1. The list in brief
2. Best overall
3. Best budget
4. Best OLED
5. Best for drawing
6. Best ultraportable
7. Best business
8. Benchmark comparisons
9. Recently reviewed
10. Find your perfect touchscreen
11. FAQs
12. How we test
13. Why trust Laptop Mag
The best touchscreen laptops are a great option for anyone who wants something larger and more powerful than a keyboard folio attached to a tablet. They're also great for anyone who prefers or finds it easier to navigate a laptop with finger taps instead of a trackpad or mouse. Our favorites span a variety of use-cases: from performance powerhouses and budget-minded stalwarts, to entertainment wonders with loud speakers and color-rich OLED displays.
Traditional clamshell laptops with touchscreens are great, but I've included some of the best 2-in-1 laptops here, too. They have stylus support and their displays connect to the keyboard on a 360-degree hinge so they can transform into a tablet. This makes drawing and note-taking so much easier! (I should know; I have a Lenovo Yoga Book 9i.)
If you're not sure you'll need a touchscreen, check out our best laptops page, which includes non-touch models. And if you're a student, check out our list of the best college laptops.
Laptop Mag uses a two-pronged review strategy that gives us a complete picture of each laptop. The testing team runs every laptop through a barrage of tests to determine its performance, battery life, heat management, and more. Then, our reviewers put the laptops to use in real-world situations.
This page is constantly updated based on our latest reviews to reflect Laptop Mag's current picks for the best touchscreen laptops in 2024.
The Quick List
Best overall
The Spectre x360 14 is the best 2-in-1 you can grab today for its versatility and performance. Peroid.
Best budget
What the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (7441) lacks in display luster it more than makes up for with a powerful, entry-level Snapdrgon X Plus processor — and it has one of the longest battery lives we've ever seen in a Windows laptop.
Best OLED
The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 display's color accuracy is outerworldly. Images are sharp, vivid, and perfectly saturated. Its near 400-nit peak brightness helps ward off distracting glare, too.
Best for drawing
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x's easy to carry around, it's color accuracy is incredible, it has a 360-degree hinge, and it's safe to put in your lap. All expected from a great 2-in-1 for drawing, of course, but this laptop far exceedes those expectations.
Best ultraportable
The Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406) has the most performance and battery life packed into one of the thinnest laptops currently on the market — especially for the price.
Best business
Mic quality, a good 1080p webcam, and portability make the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x G4 a great choice for anyone who needs a work computer, especially if you travel frequently. It's also a great entertainment PC, too, and won't scald your lap.
Joanna Nelius has reviewed laptops and computer hardware since 2018. Her work has appeared in The Verge, USA Today, Gizmodo, PC Gamer, and Maximum PC. She also holds an MFA from Chapman University and works as a creative writing instructor.
The best touchscreen laptops in 2024
Why you can trust Laptop Mag Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Best overall
HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) is a 2-in-1 laptop packed with versatility. Its fast processor makes it a fabulous multitasking buddy. It's OLED display makes the colors of your favorite shows pop. It's speakers can immmerse you in your favorite song. And if you feel like drawing, grab your stylus and flip the lid back — you now have a tablet.
✔️ You know quality doesn't come cheap. But every penny you spend on this laptop's performance, battery life, a vibrant display, great speakers, and good looks will be well-spent.
✔️ You like subtly beautiful laptop designs. The Spectre has rounded edges, a dual-hinged display, large keys, and deep blue colored chassis. It's neither ostentatious or bland.
✖️ You don't want to buy a docking station. Other than a power port, this laptop has only one USB-A port and two USB-C ports.
✖️You need something with perfect color accuracy. Its display, while perfectly fine for the average user, doesn't cover the full DCI-P3 gamut. This could create issues for artists, designers, video editors, and anyone else who routinely work with that color space.
The HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) is highly regarded at Laptop Mag. It appears on a few other buying guides as the best 2-in-1 laptop for a very good reason: it's near-perfect, offering the most consistent balance between performance, battery life, design, audio, keyboard clickiness, a 4K webcam, and a gorgeous display.
HP built the 2024 Spectre x360 14 with a powerful Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD storage, a 2.8K OLED touchscreen, and 11 hours of battery life packed into a 14-inch chassis. That's incredible on its own, but it's staggering that it's somehow only $1,858 — and we've seen it go on sale for hundreds of dollars less.
On the Geekbench 6.1 overall performance test, its 12,358 multicore score flew far over the average premium laptop (8,443). Its SSD speeds are also decent, transferring 25GB of data at 1,362 megabytes per second. That's close to the average (1,378 MBps).
The Spectre doesn't have the brightest or most colorful touchscreen, though. Its display reaches 366 nits of brightness, which is lower than the average touchscreen (431 nits). It also covers 85.8% of DCI-P3 color gamut, below the average premium laptop (98.5%). Both the LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which are both on this list, reach 133.5% and 155%, respectively.
However, its OLED panel still filled the "Road House" (2024) trailer with "expected vibrance," as our editor, Rami Tabari, said in his review.
See our full HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) review.
Best budget
Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (7441) nails the important stuff — performance, portability, and battery life — at an affordable price. It also has just enough ports if you want to hook up an external monitor or directly transfer photos from your camera or phone.
✔️ You occasionally (or frequently) forget your laptop charger at home. This laptop, and its 18 hours and 20 minutes of battery life, will save your day.
✔️ You want a laptop cool enough to use in your actual lap. It's a sweet treat to come one that doesn't feel like a pint-sized heatwave, and this one didn't exceed 88 degrees on the underside. That's well below our 95 degree threshold — and the average human body temperature.
✖️ You use or a bunch of niche apps. Snapdragon laptops run Windows on ARM, and while this version has pretty good emulation software this time around, it may not run some apps reliably, or at all. Check if a native ARM4 version exists, first.
✖️ You want a display with bright, accurate colors. Our tests showed this laptop's gamut coverage is almost 10% less than the average of all the premium laptops we've tested, which isn't totally wide enough to begin with — only about 88.7%.
The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (7441) is part of the first wave of Copilot+ PCs to feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor — and for a budget touchscreen laptop we've seen go on sale for less than $1,000, it's impressive: great performance, great heat management, excellent battery life, and even a solid web cam. Laptop Mag's editor, Rami Tabari, summed it up best in his review: "If your focus is affordability and incredible battery life, the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus is the one to buy."
It has one of the slower Snapdragon X processors, but it sure doesn't feel like it. This laptop flew past the average premium machine in our Geekbench 6.3 overall performance test, 13,281 to 9,726, respectively. Next to one of its closest competitors, the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x G4 (11,058), it's 17% faster. It's also almost matches the performance of its faster Snapdragon sibling, the X Elite X1E-78-100, in Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7x (13,750), falling behind by only 4.5%
The Inspiron 14 Plus has one of the longest battery lives we've seen in any laptop: 18 hours and 20 minutes, which blows past the average premium laptop by almost seven hours. Even the Zenbook 14 (15:52), Slim 7x (14:14), and MacBook Air (15:13) can't keep up with it.
There's more: it has a surprisingly good 1080p webcam that clearly captures fine details like strands of hair, and the contrast doesn't blow out when there's too much light. You can safely keep this Inspiron in your laptop, too, whether your writing a paper for a history class or streaming the latest gaming news on YouTube.
But here's the womp-womp: this laptop's display. It's dull, covering only 69.1% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. The average premium laptop (88.7%), Zenbook 14 (79.8%), Slim 7x (155.4%), and MacBook Air (77.8%) all have better color accuracy. Its redeeming quality is its brightness. At 470 nits, its max brightness is just a few nits shy of the MacBook Air M3 (476) and a few nits higher than the category average of 464.
See our full Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review.
Best OLED
LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1's finely calibrated, color-accurate display presents images with the right amount of saturation and contrast. It's also one of the thinnest and lightest 16-inch laptops you can get right now.
✔️ You frequently watch movies on a laptop. With great color accuracy covering over 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut, its OLED display makes everything appear perfectly saturated. The display is super bright, too, just shy of 400 max nits.
✔️ You like big laptops, and want one that's thin and light. This one weighs three pounds and is 0.49 inches at its thinnest, yet it's also super sturdy thanks to its magnesium alloy chassis. It can survive a few knocks.
✖️ You're going to primarily use it in your lap. There's a spot on the underside that gets uncomfortably warm, over 110 degrees — even after 15 minutes of streaming.
✖️ You like trackpads with tactile feedback. This one is more squish than click, lacking enough physical spring-back to make it feel satisfying.
The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 has a large, incredibly color-accurate OLED display that makes it our top-pick for anyone who likes to wind down with their favorite TV show at the end of day. It's one of the thinnest and lightest 16-inch laptops you can currently buy that still has more performance than the average premium machine, and enough battery life to binge-watch the latest true crime series on Netflix.
Not many laptop displays can produce the same accuracy and vibrancy as this Gram Pro — even other OLEDs. Covering 133.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut (the movie industry's standard) it surpasses the premium laptop average (89.7%) and many of its closest competitors, like the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i (105.7%) and the Spectre x360 (85.8%). The display also gets brighter: 392.2 max nits compared to the Yoga's 373 and Spectre's 366.
When it comes to weight and dimensions, the Gram solidly beats both those laptops at 0.49~0.51 inches thick and 3.08 pounds. (The Yoga is 0.7 inches thick and weighs 4.3 pounds, while the Spectre is 0.8 inches thick and weighs 4.3 pounds.) It's dimensions are incredibly close to Asus's flagship AMD Ryzen AI laptop, the Zenbook S 16. (Which covers only 86.2% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, too!)
This laptop isn't the fastest performance-wise, but it's not a slow-poke. In the Geekbench 6.3 overall performance, the Gram churned out a multicore score of 11,897, easily beating the category average of 9,905 but falling behind the Yoga Pro 9i (12,141) and HP Spectre x360 (12,370) by 2% to 4%, respectively — even though the Gram Pro has the same processor as the Spectre and a faster process than the Yoga.
Laptop Mag's managing Editor, Sean Riley, reviewed the Gram Pro and believes "the slowdown is due to thermal management" rather than a "question of raw power." This seems to track with one of our big sticking points about this laptop: it can get too warm. The touch pad and center of keyboard stayed below our 95-degree comfort threshold, but underside reached 100.4 degrees. One particular spot on the underside, the center-rear, spiked to 115.7 degrees!
Not great if you like to curl up on the couch and watch movies with your laptop in your laptop. But as long as you keep the Gram Pro on a surface other than your skin, you can enjoy all the visual delights its display has to offer.
See our full LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 review.
Best for drawing
Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x has a bright OLED (HDR compatible) display that covers an overly generous portion of the DCI-P3 color gamut. Heat management is on-point, too, so this laptop stays pleasantly cool yet still gets fantastic performance and battery life without much compromise.
✔️ You want one PC for drawing and typing. This laptop is a 2-in-1, so when the display folds back it transforms into a tablet. No need to carry two separate devices around!
✔️ You want to draw in your lap. The Yoga Slim 7x reached only 80.5 degrees, well below our 95-degree threshold.
✖️ You draw in Adobe Fresco. Unfortunately, that program isn't compatible with Windows on ARM, not even through emulation. There's no telling when (if ever) Adobe will make a native ARM64 version.
✖️ You usually draw under harsh lighting conditions. This laptop's OLED screen is too reflective, which might make it hard to concentrate on your work. Cranking up the brightness helps get rid of that issue, but it at the expense of battery life.
What does a 2-in-1, touchscreen laptop need to be a great digital canvas? The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x can answer that: a sharp OLED display that produces vivid colors and inky blacks; enough performance to handle you largest artwork files; and battery life that makes you feel free to lose track of time. Oh, and it should be cool enough to put in your lap.
This laptop's display covers the widest amount of the DCI-P3 color gamut out of any laptop on this list — and even some dedicated tablets. At 155%, that's way more than the LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 (133.5%), the Microsoft Surface Pro 11th Edition (115%), the HP Spectre X360 (87%), and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (108.5%).
It also gets bright, hitting a max of 464 nits in SDR and 785 nits in HDR. 431 nits is also the average SDR brightness for a premium laptop, so the Yoga Slim 7x is right on the money here. It's brighter than the Spectre (366 nits), but falls a tad behind the Yoga Slim 7i Aura (486 nits). Not enough to made a meaningful difference, though.
It's essential for any creativity laptop to have fast multicore performance, as many creativity programs make full-use of all the CPU's cores simultaneously. The Yoga Slim 7x has speed in spades. With a Snapdragon X Elite processor, it cranked out a benchmark score of 13,750 in Geekbench 6. That's about 20% faster than is Aura Edition counterpart with a brand new Intel Core Ultra 7 256V chip (10,711) and 10% faster than the MacBook Air M3 (12,087), making this laptop not just great for drawing but for video editing or 3 rendering work, too. (It outshined the MacBook Air by over a minute in our HandBrake video transcoding benchmark.)
There are two crucial things to keep in mind about using the Yoga Slim 7x as your next drawing laptop: app compatibility and its reflective OLED display. The display can pick up more glare than your hyper-political uncle at the holiday dinner table, so you might need to max out its brightness to see your work without that distraction. (Which, of course will shorten the battery life; the brighter the display, the more power it needs.) Our reviewer, Stevie Bonifield, wishes "there was an anti-reflective layer over the display," but otherwise, "It looks sharp and colorful."
You'll also want to make sure your favorite drawing app has a native ARM64 version, since this laptop runs Windows on ARM. For most people, this shouldn't be an issue as many popular drawing apps, like Leonardo and Concepts, are compatible. But if you are a diehard Adobe Fresco user, sorry — that won't run on this laptop.
See our full Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x review.
Best ultraportable
Asus Zenbook S 14 is one of the thinnest, lightest, and fastest laptops we've recently tested. It's only 0.47 inches thick at its thinnest point and weighs a next-to-nothing 2.6 pounds. It also has a stunning OLED display and gets nearly 14 hours of battery life.
✔️ Your laptop goes everywhere with you. It barely takes up space in a bag, and it weighs about as much as the average hardcover book. You shouldn't have to worry about straining a muscle carrying it around.
✔️ You don't want a 2-in-1 laptop. A traditional clamshell is all you need, but you'd still like to have an OLED display, great audio, and long battery life. The Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406) has the most performance and battery life packed into one We've seen it go on sale for under $1,000, too, cheaper than the average 2-in-1.
✖️ Mushy keys give you the heebie-jeebies. The Zenbook S 14's keys are shallow, with just 1.1mm of travel, and lack tactile feedback. The springy kind. Not the finger-in-applesauce-kind.
✖️ You won't play PC games under 60 frames per second. Even with a new Intel Core Ultra 200V series chip its Arc iGPU averaged 48 fps across the games we tested at Medium graphics on 1080p. This laptop fared the worst in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at just 19 fps.
As Laptop Mag's Madeline Ricchiuto said in her review of the Asus Zenbook S 14: "This is an impressive launch laptop for Intel Lunar Lake and a win for Asus." Nearly everything about it — its design, portability, performance, battery life, and OLED screen — makes it the best-balanced, thin and light laptop in its class.
It's OLED display and battery life are this laptop's most impressive features. The glossy, 3K display produces rich and accurate colors. Its peak brightness (342 nits), though dimmer than some of its competitors, is still bright enough to ward off the harsh glare of fluorescent office lighting. The 3K display also helps conserves power, while still looking as crisp and clear as 4K; the Zenbook S 14 lasted just under 14 hours in our web surfing battery test.
While that's not as long as some of its competitors, it's impressive how Asus fit a large, 72Wh battery inside the laptop's incredibly thin chassis. That definitely has a hand in powering this laptop past the 10-hour mark.
It handles dozens of open browser tabs and simultaneously running apps without a hitch, too. On the Geekbench 6 cross-platform CPU benchmark, it's evenly matched in single-core performance with the the Asus Zenbook S 16 (AMD Ryzen AI), 2,751 to 2,765, respectively. Just a 0.5% difference. It's evenly matched with the Dell XPS 13's Snapdragon X Elite chip (2,797), and it's 11.5% faster than last-gen's Asus Zenbook 14 OLED with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (2,435).
Multicore performance is a different story, though. It trails behind the Asus Zenbook S 16 (13,282, or 16%), Dell XPS 13 (14,635 or 24%), and Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (12,707 or 13%). That's disappointing to see, especially compared to Intel's last-gen Meteor Lake chip.
But the Zenbook S 14 makes up for that with its quick SSD, taking just 17.8 seconds to complete our 25GB File Copy test at a transfer rate of 1,513 MBps. That's three to four seconds faster than the XPS 13 and Zenbook 14 OLED, and almost 12 seconds faster than the Zenbook S 16.
See our full Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406) review.
Best business
The Lenovo ThinkBook 13x G4 is a well-rounded laptop with some surprisingly good features. It has more than enough power to handle multiple productivity tasks at once, a solid webcam for work meetings, and a comfortable keyboard .
✔️ You need a work laptop for writing reports, emails, or data entry. This laptop is exceedingly efficient with office administration tasks. It's a piece of cake for it to run multiple productivity apps at the same time.
✔️ You listen to music while you work. Remote workers are most likely in a better position to reap the benefits of this laptop's great speakers. But if you can listen to music in your office, everything comes through crisp and clear, even without maxing out the volume.
✖️ You work long hours away from a desk. The battery might last from sun up to sun down but it will need another charge to keep up with your late nights.
✖️ You do any kind of creative work. This laptop has neither the performance or a vivid enough OLED screen for serious video editing or digital artwork.
A good business laptop should have a powerful CPU, a snappy keyboard, and an office-appropriate chassis. But a great one does all that and more, like the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x G4. Our reviewer, Stevie Bonifield, found it has "surprising strengths" for a business laptop, including "seriously impressive speakers." It's the kind of laptop that can be an "an around-the-clock companion."
At 0.5 inches thick and 2.7 pounds, this ThinkBook as thin and as light as other laptops on this list. It's easy to travel with, whether flying to a conference or walking down the hall to the conference room (or for you remote workers, to your favorite coffee shop). Its two-toned, silver-gray chassis is business-appropriate without being business-boring. It also has a snappy keyboard with a decent amount of tactile feedback, yet stays pretty quiet. (I've tested a lot of Lenovo laptops over the years and I like their keyboard for the same reasons.)
Stevie's review also praises how well Billie Eilish’s “Ocean Eyes” sounded through the ThinkBook's speakers; the bass was smooth, balanced with the highs in a way that created a surround-sound effect.
While this laptop's CPU isn't the most performative compared to some of its closest competition, it still handles numerous open browser tabs with two or three apps open at once just fine. Geekbench 6 benchmark tests reveled a multicore score of 11,058, which is lower than both the Lenovo Slim 7i Gen 9 (12,111) and 13-inch MacBook Air M3 (12,087) — even the Dell Inspiron Plus 14's entry-level Snapdragon chip (13,281).
But most people will not notice a difference in basic productivity tasks. (And to be fair, the Silm 7i does have a higher-end processor, an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H compared to the ThinkBook's Core Ultra 5.)
This laptop could also use a little more battery life; it lasted only eight hours and 39 minutes. Unlike CPU performance, this is definitely more noticeable to the average user. By comparison, every laptop on this list has much more battery life, between two hours and ten hours. But if your job doesn't constantly keep you glued to your laptop, or you rarely ever work away from a desk (maybe you're a teacher!), its lower-than-average battery life shouldn't be a huge concern.
See our full Lenovo ThinkBook 13x G4 review.
Benchmark comparisons
Click to view chart data in table format
| Header Cell - Column 0 | HP Spectre x360 14 | Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 | LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 | Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x | Asus Zenbook S 14 UX5406 | Lenovo ThinkBook 13x G4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 (Higher is better) | 12,358 | 13,281 | 11,897 | 13,750 | 11,157 | 11,058 |
| Handbrake time ((MM.SS), lower is better) | 07:30 | 06:23 | 08:52 | 05:16 | 08:30 | 05:58 |
| Battery life - Web surfing (HH.MM) | 11:01 | 18:20 | 10:41 | 14:14 | 13:51 | 08:38 |
| SSD transfer speeds (MBps, higher is better) | 1,362 | 1,510 | 1,810 | N/A | 1,513 | 1,011 |
| DCI-P3 Color Gamut (Higher is better) | 85.8% | 69.1% | 133.5% | 155.0% | 82.0% | 74.0% |
| Display Brightness (Nits, higher is better) | 366 | 470 | 392 | 464 | 342 | 477 |
| Hottest temperature (95 degree comfort threshold) | 102 | 100 | 115.7 | 86 | 97.7 | 92 |
Recently Reviewed
Not every laptop can make the best touchscreen laptop page. (You'd be scrolling for days if we included them all!) We review new laptops every week and over 100 laptops yearly, so here's a look at our most recently reviewed laptops that didn't make this page either due to a fault, price, battery life, display brightness, or something else.
How to find your perfect touchscreen laptop
Finding the perfect touchscreen laptop for you differs from a traditional laptop. After all, they're often 2-in-1s, which means they should be portable.
Display: You need something bright and sharp
Touchscreen laptops aren't exclusively reserved for artists and designers but many use them. (Some even come with a stylus.) If you're looking for your next digital sketchbook or canvas, you absolutely need a display that can accommodate your creative endeavors. If it's too dim or can't accurately present color, you most likey will be disappointed.
OLED displays generally produce the richest colors with the widest color gamuts, but there are also good IPS displays out there. 80% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut should be your minimum if you're an artist, but you'll be better off the closer you get to 100% (or higher in some cases).
We also recommend getting a laptop with a high resolutoin display since they present sharper images. If you're an artist or designer who creates highly detailed work, a 2K display or higher will let you get into the nitty gritty.
Design: Sturdy portability is a necessity
Flexibility is vital, especially for 2-in-1 laptops. Not only do its hinges need to support up to 360-degree angles, but trying to draw or tapping on a screen that constantly bounces becomes a headache real quick. Creaky hinges and a lid that feels like it'll snap off every time you lift it are an absolute no.
The best touchscreen laptops support themselves in any position and require conscious force to open and close the lid. Laptops with an aluminum chassis are usually the sturdiest, but you'll want to read our reviews and see which ones feel the best in practice.
We also recommend getting a light laptop, anything around four pounds. Depending on the size, some can be a little heavier or lighter, though.
Battery life: The longer the better
Battery life is another key component of any good laptop. If you travel a lot, walk back and forth across campus multiple times a day, or draw in the park aganist your favorite tree for hours on end, don't count on there being an outlet! Consider a laptop that gets at least nine to ten hours of battery life. That should be enough to get you through most of a day.
FAQs
Q: What is a Copilot+ PC?
A: Microsoft has specific requirements as to what it considers a Copilot+ PC. One of those requirements is that a laptop's processor must have an NPU capable of reaching at least 40 TOPS to run more advanced Windows AI features like Recall, Automatic super resolution, and Live Captions.
Copilot+ PCs have a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or Plus, an Intel Core Ultra 200V series, or AMD Ryzen AI 300 series processor. However, the advanced AI features are currently only available on Snapdragon laptops. A free update for Intel and AMD laptops should be available to Windows Insiders by December 2024.
Q: How is Windows on ARM laptop different from a regular (x86) Windows laptop?
A: Windows on ARM laptops are configured with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or Plus processor. Laptops with the x86 version of Windows are powered by either an Intel or AMD processor. Each Windows version uses a different instruction set (ARM or x86), so it needs a processor that can run it.
For most people, using one versions of Windows or the other shouldn't be an issue. But depending on what apps you use day to day, some might not be compatible with Windows on ARM. App compatibly is growing, but it's best to verify what you need will work before buying one of these laptops.
Q: I already have a stylus; will it work with one of these laptops?
A. That depends! Not all touchscreens have stylus support. The ones that do might not support the same type of pens. We recommend checking the manufacture's website of both the laptop and stylus to be absolutely sure.
This will help you determine what pen protocols the stylus and laptop support. The two main ones are Microsoft Pen Protocol (MPP) and Wacom AES. They're not intercompatible, but some pens support both, while others only support one.
How we test touchscreen laptops
We put each laptop through extensive benchmark testing—both synthetic and real-world—before we send it to our reviewers. We evaluate each aspect of the laptop, including its performance, battery life, display, speakers, and heat management.
For synthetic performance, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including Geekbench 6 and 3DMark professional graphics tests.
To determine real-world performance, we convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution and duplicate a 4.97GB multimedia file. We run the Sid Meier's Civilization 6 Gathering Storm benchmark with medium settings at 1080p resolution to test graphics and also run heat tests by playing a 15-minute full-screen video and measuring the surface temperature of different areas on the laptop.
To test the battery, we set the display to 150 nits of brightness and continuously web surf to test the battery. For MacBooks and premium Windows 11 laptops, a runtime of over nine hours is considered a good result, whereas gaming laptops and workstations that can stay powered for longer than five hours deserve praise.
Additionally, we measure the laptop's display's brightness and DCI-P3 color gamut with a Klein K10 colorimeter.
These tests are complemented by extensive hands-on testing from our reviewers, who critique everything from the laptop's materials to the feel of its touchpad.
See this page on How We Test Laptops for more details on our benchmarking procedures.
Why Trust Laptop Mag
Laptop Mag reviews over one hundred different laptops yearly, from paperweight ultralights to everyday workhorses to lumbering gaming notebooks that scorch the frame rates of even the hottest AAA games. We're not just experts in the laptop field, as we go one step further by meticulously testing smartphones, tablets, headphones, PC accessories, software, and even the latest in gaming.
We are 100 percent independent and have decades of experience to help you buy with confidence. In fact, Laptop Mag has been testing and reviewing products for three decades and continues to deliver trustworthy reviews you can rely on.
Our experienced team of writers and editors scour the available information about the laptop and put it through its paces to determine which is best for you. But before they start, the testing team subjects each system to a rigorous regimen of synthetic and real-world tests to see how a system handles the type of work and games you’re most likely to throw at it.
One of the world's largest technology publishers, Future Publishing, enforces our editorial trustworthiness. As a company, we have unrivaled experience across every tech sector — and we're the group's specialist for all things mobile tech.
