Having the right laptop is now a crucial part of your business life, with more and more us requiring a device that lets us work on the go.
The best business laptops on this page all combine the latest hardware with productivity features – while also offering slimline designs and long battery lives.
The best business laptops need those long battery lives to keep you productive while out and about. No matter how powerful a notebook is, it’s no good as a business device if the battery runs out after a few measly hours.
Day-long battery lives provide mobility and productivity – essential functions for the modern workplace, whether inside a global Fortune 500 enterprise or a small business.
While compiling this list of the best business laptops, we’ve taken into consideration a number of key factors including power, battery life, feature set and sheer value for money.
This means that we’ve selected a wider range of laptops to suit most (if not all) budgets and hopefully all tastes; there’s a mix of cutting-edge products and old favourites here.
Almost all of them come with Windows 10 Pro (or Windows 10 Workstation) to enhance their business credentials.
We also have our very own price comparison tool that will compare prices and make sure you’re buying the very best business workhorse for the very best price. This list of the best business laptops of 2019 will hopefully help you find your next work notebook.
If you’re looking for a bit more power, then check out our list of the best mobile workstations, as well as our pick for the best business desktop PC.
- Here’s our full list of the best laptops of 2019
Where to buy business laptops
- Apple MacBook Pro
- Lenovo Yoga, ThinkPad and Ideapad
- HP ZBook, Elitebook, Pro and ElitePad
- Dynabook Portege, Tecra and Satellite Pro
- Fujitsu Lifebook and Celcius
- Dell Latitude, Precision and Vostro
Previous versions of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon have been the absolute best-in-class when it comes to business laptops, and this year’s model is no exception, with Lenovo delivering a thinner and smaller design with practically no trade-offs.
Despite its small size, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon comes with pretty much every feature you need in a productivity machine, making it the best business laptop money can buy. Thanks to a battery life of up to 15.5 hours, and a rapid charging feature that brings the battery back up to 80 percent capacity in only an hours, the X1 Carbon is an ultrabook that lets you keep on working while you’re on the move.
Huawei may not be the first name you think of when looking to buy a new business laptop – whereas Dell and Lenovo are two names you’d more likely associate with notebooks for work, but the Chinese company has proved to be an excellent laptop manufacturer with its new MateBook X Pro.
It has a beautiful design that will get appreciative looks in the boardroom, it’s light enough to carry around with you, and it has powerful components and excellent battery life. It’s also one of the cheaper ultrabooks on the market.
Believe it or not, Dell classifies the XPS 13 as a business laptop, albeit one that is geared towards a home office environment but business users will love the design. This ultraportable laptop – as Dell puts it – punches above its weight with Windows 10 Pro across the entire range as well as rather attractive pricing.
This award winning laptop (it won best laptop of the year from us and many others) manages to pack a 13.3-inch display into the chassis of an average 11.6-inch model. It was also refreshed in 2018 with even better components, for a much improved business laptop experience.
The laptop can be upgraded to 16GB of RAM and a 1TB M2 SSD drive. Battery life is exceptional as well with almost 22 hours of continual use when using productivity applications.
In 2019, Dell has once again given the Dell XPS 13 a boost when it comes to components, and the webcam is now placed above the screen for better video calls, which helps make the Dell XPS 13 2019 once again one of the best business laptops money can buy.
The 2018 model of the 13-inch Macbook Pro with Touch Bar is a brilliant upgrade to Apple’s formidable laptop range, and it’s one of the best business laptops money can buy.
While Microsoft had the performance edge over last year’s MacBook Pro, with the Surface Book 2, Apple has come out swinging with some seriously beefed up specs for the 13-inch MacBook Pro 2018. The 13-inch model can be configured with the latest Intel Core processors, all USB-C ports are not Thunderbolt 3, and you can have up to 16GB of RAM. If you want even more performance, the 15-inch version is worth considering, as it bumps the specs up even more.
The Lenovo Yoga C630 is hands-down the best Snapdragon-powered laptop ever made. Unlike other Windows laptops that run on Intel or AMD hardware, the Lenovo Yoga C630 runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 850 SoC. This is usually found in flagship smartphones, and it allows the Lenovo Yoga C630 to have some of the best smartphone features – but in a laptop.
So, you get instant-on startup times and 4G connectivity. This makes it one of the best business laptops because it means you don’t have to rely on Wi-Fi. You can be out almost anywhere, and as long as you have a 4G SIM installed, you can access the internet quickly and securely. The Lenovo Yoga C630 is also always connected, which means even when it is not being used, it’s still connected to the internet. So, when you next turn it on, all your emails, messages and notifications will be there waiting for you.
Best of all, it’s got a phenomenal battery life of almost 24 hours. That means it can go several work days on a single charge. The only problem is that because it doesn’t run on traditional hardware, not all applications are compatible. Hopefully that will change in the future, but if your business relies on a certain program, make sure it runs on Snapdragon or ARM hardware before you buy.
Lenovo took an existing form factor and refined it to deliver the new 2016-2017 ThinkPad E470. Powered by the 7th generation Intel Core processors, this particular SKU has a 14-inch FHD anti-glare display, powered by a discrete Nvidia Geforce 940MX 2GB GPU.
Equipped with a spill resistant keyboard, a TrackPoint and a 3+2 buttons click pad, the E470 has more than enough ports and expansion capabilities to keep the average user happy. Shame that it doesn’t do DisplayPort, so no 4K output.
We’ve been waiting years for a new MacBook Air, and it’s finally here. Now thinner, lighter and with a Retina display for the first time, it’s easily the best MacBook Air we’ve ever used, and it makes it one of the best business laptops in the world as well, thanks to its thin and light design, improved hardware for better performance (including 8th-generation processors, more RAM and faster SSDs) and affordable price. We just wish that these were full-fat U-series quad core chips, rather than the Y-series dual-core fanless processors. Still, this means that you’re going to easily get all-day battery out of this thing, which makes it one of the best Macs for travel.
Last year’s Dell XPS 15 was already one of the best laptops you could buy, but now that Dell has taken the beautiful redesign of the Dell XPS 13 and applied it here – while also making it a convertible.
This makes it easily one of the best business laptops money can buy in 2018. It looks fantastic, feels great to use and it packs one of those new Intel Kaby Lake G-series CPUs featuring ‘discrete-class’ Radeon graphics. This means that this laptop packs serious power – even if it can get a little loud.
The Surface Book 2 (13.5-inch) is another entry from Microsoft in our best business laptop list, and it’s worthy of its spot, as Microsoft has crafted one of the most powerful 2-in-1 laptops in the world.
The Surface Book 2 has some powerful enough components to handle most day-to-day tasks, and even some light gaming and video editing if you go for a model with a dedicated graphics card. If you want a bigger screen, then there is also a 15-inch version of the Surface Book 2, which comes with more powerful components.
Chromebooks might not be the most obvious devices for business laptops, but the Asus Chromebook Flip proves that they can be excellent work tools. It comes with a full-fat Intel Core processor, full HD 1080p display and backlit keyboard. ChromeOS is now a more robust operating system with plenty of tools, and if you rely on web-based CMS or Google Docs to do your work, then the Asus Chromebook Flip is an affordable, well built and handy business laptop.
