Best laptop for students UK 2026: Our favourites, all tried and tested

• We’ve tested hundreds upon of laptops over the years and our reviewers since Expert Reviews was first founded in 2009
• Cumulatively, our reviewers and editors have more than sixty years of experience benchmarking, writing reviews of and recommending laptops, so you can trust what they say
• Our favourite laptop so far in 2026 is the Apple MacBook Neo. No other laptop matches its combination of display quality, portability, all-round performance and design
• Our second favourite pick is the Honor MagicBook 16 – a big Windows laptop that packs in lots of features and power at a very reasonable price

What’s the best laptop for students? At the moment, our pick is the Apple MacBook Neo for its sterling combination of portability, sturdiness, battery life and solid day-to-day performance, but it might not, for a variety of reasons, be quite the laptop for you.

Laptops come in all shapes and sizes, even at the budget end of the market that students. What if you need more power or a GPU for heavy scientific modelling? A Windows machine or a bigger screen for watching movies on after you’ve finished studying for the day? There’s a laptop for you in our list below.

We’ve also included a buying guide, detailing all the key things to consider when buying a laptop for school, college or university. And if your budget isn’t so limited, you can also read our best laptops roundup for the best of the best.

Best laptop for students: At a glance

• Best student laptop overall: Apple MacBook Neo | Check price
• Best student laptop with Google ChromeOS: Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 Gen 10 | Check Price
• Best student laptop with Windows: Honor MagicBook 16 (2026) | Check price at Honor

How we test laptops for students

At Expert Reviews, we have decades of experience reviewing laptops so we can intuitively tell a good laptop from a bad one. However, we still need to be sure we’re being as unbiased as possible in our assessments, and to do that we run every single laptop we’re sent through a series of benchmark tests.

We test performance with a combination of in-house benchmarking software, third-party benchmarking tools and games tests. We also measure a laptop’s screen using a colorimeter and the DisplayCAL software. And we test storage speed, too, recording sequential transfer speeds.

Of course, no suite of laptop benchmarks would be complete without some kind of battery life assessment, and we test this by playing a video on loop and seeing how long it takes to run the battery flat from 100%.

We also ensure we actually use every laptop to write on, watch videos, browse the web, carry out video calls and more. To find out more about how we test, read our in-depth how-we-test article.

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The best student laptops you can buy in 2026

1. M2 MacBook Neo: Best student laptop overall

Price when reviewed: From £599 (with student discount) | Check price at Apple | John Lewis

best buy

Reviewed by Jonathan Bray

The Apple MacBook Neo is the cheapest laptop Apple has ever produced and, to be bonest, it’s the only laptop most students will ever need. So long as your course doesn’t require you to run Windows-only apps, or you need to GPU-heavy data modelling tasks, it’s the perfect machine.

It’s superbly lightweight and portable, has a display that is better than most at this price, and even though it uses a smartphone chip for power (the Apple A18 Pro) it should cope just fine with the day-to-day tasks of student life. In our testing, we found it beat the Apple M2 processor for single-core performance, but lagged behind it for multi-core.

Apple has hiked the price since launch, which is disappointing, but we still think the MacBook Neo remains the best choice for most students. If you’re going to buy one, though, do make sure you use Apple’s education discount to get yourself £100 off.

Read our full Apple MacBook Neo review (2026)

Key specs – Processor: Hexa-core Apple A18 Pro; RAM: 8GB; Storage: 256GB or 512GB SSD; Screen size: 13in; Screen resolution: 2,408 x 1,506; Weight: 1.23kg

2. Honor MagicBook 16 (2026): Best student laptop with Windows

Price when reviewed: £849 (£700 with student discount) | Check price at Honor

best buy

Reviewed by Alun Taylor

Some laptop users prefer a machine with a larger screen, and in our opinion the Honor MagicBook 16 (2026) ticks more boxes in this category than any other. It’s got decent amount of kick in the horspower department, thanks to four-core Panther Lake Intel Core 5 chip.

Build quality is excellent – it even comes with an IPX2 splash-resistant keyboard – it has plenty of storage via a 512GB SSD, and you can add extra via a second SSD slot inside. Plus, there’s a generous 16GB of RAM. It comfortably outperforms the MacBook Neo and it has longer battery life as well. In our testing, it lasted nearly three times as long as the Neo – a stunning 27hrs 41mins.

Of course, it is heavier than the Neo and its display isn’t nearly as nice, either, but if you need a laptop with more oomph and prefer a larger screen on which to spread out, this is the laptop you want. Plus, it’s currently available to students with a whopping £300 off the asking price.

Read our full Honor MagicBook 16 (2026) review

Key specs – Processor: Intel Core 5 325; GPU: Intel Graphics (4x Xe cores, integrated); RAM: 16GB; Storage: 512GB SSD; Display size: 16in; Display resolution: 1,920 x 1,200; Display type: IPS, 60Hz; Dimensions: 355 x 243 x 15.9mm (WDH); Weight: 1.64kg

3. Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 Gen 10: Best budget laptop for students

Price when reviewed: From £400 | Amazon

Reviewed by Stuart Andrews

If you don’t want to spend the Earth on your laptop, and the requirements aren’t too stringent, you can’t do much better than this machine. Our reviewer said it was the best Chromebook he’d tested in years when he reviewed it at the back end of 2025 and it remains one of the best value laptops you can lay your hands on anywhere.

Not only is it quick and responsive, but it also comes with a sumptuous OLED Full HD display, near 15-hour battery life in our testing and performance that holds its own against other budget Windows machines.

It’s not quite as potent as the Apple MacBook Neo, but it is significantly cheaper. If you can get by with just a Chromebook, it’s just about the biggest bargain in laptops right now.

Read our full Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 Gen 10 review

Key specs – Processor: Mediatek Kompanio Ultra 910; GPU: ARM Immortalis G925 MC11 (integrated); RAM: 12GB; Display size: 14in; Display resolution: 1,920 x 1,200; Display type: OLED 60Hz; Storage: 128GB UFS 3.1; Dimensions: 314 x 219 x 15.8mm (WDH); Weight: 1.17kg

4. Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x Gen 10: Best value Windows laptop for students

Price when reviewed: from £579 | Check price at Argos

Reviewed by Alun Taylor

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x Gen 10 is our current favourite budget-friendly Windows laptop. It might not be as up to date or as powerful as the Honor MagicBook 16, but if you can find it at the right price, it packs in an awful lot for your money.

Alas, the price has risen a lot at SOME retailers since we reviewed the laptop, and the OLED model is overpriced (£1,270 at Lenovo – ouch!). However, the standard machine with its 300 nit IPS display is still dirt cheap at Argos, where a student discount has reduced the cost of to £449. That’s great value for a laptop with this much packed in.

It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X1-26-100 processor, backed up by 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD – the sort of specification that will soon be a pipe dream as the RAM and storage crisis continues to bite – and has fantastic battery life, lasting longer than 15 hours in our tests.

Key specs – Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon X1-26-100; GPU: Qualcomm Adreno; RAM: 16GB; Storage: 512GB SSD; Display size: 15.3in; Display resolution: 1,920 x 1,080; Display type: IPS, 60Hz; Dimensions: 343 X 240 X 17mm (WDH); Weight: 1.6kg

5. Medion Erazer Deputy P1: Best student laptop with a discrete GPU

Price: £980 | Check price at Laptops Direct

recommended

Reviewed by Alun Taylor

The ongoing RAM and storage crisis, driven by the demand for AI datacentre-hardware means that, currently, high-spec laptops with gaming-grade graphics are much more expensive than they were a couple of years ago.

All of which means that, despite what it might look like £979 is actually a very reasonable price to charge for the specification in this Medion machine. For your money, you’re getting not only top-level CPU performance that will be able to cope with most workloads student life is likely to throw at it, it’s also beefy enough to cope with most stuff that might require hardware-accelerated GPU processing.

Plus, at the end of a hard day’s studying, you’ll be able to fire up Steam and play most AAA titles at native resolution and high frame rates. Battery life isn’t very good, and the screen is middling, but performance is just about as good as it gets at below a grand these days.

Key specs – Processor: Intel Core 7 250H; GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060; RAM: 16GB; Storage: 1TB SSD; Display size: 15.6in; Display resolution: 1,920 x 1,080; Display type: IPS, 144Hz; Dimensions: 360 x 240 x 29mm (WDH); Weight: 2.42kg

How to choose the best laptop for school, college or university

How much should I spend on a student laptop?

Depending on what your studies involve and whether you plan on using your laptop for play as well as work, you can spend anywhere between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand pounds on a student laptop.

However, if you want your laptop to last you longer than a couple of years, we recommend you avoid the very cheapest machines at £300 or less. Above this price, laptops tend to be much more capable and pleasant to use, and the more you spend, the better they become.

Indeed, we recommend spending between £500 and £1,000. In this price bracket, you’ll find laptops that offer impressive performance coupled with attractive build quality.

Do I need a fast processor and loads of RAM?

Processors and RAM aren’t too important if you just want a laptop for writing essays on – even a cheap Chromebook is good enough for Google Docs and searching the internet.

However, if your studies require the use of more demanding software for photo or video editing, 3D design or crunching databases, it’s worth putting money towards a more powerful CPU. Intel’s Core Ultra 5 and 7 processors are what you want here or the non-Ultra Intel Core 5 and 7 series of chips. Take note of the three numbers following the chip denomination as this indicates which generation the chip is from. Ideally, you want something with a 2 or a 3 at the beginning.

Meanwhile, AMD’s Ryzen AI range of chips, specifically the 5, 7 and 9 families often rival Intel’s in terms of performance (look for laptops with at least a number in the 300s or 400s at the end of the name). On the Apple side of things, the M4 and M5 processors are the latest two generations.

More RAM is always welcome, as it means you can leave more applications and browser tabs open before your laptop grinds to a halt. You should look for a laptop with at least 8GB of RAM, and 16GB is even better if your budget allows it, but our advice is to avoid anything with 4GB or lower if you can possibly help it.

However, do bear in mind that RAM (and storage) is very expensive at the moment thanks to the ongoing memory crisis, so you may not be able to find a new laptop with more than 16GB of RAM at anything like a reasonable price.

How much storage do I need?

This will be determined by how you plan on using your student laptop. If you’re going to be saving lots of documents locally and plan on downloading numerous apps and working on video or audio files, you’ll find storage gets eaten up pretty quickly.

A laptop with 256GB of storage will suffice for most students, but 512GB is a safer bet if you don’t want to have to uninstall and delete things a year or two after buying your new device, and 1TB is even better but a rarity at lower price points.

It’s important to look at the type of storage a laptop has in addition to how much of it you’re getting. A student laptop with a proper SSD (solid-state drive) is preferable to one with a cheaper eMMC flash drive.

What else do I need to look out for?

If you can try out a laptop before buying, then do so. Everyone has a different idea about what constitutes a comfy, usable keyboard or touchpad, and while we pay close attention to those aspects in our reviews, it’s well worth trying it out for yourself. Equally, what some people might consider a heavy, bulky laptop might be entirely manageable by other people’s standards.

Similarly, it’s worth keeping an eye out for the number of USB-C or USB 3 ports. The faster USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4 or 5 are worth paying extra for if you need additional storage or backup through a fast external drive, and you’ll also have more options for connecting monitors and other devices.

It’s well worth leaving some room in your budget for a good external USB hard drive or SSD, or just making sure you use a cloud storage service such as OneDrive or Google Drive to keep your documents backed up. Even the best laptop for students can be damaged, lost or stolen, so it pays to make sure your coursework doesn’t disappear along with it.

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Written By

Jonathan Bray

Head of reviews at Expert Reviews, Jon has been testing and writing about products since before most of you were born (well, only if you were born after 1996). In that time he’s tested and reviewed hundreds of laptops, PCs, smartphones, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines, doorbells, cameras and more. He’s worked on websites since the early days of tech, writing game reviews for AOL and hardware reviews for PC Pro, Computer Buyer and other print publications. He’s also had work published in Trusted Reviews, Computing Which? and The Observer. And yet, even after so many years in the industry, there’s still nothing more he loves than getting to grips with a new product and putting it through its paces.

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