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The Best Laptops for Video and Photo Editing

By Dave Gershgorn
Updated
The 16 inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip sitting open on a white surface, showing a picture of hilly farmland as a background.
Photo: Dave Gershgorn

Videographers and photographers on the move need a laptop that can keep up with quick deadlines and handle any task from color grading to 4K video editing. For professionals who need a laptop that doesn’t compromise on processing power, color accuracy, or battery life, the Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M3 Pro) is our undisputed recommendation. But if you prefer Windows, or if you want a laptop that you can repair and upgrade in the future, the Dell XPS 15 9530 is the best option right now due to its processing power and OLED screen. And the more-budget-friendly 15-inch M2 MacBook Air has a superb display for a laptop of its price, as well as a processor that’s easily capable of editing 1080p footage.

Everything we recommend

Our pick

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is faster than any other laptop we’ve tested for photo or video editing, and it has truly impressive battery life, to boot.

Also great

The Dell XPS 15 has a vivid 3.5K display and the processing power to edit any kind of footage on the go. It’s also more repairable and upgradable than the MacBook Pro.

Buying Options

Budget pick

The MacBook Air is a staple of many modern office desks (or home offices, these days), but it’s a surprisingly capable video-editing laptop, especially for lighter loads and 1080p footage.

Our pick

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is faster than any other laptop we’ve tested for photo or video editing, and it has truly impressive battery life, to boot.

Recommended configuration

Processor:Apple M3 ProScreen resolution:3456×2234
Graphics:18-core (integrated)Weight:4.7 pounds
Memory:18 GBTested battery life:15 hours
Storage:512 GB SSD

The Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M3 Pro) pairs a color-accurate screen with an incredibly fast laptop processor, and it delivered battery life of 15 hours in our testing. The large, 16.2-inch display offers bright images and has great contrast, so you’ll be able to see every detail in your photos or videos. And when it comes to editing, the MacBook Pro crunches through video with the power of a desktop computer. However, the laptop is a bit heavy, at 4.7 pounds, and it lacks a USB-A port, so you may still need to carry a dongle for now.

Also great

The Dell XPS 15 has a vivid 3.5K display and the processing power to edit any kind of footage on the go. It’s also more repairable and upgradable than the MacBook Pro.

Buying Options

Recommended configuration

Processor:Intel Core i7-13700HScreen:3456×2160
Graphics:Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070Weight:4.2 pounds
Memory:32 GBTested battery life:8 hours
Storage:512 GB SSD

For people who want a Windows laptop, we recommend the Dell XPS 15 9530. Among the Windows laptops we tested, it’s the one that makes the fewest compromises, giving you a nearly 4K screen, a speedy processor and graphics card, and a comfortable keyboard. The XPS 15’s RAM and storage are upgradable, too, so you’re not stuck with the same specs if you want to upgrade your system down the line.

Budget pick

The MacBook Air is a staple of many modern office desks (or home offices, these days), but it’s a surprisingly capable video-editing laptop, especially for lighter loads and 1080p footage.

Recommended configuration

Processor:Eight-core Apple M3 CPUStorage:256 GB SSD
Graphics:Ten-core Apple M3 GPUScreen:2880×1864 IPS
Memory:16 GB

Apple’s 15-inch M3 MacBook Air is now even faster than the previous M2 model, making it not just a budget option, but a possible first choice for many photographers and videographers who don’t have intensive processing needs. The M3 Air is much lighter than our top pick, so if you’re a creative pro who uses minimal editing or computer-generated effects in your work, and you carry around your laptop a lot, the 1.4-pound difference might help save your back. The M3 Air’s 15.3-inch display has a resolution of 2880×1864 and a brightness of 500 nits, so it’s bright enough to use outdoors. It nearly matches the MacBook Pro in color accuracy, and it charges on a much smaller power brick. Pros tend to gravitate toward the MacBook Pro for obvious reasons, but Apple’s chips are now so good that it’s possible you don’t need to look any further than the MacBook Air.

Dave Gershgorn has reviewed and covered technology since 2015 at publications such as Popular Science, Quartz, Medium, and now Wirecutter. He has also worked as a freelance photographer, with photos in outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The Journal News, and The Village Voice. Additionally, he was a news assistant in the New York Times photo department, mainly focusing on the Lens blog. He also took all the photos for this guide.

An editing laptop is essential for any videographer, photographer, or other media worker. These machines allow you to bring the power of a desktop computer (or most of it, at least) on-site to shoots, and they let you edit footage in any airport gate you might find yourself in.

For people who need as much power as they can possibly get on the road, we looked for laptops with features such as color-accurate displays, great battery life, the latest processors and graphics cards, and enough ports for you to plug in all your peripherals and SD cards.

If you edit photos or videos, or if you create illustrations that don’t demand ridiculously high resolutions, such as on social media, you don’t have to shell out for either of our top picks. The M2 MacBook Air, our budget pick, is powerful enough to handle any of those tasks (just a little slower) and can save you a bit of money. One of our favorite ultrabooks could also make for a tidy compromise if you prefer Windows and edit video only occasionally, or if you’re just getting started and don’t need a full professional setup.

Office-bound editors are likely to get better performance for the same price by buying or building a desktop PC. Such computers don’t need to manage battery life and can feed components far more power, and they also have more room for fans and heatsinks to keep components cool. And down the road, when your desktop computer ages, you’ll be able to upgrade it for less than it would cost to buy an entire new computer.

We have a high bar for video-editing laptops, since these machines need to contend with some of the most demanding professional workloads. Here’s how we choose which laptops to consider and test.

Performance:

  • Processor: Also referred to as the CPU, the processor is the most important component of any editing laptop. Windows users have to choose between a processor from Intel or one from AMD. For Intel, we recommend the latest, 12th or 13th generation of the Core i7 chip. If you’re looking at AMD, seek out processors with the Ryzen 5000 or 6000 designation. And if you’re buying a Mac, choose a system that uses an M3 Pro or M3 Max, as those are Apple’s newest custom-built processors.
  • Graphics card: Video editors and those who work in motion graphics should pay special attention to a system’s graphics card, or GPU. Since 2020, creative-software giant Adobe has worked to expand how GPUs can speed up editing tasks in its Premiere video-editing software, making exports up to five times faster than in previous versions of the software. Laptops with Nvidia’s latest RTX line of graphics cards have become cheaper and easier to find, so in our latest round we tested laptops with RTX 4000-series graphics. Even higher-end GPUs tend to ship in gaming laptops that are typically heavier, bulkier, and louder than the ultrabooks we consider for this guide.
  • Memory: On both Windows and Mac laptops, we recommend a baseline 16 GB of RAM for photo and video work. However, if your projects contain dozens of gigabytes of video, you should upgrade to 32 GB.
  • Storage: Most new laptops use fast NVMe drives, so you’re just shopping for how much storage you need. The smallest drive we recommend is 500 GB, but we suggest that option only if you’re already archiving video projects on external hard drives or a network-attached storage system. A 1 TB drive gives your system a bit more headroom and allows you to store a few more projects at a time.

Displays: For this round of testing, we looked for laptops with 15-inch or larger displays with a 4K resolution (or close to it). For our budget picks, we consider smaller, 13-inch displays as well.

Noise and heat: The more powerful a laptop is, the more heat its components typically generate. Some laptops we’ve tested have become so hot that they’ve literally burned our thighs when we’ve used them on our laps, so we prioritize those that stay cool under pressure. To deal with this heat, many laptops use fans, which in turn makes them noisy. We pay special attention to how loud each laptop gets under a heavy workload, but every Windows laptop we’ve tried generates some kind of fan noise.

Ports: We look for laptops with a variety of ports, but we also confirm that the connections are fast enough to handle huge media files. Thunderbolt 4 is the latest standard for USB-C ports and supports transfer speeds as high as 40 Gbps. We also check for SD card slots that support UHS-II, the modern standard.

Battery: Great battery life on a laptop feels like a superpower, and bad battery life feels like a curse. Many of the Windows laptops we’ve tested prioritize capable components and power-hungry displays at the expense of battery life. In contrast, this is where Apple laptops shine.

Size and weight: Photographers and videographers carry around enough weight in gear. We make sure to consider how heavy these laptops are, and we also check that they fit in a few different backpacks, testing the laptops in bags from Aer, Chrome Industries, Evergoods, Fjällräven, Tom Bihn, and Osprey, as well as a trusty Manfrotto camera backpack.

We run each laptop through a series of benchmarks and functional tests. After we run those benchmarks and functional tests three times, we calculate an average value for the final result. We also use each laptop for a few days to understand each machine’s strengths, shortcomings, and nuances.

To get a baseline understanding of each computer’s processing power, we first run the PCMark 10 and Geekbench 5 benchmarks on each laptop. Then we graduate to functional tests, which include exporting 4K and 1080p video in Adobe Premiere Pro. (For video pros: We export using the H.264 video standard, with two-pass variable bit rate encoding at a 50 Mbps target and maximum.) We also run graphics-intensive games on the laptops while we have them on our laps to get a sense of how much heat they would produce over long periods of time, and we take surface-temperature readings on our top picks with an infrared thermometer.

Our test for photo-editing performance relies on Photoshop’s Image Processor tool to measure how fast the CPU can rip through image transformations and color-space changes. To ensure realistic results, we use a set of 330 images that were taken on a Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera and include both JPEG and Canon RAW files.

We also transcode the movie Night of the Living Dead using Handbrake’s default Fast 1080p30 preset. This is a small video file, but it gives us another data point to illustrate how each laptop deals with video encoding.

To test the display of each laptop, we use an X-Rite i1Basic Pro and an X-Rite OEM i1 Display colorimeter. With these devices we measure each screen’s color accuracy and contrast, as well as how many colors the screen can display, using customized tests in the Calman Ultimate 2021 color-calibration suite. This software was provided to Wirecutter by Portrait, the company that develops Calman.

Finally, to test battery life, we set each laptop to the same brightness (as measured by a Spyder 5 colorimeter) and run Wirecutter’s standard laptop and pro-tablet battery test. This test employs a custom Chrome extension that simulates web browsing and video playback. However, video editing takes a bit more horsepower than surfing the net, so keep in mind that those numbers are best used to compare the battery life of laptops in this guide against one another, rather than as a measure of how these systems would perform under a heavy workload.

The 16 inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip sitting open and plugged in on a white surface, showing a picture of hilly farmland as a background.
Photo: Dave Gershgorn

Our pick

The 16-inch MacBook Pro is faster than any other laptop we’ve tested for photo or video editing, and it has truly impressive battery life, to boot.

Recommended configuration

Processor:Apple M3 ProScreen:3456×2234
Graphics:18-core (integrated)Weight:4.7 pounds
Memory:18 GBTested battery life:15 hours
Storage:512 GB SSD

When it comes to editing video on a laptop, there’s no competition for the Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M3 Pro), unless you pay thousands more. In our tests, Apple’s latest pro laptop was up to twice as fast as any Windows laptop we evaluated on editing, rendering, and exporting video. The MacBook Pro’s large, color-accurate display and quick processor made it easy for us to precisely tune still images, too.

The MacBook Pro is faster than the competition. The Pro exported a one-minute 4K video in 1 minute 25 seconds on average, in contrast with the Dell XPS 15’s average of 2 minutes 29 seconds. This result is also about 45 seconds faster than what we saw from the previous-generation MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor, and it is about two minutes faster than the original M1 Pro chip we tested. We tested two versions of the MacBook Pro, one with the M3 chip and another with the M3 Max, and given their relative performance and how Apple’s chips have performed in the past, we’re confident in recommending the mid-range M3 Pro processor. If price is no option, though, the M3 Max is wildly fast—up to three times faster than the M3 chip in some tasks and benchmarks.

It’s especially fast working with media. When converting a low-resolution movie with a run time of an hour and a half to another format (a process also known as transcoding), the MacBook Pro processed the file in 1 minute 15 seconds, finishing more than a minute faster than any other machine. This is a pretty short test, so we didn’t see as much improvement in this regard, but it’s still nice to see faster performance in comparison with other, non-Apple machines.

The right side of the 16 inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip showing its ports.
Photo: Dave Gershgorn

The MacBook Pro has an excellent display. It’s sharp, with great contrast, and it was generally pleasant to look at for extended periods of time. The table below shows how the MacBook Pro scored in our color-accuracy tests, including whether the grays it produced were tinted with color, and how true the colors were to real life. As usual, we found Apple’s displays to be stellar. Apple also has a tool to help calibrate the XDR displays on the MacBooks Pro, if you want to ensure the most precise color.

Color accuracy test results

MacBook Pro (16-inch, M3 Max)MacBook Pro (14-inch, M3)MacBook Pro (16-inch, M2 Pro)MacBook Air (M3, 2024)Dell XPS 15 9530
Grayscale1.87271.432.441.681.3928
ColorChecker1.28131.071.321.380.7874
Saturation1.120.901.261.250.7356
Lower numbers are better. The Calman color-calibration software generates these scores by using the Delta E 2000 equation to determine the perceived difference between colors. Scores under 2.0 indicate that inaccuracies can be found when the viewer closely compares the results against the original, and scores under 1.0 mean that inaccuracies are imperceptible to the human eye.

Its screen is bright enough for editing in bright conditions. The MacBook Pro’s 500 nits of brightness means you’ll be able to see the screen clearly in sunny or bright conditions. But unlike previous iterations of the MacBook Pro, this model didn’t allow us to reach 1,000 nits of brightness from the normal screen-brightness controls. On both the 14-inch and 16-inch versions, we could get to only about 500 nits. This restriction reflects the 500-nit standard-definition brightness that Apple lists on its website, but the limitation still makes this laptop’s screen less bright than previous versions. The panel might hit 1,000 nits for HDR content, but we were unable to replicate that in our standard tests.

It has a decent webcam. The MacBook Pro’s webcam produced a sharp picture for video conferencing when we used it in good lighting situations—and even in lower-light situations, when we used only the light from the screen itself, the image quality was acceptable. The camera is housed in a black notch at the top of the display, a design that didn’t interfere much with our day-to-day use of the laptop.

The MacBook Pro runs cool. We also don’t have much to say about the MacBook Pro’s noise and heat, mainly because we didn’t notice much of either. The system stayed cool even during our export tests, making it easy for us to keep it on our laps even when the computer was doing heavy lifting. In this regard, the MacBook Pro had an advantage over every Windows laptop we tested, all of which became warm to the touch and turned on an audible fan when the processor was under a heavy editing load.

The left side of the 16 inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip showing its ports and charging cord plugged in.
Photo: Dave Gershgorn

The MagSafe port is here to stay. Like the 2021 MacBook Pro, the 2023 models have a MagSafe charging port, an SD card reader, an HDMI port, and three USB-C ports, in addition to retaining the headphone jack. We like that USB-C ports occupy both sides of the laptop, which limits the possibility of a chunky cable blocking valuable port space. All of the USB-C ports on the MacBook Pro are Thunderbolt 4 enabled, which means you can charge your laptop, hook it up to external displays, and transfer data at the fastest speed available on either side of the laptop. However, it has no USB-A ports, and the 14-inch M3 model of the laptop doesn’t have a third USB-C port on the right side. If you’re frequently working with USB-C peripherals, especially ones that are bulky and block other ports, you’ll want to get a version with Pro or Max chips to get the third USB-C port.

The laptop has great battery life. In our battery test, which simulates web browsing and video playback at a standardized brightness across every device, the 16-inch MacBook Pro was again the top performer. It lasted about 15 hours, almost twice as long as the Dell XPS 9530. The 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro lasted 13.5 hours in the same test.

It’s not the most portable laptop, but you can still easily travel with it. The MacBook Pro is large, but it still fits inside backpacks with ease. The size has allowed Apple to cram a 16.2-inch display into the machine, as well as a 100-watt-hour battery, the largest allowed on domestic flights in the United States. However, the 14-inch version has a smaller, 70-watt-hour battery, which mostly accounts for its slightly shorter battery life.

It’s essentially impossible to repair or replace components. Apple has soldered the processor, RAM, and storage to the computer’s motherboard. The inability to repair these parts shortens their lifespan.

The camera notch can be annoying. If an application has more than seven or eight menu tabs, the notch can block some of them. Apple has released a simple workaround, allowing you to switch certain apps to display their menu items below the menu bar.

There are no USB-A ports. That means older peripherals won’t work without a dongle. USB-C has been around for a while, however, and although it's a little annoying to fiddle with a dongle, we’ve found that few of our accessories still require the older cable.

It’s pretty heavy. The 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs 4.7 pounds without the charger or any additional accessories. If you’re tucking it into a Pelican case with other gear, that might not be a big deal, but the weight adds up in a backpack or bag. (The laptop actually weighs about the same as a standard brick. If you’re unsure about whether you can tolerate the weight, carrying around a brick in your backpack could be a fun test.) We’re recommending the 16-inch version of the laptop over the 14-inch model because it provides more real estate for video editing. But if weight is a concern for you, consider the smaller laptop.

Our also great pick the Dell XPS 15 9530, set on a light blue background with the lid open to an abstract water and landscape background.
Photo: Dave Gershgorn

Also great

The Dell XPS 15 has a vivid 3.5K display and the processing power to edit any kind of footage on the go. It’s also more repairable and upgradable than the MacBook Pro.

Buying Options

Recommended configuration

Processor:Intel Core i7-13700HScreen:3456×2160
Graphics:Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060Weight:4.2 pounds
Memory:32 GBTested battery life:8 hours
Storage:512 GB SSD

If you specifically need a Windows laptop for media editing right now, or if you just don’t like Macs, we recommend the Dell XPS 15 9530. It has a sharp, bright OLED screen, and it allows you to upgrade the RAM and storage. Dell also has published guides on how to replace most of the laptop’s components yourself.

It’s nearly as fast as the MacBook. The XPS 15 performed well on all of our real-world tests. It exported our test 4K video in just under two and a half minutes, more than a minute faster than last year’s models. When working with photos, its performance was above average, and it processed more than 300 images in just under seven minutes.

The XPS 15 has a large trackpad and a spacious keyboard. Photo: Dave Gershgorn

It’s also user-upgradable and repairable. We tested a version of the XPS 15 with an Intel Core i7-13700H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, and 32 GB of RAM. The replaceable components, such as the memory and storage, become readily accessible once you take off the laptop’s back plate. This kind of repairability, alongside Dell’s published repair guides, is to be applauded for the long-term value it adds to a laptop like this.

The display is fit for professional editing. The XPS 15’s 3.5K display is sharp, and thanks to its OLED technology it has an infinite contrast ratio. OLED displays can individually turn off pixels, rather than just dimming them, so the screen’s deepest blacks are created by a true absence of light. This display is fantastic, but for some reason Dell hides its potential behind a truly bad “Vivid” color profile hidden in the preinstalled MyDell software. Switch the display setting from “Vivid” to “Internet” and the laptop takes the display’s color inaccuracies from obvious to imperceptible to the human eye.

Color accuracy test results

MacBook Pro (16-inch, M3 Max)MacBook Pro (14-inch, M3)MacBook Pro (16-inch, M2 Pro)MacBook Air (M3, 2024)Dell XPS 15 9530
Grayscale1.87271.432.441.681.3928
ColorChecker1.28131.071.321.380.7874
Saturation1.120.901.261.250.7356
Lower numbers are better. The Calman color-calibration software generates these scores by using the Delta E 2000 equation to determine the perceived difference between colors. Scores under 2.0 indicate that inaccuracies can be found when the viewer closely compares the results against the original, and scores under 1.0 mean that inaccuracies are imperceptible to the human eye.

Our tests also confirmed that the XPS 15 can cover the entire sRGB color gamut and 99% of the DCI-P3 gamut, offering the most color-space coverage of any laptop we tested.

It has a great selection of ports, including an SD card reader. The XPS 15 9530 has two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4, as well as a third USB-C port on the other side of the laptop that supports USB 3.2 Gen 2. The only other ports are an SD card reader and a headphone jack. If you’ve fully moved to USB-C accessories and peripherals and require only an SD card slot, this laptop has all the ports you need. But if you use niche tools such as colorimeters to calibrate your display, or even if you just have a favorite wired mouse, you still need a dongle for those USB-A attachments.

It’s easy to carry and has quality construction. We like how slim the XPS 15 feels to carry around, and it weighs about 4.2 pounds. The laptop’s keys have a nice, deep travel, and the trackpad is large and sensitive. These features, plus the display’s slim bezel, make the XPS 15 a pleasure to use.

The webcam could be better. The 9530’s camera embedded in its incredibly thin display bezels only has a resolution of 720p, while many laptops have upgraded to a 1080p camera. This isn’t too noticeable in good lighting conditions, but in darker rooms or at night the image is blurry and grainy.

The battery life is underwhelming. The XPS 15 lasted an average of 8 hours, which is shorter than the last-gen model. This is still enough for a day’s work away from an outlet, but keep in mind that under a heavy load the laptop will eat through its battery even quicker.

It runs a little hot. We noticed that the fans on the XPS 15 would start to turn on after a few minutes of stressing the GPU, which is a capable Nvidia GeForce RTX 430750 Ti. When we ran a game with the computer positioned on our laps to tax the computer’s CPU and GPU, we found the bottom of the laptop hotter than the previous generation. It’s not unbearably hot, but could be uncomfortable on your lap for an extended period of time. While we tested a version with the RTX 4070, the RTX 4060 option will give you most of the performance for $600 less.

An Apple 15-inch MacBook Air (M3, 2024) open to the home screen.
Photo: Dave Gershgorn

Budget pick

The MacBook Air is a staple of many modern office desks (or home offices, these days), but it’s a surprisingly capable video-editing laptop, especially for lighter loads and 1080p footage.

Recommended configuration

Processor:Eight-core Apple M3 CPUStorage:256 GB SSD
Graphics:Ten-core Apple M3 GPUScreen:2880×1864 IPS
Memory:16 GB

The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air is a great laptop for editing photos and videos, because it has a big screen with fantastic color accuracy, surprisingly nice speakers, and Apple’s capable M3 processor. We think many photographers and video editors with simple workflows should consider buying this latest MacBook Air instead of a MacBook Pro, to save money, and weight in their camera bag. In our testing, we found editing on the M3 Air to be nearly as fast as on our top pick, which is much pricier.

It’s best for lighter workloads. Our main pick, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, is better for video and photo editors in many ways, since it’s significantly faster, has a higher-resolution screen, and has far more ports. But on the other hand, the MacBook Air is 1.4 pounds lighter, which might be a bonus for some people who need to carry a lighter backpack. It also edits 4K video nearly as fast as our Windows pick, taking 2 minutes 51 seconds on average, compared to the Dell XPS 15’s 2 minutes and 29 seconds. We think for students, 1080p video editors, and photographers, the MacBook Air is up to the task. If you’re editing hundreds of gigabytes of 4K footage, however, you’ll want the MacBook Pro.

Color accuracy test results

MacBook Pro (16-inch, M3 Max)MacBook Pro (14-inch, M3)MacBook Pro (16-inch, M2 Pro)MacBook Air (M3, 2024)Dell XPS 15 9530
Grayscale1.87271.432.441.681.3928
ColorChecker1.28131.071.321.380.7874
Saturation1.120.901.261.250.7356
Lower numbers are better. The Calman color-calibration software generates these scores by using the Delta E 2000 equation to determine the perceived difference between colors. Scores under 2.0 indicate that inaccuracies can be found when the viewer closely compares the results against the original, and scores under 1.0 mean that inaccuracies are imperceptible to the human eye.

It has a professionally-accurate display. The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air also has a fantastic screen for media work, with a 2880x1864 resolution and 500 nits of brightness. It’s nearly as color-accurate as the MacBook Pro, though it only covers about 80% of the DCI/P3 color gamut and lacks HDR capabilities of the XDR display.

You’ll want the extra RAM. The budget configuration we recommend prioritizes 16 GB of RAM over Apple’s very expensive storage, which costs $200 to add 256 GB. You’ll likely be utilizing high-speed external SSD drives for storage anyway, so we recommend using the laptop’s internal storage for applications and documents and storing everything on your external working drives.

If you’d like to read more about the 15-inch MacBook Air, check out our guide to the best MacBooks.

Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung and other manufacturers are releasing an onslaught of new Windows laptops powered by Intel’s new Core Ultra chips, which have a new Neural Processing Unit (or NPU) that handles AI processing tasks like image recognition and audio processing. We’ll adapt our tests to measure the efficacy of this new technology in the coming months. We got to see a few of the new laptops in action at CES.

The Acer Swift X 14 has Intel’s new Core Ultra processors and up to a RTX 4070 graphics card. It also has a 2.8K OLED display, and though it’s a little smaller than we’d like, it’s priced at $1,400, so we’ll need to test it out to see if it can be our new budget pick. It will be available in February, according to Acer.

Dell has relaunched its XPS line, which we recommended for years in the past, and will now be making the $1,300 XPS 13, $1,700 XPS 14, and $1,900 XPS 16. The laptops will be released in Q1 2024, and they’ll have the new Intel Core Ultra chips and up to the Nvidia RTX 4050. We’re hoping the new design keeps most of what we already like about the XPS laptops.

The MSI Creator 16 AI Studio can be configured with the latest and fastest components, including Intel’s new Core Ultra line and Nvidia’s RTX 4090. It also has a 4K OLED screen with 120 Hz refresh rate. But this makes it very expensive, starting from $3,000 and topping out at $4,000, based on the configuration. We’re also looking forward to seeing how hot this laptop gets and how long it lasts on a charge–all of these powerful components typically need a lot of energy.

Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 9i and Samsung’s Galaxy Book 4 Ultra are also strong contenders with many of the same specs as the competition: They also have the Intel Core Ultra series processors, up to Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics cards, plus similar high-resolution displays. The Yoga Pro 9i will be available starting in April and start at $1,700, and Samsung hasn’t released availability for the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra outside of Korea.

Apple 13-inch MacBook Air (M2): We think this laptop is great for many people, but not for photo or video editors. The smaller screen is too cramped for comfortable editing, and we’ve found that the 13-inch version of the M2 MacBook Air got uncomfortably hot during long editing tasks.

Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro (M3): Compared with Apple’s other laptops, its entry-level MacBook Pro (M3) is too expensive, even to be a budget pick. Creative professionals who buy a MacBook Pro with the M3 chip will be underwhelmed by its performance compared with Apple’s M3 Pro chip. And typical consumers don’t need the main reason to upgrade: the XDR display with 120 Hz ProMotion. In terms of displays, Apple’s MacBook Air displays already offer 500 nits of brightness (compared with 600 nits on the MacBook Pro), they’re about as color accurate, and most people won’t notice a lack of HDR support. The M3 MacBook Pro is also about a pound heavier than our budget pick, the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2: The $2,000 Surface Laptop Studio 2’s main differentiator is its hinged screen, which allows for the bottom of the touchscreen display to pop away from the laptop and tent over the keyboard and trackpad in two different orientations. Whether this is useful is completely based on preference, but we couldn’t find any obvious or universal benefits for photo or video editors. The screen is also just a bit too heavy for the laptop’s hinge, when you pick up the laptop when it's open, the screen flops back under its own weight. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is powerful and quiet, but the Dell XPS 15 we recommend is better in most ways. The Dell can be configured with a higher-resolution and more accurate display, it exported our 4K videos about 30 seconds faster than the Surface Laptop Studio 2, and it’s far more repairable. It’s also about $1,000 cheaper.

Acer Swift X: We like the power and battery life of the Acer Swift X, but we can’t recommend it due to its 1080p screen. If you need a small and powerful laptop with the Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics but use only external monitors for your editing work, you might want to consider the Swift X. Note that the charging jack is flimsy, and we question how long it would last before breaking.

Acer Predator Triton 300 SE: In testing the Predator Triton 300 SE, we found that it was hotter and louder than the competition, with worse editing performance. Its screen also has a lower resolution than that of our similarly priced budget pick, the 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. It’s a great budget gaming laptop, but it’s not the best choice for media editors.

Dell Latitude, Precision, and Alienware lines: Dell laptops outside the XPS line generally don’t meet our minimum specifications for media-editing machines, especially when it comes to display resolution. Most of the laptops that Dell offers don’t have resolutions higher than 1440p, which is low when you’re spending $2,000 or more for an editing laptop.

Razer Blade: We considered Razer’s line of gaming laptops, which offer high-end components and a sleek design. But when we tried configuring one for media-editing tasks, certain upgrades such as a 4K display brought the total to more than $1,000 beyond the price of our top pick.

The latest version of this article was edited by Arthur Gies and Caitlin McGarry.

Meet your guide

Dave Gershgorn

Dave Gershgorn is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter. He’s been covering consumer and enterprise technology since 2015, and he just can’t stop buying computers. If this weren’t his job, it would likely be a problem.

Further reading

  • Some of our picks for best laptop, placed around each other in a grid. Some of them are open and active while others are shut.

    The Best Laptops

    by Kimber Streams and Dave Gershgorn

    From budget-friendly options to thin-and-light ultrabooks to powerful gaming laptops, we’ve spent hundreds of hours finding the best laptops for most people.

  • An ASUS Zenbook open to a Kant essay sitting on a green background among textbooks, pen, and paper.

    The Best Laptops for College Students

    by Kimber Streams

    Of all the laptops we recommend, these offer the best balance of performance and a low price—and that makes them our favorite laptops for college students.

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