With the holidays right around the corner, it’s time for our latest guide to the best laptop buys of the year. We will of course pay attention to the best laptop with a budget of 500 euros, and return again to the best basic laptop that can cost 700 euros. What’s more, we’re looking for the best entry into the Apple ecosystem now that the Cupertino-based manufacturer recently updated its lineup of MacBooks with laptops powered by the new M3 SoCs.

The last months of the year traditionally consist of sales of devices introduced at the beginning of the year, culminating in the Black Friday festival. Meanwhile, Intel and AMD are working on new hardware that will likely be officially presented at CES 2024, and of course laptop manufacturers will immediately use this show to show off their new lineups with those processors. We already learned from Intel that a new Meteor Lake series is coming. Tweakers wrote a preview about it: A chipset with a structure of different “tiles”, with faster CPU cores, an improved GPU and special low-power CPU cores that perform background tasks, as well as a new NPU for AI calculations.

AMD is rumored to be relaunching the Ryzen 7040 chipset under the Ryzen 8040 name, with the same Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 GPU. New Ryzen 8050 APUs are also expected to arrive under the Strix Point name, based on a hybrid architecture with Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores, but it is uncertain whether they will be ready in January. It doesn’t look like new video cards for gaming laptops will be available anytime soon. Although Nvidia is holding a presentation at CES, it appears to be only about the new desktop cards.