective decades of expertise help us evaluate laptops based on raw performance, build quality, screen fidelity, connectivity, and value. Our current favorite for most people is the high-value Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch, an excellent 2.8-pound ultraportable with a brilliant touch screen and a powerful AMD processor. It's a well-priced laptop—one of the best overall, period, not merely for its weight. Read up on the rest of our top picks in super-light laptops for other budgets and usage cases, plus check out our detailed buying guide and a spec breakout of all recommended models.
What defines a lightweight laptop? Most would agree that the upper limit is three pounds, possibly stretching to four for a system with a big 15.6-inch screen. Neither of those figures counts the computer's AC adapter, an often-overlooked bit of baggage that can be anything from a compact shirt-pocket gadget to an ungainly brick.
For manufacturers, crafting an ultralight laptop is all about compromise. A smaller battery pack will save weight, but it won't last as long—a risky move in a market in which many buyers expect to get through an entire workday, plus a Netflix movie in the evening, on a charge. Exotic chassis materials, like carbon fiber and magnesium alloys, weigh less than ordinary notebooks' plastic and aluminum but also increase cost. A touch screen is convenient, but its glass overlay adds a few grams.
For you, shopping for a svelte laptop is all about choices. Some aren't particularly obvious, such as a system's expandability—the lightest machines may have their memory, for instance, mounted directly on the motherboard rather than in the upgradable SO-DIMM sockets of bulkier models. Similarly, all new models now use solid-state drives (SSDs) rather than cheaper but heavier hard drives for storage. However, the upgradability of these drives in the lightest laptops will vary from no-can-do (the storage is soldered down) to potentially upgradable (on a PCI Express M.2 SSD module, if you can crack the case to access it).
Other choices will be in your face, starting with the obvious one: the display panel.
What Screen Size Is Best in a Light Laptop?
At the risk of insulting your intelligence, the biggest factor in laptop weight is the physical size of the chassis. And for a laptop, that correlates with screen size. If you're cool with a 13-inch or 14-inch display, you've got plenty of ultralights to choose from; if you want a jumbo 17-inch screen, look to LG (known better for appliances) with its LG Gram Pro 17 weighing a feathery 3.2 pounds.
As you'd expect, most weight-savers are smaller than that, though it's up to you how small is too small. The most popular panel sizes for light laptops are 13.3 and 14 inches. Resolution is usually 1080p full HD (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), 1440p (2,560 by 1,440 pixels), or 4K UHD (3,840 by 2,160 pixels). Many laptops fall somewhere in between, with a better-than-FHD resolution that's still less detailed than 4K.
While it can be tempting to revel in the ultrafine detail of a 3K or 4K display for applications such as image editing or video streaming, don't be ashamed if your needs (and budget) favor the everyday productivity of a 1080p panel. Besides getting a perfectly adequate screen (something that can't be said for the older standard of 1,366 by 768 pixels), you'll get substantially better battery life, all else being equal.
Light Laptop Trends: Slim Bezels, Squarer Screens
Excess bulk is the enemy of weight, so look for a laptop with a high screen-to-body ratio—in other words, thin rather than thick bezels surrounding the display. (Ditto for a unit without wide borders on either side of the keyboard.)
Another detail related to screens and bezels concerns a panel aspect-ratio migration underway. A big trend recently is the move of many popular laptops (from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others) away from the typical 16:9 screen aspect ratio to a squarer 16:10 or 3:2. This allows for more vertical viewing space for web page viewing, spreadsheet browsing, and more. It's something to watch for, especially if you'll use your light laptop more for productivity work than video viewing. (The 16:9 ratio is the best literal fit for the latter, but not much else.)
Light Laptops That Turn Into Tablets: Detachable 2-in-1 Laptops
What if you'd like to indulge your inner Charles Lindbergh and redesign your laptop for travel, in the same way the trans-Atlantic pioneer swapped out the Spirit of St. Louis' seat for a wicker one to save weight? There used to be notebooks that let you replace their optical drives with empty weight-saving slices, but designs of that kind (not to mention, um, optical drives) are history.
However, you can opt for a 2-in-1 tablet-style laptop that lets you remove its keyboard cover. This gives you two choices: carry just the tablet if you're viewing videos or jotting short notes with a stylus, or carry both parts along if you need to type something. A tablet and its thin keyboard cover or folio usually weigh less than a conventional clamshell laptop.
Of course, detachables aren't the only 2-in-1 hybrid laptops—there are convertibles whose screens flip and fold from laptop to tablet mode, propping up for kiosk or easel-like presentation modes in between. Several of these qualify as light, though their versatile hinges add some weight compared with clamshells.
What Are the Features to Look for in a Light Laptop?
If you're an avid PC gamer, you should know that nearly all ultralights rely on their processors' integrated graphics instead of faster-dedicated graphics—a discrete GPU is one of the first things that gets taken off the cargo roster when designers are trying to hit a weight target. Light laptops also tend to have fewer ports and expansion options than their heavier cousins. Having just a couple of ports is common.
Shop carefully if you're looking for, say, a full-size HDMI video output or a full-size SD card slot. Also, realize that some ports seen on larger laptops (such as an Ethernet port for wired networks) are seldom found on the lightest laptops. In ultralight laptops, video output is often relegated nowadays to DisplayPort over a physical USB-C port.
Fortunately, the days when light laptops lacked battery life are more or less over. Though a beefy battery pack is still the easiest route to extended run time, today's lithium-polymer cells are both weight- and energy-efficient. You can cross-index this guide against our roundups of the best battery-life laptops and the best ultraportables . But rest assured that we factored battery life into our top picks here.
Ready to Buy the Right Light Laptop for You?
By now, it's clear—you don't have to strain your arm and shoulder to carry real productivity power. To go deeper with the models we selected, check out the detailed spec breakout included in this story of the best light laptops we've tested. It's not comprehensive for every light model we've tested, since we review so many systems, but we refresh it frequently with the best of the best. Meanwhile, safe travels and happy landings.
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