(Credit: René Ramos; cmgirl, zentilia, seveniwe / Shutterstock.com)
In order to provide freedom and flexibility for today's mobile workforce, many businesses supply their employees with laptops—the modern, portable powerhouses of computing. So as we do every year, we asked the PCMag audience of working folks and IT managers to rate the best laptop brands. They did so with great enthusiasm, weighing in on everything from setup and ease of use to battery life and tech support. After the survey concluded, we got straight to work tallying scores and crunching numbers. Our goal? To zero in on the best work laptops on the market, as chosen by hundreds of working professionals across the country. Read on to see the results.
Also be sure to check out this year's Readers' Choice Award Winners for Laptops and Tablets!
Business Choice: Laptops 2024
With its highest score for overall satisfaction in this survey since 2009, Apple rides high as the top laptop brand for work, as it has for more than a decade and a half of this survey. This is according to those who use MacBooks to get work done. It's not just the satisfaction number driving success—almost all of Apple's scores are stellar, most at 9.0 or higher, with one big exception.
That exception is price. Of the four vendors we have in our results for work use, Apple scores the lowest for satisfaction with cost. This isn't uncommon in our surveys, in particular with Apple products; scores that are otherwise generally high for products people consider overpriced underscores that paying more can sometimes be satisfying.
Because not everyone can or will utilize a Mac when we live in a (mostly) Windows-based work world, we also give an award to the top vendor of Windows laptops. For the second year, that company is Lenovo. The maker of ThinkPads and several other laptop brands earns great scores, the best against the other Windows platformers here (Dell and HP). Lenovo laptops stand out with particularly high numbers for setup, reliability, tech support, and the quality of their touchscreens.
That's not to say that Dell and HP score poorly, though. In other surveys, these numbers might be big winners, but it's hard to compete with the adoration that users have for Apple and Lenovo.
Because it's always interesting to see the ongoing, decades-long battle between the top operating systems play out, we specifically asked readers to rate their laptop operating systems. They did so based on our typical criteria such as satisfaction, ease of use, and reliability, as well as categories like software compatibility, the quality of the included apps/software/utilities, and the hardware options available for each OS.
No surprise: Apple's macOS comes out on top, with numbers that best Windows in every single category except one. And even that—software/app compatibility—is a simple tie.
Overall, Apple's got the advantage in the software/OS department to go along with the hardware advantage seen above.
Business Choice: IT Laptops 2024
Usually, there can be only one winner, and that was the case last year when we asked IT managers to rate laptops for the first time. They gave HP just enough points to push ahead of the competition from the other big players in fleet deployment of laptop computers.
This year, HP's overall satisfaction number went up—but so did Dell's, by an even larger jump. This puts the two in a tight tie for IT-managed laptops. It could be argued that HP's lead in categories like cost, setup, and reliability are a tie-breaker…but so could Dell's scores for tech support, repairs, and remote management (all categories where HP doesn't have enough response to have a score), plus a high likelihood that someone would recommend Dell laptops to a colleague.
Ultimately, both HP and Dell are excellent options for someone in IT to consider, and both earn this year's Business Choice award for IT-managed laptops.
Don't discount Lenovo, though. While its slightly lower overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend numbers leave it without an award this year, it has some high scores of its own, such as ease of use, battery life, display quality, and durability.
HP, Dell, and Lenovo are all among the biggest names in US Windows-based laptops and it shows. They're all in a dead-heat competition to win the hearts of minds of IT managers.
For our in-depth reviews, read The Best Work Laptops for 2024.
Full Results
The PCMag Business Choice survey for Laptops & Tablets was in the field from January 29 to February 20, 2024. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read the survey methodology.
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