There's no question about it - Dell is behind some of our favorite business laptops, and right now the Dell 16 is down to $760 (was $980). And whether you're prepping for back-to-school or looking for an office upgrade, this everyday productivity machine is worth a look.

The laptop is powered by Intel's Core 5 120U processor with 16GB of DDR5 memory and a 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD. The 16:10 touchscreen delivers a 1920 x 1200 resolution with ComfortView technology to help reduce eye strain during long sessions.

Wi-Fi 6, USB-C with Power Delivery and DisplayPort, HDMI, and a full-size keyboard with numeric keypad make it well equipped for productivity, and it comes with Windows 11 Home pre-installed.

Should you buy it?

✅ Buy the Dell 16 if...

You want an affordable productivity laptop with a large touchscreen laptop for documents, spreadsheets, web browsing, and multitasking. The Intel Core 5 processor, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and fast SSD promise smooth everyday performance. We think it's particularly well suited to students, home workers, and office users who spend hours in front of their laptop each day.

❌ Skip the Dell 16 if...

You need dedicated graphics for demanding creative software or modern games, or portability is your highest priority. At 4.37 pounds, it's designed as a desktop replacement rather than an ultraportable, and the integrated Intel graphics are more for productivity purposes rather than graphics-intensive workloads.

Why we recommend it

The Dell 16 focuses on the features most people use every day rather than chasing headline-grabbing specs. The large touchscreen, comfortable 16:10 display, DDR5 memory, fast SSD storage, and practical connectivity make for a dependable laptop for work, study, and home use.

Dell is very well known for producing reliable business and consumer laptops, and its products often feature in our roundups of the best business laptops. In our experience, you can't really go wrong with other models from the company either.

Price context & historical value

Saving $220 brings the Dell 16 comfortably below its usual retail price and makes it competitive with many smaller 15-inch (and below) laptops offering similar hardware. Considering the larger 16-inch touchscreen, DDR5 memory, and Intel Core 5 processor, the current price represents good value for buyers, and you'll pay a lot more for it elsewhere.

For more savings, every week we track all the best business laptop deals.

The Catch: What to know before you buy

Dell's 16 Laptop is designed for everyday productivity rather than demanding creative or graphical workloads.

The integrated Intel graphics comfortably handle office applications, streaming, web browsing, and light photo editing, but they aren't intended for modern games or professional 3D rendering.

The 41Wh battery is also relatively small for a 16-inch laptop, so frequent travelers may want something with greater endurance away from a charger.

• Shop all laptop deals at Dell

Microsoft has been battling to truly establish itself in the device market for years now, with its Surface suite covering everything from foldable smartphones to 2-in-1s up to more traditional laptops and desktops - all the way up to the enormous Surface Hub (RIP).

But the company has seemingly always fallen short - whether it's battery life, falling short on power, or the unavoidable lock-in with the Microsoft 365 experience.

However its latest collection of Surface for Business releases, framed squarely at work and enterprise users, looked to address all of that, and having been using one for the last few weeks now, I can safely say, Microsoft may finally have cracked the formula for a great working laptop at last.

Going hands-on

Microsoft has positioned the Surface Laptop for Business squarely at enterprise customers rather than consumers, and it's a substantial refresh over the previous generation, with the biggest improvements around AI, security, manageability, battery life and repairability.

The device is light and portable, weighing in at just over 1.35kg, and its slim build (just 0.69in in width) means it slipped easily into a rucksack or carry-on bag.

It's a stylish device to look at as well - the polished black anodized aluminium build is far more striking than other identikit dull business laptops around today, with a well-designed keyboard and touchpad that offer more than enough space.

But where Microsoft is looking to take a real step forward with the Surface Laptop for Business is in hardware, where the company has equipped the device with Intel Core Ultra (Series 3) processor, up to 64 GB LPDDR5X RAM and up to 1 TB removable Gen4 SSD.

Crucially though, as with many modern devices, it also features AI-specific hardware, with an Intel AI Boost NPU delivering 50 TOPS of AI performance.

Along with offering local AI processing on the device, the NPU looks to perform a number of other tasks, from improved battery life to greater Windows performance. This is a decent level of performance, but if you're looking for tasks such as CAD, 3D rendering or AI model training, you may want something a bit more powerful, with a dedicated Nvidia GPU.

This looks to boost productivity and efficiency across the board - and I can say this was definitely true when I was working on the go.

Sadly I wasn't doing particularly AI-heavy work to really test it out, but I was able to take the device with me on a week-long overseas work trip, using it in conference keynotes, remote interviews, and site visits, and it absolutely ticked all my boxes when it came to responsiveness, usefulness and battery life.

At home however, it wasn't quite the same story.

It should also have meant the device was well-placed to be the centerpiece of my home office set-up, but unfortunately I frequently found issues when trying to connect a range of devices, from monitors to Bluetooth keyboards - this may have been a driver-led issue, but it was frustrating for quite some time.

The lack of ports may be an issue for some users - as there is just one USB-A connection, and two USB-C ports, which might be an issue for some creators. I use a docking station for my set-up, so for my usage I was largely OK - however as mentioned, even this wasn't always responsive - and it's a shame Microsoft has ditched the USB-A port on the charger block cable as well, as this has definitely saved me in the past with previous Surface devices.

Microsoft has also introduced a more advanced haptic touchpad for the Surface Laptop for Business, promising a more consistent click feel and improved gesture support, as well as customizable feedback. Although slightly smaller than my usual work device (a HP EliteBook) I found the touchpad incredibly responsive and interactive, making navigation between different apps and windows a breeze.

My device was equipped with the new integrated privacy display - a feature which gained a lot of attention when it was included in the latest Samsung Galaxy flagship smartphone earlier this year.

Toggled on via the alternate F1 button function, the privacy display instantly makes the screen difficult to read from side angles - no need for an external magnetic privacy filter any more.

This is obviously pretty useful for those workers accessing private or proprietary information, stopping snoopers or spies from catching a glimpse, but it also offers an anti-glare coating which should be a hit with everyone.

I loved it - but will you?

Will it be the ideal device for everyone? Probably not, as being a Surface device means it is closely tied-in with the Microsoft ecosystem - so if you use Microsoft 365 at work (which I don't) you'll have a much smoother set-up and overall experience.

The price will also be a sticking point for some shoppers, as my model starts from £1,599 - with the top spec hitting £2,499 - probably out of reach for most start-ups and SMBs.

But overall, I was incredibly impressed by the Surface Laptop for Business, easily the best Microsoft device I've used for work by a mile - and one I hope to get to use again sometime in the future.

In the pre-AI era, buying a Windows laptop or Windows desktop used to be pretty simple.

You looked at the processor, checked how much RAM and storage it had, considered a few screen size options, and tried to work out whether the battery claim sounded even vaguely realistic.

Fast forward to 2026, however, and most PC spec sheets look much busier and lot more focused on AI.

Alongside the usual phalanx of numbers and brand names, you’ll now find labels such as AI PC, Copilot+ PC, Snapdragon X Elite or X2, AMD Ryzen AI, NPU, and TOPS, among many others.

Some of these terms are definitely useful and relatively easy to understand, others are easy to misread, and a few sound more important than they are.

The good news is that the fundamentals have not disappeared.

The best laptop still depends on your apps, workload, budget, and the parts of the machine you’ll notice every day, such as CPU speed, memory, battery life, screen quality, ports, and weight.

The newer AI specs can help, especially if you want the latest on-device Windows features, but they are only one part of the picture.

To help demystify the laptop buying process, let's take a look at how to read a laptop spec sheet in 2026 – from AI PC to TOPS – and what actually deserves your attention before you buy.

AI PC vs Copilot+ PC: what’s the difference?

“AI PC” is the broadest label on the spec sheet. In most cases, it means the laptop has some form of dedicated AI hardware, usually a neural processing unit, or NPU, built into the chip.

While AI PC can be a useful shorthand, especially if you’re comparing newer laptops against older models, it is still a flexible term; different manufacturers use it in slightly different ways.

“Copilot+ PC” is Microsoft’s own branding category for Windows laptops that meet a defined hardware standard.

In 2026, that means a compatible processor or system-on-chip with an NPU capable of at least 40 TOPS, 16GB of DDR5 or LPDDR5 RAM, and at least 256GB of SSD storage. (Basically, a powerful set of specs.)

A Copilot+ PC should be ready for Microsoft’s latest on-device AI features, like smarter search and Live Captions, but it does not automatically tell you whether the laptop has enough storage or enough graphics heft.

NPU and TOPS: the new numbers in town

The NPU is the new spec most likely to trip people up. Short for neural processing unit, it is a dedicated part of the chip designed to handle AI tasks more efficiently than the CPU alone.

TOPS is the number usually attached to the NPU, and it stands for "trillions of operations per second", giving you a rough sense of how much AI work an NPU can handle.

For a Copilot+ PC, the important number is 40 TOPS or higher. Once a laptop clears that bar, it should be able to run Microsoft’s current on-device AI features.

A higher TOPS number may help with some local AI features, especially as software catches up, but it does not tell you how fast the laptop will feel when you open a big Photoshop file or fill Chrome with tabs.

For most people, NPU performance is worth checking, but it shouldn't take precedence over the specs you’ll feel every day, like battery life or screen size.

Snapdragon X, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen AI explained

Processor (or CPU) names have quietly become one of the easiest parts of the spec sheet to misread.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips brought Windows on Arm laptops into the mainstream, focusing on battery life and thin-and-light designs, which had often been Apple's main advantage.

Newer Snapdragon X2 laptops push that further with more powerful NPUs and improved graphics, but the basic buying question remains the same: will your apps run properly on Arm?

For most everyday tools, the answer is now likely to be yes.

Browsers, Microsoft 365, video calls, media apps, and many creative tools either run natively or work well through Windows’ translation layer. The areas to check are usually more specific, like older Windows software or specialist work apps.

Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen AI laptops take a more familiar x86 route, while still adding NPUs for newer AI features.

One thing to note: the exact model wording is important. A laptop with “Core Ultra” on the box is not automatically a Copilot+ PC, and the same goes for older Ryzen laptops without the right AI hardware.

RAM still matters more than most AI labels

RAM is likely to be one of the specs most familiar to many Windows laptop buyers, and with good reason: it's still one of the clearest signs of how a laptop will feel in daily use.

For a mainstream laptop in 2026, 16GB should be treated as the baseline – especially if the machine is being sold as an AI PC or Copilot+ PC – giving you enough headroom for normal work, video calls, web apps, and so on.

Anyone buying for heavier work like photo editing or coding should look at 32GB if the budget allows. As the AI boom takes hold, though, RAM is getting extremely expensive, so make sure you do really need it.

One benefit of buying a laptop with more RAM is that, in general, it will make the laptop eel useful for longer, especially on machines where the RAM is soldered and cannot be upgraded later.

Storage: 256GB is the minimum in 2026

Storage is another spec where the minimum and the sensible choice are not the same thing. A Copilot+ PC only needs 256GB of storage to meet Microsoft’s hardware requirements, but that can start to feel tight in everyday use.

For most people, 512GB is the better starting point, and leaves more breathing room over the lifetime of the laptop.

A 1TB drive is worth considering if you work with large files or want more local storage for games, video, or AI tools. However, as mentioned in the RAM section, AI companies are rapidly driving up prices for higher-storage SSDs.

External drives and cloud storage can help, but they are not a complete substitute for having enough fast storage inside the laptop you use every day.

Battery life: look for real-world testing

Battery life is one of the biggest promises behind the latest AI PCs, especially newer Arm-based Windows laptops.

More efficient chips and dedicated NPUs can help away from the charger, but battery life is still one of the easiest specs to oversell. A claim such as “up to 20 hours” may be based on video playback or controlled test conditions, rather than a normal day of usage.

Reviews are much more useful here, and TechRadar puts every laptop through a series of real-world battery tests to really dig into the real endurance.

Look for tested battery life that reflects mixed use, rather than assuming the biggest number on the box will match your working day.

The boring specs still matter

While AI labels are useful, they obviously don't make the rest of the laptop disappear. The screen, keyboard, trackpad, ports, weight, heat, and fan noise will shape your experience far more often than a fancy Copilot+ badge.

The best way to read a laptop spec sheet in 2026 is to start with your own needs: enough RAM, enough storage, tested battery life, and a screen and keyboard you’ll be happy to use for hours at a time.

After that, the NPU and TOPS figure can help you understand how ready the machine is for newer on-device AI features.

Windows laptop spec sheets have not become meaningless, just easier to misread. The best laptop is still the one that gets the fundamentals right first, then uses its AI hardware to add something useful on top.

In 2026, buying a new laptop, whether that's the best Windows laptop or the best MacBook, is still a fairly involved process that requires balancing an ever-expanding array of features and specs with your everyday requirements.

With the proliferation of AI, as both a new set of features and a branding exercise (think Microsoft's Copilot+ PC, for example), the list is only getting longer.

However, one universally essential feature everyone needs is above-average battery life.

A common mistake when assessing your options might be to simply rely on the manufacturer's “up to X hours” claim or watt-hour rating. Both of these are useful signals, but they don't tell the full story.

While a bigger battery can definitely help, going on pure numbers alone does not guarantee better battery life. Two laptops with similar battery sizes can actually last very different lengths of time.

A more useful frame of comparison is looking at how efficiently a laptop uses its available battery capacity, including whether its CPU and GPU are tuned to maximise battery life over raw power.

In recent years, Apple has been an expert in this domain, eking out longer and longer video playback and everyday usage times by optimising its M-series of chips specifically to use as little power as possible.

Why battery capacity still matters

Of course, we're not saying that battery capacity doesn't matter – a larger battery should offer longer times between charges in most cases, in the same way that a car with a bigger fuel tank can travel further between stops.

The rub is that laptops are rarely equal, and while a bigger machine might have more space for a larger battery, it almost certainly pairs that with a bigger display, a faster CPU and GPU, more cooling demand, and so on.

Every component of a laptop needs power, and these can eat into any advantage gained from having a purely larger battery capacity.

Physics applies its own limits, too. A bigger battery is naturally thicker and heavier, often defeating the point of modern ultraportables like the MacBook Neo that prioritise being thin and light.

There's also a practical ceiling: many laptop batteries sit below the 100Wh limit used for regular air travel, so manufacturers cannot simply scale capacity forever.

Checking the watt-hour rating and manufacturer claims of "all-day usage" is still worthwhile, but these tell you more about how much energy your laptop's battery can store, not what it looks like in practical day-to-day use.

The display is the biggest everyday drain

Any consideration of battery life has to start with the display, which can often be the easiest thing to overlook, despite being the feature you use the most.

The main factor at play is brightness. To state the obvious, a laptop used at 100% brightness – especially when working outside or under bright lights – is going to drain its battery a lot faster than on a lower setting.

On top of that, resolution, panel type, and refresh rate (especially for newer variable displays that go up to 120Hz or 144Hz) can all dramatically increase energy usage.

3K and 4K displays look absolutely fantastic, especially for creative work or watching films, but they will kill your battery life fast. OLED displays are in a similar category, offering incredibly deep blacks due to local pixel-dimming while consuming lots of power to show bright webpages and documents.

Refresh rates have become more of a factor in battery usage in recent years, too. A fixed 120Hz or 144Hz panel can naturally make scrolling and animations feel smoother, but it also refreshes the screen more often, requiring more power.

Taken together, you should at least consider the type of display and its impact on battery life when choosing a new laptop – a top-end 120Hz OLED panel sounds awesome right up until you try to work all day away from a plug.

Efficient chips change what “all-day” means

As the success of Apple's M-series chips shows, the chip inside your laptop plays a huge part. Gone are the days when processors were simply about speed; the better question is how much computation you can get for your battery draw.

Apple Silicon, found in both Macs and iPhones, is designed specifically for Apple’s hardware and software, so macOS and iOS can make very efficient use of the available power, especially during everyday tasks.

In recent times, Windows laptops have also made big strides.

Intel’s Core Ultra chips, AMD’s Ryzen AI processors, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips, utilising Arm-based designs, are all part of the same wider shift towards prioritizing performance per watt.

Modern chips optimize for extended battery life in several clever ways. For example, low-power cores can handle lighter jobs, integrated graphics can take care of basic visual tasks, and dedicated media engines can play video more efficiently than if the main processor has to do all the work itself.

Taken together, these innovations mean that newer laptops with similarly sized batteries can dramatically outlast older generations.

Windows, macOS, and apps all affect the final number

Hardware only gets you so far. A laptop can have an efficient chip, sensible display, and decent battery capacity, but the operating system and apps still decide how often those components are being pushed.

Apple has the clearest advantage thanks to its end-to-end hardware and software designs. macOS only has to run on a handful of Mac laptops and desktops, all of which are built around Apple Silicon chips, displays, and power management – everything is tightly controlled.

On the other hand, Windows has to work with a near-infinite combination of hardware and software from thousands of OEMs around the world. It must run across Intel, AMD, and Arm-based laptops, with different screens, drivers, utilities, and manufacturer settings.

This situation doesn't stop Windows laptops from having great battery life – as our extensive testing of the best laptops has found – but it is a real barrier, and there is a wider variation between makes and models.

Beyond the OS, apps matter just as much: having tens or hundreds of Chrome tabs open is very likely to nuke your battery life. Arm-based laptops also face the potential issue of running apps through compatibility layers, increasing the power demands and reducing battery life.

GPUs, AI features, and heavy workloads are the hidden traps

How you actually use your laptop makes a big difference and the rise of AI workloads – alongside traditional heavy hitters like 3D rendering, compiling code, and video editing – are surefire ways to go from 100% to 30% in no time.

Dedicated graphics are a big part of this. A powerful GPU can be brilliant if you need it, but it is also one of the most power-hungry components in a laptop.

Lots of modern machines now use hybrid graphics, switching between integrated graphics for lighter tasks and a dedicated GPU when more performance is needed.

New laptop chips increasingly include Neural Processing Units (NPUs), which are designed to handle certain AI tasks more efficiently than a CPU or GPU. That can help when software is built to use them properly, but heavier local AI workloads can still drain the battery quickly, especially if they lean on the CPU or GPU.”

Read manufacturer claims and lab tests carefully

Manufacturers understandably want to present their laptops in the best light and so make some... optimistic claims about real-world battery performance. None of these claims are untrue per se, but they do rely on lab conditions.

Video playback is a good example. Looping a film at controlled brightness with few background tasks can produce a very different result from a normal workday full of browser tabs, emails, calls, and everything else.

Brightness, volume, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, keyboard backlighting, refresh rate, and background apps can all shift the result. Even the browser you use or the number of tabs you keep open has an effect.

Treat such claims as a baseline – an ideal, if you will – and go from there. For a clearer picture, reviewers like ours at TechRadar actually put laptops through their paces and have tests that simulate messy real-world usage.

If a hypothetical laptop maker says its laptop can deliver "all-day battery life", but a review finds that the device lasts for just a few hours under heavy usage, that's grounds for being a bit cautious.

What laptop buyers should actually look for

So what should you actually look for when buying your next laptop?

Firstly, capacity is still worth checking, if only to get a sense of how big your laptop's battery is and roughly what you can expect as a baseline.

But there are lots of specs to check alongside raw watt-hours. Display type, resolution, refresh rate, chip generation, graphics hardware, and software support can all be just as important once you start using the laptop properly.

A good review is likely more useful than a manufacturer’s headline claim. Look for tests that reflect the way you actually work, which can often be in sub-optimal conditions. A laptop with slightly lower quoted battery life may still be the better choice if it performs well in ordinary day-to-day use.

Analysing your own habits can also be useful. If you are a heavy Chrome user that likes to keep 200 tabs open at once (because you never know when you might need that recipe from two years ago!), adjust accordingly.

Similarly, if you edit video, play games, or use demanding creative tools, you should expect shorter runtimes and pay closer attention to charging speed.

Battery life is more than one number and results from dozens of design and hardware choices working together, and the best laptop for you is the one that uses its battery well for the things you actually do.

• Microsoft has cut the price of last year's Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch models
• The freshly introduced entry-level models have 8GB of RAM and provide some relief from recent major price hikes
• This isn't a compromise that some people are happy about, and they're arguing that 8GB isn't enough for a laptop these days

Microsoft has given us some more affordable Surface devices, models that are back under a grand in the US due to price cuts – but there's a catch, and that's the compromise made to achieve this pricing.

Windows Central reports that Microsoft's chosen tactic here is to push out new variants of the Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch from last year with just 8GB of RAM to cut the cost. Previously, the baseline models had 16GB of system memory.

These new 8GB versions are priced at $849 for the Surface Pro and $949 in the case of the Surface Laptop on the Microsoft store in the US.

Note that there aren't fresh 8GB models for the recently introduced new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, which remain with a 16GB loadout at the entry-level.

The new prices for last year's models follow major price hikes for those devices in April 2026. The Surface Pro 12-inch (with 16GB of RAM) was jacked up to $1,049 in the US, whereas previously it started at $799. And the Surface Laptop 13-inch rose to $1,149 versus the original base MSRP of $899.

Analysis: A Neo approach some are questioning

While the new prices are a fair old drop down from the painful hikes that happened a couple of months back, Microsoft has sacrificed half the system RAM to get that reduction. This means these Surface devices are no longer Copilot+ PCs with exclusive AI features, as 16GB of RAM is required for that (although not everyone will miss these AI trimmings).

What else is a bit of a downer here is that the new low prices for half the RAM loadout are still $50 more than the original MSRPs for these Surface products back at launch, when they packed 16GB of RAM.

The other potential aggravation for would-be buyers here is the worry over whether 8GB of RAM is enough these days, a concern that looms ever larger. I've written about this in the recent past, and while yes, you can get by on 8GB for everyday computing duties, I am worried about how future-proofing is going to pan out for Windows 11 laptops (or indeed MacBooks, by which I mean the Neo with 8GB).

Okay, granted, Microsoft is working to make Windows 11 more performant in general, and to ensure the OS is happier with a low allocation of RAM like 8GB — and it is low these days, if you were in any doubt — but what about in five years? I don't know about you, but I expect my laptop to last half a decade, if not longer, and a non-upgradable 8GB is, I fear, going to feel wonky before too long.

Still, I take the point that the option for a more affordable Surface is good to have, and more choice is good — plus that 8GB may remain tenable for longer than you expect if you're sticking to basic computing tasks.

As Windows Central's Zac Bowden points out on X: "Microsoft tells me that it's working behind the scenes to optimize Windows 11 to run better on 8GB RAM, and these devices will be more than capable enough for day-to-day productivity workflows, internet browsing, and media consumption tasks."

Other people are a lot more doubtful, though, as you can see in the replies on that thread, which range from: "8GB of RAM in Windows isn't going to run well regardless of optimizations. You can't stop modern software bloat" to the far more blunt: "8GB RAM in 2026 is a scam."