Screen size: 12.3 inch
Weight: 1.1kg
Battery life: 10 hours
Operating system: Chrome OS
Storage space: 128GB-512GB
Chromebooks have been around for a while now: small, lightweight laptops that use Google's operating system and prioritise convenience over everything else. You won't find programmes like Word or Excel here; they've been replaced by Google's own suite of applications, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Gmail, which habitually save files to the cloud rather than your hard drive. The quietly revolutionary idea is that you can pick up your work wherever you are, whatever device you're using. No more facepalming when you realise you've left that work presentation on your laptop at home.
For a while, Google essentially franchised ChromeOS out to hardware manufacturers like HP, so Chromebooks were always made by other companies. The Pixelbook is Google's first attempt to go it alone, allowing the creators of the OS to show exactly how their system should be handled.
The overarching idea is for the Pixelbook to rival the Apple Macbook, and for my money, it's a huge success. It's blessedly light and portable, easy to use, gorgeous to behold, and endowed with the fantastic ability to morph into a tablet at the drop of a hat.
Google have designed a winner here. The Pixelbook comes in a sleek aluminium silver with a white glass top to break up the design. It looks – and feels – premium. Inside, you’ve got a very flat keyboard which is really comfortable to type on and never feels cramped, despite its small size. I found it easy to work on all day long (although I did grow frustrated of the tiny lag between pressing the CAPS LOCK key and caps lock actually activating, which resulted in this sort of thing: aLl of my sentences ended up looking like i Couldn’t type properly. Still, that's probably my fault for not using the shift key like a normal person.)
With the screen closed, the whole thing is just 20.6mm thin, so it's ideal for sliding into a backpack or briefcase. The price you pay for the slimness is the lack of ports, with just two USB-C included and no HDMI to share your screen with a television.
Its skinny size is matched by the lightness of the device – just slightly more than a bag of sugar. I took the Pixelbook to and from work every day and barely noticed it in my bag.
The Pixelbook also has 360 degree hinges, and probably makes the most convincing case for them of any of the laptops I tested. Spin the screen all the way around and the computer becomes a tablet. Importantly, it feels right as a tablet – about the same size and weight – whereas other laptops feel too clunky once they're spun to tablet mode. The keys stay flush to the back of the screen thanks to a pleasingly effective magnet.
As for the screen quality, it's excellent. The Pixelbook has a 2400×1600 pixel resolution (better than a HD TV, but not quite as good as a 4K one), so it's bright, sharp and shows colours really well. It's not the biggest screen on this list – Google list it as 12.3 inches, but if you discount the bezels, it’s an even 12 – but it looks as crystalline as any.
Battery life is good at ten hours of usage, but where it really shines is in standby. I left my test device in standby with the screen closed for about four days over Christmas and it only lost about 10pc of battery life. To me, that's useful: you can leave it on a computer desk at home, much like your chunky old desktop, and not worry that it won't work the next time you sit down to write to a friend.
The Pixelbook comes with a stylus, as is the fashion at the moment. I found the Pixel Pen to be the best stylus I've ever used – it felt precise and sat perfectly in my hand. What did I use it for? Well, a bit of drawing, a bit of painting, some handwritten notes. Yeah, OK, styluses are still gimmicky – but at least Google's one works well.
All this to say, the Google Pixelbook is the best laptop for everyday use. I love the design, I love how light it is, I love the look and feel, and the speed is great. I’d buy one in a heartbeat... if money was no object.
And therein lies my one real gripe with the Pixelbook. Circa £1,000 feels a little on the punchy side to me. It's probably indicative of Google aiming for Apple's market, but I think it's a shame they haven't found a way to sell a version of the model for a couple of hundred quid cheaper, because I can see vast swathes of young people and students shelling out £800 for this, but not £1,000.
Anyway, if you've got the money, this is the one to buy.
2. Microsoft Surface Laptop 3
Screen size:13.5-15 inches
Weight: 1.25kg
Battery life: Up to eleven hours
Operating system: Windows
Storage space: 128GB-1TB
Microsoft’s answer to the Macbook is, in a word, excellent. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s simple, it’s well-designed. The whole thing is incredibly finely tuned. Every element is carefully considered and designed with the user in mind. In their advertising, Microsoft has clearly pitched their Surface range to that nebulous range of professionals known as “creatives”. And, to be fair, you can see why. With a choice of 13 or 15 inch touchscreens, a stylish, clutter-free design, and an incredibly fast processor, the Surface Laptop 3 is ideal for artistic, musical, or design pursuits. But to imply that it is only good for that small minority is to undersell the Surface Laptop 3. Simply put, I can’t imagine anyone picking this thing up and not immediately falling in love with it.
At just 1.25kg, the 13.5-inch model that I’ve been testing is one of the lightest laptops out there. I frequently found myself running back to my flat to pick it up, thinking my bag was too light to contain a laptop, only to discover that it had been with me the whole time. And it’s stylish too, I have been using the sandstone (don’t you dare call it rose-gold, a stern Microsoft exec told me) version and it has attracted plenty of attention. The keyboard is a highlight. It is simply a joy to type on, with the subtlest grooves in the keys to make it more comfortable and presses are almost entirely silent. The keyboard also doubles as what Microsoft calls an “omnisonic speaker”, that just means that sound comes through the keyboard rather than through a separate speaker grill, saving room on the laptop’s body while still delivering impressive sound quality. It also has the added (albeit unintentional) benefit of delivering a seriously immersive experience when you’re listening to music while typing.
By saving speaker-space, the Surface Laptop 3 manages to squeeze in a nice large trackpad which is 20pc bigger than on the Surface Laptop 2, which is always appreciated. As with most laptops, the Surface Laptop 3 comes in a variety of permutations. The screen sizes are the obvious differences but internally there are a few chipsets on offer. You can go for the 10th Generation Intel chipsets or AMD chips. The average user won’t notice the difference, to be frank, but both are frighteningly fast. I’m particularly enamoured with the fact that the laptop can launch itself from standby to working in just two seconds, as opposed to the 30 or so I’m used to waiting on my decidedly dated old machine.
In terms of ports, Microsoft has done reasonably well to include connections for USB, USB-C, SD card, and a headphone jack, though only one of each. If I was to make a minor suggestion, I’d have added more of each, though admittedly I never needed to use more than one at a time.
There are bugbears, to be sure, even the cheapest variant is an extortionate sum to pay for a laptop, even one as good as this, and the battery life is merely serviceable certainly not fantastic. I also sort of resent that Microsoft didn’t see fit to include a SIM card slot or E-SIM functionality so the laptop could connect to the internet on the go.
If Microsoft was to produce a budget version, I have absolutely no doubt that it’d be historic; considered one of the best laptops in history. Even so, this one is nothing to sniff at, if you can spare the money and need a new laptop, it’s a must-buy.
3. Honor Magic Book 14
Until about a year ago I'd never even heard of Honor, but it's rapidly becoming one of my favourite tech brands out there. Why? Well, frankly, the prices. First there was the Honor 9X; a decent smartphone costing just £219.99. The brand followed this up with the Honor Band 5, a Fitbit-quality fitness tracker costing about £100 less.
The Magicbook is Honor's first foray into the world of personal computing but it's an assured introduction. As I've come to expect from the Chinese company, the quality is impressive and it's being sold for a price which seems almost ludicrous.
Let's start with the outside. The Magicbook is a real looker, an all-metal dark grey chassis with an electric blue trim around the edge. Thankfully, that chassis is also matte so neatfreaks like me won't need to worry about fingerprint marks. Yet despite being entirely metal on the outside, the Magicbook isn't particularly heavy. It's only 1.47kg and 15.8mm thick when closed so it'll definitely slide into your bag with ease.
Opening it up you'll find the massive 14 inch screen. The laptop has an 84pc body-to-screen ratio so you're getting plenty of space. Smartly, the webcam of the laptop is hidden in the keyboard allowing Honor to save space on the top bezel. The screen itself is well lit and colours looked good to my eye, though I will say it didn't wow me quite as much s the Google Pixelbook. It isn't a touchscreen but honestly, that's no great loss.
As for the rest? Well, the keyboard is a comfortable size to write on for extended periods and the trackpad is positively massive. These are not, I'll admit, things you'll notice much when you're using the laptop, but having tested quite a few at this point, I know how annoying it can be when either of these two features are too small. The final thing worth mentioning is that the power button doubles as a fingerprint scanner which is a handy feature, saving you from having to put in your password every time.
In terms of battery life I'm impressed. Honor claim it can last 10 hours of usage on normal settings and I can well believe it. I tested it in quite a brightly lit room so I didn't have the backlight turned up very much and I managed to make it last nearly 12 hours doing basic internet browsing and word processing. The laptop also comes with a USB-C charger which can take it from 0-46pc in half an hour.
I've also been seriously impressed with the speed of this thing. Booting up from off to the desktop takes less than ten seconds, and you can go from standby to working in about two thanks to the fingerprint scanner. And actually, no matter what I was doing, the Magicbook never slowed down. Streaming 4K movies, playing video-games, video-calling. There was no lag, no overheating, no slowdown. It's an impressive performance, the likes of which you rarely see on laptops at this price.
Unlike some modern laptops, you won't lack for ports either. There's a USB-C port which can be used for charging, two traditional USB ports, a HDMI port, and a headphone jack.
All in all, the Magicbook 14 is just that: magic. I don't know how Honor are justifying selling it for £550 when they could definitely get away with charging more for these specs, but whatever the case, this is a bargain you'll want to snap up.
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