The best business laptops might cost a bit. But they can help you or your employees remain productive, whether you're working from an office, or working from home. So in the long term, they're a great investment.
So, what constitutes the best business laptop? It needs to be thin and light enough to be easily portable. It needs to be sleek and professional-looking. The screen should be large enough to display documents on. And the keyboard should be comfortable enough to use for a whole work day.
It should offer enough power to be able to run office apps and display presentations, and ideally, the highest-end models should be able to handle more demanding jobs, such as video editing. Plus the battery should be powerful enough to last an entire work day without needing to be plugged in.
For more advice on buying a laptop, we also have guides to best laptops for video editing and the best student laptops.
The best business laptops in 2022
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Dell is the top dog when it comes to making slim, stylish and utterly desirable Windows laptops, and the XPS 15 is their brilliant flagship. Take this device out in any office or meeting, and you'll get a lot of appreciative looks. But it's not just about aesthetics. Dell has packed the XPS 15 with some of the most powerful mobile components you'll find in any laptop right now, so it'll easily handle pretty much any task you need to use it for. It's so powerful that you can even play games on it pretty effectively, and it's great for photo and video editing too.
All this power is packed into a stylish body that's thin and light, making it ideal if you're often working out and about. Its 15.6-inch screen is bright and vibrant, and it's backed up by a comfortable keyboard and excellent speakers. All this, plus Dell's famous build quality and support, makes it expensive, but worth it.
Lenovo make excellent laptops for business use, and this new model is a great example of that. It's thin and light, with an excellent battery life, which makes it perfect for business people who travel a lot for work.
It packs a speedy Intel i7 CPU and Intel Iris Xe graphics, has some great built-in security features and can be fitted with up to 32GB of RAM. The build quality and after sale support means this is a laptop you can confidently use for work day in day out as well.
However, for creatives, you may want to bear in mind that it only comes with integrated graphics. This means for graphic intensive tasks like 3D rendering and animation, or CAD use, this may not be for you.
Short on cash? The Acer Swift 3 is a fantastic business laptop for people who want to keep costs down. It's one of the most affordable Windows laptops out there, but it doesn't skimp on performance. In fact, it can go toe-to-toe with more expensive laptops, even though some of its hardware is showing its age a bit (it was first released in 2020).
The keyboard and trackpad are both comfortable to use, and while the chassis is a little plain, it feels robust enough that you won't worry about carrying it around with you. The 14-inch 1080p screen means working on this laptop doesn't feel cramped, and it offers enough power to handle pretty much any day-to-day office task you require of it. For heavy-duty use, however, you'll want to splash out on something a bit more capable.
Do you desire an Apple laptop above all else? Many do, partly as a fashion statement, partly because they're just so powerful and reliable.
The MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2, 2020) is by far the best business laptop Apple has made, so if you have your heart set on using a MacBook for work, this is the one to get. It's super-powerful, thanks to its Apple-designed M2 chip, and has the longest battery life ever seen in a MacBook. This thing is seriously impressive when it comes to battery, and means you can work on it all day without needing to plug it in.
As is usual with MacBooks, it also has a gorgeous Retina screen, while offering a sleek and stylish design that Apple is renowned for. The Touch Bar, a slim touch display that runs along the top of the keyboard, is a great feature, as it displays context-sensitive buttons and shortcuts that change depending on the app you're using. With the right apps, it can be a real boon to your productivity.
The only real downsides are the price and the lack of ports: just two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports (one of which is used for power), an audio jack and that's it. Read more with our MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2, 2022) review and our MacBook Pro vs MacBook Air comparison.
If you're after a business laptop with a large screen then the LG Gram 17 is our top pick, because despite its size, it remains thin and light enough to easily carry around.
Packed with some of the latest mobile tech around, including 11th generation Intel processors, Iris Xe graphics, 16GB of RAM and speedy SSD storage, this is a great performer. Battery life is also phenomenal, easily lasting around 12 hours on a single charge. Best of all, it's also incredibly light at just 2.98 lbs (1.35 kg), yet doesn't feel at all flimsy. You honestly won't expect a laptop with a 17-inch screen of feeling this light, which is a credit to LG's engineers.
The Gigabyte Aero 17 (2021) is one of the most powerful business laptops you'll find at the moment, combining a 10th generation Intel Core i9 processor with 8-cores, along with the Nvidia RTX 3080; one of the best graphics cards around right now. This makes it a brilliant business laptop for people working in a creative industry that needs to handle lots of graphically intensive workloads.
Perhaps its biggest selling point is the stunning 4K HDR screen, with 100% Adobe RGB coverage, and which is Pantone-certified as well. This ensures your creative work is going to look its very best, and keeps the colours as accurate as possible.
It also packs loads of ports, so you can plug in your memory cards and peripherals without needing adaptors. It may be overkill for many people, but if you want cutting edge performance, this is the laptop to get. For more details, see our Gigabyte Aero 17 review.
The MacBook Air (M2, 2022) is similar to the MacBook Pro, above, but about $100/£100 cheaper. It's another great choice for business use, thanks to its powerful Apple-designed M2 chip. Its fanless design also means that it is pretty much completely silent when in use. And as with previous MacBook Airs, it features a gorgeous thin and light design that makes it easy to carry around with you, which makes it a great choice for businesses people who like to travel a lot.
The fanless design means it can't quite keep pace with the MacBook Pro in heavy use cases, but for day-to-day use, the MacBook Air is a great affordable alternative to the MacBook Pro 13-inch. For more details, read our MacBook Air (M2, 2022) review and our MacBook Pro vs MacBook Air comparison.
The Asus ZenBook 13 is a business laptop that can easily go head-to-head with any Apple MacBook when it comes to pure design and power. You can choose between an AMD Ryzen 5000 series processor, or Intel 11th gen CPU, and both of these offer excellent performance.
It also has an absolutely stunning 13.3-inch OLED screen and one of the best battery lives around. You can configure it up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage, which makes this a brilliant laptop for working on, especially if you want to multitask, or store lots of large files. And that means it's a great choice for creatives looking for a classy business laptop.