I’ve used more laptops than I can count — here are the 5 features I'll never compromise on

I've used a lot of laptops. Even before I started reviewing them for XDA, I spent a lot of time with both Mac and Windows machines alike, and through that experience, I learned quite quickly what I found valuable about the mobile computing experience. Most laptops do a great job at covering their bases today, but if I were in the market for a new one today, these 5 features need to be absolutely bang-on for me to even consider a purchase.

5 Display

Probably the most important part of a laptop

I can't stress enough just how important the display is to the experience of using a laptop. Obviously, the specs matter, like resolution and color accuracy, but what I find most crucial are things that will directly impact the usability. How bright does the display get? What kind of coating is on the glass? How solid is the hinge, and will it wobble when I'm typing?

These are just a few of the questions I ask myself, and having been lucky enough to use so many different laptops for varying amounts of time, I've been exposed to many different small display issues that would bother me over the course of a laptop's life. The best display I've used on a laptop in terms of how it looks is definitely the 2025 rendition of the Lenovo Yoga 9i, which sported a 2K OLED display with variable refresh rate. If we're talking about general build quality, taking into account the hinge wobble and thinness, then the MacBook Air definitely takes the cake. You can lift it with one finger, yet it doesn't wobble at all when typing. It might be a silly thing to put so much stock into, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for a great hinge.

4 Touchpad

A touchpad can make or break a laptop for me

Trying to use a laptop with a bad touchpad is like using a dull knife in the kitchen—just horrible. When touchpads first started ballooning in size, I remember there being a lot of discourse about them being comically sized, but honestly, the extra real estate that has since become commonplace couldn't be more welcome.

Size is important, but I'd argue the feel is more crucial to get right. A click shouldn't feel mushy, and while having physical buttons for your right and left clicks is nice, I'd prefer a fully haptic pad over anything else. Apply didn't invent the fully haptic touchpad, but they were the first to put it in a laptop, and boy, are we better for it. The current touchpads found in MacBooks circa 2025 are pretty unbeatable, although Sensel touchpads found in ThinkPads and Microsoft Surface laptops do come close.

3 Battery life

There's nothing worse than a workhorse with no stamina

Poor battery life alone can be enough of a reason for me to not recommend a laptop. The good news is: there are actually very few laptops with downright poor battery life, and while some are certainly better than others, most ultrabooks and business laptops have batteries to last an entire workday at the very least.

Because of the way Apple can control essentially every part of the laptop to optimize battery usage, they've been kings of battery life for quite some time, with the latest line of M4-powered systems being far and away the best at being away from an outlet. For Windows-based systems, anything with the new Snapdragon X Elite or Pro ARM-based chips continue to shrink that gap, which would make them my main choice, compatibility issues notwithstanding.

2 A clean OS install

The less time I spend cleaning bloat, the better

One of my biggest laptop pet peeves is bloatware. The presence of it at all is enough to tick me off at the very least, but if I'm being forced to use your proprietary program to change settings that I should be able to control in the menus of the OS, you've done enough to make me not want to buy your laptop.

Programs like Norton or McAfee are relatively harmless by comparison, but still annoying to have installed at all. The less bloat I need to deal with after I open the lid for the first time, the better.

1 A great keyboard

My fingers only deserve the best

Last, but certainly not least, a laptop's keyboard is one of the most crucial parts to nail. For someone like me, who spends many hours a day typing away on a laptop, a good keyboard is just a necessity.

A good laptop keyboard, to me, has good travel, isn't mushy, and doesn't have a funky layout. I appreciate what Apple was trying to do with the Touchbar era of MacBook Pros, but those keyboards were a perfect example of what not to do. Those keyboards had no travel, and the function keys being replaced by a Touchbar that would change depending on what you were doing was just annoying more than anything. Not to mention the horrible durability problems it suffered from.

By contrast, the keyboards you'll find on Lenovo's ThinkPads, Dell's Latitude series and HP's Elitebooks are some of the best to type on. Apple's MacBooks post-Touchbar era also feel excellent.

Don't settle for less

As processing power starts to plateau relative to the needs of most of us, there have never been more options that are viable in terms of their performance. A laptop purchase really is an investment that can last you years, and as a result, it's worth paying really close attention to the parts of the experience that might not show up on the spec sheet.