Best Laptops: Holiday 2021

With 2021 coming to a close, it is time again to look back at the laptop market. Despite bumps from the COVID pandemic, the laptop ecosystem continues to flourish, delivering a bevvy of new products based on new platforms.

For 2021, AMD launched their very successful Ryzen 5000 series products (codenamed Cezanne) featuring the latest Zen 3 CPU cores paired with AMD Vega graphics. Intel, still basking in the glow of the Tiger Lake launch in late 2020 continues to feature the 11th generation Core platform that is now over a year old. Based on the Willow Cove cores and featuring a much-improved Intel Xe graphics solution, Intel's solution still provides excellent performance and efficiency for the PC laptop space.

The big news of 2021 was Apple ditching x86 processors and beginning the process of moving their products to their in-house designs. While Macs won't be covered in this guide - either you want an Arm-based Mac or you want an x86-based PC - it was still an important milestone in the laptop space and not one to be ignored.