It's time for our mid-year update to the best laptops you can buy right now. The first half of 2026 has been one of the most eventful stretches for laptops in years – and also one of the most expensive, thanks to a global memory shortage that has almost doubled DRAM prices. Prices across the board are higher than they've been in years, and that's not expected to ease anytime soon.
The MacBook Neo launched in March at $599, but it's been somewhat hard to find ever since, now Apple means to double production to keep up with demand. It may be Apple's most disruptive Mac product in years, and it's changing what people expect from a budget laptop.
Our latest update includes a brand name that's never appeared in this guide before. We've also chosen one Windows Ultraportable option for each major platform – Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm – and all three categories have seen meaningful changes since we last updated this list.
Computex 2026 brought a wave of announcements that will reshape this guide by the end of the year. Most significantly, Nvidia revealed the RTX Spark, its first-ever Arm CPU/GPU for Windows laptops, co-developed with MediaTek. The first Spark devices are confirmed from Microsoft, Dell, Asus, HP, Lenovo, and MSI, arriving this fall. The chip combines a 20-core Arm CPU with a Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory, and it's positioned squarely against the MacBook Pro in terms of both ambition and price.
