While many powerful laptops feature powerful graphics and heatsinks, the extra bulk can add weight to your bag and leave you with a sore shoulder at the end of your commute. With new technology making components lighter than before, your laptop doesn’t have to feel like it weighs bricks. Some of the best lightweight laptops, like our favorite, the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED, can still pack great performance and a gorgeous display in a package that’s less than three pounds.
The 14-inch Asus Zenbook 14 OLED is the best lightweight laptop you can get right now.
Illustration: Forbes / Photo: Retailer
It’s not the only powerful lightweight laptop on the market, either. From the our budget pick, the bang-for-buck Acer Aspire Vero 15, to Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air M3, you can game, stream and more without worrying about back pain from lugging your laptop around. Here are the best lightweight laptops you can buy in 2024.
Best for: Everyday web browsing, office use and watching movies on a brilliant, sharp screen.
Pros:
Great performance
Crisp, vivid OLED display
Lightweight and portable
Cons:
Lacks an onboard GPU for gaming
The Asus ZenBook 14 OLED is arguably one of the best laptops around—its sibling, the Asus ZenBook S 13 OLED currently holds that crown. But the ZenBook 14 is the best lightweight laptop you can get right now. It comes with a latest-generation Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU, with 16 cores for impressive multi-threading performance. Its onboard graphics give it casual gaming power too, and lightweight games look amazing on the 3K OLED screen and a high 120HZ refresh rate. You also get up to 15 hours of mixed use battery life, making this a stellar all-round machine.
That would be enough to get this laptop on to any best-of list, but its the low weight that makes it truly stellar. At just 2.8 pounds, this is the kind of laptop that you can actually use on your lap without it weighing you down, and it’s easy to carry around all day.
Best for: Everyday web browsing, light work and entertainment.
Pros:
Affordably priced
Relatively lightweight
Eco friendly design
Cons:
Dated design
The Acer Aspire Vero 15 is a capable, affordable laptop with a relatively lightweight design that just crests three pounds. That makes it one of the heavier laptops in this roundup, despite its more modest hardware, but part of that comes as part of its eco-friendly design. It’s built mostly from recycled materials, and is designed to be easy to recycle when it reaches the end of its lifespan. It’s also relatively low power and efficient, giving you up to nine hours of battery life on mixed use.
In terms of its aesthetic, it’s not the most cutting-edge, but it has plenty of performance for everyday tasks and a half terabyte of storage giving you enough space for a few casual games and apps. It has a good selection of ports, including USB-C, USB-A and a 3.5mm jack.
Best Lightweight 2-in-1 Laptop
The Leanest And The Meanest
Best Buy
Microsoft Surface Pro 11
CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite | RAM: 16GB LPDDR5X | Graphics: Snapdragon X Elite GPU | Storage: 512GB SSD | Display: 15.6-inch | Resolution: 2,880 x 1,920 | Refresh rate: 120Hz | Battery: Up to 14 hours | Weight: 1.9 pounds
Best for: Everyday web browsing, light work, and entertainment.
Pros:
Impressive performance
Extensive battery life
Incredibly lightweight
Cons:
Type cover keyboard sold separately
Copilot AI features don’t do much
Microsoft has been trying to get Windows on ARM working for years now, and it’s finally cracked it with the Surface Pro 11. This detachable 2-in-1 device offers amazing performance, extensive battery life and a brighter OLED display, giving it the kitchen sink of capabilities in a device that weighs less than two pounds. The only reason this isn’t stealing the top spot as the best lightweight laptop overall is because you have to buy the keyboard separately.
That additional cost makes this quite an expensive laptop, but it’s still one well worth considering. Not for the AI features, which are watered down from their original plans and not that impressive, but the overall design is stellar. It works fantastically well as a laptop and tablet, no matter what task you throw at it.
Best Lightweight MacBook
Get The Apple Ecosystem Under Three Pounds
Best Buy
Apple MacBook Air M3
CPU: Apple M3 | RAM: 16GB integrated LPDDR5 | Graphics: Apple M3 GPU | Storage: 512GB SSD | Display: 13.6-inch | Resolution: 2,560 x 1,644 | Refresh rate: 60Hz | Battery: Up to 18 hours | Weight: 2.7 pounds
Best for: Running your favorite macOS apps on a lightweight laptop.
Pros:
Impressive performance
Extensive battery life
Affordable compared to MacBook Pro
Cons:
Lacks top performance of M3 Pro and M3 Max models
External monitor support not as strong as Windows
Apple’s range of M3 MacBooks are its best yet, with incredible performance from the newly upgraded CPU and GPU cores, while maintaining the impressive performance that guarantees longevity. The M3 Air is the lightest of the bunch, while maintaining strong performance with its M3 chip and 16GB of fast integrated memory. That does mean it’s not upgradeable, but it has very low latency, enhancing performance.
You get half a terabyte of storage, which is plenty for a range of apps and some local backup of photos and videos. The 13.6-inch screen is the most compact Apple offers, but it’s still retina-grade resolution, so packs a lot of pixels into its compact size for a crisp, bright image.
Best for: Playing the latest and greatest games at high detail settings and frame rates.
Pros:
Strong performance in gaming and productivity
Lightweight and portable for a gaming machine
Bright, fast display
Cons:
Battery life when gaming could be better
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 brings some serious power to the table, with one of AMD’s most powerful eight-core mobile processors and one of Nvidia’s best mobile graphics chips. Together, they deliver high-end performance for playing AAA, competitive and casual games at top detail settings at 1440p. You can even push frame rates up to the 120Hz refresh rate maximum for smoother visuals with DLSS and frame generation in compatible games.
The battery life is rated for 10 hours of mixed use, though you’re likely to get something closer to three hours in intense gaming. That’s still more than most need, but it’s worth considering if you need a lightweight laptop for extensive gaming away from a socket. Still, if you can plug it in now and again, you won’t find a better portable gaming machine than this. It looks great, performs well and if you want added battery life, you can always buy the version with the weaker RTX 4060 GPU. That comes at a lower price, too.
If you want a compact and portable laptop to give you a bigger screen than your phone for when you’re on the go, the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 is a great pick. With Chrome OS, its slightly aging hardware doesn’t slow it down much, and it has impressive battery life at almost 16 hours. It does have limited and slow storage, but this isn’t a full-size laptop. It’s a device that’s bigger than your phone and far easier to type on.
It works great as a tablet too, though, and its OLED touchscreen is both responsive and vibrant, making this a decent device for watching a movie on a train or plane. At just 2.2 pounds, this is the kind of laptop you can take anywhere with you. It’s also affordably priced, making it more accessible than most lightweight designs.
Consumer tech and electronics editor Rebecca Isaacs is an industry veteran who has been covering computer hardware for over four years. She oversees this guide and its updates, as well as our large library of laptop articles.
How We Chose The Best Lightweight Laptops
To find the best lightweight laptops, we tracked down top-rated models from tried and trusted brands, such as Asus, Dell, Apple, Lenovo and Acer, among others.
We sought out reputable laptop brands and examined the critical features of the most popular models, prioritizing processing power, RAM, graphics, storage, display size, resolution, refresh rate, weight and battery life.
We leveraged Isaacs and Martindale’s hands-on experience building, testing and reviewing computers when compiling our list of laptop recommendations.
We pored over customer reviews and made sure each pick had an average rating of at least 3.5 stars out of 5.
Laptops aren’t one-size-fits-all, so we included options to suit a variety of needs and budgets, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for gaming, and the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 as best 2-in-1.
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