Best Laptops in 2022

 

It's time to know about the best laptops at ces 2022. we've got gaming laptops. We've got business laptops, we've got new chips from intel and amd. But largely i think it's a story about how laptops and tablets and computers in general are evolving to meet our needs as remote workers, hybrid workers, work from home. Sometimes workers there's something for everybody out there.

There are some big themes and cut across a lot of the laptops and tablets and
computers that we're seeing here at ces 2022.I think the primary thing is we're
finally getting systems that are designed around what we're doing now which is hybrid work and remote work going to the office, sometimes in hotel desking and that includes things like having a full hd 1080 resolution webcam
as a default which we really have not had in a lot of systems up until now
even though. We're doing these web meetings and video meetings all the time.
We're also seeing a lot of gaming laptops with amd chips a lot of new stuff there. We're seeing a lot of laptops and tablets that have gpus
whether it's nvidia or amd or the new intel arc that don't really look and
feel like gaming laptops that hardware is getting into a wider range of systems.
And another interesting theme is secondary screens are getting another
turnit bat for years now we've occasionally seen pc makers try to put a
second screen into a laptop either inside like next to the keyboard or on
the back of the lid they've never really taken off i would have thought everyone
would have given up on that by now but we've seen several laptops this year
that have that secondary screen again ironically.I think the decision was made by a lot of companies and a lot of us not to go to las vegas in person kind of late in the game. 

 

So our impressions of a lot of these laptops come from the spec sheets from seeing the companies post their own videos about them and talking to them about them however there are some that we did get a chance to go see in person and check out and that definitely helped us form our opinions one of the laptops i did get a chance to go see in person was the dell xps 13 plus now the xps line has always been one of my favorites it gets a little bit better every year the 13 inch model is a really good macbook air alternative but this year dell decided to make a more premium version they're calling the plus well what makes it plus there are a bunch of design differences there are some component differences i think the first thing you're going to notice is
the fact that there's no touch pad per se it's just a big long piece of glass
covering the entire front lip of the laptop now that's not all touch pad the
actual touch sensitive part goes from kind of the alt key on this side to the
alt key on this side you have to develop some muscle memory i think over time to figure that out but i like the look and the function key row on top has been
replaced with a capacitive touch strip that does the function keys and then
flips and does the media keys you might say it's a little bit like the touch bar
on macbook pros that has been discontinued now i think that's a
legitimate criticism i think this is a little bit easier to use because there's
only two sets of buttons and you don't have to try to figure out what's
happening contextually every time that said i think they took these out so they
could fit higher power components inside this can support more powerful cpus than a regular xps 13 can and also to keep it thin they've taken the top layer the protective layer of glass off the screen basically reduced one of the layers and kind of the sandwich that makes up the display dell says that's not going to affect the ruggedness of it. 

We're going to have to wait and see but overall it's a really nice looking package. There's one weird little caveat about it it's one of the first laptops i've seen that completely eliminates the headphone jack which we thought was really scandalous when it happened in phones many years ago but we got used to it so maybe we'll get used to it in laptops also one of hp's more premium lines is the elite dragonfly they've had windows versions of that. 

For a couple of years and it's a really nice system and the gen 3 they
had at ces 2022 also very nice. You can get a big 3000 by 2000 resolution oled screen on it but i was more interested in the hp elite dragonfly chromebook, because it's a very rare premium business chromebook and it's the first chromebook i think that supports intel's vpro which is a platform that basically lets your it department remotely manage your system and not having that is a real deal breaker for a lot of big companies if they want to get chromebooks in people's hands which may make a lot of sense. But if the chromebooks don't support their business needs and their it needs then you can't do it so i think this system will help businesses get more used to using chromebooks which frankly remote schooling has taught us are frankly really good for a lot of things
it's also interesting to note the windows version of the new dragonfly is a clamshell laptop the chromebook version is actually a two in one. 

One thing i'm seeing a lot of at ces this year is that the really premium gaming
laptops are going amd and ryzen versus nvidia and intel a great example of this is a new alienware m15 r5 ryzen edition and that has got the latest parts from amd inside and of course it's a big 17 inch screen which we always like in
gaming laptops so inside you can get the ryzen 9 69 80 hx cpu and the rx 6850m xt gpu and if you don't know what those mean those are just amd's latest parts and frankly they promise to be very power efficient so this could be one of the first 17-inch gaming laptops that actually gets okay battery life but it's not only big screen laptops that are doing interesting things in gaming we're
seeing some more unconventional forms.
We've got the asus flow z13 and that is a gaming tablet a very rare thing i
remember seeing some gaming tablets years and years ago they didn't really
work out this time inside this tablet.
You can get up to an nvidia 3050 ti gpu which is frankly pretty good especially
considering it's all packed into that slate form but you could also add an
external gpu box and asus makes one of those also that's where you put a
desktop cpu in like the separate box with its own power supply and then you
plug it into your device to get that extra gpu power and then you just unplug
it and just take the slate part with you when you don't want to carry the whole
thing around lenovo always has a lot of interesting things for ces.
I'm going to be a little bit of a contrarian here and say that our pick
for the best thing is not um a fancy consumer system or a gaming system it's
actually the thinkpad z series they've got the z13 and the z16 13 inch and 16
inch models that are really really evolved business laptops the things that
really stood out about this that we liked were you can get 16 by 10 oled
displays number one oled is cool number two 16 by 10 i think is more useful for remote and hybrid work because you get a little bit more uh vertical space there especially when you're viewing documents and doing a lot of paperwork online that means a lot and they've also got those full hd webcams i talked about that are really important to have these days they've got ir facial recognition and they've even got haptic touch pads which
gives you a little kind of you know force feedback based on how you're using
the touch fan that's something else we're seeing show up in a few systems
this year and i think it's really cool another really interesting gaming laptop
we saw was the asus zephyrus duo 16. now that is one of those laptops that's
adding a secondary screen that's why it's called the duo i guess because it's
got the 16 inch main screen it's got a long kind of strip screen below that.
That's 14 inches diagonally 4k resolution it's a touch screen, and when
you open the lid that that secondary screen moves up into position underneath
it and i guess in games you could move like maps or inventory of things onto it
or if you're doing productivity things you can move certain menus or or rough
text that you want to copy and paste from down there. 

There's a bunch of different ways to use it as a secondary
display. It's not the first time we've seen this or even the first time we've
seen this from asus but this year's model with updated components and a
really nice big screen size and a really nice. Secondary screen size i think that's really impressive those are probably the overall favorites among my team we did have some honorable mentions though i'm definitely going to give a nod to the Alienware x14 which is a really thin gaming laptop from Alienware a new screen size from them they used to make 13-inch gaming laptops. I always thought were really cool they don't make those anymore now they got a 14 inch which is kind of the same thing its main selling point is that it's 14.5 inches thick, which is you know pretty thin it's a little bit heavy about four pounds and you can fit up to an nvidia rtx 3060inside.I'm also going to give an honorable mention nod to the azus zenbook 17 fold we've seen laptops and tablets with folding displays before a
couple years ago they were all the rage everybody had a prototype nothing really came of most of those this is an ambitious new version of that where it's
a 17 inch display but it's that flexible type of screen kind of like a galaxy
fold phone has so you can fold it over you can either leave it set up as a big
17-inch screen and put a wireless keyboard in front of it kind of like a
little all-in-one system or you can fold it over and have an on-screen keyboard
on the lower half and a screen on the upper half it's about a 12 and a half
inch size laptop.If you do it that way is it going to be practical who knows i
think we haven't worked out all the kinks of folding screens but the ones i've seen i've liked and i like the idea of having a really big one i'm also
going to give a nod to two other lenovo systems the yoga 9i which is really the
flagship of the yoga line it's got a redesigned hinge with a 360 degree sound
bar in it. It's got some new function keys along the side so you don't have to
do the function and hold down a function uh the fn button and hold down a
function key to do something uh and also the 7i the yoga 7i which frankly is not
as fancy but we think is spec for spec the best bang for your buck in this
product line right now and i'm also going to give an honorable mention nod
to the acer swift x's a new 16 inch size.
The swiftx has always been you know a very thin very attractive laptop line
i'd like that this is one of the first laptops we're seeing maybe even the
first with intel's new arc graphics which is intel's latest not quite a
discrete gpu but not integrated graphics something that's supposed to be a step up. I have not had a chance to test any arc systems in person yet i'm really looking forward to it and having that in a nice 16 inch screen could make this a good laptop that's you know an everyday multimedia and work laptop but can also do some gaming we're gonna have to wait and see but i am excited to check it out. 

 So these were some of the most impressive laptops we saw some based on
in-person impressions some based on reading the specs and looking at videos
of them that we saw at ces 2022. I think that we're going to continue to see laptops evolve as we go through this year and we figure out are we all going back to the office are we all going to work from home all the time are we going to do kind of half and half and how do we come up with devices and machines that are going to accommodate those needs and evolve along with us.
All right that's it for the best laptops of ces 2022.