How to Buy a Laptop Without Getting Fleeced

Battery: demand a real-world number

Quoted battery life is measured with a looping local video file at low brightness with the radios off. It bears no relationship to what you will get, and the gap is not consistent between manufacturers, so you cannot even use it for comparison.

Look for a review that states a mixed-use figure with the test conditions attached: brightness in nits, number of browser tabs, whether a video call was involved. Our own tests run 40 tabs, a call every 90 minutes and a screen at 300 nits.

As a rough sanity check, divide the battery capacity in watt-hours by 6 to get a pessimistic hours figure for a modern thin laptop. A 72 Wh machine that cannot manage 8 hours of real work has a cooling or silicon problem.

Noise: the specification nobody publishes

Manufacturers do not publish fan noise, which should tell you something. A laptop that hits 45 dBA under load is a laptop you will not use in a library, a shared office or a bedroom while someone is asleep.

There is a direct trade-off with thickness. A 15.9 mm chassis with a vapour chamber and two large slow fans will be quieter than a 13.9 mm chassis with one small fast fan at the same performance level, every time.

If a review does not measure noise, it has skipped the thing you will notice most often. The Volta Arc 14 in our recent testing held 29 dBA during a sustained compile; a competitor hit 44 dBA doing the same work.

The specification nobody publishes is usually the one you will notice every day.

RAM and storage: check what is soldered

Most thin laptops now solder the RAM to the board, which means the amount you buy is the amount you have forever. Storage is more often socketed, but not always.

Buy more RAM than you need today. 16 GB is workable now and will be tight in 2029; 32 GB costs a couple of hundred dollars at purchase and is impossible to add later. Storage, if socketed, can be upgraded for a fraction of the manufacturer's markup.

Search for the model name plus 'teardown' before you buy. Two minutes of a video will tell you what is socketed, what is glued and what is impossible.

Repairability and the five-year question

Batteries degrade. Every laptop battery will be at roughly 80 percent of its original capacity after three to four years of daily charging, and that is normal rather than a defect.

The question is what happens next. A machine with a screwed-in battery, a published service manual and parts sold direct is a $70 repair. A machine with a battery glued to the chassis under the trackpad is a $400 service job or a new laptop.

This single factor has more effect on the true cost of ownership than the price difference between most of the models you are considering.

What not to worry about

The processor model number, within a generation, almost never matters for the work most people do. The difference between the middle and top chip in a range is typically 8 to 12 percent in sustained work, which you will not perceive, and it usually costs $300.

Discrete graphics, unless you play games or do GPU-accelerated video work, are a battery-life tax you pay every day for capability you use twice a year.

Screen resolution above about 2560 pixels wide on a 14-inch panel is past the point of visible improvement and costs measurable battery. Spend that money on brightness and colour accuracy instead.