The 3 Best Business Laptops of 2025
The Acer Travelmate P6 14 is lightweight and has a sharp touchscreen display, plus it has the mix of USB-A, USB-C, and HDMI ports we like to see on business laptops. But it has a loud fan that spins up way too often, including while doing something as simple as unzipping a small file. Loud laptop fans used to be a fact of life, but the laptops we recommend now are quiet unless under heavy workloads. It’s also impossible to turn off the Acer’s AI presence sensing, which dims the display when it thinks a person has walked away from the laptop. This probably won’t be an issue for most people, but if you’re turning away from your laptop a lot—like while doing some work on an L-shaped desk—it becomes incredibly annoying waiting for a second for the computer to recognize your human body.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 has become a very good business laptop over its many iterations, but there are still a few things holding us back from recommending it. First, we noticed artifacts that looked like a slight grainy texture on the displays across the two units we tested. When we originally asked Microsoft about the same issue on the OLED version of the new Surface Pro, which launched at the same time, the company said it was an element of the touchscreen that was visibly interacting with the display. The Surface Laptop’s Snapdragon processor is also not compatible with every Windows application. (Here’s a list of major compatible apps.) This is less of an issue as more Windows applications get ported to the new chip’s architecture, but it prevents us from fully endorsing laptops with those processors. With that said, we commend Microsoft for making the newest Surface Laptop incredibly easy to repair. In addition to components being labeled and easy to remove, even the rubber feet on the bottom of the laptop are designed to be easily taken out and—crucially—put back in, rather than using cheaper glue to stick on standard feet like most manufacturers.
We tested two versions of the HP EliteBook 1040, with both OLED and non-OLED displays. These are about half a pound lighter and slightly slimmer than the EliteBook 840 we currently recommend, but after using them we don’t think the sleeker design is worth the at least $350 difference between the models. Between the two models of the EliteBook 1040 we tested, the OLED display was a drastic improvement in contrast and image quality, especially compared to the lackluster, low-quality displays often found on business laptops. As much as we liked it, the OLED display took off about 6 hours of battery life, measuring in at 10.5 hours compared to the non-OLED version’s 16.5-hour lifespan.
The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is extremely fast and has a lot of attractive features, like a slim design and sharp AMOLED display. However, it falls short as a great business laptop. It’s not repairable, and the new Snapdragon processor still isn’t compatible with all software on Windows. (Here’s a list of major compatible apps.) We’d rather recommend a laptop we know can run any Windows application, and the current benefits of Snapdragon processors aren’t significant enough to brave the uncertain waters of compatibility issues.
The Dell XPS 14 lacks USB-A and HDMI ports, and it’s heavy. This model weighs 3.7 pounds, only about half a pound more than our top pick, the HP EliteBook 840 G11, but it’s a very noticeable half pound. We also had an issue with the webcam crashing, and we found the laptop oddly difficult to open, especially one-handed.
The Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 delivered good performance in our tests, but we prefer the HP EliteBook 840 G11’s build quality, display, and webcam. Our top pick is lighter and slimmer, it’s easier to open with one hand, and its display has more contrast. This Lenovo laptop’s speakers sounded worse than those on the HP model too, and we had a brief problem with the webcam’s image flashing purple when we launched the camera.
The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro provided great performance in our tests, and it has the ports we like to see on a business laptop, but it fell short in battery life. We measured an average battery life of just under 9.5 hours, about 2.5 hours less than what we got from our top pick, the HP EliteBook 840 G11. We also prefer the HP laptop’s webcam.
Apple’s 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro are both intended for professionals—“pro” is right in the name, after all. They’re light, their screens are fantastic, their keyboards and trackpads are good, and Apple’s support is usually responsive and helpful. We have a guide to MacBooks if you prefer macOS to Windows. But these laptops currently don’t meet most of our upgradability and repairability criteria for a good business laptop. They’re difficult to repair and usually impossible to upgrade, and they include just a handful of identical ports, necessitating a pile of dongles.
Correction: A previous version of this guide referred to the HP EliteBook 840’s top lid as plastic, but it is actually made of magnesium.
This article was edited by Signe Brewster and Caitlin McGarry.
