At IFA today, Acer announced it’s expanding its Swift AI laptop line with models featuring Intel’s new Lunar Lake chips, Qualcomm’s just-announced eight-core Snapdragon X Plus, and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300. And, it claims, each of them can theoretically last over 24 hours playing back video or over 17 hours in productivity tests.

If you buy them with their IPS panels and 65 watt-hour batteries, Acer claims the new $1,199 Swift 14 AI and $999 Swift Go 14 AI can last:

• Intel: 23 hours of web browsing; 29 hours of video playback
• AMD: 19 hours of web browsing; 27 hours of video playback
• Qualcomm: 19.5 hours of web browsing; 28 hours of video playback

Those sorts of quotes aren’t unusual in late 2024! Dell just boasted its XPS 13 can get 26–27 hours of Netflix streaming with a new Intel or Qualcomm chip, and we expect real-world life to be less. But it’s more than these manufacturers have typically claimed in years past.

Just note that though Acer’s new laptops are all called “Swift 14,” they aren’t quite the same.

Swift 14 AI

The 14-inch Swift AI can be configured with either a new Intel Core Ultra 5 or 7 processor (model SF14-51) or an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 chip (model SF14-61).

Both optionally offer premium OLED screens instead of the IPS screen and support up to 32GB of RAM, but the Intel model has 3K or 2K OLED options at 90Hz and a 2K IPS screen, while the AMD model only has a 3K OLED screen alongside 3K 120Hz and 2K IPS options.

The AMD model can also be configured with up to 2TB of storage space, while the Intel model only gets a maximum of 1TB. And while both laptops offer two USB-C ports, the Intel model gets Thunderbolt 4 ports as usual while the AMD one has generic USB4 — though both sets allow for charging. Both also have two USB-A 3.2 ports, an audio jack, an HDMI 2.1 port, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4.

All have a 1440p webcam, with IR depth sensing for Windows Hello facial recognition login, a privacy shutter, and proximity sensors to lock the screen when you move away.

Both Swift 14 AI laptops start at $1,200 and should be available this month.

Swift Go 14 AI

If you’re looking for Qualcomm Snapdragon and a lower starting price, that’s where Acer’s Swift Go comes in. The 2.91-pound laptop also has a slightly larger 14.5-inch screen, your choice between a 2560 x 1600 IPS panel with a maximum brightness of 350 nits or a 1920 x 1200 that maxes out at 300 nits. Both are dimmer than the Intel and AMD options, but they do support up to a 120Hz refresh rate.

Otherwise, the Go similarly offers up to 32GB of RAM, has a 1440p webcam with IR depth sensing and a privacy shutter as well as a fingerprint reader, two USB4 type C ports that support charging, two USB-A 3.2 ports, an audio jack, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4.

The new Swift Go 14 AI starts at $999 and should be available this month. 

Swift 16 AI

Acer is also announcing a 16-inch model, too, one that weighs 3.3 pounds and is only available with a new Intel Lunar Lake processor, either a Core Ultra 5, 7, or 9. You get up to 2TB of storage space and only one display option: a 3K touchscreen OLED. All of that is powered by a 75Wh battery, though here, Acer is notably not quoting its battery life.

There are also two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports for charging and display output, two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, an audio jack, a Wi-Fi 7 adapter, and Bluetooth 5.4.

Acer’s Swift 16 AI starts at $1,200, just like the 14-inch model, and should be available in October 2024.

By the way, Acer’s new Intel- and AMD-configured Swift AI laptops will join the Copilot Plus PC family in November 2024 via a free update, giving users access to the same Microsoft AI features currently only available on Qualcomm Snapdragon X PCs.

Google Meet’s newest AI-powered feature, “take notes for me,” has started rolling out today to Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Education Premium, or AI Meetings & Messaging add-ons. It’s similar to Meet’s transcription tool, only instead of automatically transcribing what everyone says, it summarizes what everyone talked about. Google first announced this feature at its 2023 Cloud Next conference.

Unfortunately, it only supports spoken English right now, but it seems like it could make missing an important meeting less stressful; it automatically takes notes in a Google Doc and will attach that file to the calendar event after the meeting is over, so you can reference them later on. It will also send that Google Doc to the meeting organizer and anyone else who turned the feature on.

Running late to a meeting? Google says its new feature will also give you a summary of what you missed, so when you are able to join, you can quickly catch up — and no one should have to worry about repeating themselves. If you use Google Meet’s recordings and transcripts tool at the same time, links to those files will also be provided in the same Google Doc with the meeting notes.

This feature also sounds like a good accessibility tool for anyone (like me) who has trouble processing spoken language and taking notes at the same time. It might allow them to be more focused and fully present during meetings instead of having to ask someone to repeat what they said multiple times.

Google expects to complete the rollout to all Google Workspace customers by September 10th, 2024 — but there’s no guarantee how accurate Google Meet’s new feature will actually be.

AI can make a lot of mistakes; every time I’ve used Meet’s transcription tool, I have to go back through the automatically generated transcript to verify that it correctly captured the conversation. In my experience, that often entails listening to specific parts of the recording again and manually fixing the transcript. I’m skeptical but hopeful Google Meet will be a better note-taker than transcriber.

Today, Google announced it’s making assigning group work in Google Classroom easier and faster with a new feature called Student Groups. Teachers will now be able to add individual students to predefined groups before creating and assigning group work.

Google is entering this school year with a bunch of new updates for the now 10-year-old Classroom platform, like a new Education Navigator, a Read Along feature, and Dark Mode to the mobile app. But teachers have been waiting for something like Student Groups for a long time.

Previously, teachers would need to create an assignment first and then individually add students to that assignment if they wanted to assign group work. For occasional group projects, this worked okay, but it was a pain for teachers who regularly have their students do group work — especially if their students remained in the same groups throughout the school year.

But now, the process of assigning group work is no longer as much of a hassle. From inside the People tab, teachers can use the new Group button above the class roster to create, name, add, and modify custom student groups. These groups will be an available option whenever a teacher creates an assignment.

Previously, Google added the ability to import class rosters from certain Student Information Systems (SIS), which meant some teachers no longer had to manually add student names one at a time into every new Classroom they created.

Asus’ Zenbook S 16 is one of the first laptops to feature AMD’s flagship Ryzen AI processor, the one that’s supposed to be faster than Intel and Qualcomm at gaming, content creation, and AI — and fit inside a notebook that AMD says is lighter and thinner than the MacBook Air. It sounds like the makings of a perfect, do-it-all Windows laptop.

But Asus has to convince people they should buy this AMD-powered laptop now, when machines running on Qualcomm’s new chips can also do all the things most people need and with battery life that far outstrips traditional chips. To be the laptop hit of the summer, Asus would have to outshine all of the Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops that were released a few months ago in not just speed, but also in battery life, quality, comfort, apps, features, and price. That’s the mountain AMD and Asus have to climb. 

Laptops always come with some sort of compromise, whether that’s performance, battery life, or something else. I’ve found the Zenbook S 16 isn’t the perfect, do-it-all laptop. But it balances day-to-day tasks and power-user features much better than most productivity laptops — and that makes it one of the best I’ve used.

Asus Zenbook S 16

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
It’s gorgeous Incredibly thin and light for a 16-inch laptop Great performance, especially the integrated graphics	Shorter battery life than major competitors StoryCube doesn’t work Couldn’t get a sense of how fast the NPU really is

Where to Buy:

• $1799.99 $1399 at Asus
• $1799.99 at Best Buy

Doesn’t feel like a 16-inch laptop

The Zenbook S 16 is a slim 16-inch laptop with a base configuration of 24GB of memory, a 1TB SSD, and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 365 processor for $1,400. It also has a 2880 x 1800 (3K) touchscreen OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a relatively large 78Wh battery. I tested the $1,700 configuration with 32GB of memory and the faster Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip.

It’s impressive that Asus fit such a large battery into the Zenbook’s 0.47-inch thick chassis and that the whole laptop weighs only 3.31 pounds. Bigger laptops are often more annoying to carry around, and some of that has to do with the battery. But the Zenbook feels more like a 13- or 14-inch laptop, so I forgot about its actual size.

The keyboard placement makes the laptop feel smaller, too. Asus pushes the keyboard closer to the front of the laptop by keeping the trackpad to a reasonable size and placing the speaker grille in back, making it easier for me to type on it. I can reach all the way to the function row without removing my palms from the palm rests. With most 16-inch laptops, I wind up typing like I’m Thing from The Addams Family with my wrists floating up in the air. 

Left: my hand over the Zenbook S 16. Right: my hand over Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Edge.

The keys also come close to the full, satisfying press of a low-profile desktop keyboard without sounding clacky or pingy.

It’s good-looking, too. The outer body is put through a special process that creates a hard, ceramic oxide layer over the surface of the aluminum chassis, giving it a lovely texture that feels rough and smooth at the same time. Asus also kept the same gorgeous geometric lines that sparsely decorate the lid like its previous Zenbooks.

It’s increasingly standard to see a 3K, 120Hz OLED on a machine priced like the Zenbook S 16. The display has vivid colors and deep contrasts, and it makes this laptop even more stunning.

Better performance than Qualcomm 

Performance is where this laptop has a distinct advantage over Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops. For video calls, streaming music, and other everyday tasks, AMD’s Ryzen AI chip and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have the same responsiveness I’d expect from processors of their caliber. But AMD distinguishes itself with superior graphics performance, which makes the Zenbook S 16 surprisingly capable at gaming and content creation for such a portable machine.

Being on the x86 Windows platform means most games really will just work on the Zenbook. Shadow of the Tomb Raider will crash on an Arm-based Snapdragon laptop if I try to run the game at anything higher than 1080p resolution and low graphics. But I can run the same game on the Zenbook S 16 at the same resolution on high spec, and it’ll not only run fine — it will also get up to 20 more frames per second.

The integrated GPU still isn’t powerful enough to run a game like Cyberpunk 2077 natively on such a high-resolution laptop, but AMD’s upscaling technology, FSR 2.1, can help make it playable. With that on, the resolution set to 1080p, and upscaling set to ultra performance, Cyberpunk averaged 77fps for me. The only upscaler currently available to games running on Qualcomm laptops is Auto Super Resolution, and while it’s not exclusive to those Snapdragon laptops, using it results in a lot of flickering of fine lines. I would not play this game that way. 

For creative tasks, like rendering 3D images in Blender, the Zenbook S 16 is straight-up faster than every Snapdragon laptop I’ve tested. Currently, Blender doesn’t support Qualcomm’s integrated Adreno graphics on its Snapdragon chips, even with a native Arm64 version of that program available (still in alpha). The AMD-powered Zenbook S 16 runs faster because the program can actually use both the CPU and GPU.

AMD said its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip would be faster than the M3 Pro in Apple’s MacBook Pro, too, but that didn’t pan out in my testing. The Zenbook S 16 didn’t feel any slower in everyday applications, but the top-tier Ryzen AI chip is actually slower than the MacBook Pro by several whole minutes in a real-world Blender test.

Blender can crash on any laptop if it doesn’t have enough video RAM, including on previous generations of AMD Zenbooks. But I didn’t have that issue with the Zenbook S 16. It has a lot of memory, and AMD now lets you allocate up to 75 percent of it directly to the GPU. When I devoted 16GB of RAM to graphics and ran Blender’s Agent 327: Operation Barbershop demo — a scene with complex lighting and a test I normally run only when I’m testing gaming or workstation laptops — it ran smoothly and didn’t crash. It didn’t render as fast, but it finished the job without issues.

Battery life comes up short

Laptop makers usually have to sacrifice something to have the thinnest and lightest laptop possible. Most often, that’s a compromise in performance — but Asus instead seems to have sacrificed some battery life to get as much performance out of AMD’s chip as it can.

The Zenbook S 16’s battery life let me down a bit, not because the laptop isn’t reasonably long-lasting, but because it gets only 11 hours with a large, 78Wh battery. Asus’ main Qualcomm Snapdragon competitor, Samsung’s 16-inch Galaxy Book4 Edge, has nearly identical weight and dimensions, and it gets 14 hours with a battery that’s 23 percent smaller. But I’m okay with this tradeoff given how I could use the Zenbook S 16 as my primary laptop for writing articles, editing high-resolution photos, and light gaming — and it has a much more comfortable keyboard.

The Zenbook S 16 is also unusually bad at estimating its own battery life. The taskbar battery icon would say 95 percent remaining with an estimated run time of 8.5 hours, then several minutes later, it would have fallen to 87 percent remaining but with an estimated runtime of 12.5 hours. This went on for hours. Sure, battery estimations can fluctuate, but they ping-ponged chaotically on this laptop, so I never could get a good idea of how much battery was left.

AI is a big no-show

Asus’ new Zenbook S 16 comes with one flagship AI app: StoryCube. It’s supposed to help you consolidate your photos and videos from the cloud onto the laptop and automatically sort and organize everything with on-device AI. It sounded like it could be useful for me since I have a bad habit of not organizing the photos I upload to the cloud. But it didn’t work at all, and Asus couldn’t tell me why. Asus says it should take just 24 minutes to generate an AI album for every gigabyte of data, but I let the program run for 24 entire hours and nothing happened. 

The Zenbook S 16 also supports the latest version of the AI image generation app Amuse. It works, but using it with AMD’s NPU makes it run slower, not faster. It took twice as long to generate photos with the NPU on, and it’s on by default when you first open the program.

And while Microsoft has made a big push around Copilot Plus PCs this summer, the Zenbook S 16 isn’t part of that program at launch, so it doesn’t have AI-powered features like Cocreator and Live Translation. Those are currently only available on Snapdragon laptops, but they are supposed to be coming to AMD Ryzen AI laptops by the end of 2024. 

If you’re thinking about buying this laptop solely for its AI capabilities, I’d hold off. I’m still figuring out how most people can take advantage of AMD’s 50 TOPS NPU in a way that’s genuinely beneficial day-to-day.

The competition

If you’re looking for a large, powerful, relatively thin, and light machine, Zenbook S 16 is a great all-rounder laptop. I’ve tested almost all the new Qualcomm laptops, and none of them can match its overall performance or native support for apps. Even though it’s larger than most Qualcomm laptops, it doesn’t feel like it. The only thing you have to sacrifice is a few hours of battery life, and for me, the performance and size are more important. 

But if you feel differently, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge was the best Qualcomm machine I tested this summer for its battery life and size. There’s also always Apple: despite AMD’s bold claims, Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Air beat the Zenbook on both performance and battery life in my tests.

There aren’t any Intel laptops that I’d currently recommend over the Zenbook S 16 that hit the same sweet spot. While I did like the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo’s four to six hours of extra battery life, it’s nowhere near as pretty or as easy for me to type on or carry around. And while the 2024 Dell XPS 14 also comes to mind, you’re only looking at only about an hour or two of extra battery life that’ll cost you around $500 more.

Since the Zenbook S 16 isn’t truly a dedicated gaming or creator laptop, I’d recommend the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for that. In my tests, it gets two to three times better 1080p gaming performance without upscaling and rendered my Blender scene in mere seconds. It still manages six and a half hours of battery life in a thin-and-light chassis, too.

The Zenbook S 16 didn’t quite live up to all the performance claims AMD made about it, but it came close and really impressed me in the process. It’s a 16-inch productivity, gaming, and content creation machine that does all those things surprisingly well and is actually easy to carry around. All you have to give up in return are those few hours of battery life. It’s a combination that adds up to make this my favorite 16-inch Windows laptop of the summer.

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge

2024 will go down in tech history as the year Microsoft was finally able to make Windows laptops into serious competitors to the MacBook. So far, that’s thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips, which switched to a homogeneous chip architecture, increased clock speeds, and caught up to Apple’s speedy and power-efficient processors. But now, AMD says it has chips that can take on the MacBook, too — and keep the company’s processors in the mix.

Last week, AMD held a two-day event in Los Angeles to reveal in-depth information about its new Strix Point Ryzen AI chips built on its brand-new Zen 5 architecture. Zen 5 is supposed to be a major leap from AMD’s last-gen chip architecture, delivering more instructions per clock cycle and higher gaming frame rates with just 15W of power. 

At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I’ve ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed its new Ryzen chip “exceeds the performance of what MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming”; “is 15 percent faster than the M3 Pro” in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, “unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to two displays only.”

But not only did AMD tell reporters its upcoming Ryzen AI chips are faster than Apple’s M3 and M3 Pro, it also said its new integrated graphics beat Qualcomm’s current-gen and Intel’s last-gen while pointedly remarking that it can power “triple-A games in full HD,” including titles that simply “don’t work on some of our competitors.” AMD also claimed its NPU performs 50 trillion floating point operations per second, more than any of its Microsoft Copilot Plus laptop competitors will offer this year.

But if they’re faster, AMD has yet to really prove it.

Games that AMD said ran faster on its new iGPU were not available for me to test at the event. Most of AMD’s AI demos weren’t actually running on AMD’s NPU, and the ones that were weren’t responsive. The most interesting of AMD’s AI demos — Asus’ automatic file consolidation and organization program — wasn’t available to try at all, and AMD’s most powerful gaming laptop on display was running its games on Nvidia graphics with Nvidia upscaling, not its own integrated graphics. 

Various AMD spokespeople gave me various answers as to why none of that was available: the demo laptops are not representative of the final product; Asus might be working on some final BIOS adjustments; the hotel Wi-Fi is too slow to install other games; they were not sure why some of the AI-powered apps were not running on the NPU.

While I wasn’t able to actually see these Ryzen AI chips in action, here’s what I was able to find out at the event.

Architectural improvements

It does sound like Ryzen AI could be notably faster than AMD’s previous generation of laptop chips. AMD says the new Zen 5 CPU architecture delivers 16 percent more instructions per clock cycle (IPC) on average, performing tasks that much faster without having to increase the chip’s clock speed.

And while its CPU cores only offer 10 percent IPC uplift in an example game (Far Cry 6), AMD says its new RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture gives these chips between 19 percent and 32 percent more graphics performance per watt at 15 watts, which is the wattage that the thinnest laptops and handheld gaming systems typically use by default. Compared to the previous generation, the integrated graphics should theoretically be able to generate more frames per second or use less power or some of each.

Next-to-no mentions of battery life

Even though AMD’s chips are theoretically more efficient than before, it wouldn’t confirm if these machines will have any further improvement in battery life. During the event, AMD would only say that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “eight hours or more.” I was unable to speak to an Asus representative at the event to get an actual number for the laptops it demoed, and AMD seemed hesitant about giving me an answer beyond “checking with my Asus representative.”

Thin and light productivity laptops have been able to get well over eight hours of battery life for a while. So, it stands to reason that these Ryzen AI laptops could probably do the same based on the numerous improvements AMD has made to its architecture. But laptop manufacturers generally overpromise yet underdeliver on battery life. An Asus representative on this Best Buy page said the Ryzen AI Zenbook S16 gets about 12 hours of battery life, while the Qualcomm Vivobook S15 gets 18 hours — meaning Asus’ flagship AMD laptop offers six hours fewer than its Qualcomm flagship. Twelve hours is also about six hours less than the MacBook Air M3 achieved in my testing.

At least one AMD laptop is thin and light as Air

“I wanted to build notebooks that are faster than MacBook Pro, thinner and lighter than MacBook Air,” said AMD’s Jack Huynh, senior vice president and GM of computing and graphics, as he introduced Asus’ Zenbook S16 onstage. But when I finally got to hold the Zenbook S16 in the demo area, it didn’t feel lighter and thinner, because it apparently wasn’t.

According to the companies’ spec sheets, the 16-inch Zenbook is the same weight and thickness as the 15-inch Air: 3.3lbs (1.5kg or 1.51kg) and 0.43in or 0.45in (1.1cm or 1.15cm) thick. (It’s also 0.52 inches wider and 0.32 inches longer.) That’s not to say it wasn’t impressively thin and lightweight, because it was — but for me to be truly impressed, I will need to see Ryzen AI beat its competitors with my own eyes.

World’s fastest mobile NPU

During one of the two-hour general presentations, AMD bragged that its 50 TOPS NPU is over five times faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake. (Never mind that Intel’s Lunar Lake NPU, coming this fall, offers up to 48 TOPS.) But I couldn’t get a good sense of how much faster AMD’s NPU really was compared to its competitors’ chips I’ve tested previously because the available demos weren’t running on the NPU. 

I demoed two AI programs that generated images from typed prompts on the Zenbook S16 and the 13-inch ProArt, but neither of those programs were using AMD’s NPU to run the applications. Windows Task Manager showed either the CPU or the integrated graphics doing most or all of the image generation.

There was also an MSI Prestige laptop demoing webcam effects like background blur and automatic emoji, using 51 percent of the NPU in the process, but AMD’s CPU was still being taxed — 78 percent of it, along with nearly half of the laptop’s 32GB of memory. It also couldn’t reliably generate an onscreen emoji based on my facial expression, and when it did, it took several seconds. 

One of the most interesting AI apps AMD talked up was Story Cube, Asus’ AI-powered app that comes with its upcoming ProArt series laptops; the company says it can automatically retrieve, label, and sort photos and videos according to who or what is in the photo or where the photo was taken, using local on-device AI processing.

It also appeared to be available to test in the demo area — but when I asked an AMD representative to show me it in action, they said they couldn’t. Instead, I was shown the program sitting in an idle state, as if it had already finished organizing photos.

Just how fast are AMD’s new graphics?

During both its general sessions, AMD claimed its Radeon 890M iGPU could generate 52fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and 72fps in Forza Horizon 5. With AMD Fluid Motion Frames turned on, AMD said it could get 93fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 90fps in Red Dead Redemption 2, and 148fps in Forza Horizon 5.

The company did not specify onstage (nor on some slides) the graphics settings and display resolution until it got to its comparison between the Radeon 890M plus AFMF and Nvidia’s mobile RTX 2050: full HD (1080p) on medium graphics. When I asked an AMD representative in the demo area if the same settings were used with AFMF turned off, they said yes.

AMD also claims its new iGPU runs faster in gaming than the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100: 1.65 times faster in Cyberpunk 2077 and 1.36 times faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The company would not say what in-game settings it used here. They were not called out on the slide or in the footnotes at the end of the slide deck.

None of those games were available to demo with Radeon 890M, so I couldn’t verify any of AMD’s claims. In their place were Fallout 4 and Lies of P, but I wasn’t able to verify if either of those games was running at 1080p like AMD said they were or check out the graphics presets; they didn’t appear where they normally would be in the settings menu. I did notice that Lies of P’s frame rate was locked at 60fps when I enabled Steam’s in-game fps counter; Fallout 4 was running between 75fps and 95fps depending on what I was doing in-game.

I asked an AMD representative if it would be possible to run Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, or any other game it bragged about on the Radeon 890M but was told it would be best to wait for a review unit since performance is not indicative of the final, off-the-shelf version and that they would take too long to download because the hotel’s Wi-Fi was too slow.

Wait for the reviews

The first laptops with AMD’s Strix Point chips — Asus’ Zenbook S 16, ProArt P16, and ProArt PX13 — will hit shelves on July 28th. With MacBooks and Snapdragon laptops already taking up space on those shelves, this is a crucial moment for AMD to prove that its x86 Zen 5 architecture can be just as fast — or faster — than the Arm architecture of its competitors.

If AMD succeeds, that puts even more pressure on Intel ahead of its Lunar Lake release, especially since Intel also wants to prove its new x86 chips can beat Arm. If AMD doesn’t succeed, that puts the pressure back on Intel to show the old guard of PC chips can still keep up.

Correction, July 24th: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a game. It is Lies of P, not Lies of Pi.

Searching for a good laptop deal on Amazon, even on Prime Day, can feel overwhelming, especially with all the styles, hardware options, brands, and display resolutions — how do you know you’re getting a good deal on any of it?

Below, we’ve rounded up the best deals we could find on clamshell laptops, convertibles, MacBooks, Chromebooks, and even some elusive sub-$1,000 gaming laptops. When choosing the best laptop deals, we considered everything from its hardware and port options to the year some options were actually released.

There are some good options from major brands like Acer, Apple, and HP, and we found some great deals on monitors, keyboards, and mice, too.

The best Amazon Prime Day deals for Windows laptops

HP Pavilion Plus 14 (2023)

The 2023 Pavilion Plus 14 is a newer version of one of our favorite cheap laptops — and it’s on sale for $871 ($429 off) for Prime Day. It’s configured with an Intel Core i7-1355U, 16GB RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an Nvidia RTX 2050 graphics card. It’s also one of the cheapest laptops with an OLED display you can get right now. Read our review of the 2022 model.

Where to Buy:

• $1299.99 $870.99 at Amazon

• Acer Aspire 5 (2023): If you need a simple, no-frills laptop, this 14-inch Acer Aspire 5 is a great budget option, especially if you are a student. It’s currently down to $569.99 ($230 off) configured with an Intel Core i5-1335U, 16GB of memory, and a modest 512GB of storage space — yet it has a modern Wi-Fi 6E adapter and lighting-fast Thunderbolt 4 ports for whenever you stream a lot of movies or use a lot of accessories.
• Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED (2024): We really liked the 2023 version when we reviewed it, and now the current-gen version is on sale for $999.99 ($200 off). The 2024 Zenbook is configured with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155U processor, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, and an 1800p, 60Hz OLED display with 400-nit HDR peak brightness.
• Dell XPS 13 (2023): This one isn’t an Amazon Prime Day deal, but Dell has discounted it on its own website down to $1,149, saving you $250. (And it’s one of our all-time favorites.) It’s currently $150 cheaper than the Snapdragon (Windows on ARM) version and is configured with 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD storage, and a 1200p, 120Hz display.

The best Amazon Prime Day MacBook deals

13-inch MacBook Air with M3 (2024)

The MacBook Air M3 is a jack-of-all-trades, with a balanced combination of performance and power efficiency. It also now supports dual displays with the lid closed, and the storage speed is noticeably faster. You don’t need to think about if this laptop will meet your needs — it just will. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $1099 $899 at Amazon (with on-page coupon)

• The 15-inch MacBook Air with the M3 chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage is also on sale for $1,449 from Amazon. (It usually costs about $250 more.) The 15-inch Air is almost exactly the same as the 13-inch model but with a larger display and a better speaker array.

13-inch MacBook Air with M2 (2022)

The 2022 MacBook Air is a thin, lightweight device powered by Apple’s M2 chip. The M2 model touts an improved 1080p webcam and a better display than its predecessor, while retaining features like long battery life and MagSafe charging. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $799 $699 at Best Buy (256GB SSD, 16GB RAM)

• Amazon also has the 15-inch MacBook Air M2 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage on sale for $1,100. It’s almost identical to the 13-inch version but starts with a 10-core GPU, has six (better sounding) speakers instead of four, and of course, a larger display.
• The 14-inch MacBook Pro 14 with the M3 Pro chip is $300 off right now, dropping it to $1,699. The discounted configuration comes with an 11‑core CPU and 14‑core GPU, 18GB of memory, and 512GB of storage space. Its Liquid Retina XDR Display also makes it a great choice if you’re looking for a new laptop to edit videos.

The best Amazon Prime Day gaming laptop deals

Razer Blade 16 (2023)

Razer’s 16-inch Blade is discounted 33 percent for Prime Day — or $1,000 off the regular list price. It’s outfitted with an Intel Core i9-13950HX processor, an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 1600p, 165Hz display. The gaming laptop also pairs nicely with the Razer gaming mouse further down this list.

Where to Buy:

• $2999.99 $1999.99 at Amazon

• Asus ROG Strix G16 (2023): This midtier gaming laptop is a great amalgamation of parts and is $300 off, bringing it down to $1,100. It has a 165Hz display, an Intel Core i7-13650HX processor, Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD for all those 50GB-plus game installations.
• Lenovo LOQ 15 (2024): This entry-level gaming laptop is normally $1,000, but it’s 10 percent off for Prime Day, bringing it down to $900. (These days, it’s rare to see any gaming laptop at this price, even the budget ones!) Along with the right amount of RAM, it has an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, an Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics card, a 512GB SSD, and a simple 1080p display.

The best Amazon Prime Day Chromebook deals

• Acer Chromebook Plus 514 (2023): This great Chromebook is $320 ($80 off) right now. It has an Intel Core i3-N305 processor, 8GB of memory, a 128GB SSD, and a 1080p IPS touch display. As an added bonus, it also comes with a free 12-month subscription to Google AI with 2TB of cloud storage.
• Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (2023): This one is a deal from Best Buy, technically, but it’s marked down to $470 for $230 in savings. It’s a convertible, or 2-in-1, Chromebook that’s configured with an Intel Core i5-1335U, 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a 14-inch touchscreen display with stylus support.
• Asus Chromebook Plus CX34 (2022): This Asus Chromebook comes with an Intel Core i3-1215U, 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a 1080p display. It’s down to $374 ($66 off) for Prime Day — a new all-time low.

The best Amazon Prime Day laptop peripheral deals

Razer Basilisk V3 gaming mouse

This wired gaming mouse from Razer is a favorite among gamers. It features 11 programable buttons, optical mouse switches, and even an ergonomic thumb rest. You can cycle the scroll wheel between three different modes and, of course, customize the RGB to your heart’s content.

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 $49 at Amazon

• Logitech MX Master 3S wireless mouse: One of the best ergonomic wireless mice is 10 percent off, or $90, right now. It features two scroll wheels, one vertical and one horizontal, an 8,000 DPI sensor, and you can use it across multiple computers or laptops, Windows or Mac, at the same time with Logitech Flow.
• Nuphy Air75 V2 mechanical keyboard: This is the first time Nuphy’s latest version of this keyboard has gone on sale on Amazon, and it’s $112 ($28 off) right now. It works with both Windows and macOS, is both wired and wireless (Bluetooth and 2.4GHz), and it comes in black, gray, and white. There’s no numpad, but it does have arrow keys and a full row of function keys that double as media keys.
• Keychron V1 mechanical keyboard: If you’re new to the world of mechanical keyboards, you can’t go wrong with this being your first one. It’s down to $67.99 ($17 off), features hot-swappable switches, full remappability with VIA, and RGB backlighting. Like the Nuphy above, it’s also a 75 percent wired board. (The frosted version is cheaper at $59.99.)
• Gigabyte M28U 28-inch 4K gaming monitor: This is one of the best gaming monitors I have ever purchased — and it’s $400 ($200 off) during Prime Day for $400. It has a fantastic, color-rich 144Hz IPS display with HDR400. It also supports AMD FreeSync Premium Pro for fighting screen tears and stuttering.
• The 27-inch HP Omen 4K gaming monitor: The Omen is another great gaming monitor getting the Prime Day treatment. It has an IPS panel, a 144Hz refresh rate, DisplayHDR 400 support, and a sale price of $369.99 ($74 off). It also features a KVM switch, so you can switch between computers without having to switch between mice and keyboards.