Why you should trust us
I’m a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering computer monitors, laptops, tablets, and 3D printers. I’m a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation, and I am responsible for all of Wirecutter’s computer monitor coverage. I previously worked as a freelance photojournalist, photographing everything from local business features and politics to the protests after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I also once staked out Punxsutawney Phil for Groundhog Day. My previous work can be seen in the Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and The J…
Why you should trust us
I’m a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering computer monitors, laptops, tablets, and 3D printers. I’m a certified display calibrator through the Imaging Science Foundation, and I am responsible for all of Wirecutter’s computer monitor coverage. I previously worked as a freelance photojournalist, photographing everything from local business features and politics to the protests after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I also once staked out Punxsutawney Phil for Groundhog Day. My previous work can be seen in the Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and The Journal News. I was also a news assistant in the New York Times photo department, mainly focusing on the Lens blog.
For this guide:
- I attended the 2024 CES trade show in Las Vegas to get a preview of upcoming technology and saw many of the year’s most anticipated laptops.
- I’ve covered Apple’s laptops for Wirecutter for the past three years, and for this review I ran our updated suite of new tests on four previous models of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro to confirm that the older machines we recommend still work.
- I took all the photos.
- Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. Most of the laptops we test are sent by the manufacturer for review consideration, but I return every laptop that isn’t purchased by Wirecutter. I’m also never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.
Who this is for
An editing laptop is essential for any videographer, photographer, or other media worker. These machines allow you to bring the power of a desktop computer (or most of it, at least) on-site to shoots, and they let you edit footage at any airport gate you might find yourself in.
For people who need as much power as they can possibly get on the road, we looked for laptops with features such as color-accurate displays, great battery life, the latest processors and graphics cards, and enough ports for you to plug in all your peripherals and SD cards.
If you edit photos or videos, or if you create illustrations that don’t demand ridiculously high resolutions, such as on social media, you don’t have to shell out for either of our top picks. The M3 MacBook Air, our budget pick, is powerful enough to handle any of those tasks (just a little slower) and can save you a bit of money. One of our favorite ultrabooks could also make for a tidy compromise if you prefer Windows and edit video only occasionally, or if you’re just getting started and don’t need a full professional setup.
Office-bound editors are likely to get better performance for the same price by buying or building a desktop PC. Such computers don’t need to manage battery life and can feed components far more power, and they also have more room for fans and heatsinks to keep components cool. And down the road, when your desktop computer ages, you’ll be able to upgrade it for less than it would cost to buy an entire new computer.
How we picked
We have a high bar for video-editing laptops, since these machines need to contend with some of the most demanding professional workloads. Here’s how we choose which laptops to consider and test.
Performance:
- Processor: Also referred to as the CPU, the processor is the most important component of any editing laptop. Windows users have to choose between a processor from Intel or one from AMD. For Intel, we recommend the latest Core Ultra 7 or 9 chips. If you’re looking at AMD, we’ve been impressed with the Ryzen 9 AI 370 found in our top Windows pick. And if you’re buying a Mac, choose a system that uses an M4 Pro or M4 Max, as those are Apple’s newest custom-built processors.
- Graphics card: Video editors and people who work in motion graphics should pay special attention to a system’s graphics card, or GPU. Since 2020, creative-software giant Adobe has worked to expand how GPUs can speed up editing tasks in its Premiere video-editing software, making exports up to five times faster than in previous versions of the software. Laptops with Nvidia’s latest RTX line of graphics cards have become cheaper and easier to find, so in our latest round we tested laptops with RTX 4000–series graphics. Even higher-end GPUs tend to ship in gaming laptops that are typically heavier, bulkier, and louder than the ultrabooks we consider for this guide.
- Memory: On both Windows and Mac laptops, we recommend a baseline 16 GB of RAM for photo and video work. However, if your projects contain dozens of gigabytes of video, you should upgrade to 32 GB.
- Storage: Most new laptops use fast NVMe drives, so you’re just shopping for how much storage you need. The smallest drive we recommend is 500 GB, but we suggest that option only if you’re already archiving video projects on external hard drives or a network-attached storage system. A 1 TB drive gives your system a bit more headroom and allows you to store a few more projects at a time.
Displays: For this round of testing, we looked for laptops with 15-inch or larger displays with a 4K resolution or close to it. For our budget picks, we consider smaller, 13-inch displays as well.
Noise and heat: The more powerful a laptop is, the more heat its components typically generate. Some laptops we’ve tested have become so hot that they’ve literally burned our thighs when we’ve used them on our laps, so we prioritize those that stay cool under pressure. To deal with this heat, many laptops use fans, which in turn makes them noisy. We pay special attention to how loud each laptop gets under a heavy workload, but every Windows laptop we’ve tried generates some kind of fan noise.
Ports: We look for laptops with a variety of ports, but we also confirm that the connections are fast enough to handle huge media files. Thunderbolt 4 is the latest standard for USB-C ports and supports transfer speeds as high as 40 Gbps; Apple’s MacBook Pros have Thunderbolt 5 ports, which are faster and can deliver more power, but only a handful of Thunderbolt 5 accessories exist. We also check for SD card slots that support UHS-II, the modern standard.
Battery: Great battery life on a laptop feels like a superpower, and bad battery life feels like a curse. Many of the Windows laptops we’ve tested prioritize capable components and power-hungry displays at the expense of battery life. In contrast, this is where Apple laptops shine.
Size and weight: Photographers and videographers carry around enough weight in gear. We make sure to consider how heavy these laptops are, and we also check that they fit in a few different backpacks, testing the laptops in bags from Aer, Chrome Industries, Evergoods, Fjällräven, Osprey, and Tom Bihn, as well as a trusty Manfrotto camera backpack.
How we tested
We run each laptop through a series of benchmarks and functional tests. After we do so three times, we calculate an average value for the final result. We also use each laptop for a few days to understand each machine’s strengths, shortcomings, and nuances.
To get a baseline understanding of each computer’s processing power, we first run Geekbench 6, GeekBench AI, and Cinebench 2024 benchmarks on each laptop. Then we graduate to the functional tests, which include exporting 4K and 1080p video edited in Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve Studio 19.
Our Adobe Premiere test includes three different sequences, which are two-minute, five-minute, and 10-minute cuts of 4K 60 fps video footage from a Nikon Z6II. We export on Premiere’s High Quality settings for 4K and 1080p, which uses the H.264 codec and one-pass variable bit rate encoding with a target of 80 Mbps and 20 Mbps, respectively. The tests are sent to Adobe Media Encoder, which creates a queue of jobs to run exports in batches. This also increases the time the computer is using a lot of processing power, and if we see signs like export times getting longer, it’s an indication that some components are overheating.
We use the same footage in DaVinci Resolve Studio, where we currently export a two-minute 4K video using the H.264 Master settings to make sure the results are in line with our Adobe data.
We also run graphics-intensive games on the laptops, typically the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at 1920×1200 resolution, while we have them on our laps, to get a sense of how much heat they would produce over long periods of time. We also take surface-temperature readings on our top picks with an infrared thermometer.
To test each laptop’s display, we first warm up the screen for at least 30 minutes, and then we run a suite of tests using Portrait Displays’s Calman Ultimate to determine color accuracy, contrast, and brightness. We run these tests using Calibrite Colorchecker Display Plus, which we calibrate to every screen with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer. The Calman software is provided to Wirecutter by Portrait Displays for use in reviews.
Finally, to test battery life, we set each laptop to a standard 150 nits, turn off all the power-saving features, and run Wirecutter’s standard cross-platform laptop-battery test. The test is a Chrome extension that simulates web browsing and video playback until the laptop runs out of battery. However, video editing takes a lot more processing power than web browsing, which means more battery consumption, so keep in mind that the battery-test numbers in this specific guide are best used for comparison rather than as an absolute measure of battery life while you’re editing.
Top pick: Asus ProArt P16
Dave Gershgorn/NYT Wirecutter
Top pick
Recommended configuration
| Processor: | AMD Ryzen AI 9 370 | Screen: | 3840×2400 |
| Graphics: | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 | Weight: | 4 pounds |
| Memory: | 32 GB | Tested battery life: | 10.5 hours |
| Storage: | 1 TB SSD |
If you prefer to use Windows when editing or need access to Windows apps and capabilities, you finally have an option that keeps up with the Macs we’ve tested. The Asus ProArt P16 exports a 10-minute 4K video in less than five minutes, still offers a USB-A port alongside its USB-C ports, and has a vibrant 4K touchscreen.
It quickly crunches through 4K footage. In our tests, across two-minute, five-minute, and 10-minute video lengths, the ProArt P16 rendered and exported high-resolution 4K video up to twice as fast as Apple’s M4 Pro–based laptops. We found that even over long, repeated exports, the P16’s processors didn’t slow down due to overheating, which can be a common problem among higher-powered laptops. During our test of its ability to export three consecutive 10-minute 4K videos, the P16 rendered the last video slightly more quickly than it did the first one, rather than taking a bit more time for each successive file.
| Export test, 4K, 2 minutes | Export test, 4K, 5 minutes | Export test, 4K, 10 minutes | |
| Asus ProArt P16, AMD HX 370, Radeon 890M | 0:59 | 2:28 | 4:56 |
| Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, M4 Pro, 48 GB | 1:55 | 4:47 | 9:35 |
| Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch, M4, 24 GB | 2:00 | 4:59 | 9:57 |
All times are expressed in minutes:seconds.
It has an accurate 4K OLED touchscreen display. With a resolution of 3840×2400 and an aspect ratio of 16:10, the P16’s screen is a bit taller and has more space for the packed controls of a creative editing suite. It’s sharp and relatively bright, but we measured it at 367 nits. OLED computer monitors usually don’t get too much brighter, especially not until you start spending more than $1,000 on the monitor itself. The display runs up to 120 Hz, which makes the laptop’s software look better by showing smoother-moving graphics, such as when you scroll down a website. If text looks blurry as you scroll, you can resolve that with a 120 Hz refresh rate, which shows 120 frames per second, in contrast to the 60 frames of a 60 Hz refresh rate. Those extra interstitial images help fill in the gaps for your brain, and motion looks smoother and less jagged as a result.
And it’s accurate in the DCI-P3 color space. We typically test for accuracy in the sRGB color space, but we found that the P16 really shines in the DCI-P3 space instead. The P16 showed strong grayscale accuracy, producing colors close enough that they would be indistinguishable to the human eye. Accurate grayscale measurements show that a display’s white and gray tones aren’t improperly tinged with color. White is arguably the most important color in creative work, and being able to see a true white tone helps in a thousand ways, such as making it easier to white-balance images.
The Asus ProArt P16 has HDMI, USB-C, and USB-A ports, as well as a power jack and a headphone jack. Dave Gershgorn/NYT Wirecutter
It has a useful variety of ports. The P16 has two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, an SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a power jack. You can charge the device over USB-C, but doing so is slower than using the heavy 200 W power brick that comes with the laptop. Although the P16’s USB-C ports aren’t Thunderbolt-certified, they still carry video and data at the same 40 Gbps rate.
Color-accuracy test results
| Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro, 2024) | Apple MacBook Air (15-inch, M3, 2024) | Asus ProArt P16 | |
| Grayscale | 0.83 | 1.68 | 1.00 |
| ColorChecker | 0.90 | 1.38 | 1.82 |
| Saturation | 0.66 | 1.25 | 2.06 |
Lower numbers are better. The Calman color-calibration software generates these scores by using the Delta E 2000 equation to determine the perceived difference between colors. Scores under 2.0 indicate that inaccuracies can be found when the viewer closely compares the results against the original, and scores under 1.0 mean that inaccuracies are imperceptible to the human eye.
It has okay battery life for a laptop with this much oomph. The P16 lasted about 10.5 hours in our battery tests, which simulate real-world web browsing and video streaming through a custom Chrome extension. This result was about seven hours less than what the MacBook Pro’s battery provided before it died. Keep in mind that this test is built around web browsing and doesn’t reflect how long the laptop might last when editing your specific content.
It’s about the same size and weight as the MacBook Pro. The P16 is made of a black-colored metal that resists fingerprints reasonably well, and it has rounded edges that make resting your wrists on the laptop more comfortable than on the MacBook. It weighs 4 pounds, about half a pound less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
It has a quality keyboard and trackpad, a control dial, and a fingerprint sensor. The P16 has a large trackpad with a special feature: a touch dial that you can configure to control different settings in Windows or editing software like Adobe Premiere. You can swipe down from the top-right corner of the trackpad to activate it, and you can assign it to different tools, such as scrubbing through your video-editing program’s timeline.
You’ll have to rely on Asus if it breaks. Unlike Apple, Asus doesn’t have a nationwide network of stores that can handle repairs, and the P16 isn’t a user-repairable device. You’re subject to Asus’s customer service, which will determine whether a repair is possible.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
It doesn’t have the best battery life. The MacBook Pro’s 17.5-hour battery life handily beats the Asus ProArt P16’s longevity by nearly a business day. Although 10.5 hours isn’t too bad for a laptop with this much processing power and an OLED display, we’d love to see more.
It has a large power brick. The P16 has a large, old-school power brick, the kind you’ve probably seen strewn on the floor of every college library and coffee shop. This offers some advantages—the brick is in the middle of the cable, so it’s less likely to fall out of the wall than Apple’s big, heavy charger. However, it’s also more difficult to wrangle and pack neatly.
Top pick: Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro, 2024)
Dave Gershgorn/NYT Wirecutter
Top pick
Recommended configuration
| Processor: | Apple M4 Pro | Screen: | 3456×2234 |
| Graphics: | 20-core M4 Pro | Weight: | 4.7 pounds |
| Memory: | 24 GB | Tested battery life: | 17.5 hours |
| Storage: | 512 GB SSD |
The MacBook Pro has long been an industry standard for media editors due to its fast performance, high-quality display, and slim, refined design. The newest version, the Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro, 2024), continues that tradition, but both Windows laptops and Mac laptops with Apple’s own consumer-level processors have started to close the gap in performance. The MacBook Pro remains a fantastic editing machine, with its impressively accurate display, the longest battery life for a laptop this powerful, energy-efficient performance, near-silent fans, and the integrations of the Mac ecosystem. But it isn’t the only option anymore.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro chip is the best Mac option for working professionals who need an editing suite on the go. If you work with abnormally large files or work in time-critical environments where shaving a minute off an export time is worth $1,000, you should upgrade to the M4 Max chip.
The M4 Pro chip is fast, but it has some competition. The M4 Pro chip performed well across most of its benchmarks but fared a bit worse than its Windows competition when exporting 4K video. In a standardized test in Adobe Premiere Pro, which we had just run on four other MacBooks updated to macOS Sequoia, the laptop with the M4 Pro chip exported video just seconds faster than one with the M4 chip and took nearly twice as long as the Asus ProArt P16. But in other tests, such as encoding video in Handbrake, the MacBook with the M4 Pro chip was the fastest by far: It processed the 4K video at 99 frames per second, in contrast to 70 fps for the P16 and 58 fps for the M4-based MacBook. We’re conducting more tests on the M4 Pro chip, but for now we can say that this performance doesn’t meaningfully detract from the overall competitiveness of the laptop.
| Export test, 4K, 2 minutes | Export test, 4K, 5 minutes | Export test, 4K, 10 minutes | |
| Asus ProArt P16, AMD HX 370, Radeon 890M | 0:59 | 2:28 | 4:56 |
| **Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, M4 Pro, 48 GB ** | 1:55 | 4:47 | 9:35 |
| **Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch, M4, 24 GB ** | 2:00 | 4:59 | 9:57 |
All times are expressed in minutes:seconds.
The MacBook Pro has an SD card reader, USB-C port, and HDMI port on its right side. Dave Gershgorn/NYT Wirecutter
The MacBook Pro has an excellent display. The 16-inch display offers a resolution of 3456×2234, just under the standard 4K resolution of 3840×2160. However, out of the box, Apple’s displays are impressively accurate, to the degree that most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the intended color and the “incorrect” color being shown, even if they had a reference image. Apple also has a tool to help calibrate the XDR display on the MacBook Pro, if you want to ensure the most precise color.
Color-accuracy test results
| Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro, 2024) | Apple MacBook Air (15-inch, M3, 2024) | Asus ProArt P16 | |
| Grayscale | 0.83 | 1.68 | 1.00 |
| ColorChecker | 0.90 | 1.38 | 1.82 |
| Saturation | 0.66 | 1.25 | 2.06 |
Lower numbers are better. The Calman color-calibration software generates these scores by using the Delta E 2000 equation to determine the perceived difference between colors. Scores under 2.0 indicate that inaccuracies can be found when the viewer closely compares the results against the original, and scores under 1.0 mean that inaccuracies are imperceptible to the human eye.
Its screen is bright enough for editing in bright conditions. The MacBook Pro’s backlight gets to about 400 nits, bright enough for most inside environments; beyond that, it uses an ambient-light sensor to increase its brightness up to 1,000 nits. You’ll probably want to leave the auto-brightness on, unless you’re always working indoors. This impressively bright backlight allows you to work in sunnier conditions than with any other laptop we’ve tested, and if doing so is commonplace where you work, we also recommend the optional nano-texture glass. Rather than a glass coating, the nano-texture is actually scratched or otherwise applied into the glass itself, so it diffuses light rather than deflecting it back. The nano-texture can cause a bit of a washed-out, diffused glare, but in the situations we tested, the MacBook Pro’s backlight was bright enough to overcome that glare. If you work primarily outside, the nano-textured glass makes the MacBook Pro far more usable for an additional $150.
It has an upgraded webcam. The new 12-megapixel webcam is sharp and much better in low light than previous MacBook webcams. It outputs 1080p resolution video and works well for video calls. Apple has also added Desk View, an option for attempting a top-down view of an object just in front of your laptop, such as a diagram on a notepad. We found the resolution to be a bit low, and the footage looked as if it were coming from a strange angle, but creative people are sure to put it to better use.
The MacBook Pro runs cool. We have little to say about the MacBook Pro’s noise and heat, mainly because we didn’t notice much of either. The system stayed cool even during our export tests, so we could easily keep it on our laps even when the computer was doing heavy lifting. In this regard, the MacBook Pro had an advantage over every Windows laptop we tested, all of which became warm to the touch and turned on an audible fan when the processor was under a heavy editing load.
Dave Gershgorn/NYT Wirecutter
It has some modern ports such as USB-C, but no USB-A. The MacBook Pro with Apple’s M4 chip has a MagSafe charging port, an SD card reader, an HDMI port, and three USB-C ports, in addition to retaining the headphone jack. We like that USB-C ports occupy both sides of the laptop, which limits the possibility of a chunky cable blocking valuable port space. All of the USB-C ports on the MacBook Pro are Thunderbolt 5 enabled, so you can charge your laptop, hook it up to external displays, and transfer data at the fastest speed available on either side of the laptop. You don’t have many Thunderbolt 5 devices or accessories to choose from at the moment, however. Also, the MacBook Pro lacks a USB-A port.
The laptop has great battery life. In our battery test, which simulates web browsing and video playback at a standardized brightness across every device, the 16-inch MacBook Pro was again the top performer. It lasted about 17.5 hours, around seven hours longer than the Asus ProArt P16.
It isn’t the most portable laptop, but you can still easily travel with it. The MacBook Pro is large, but it still fits inside backpacks with ease. The size has allowed Apple to cram a 16.2-inch display into the machine, as well as a 100-watt-hour battery, the largest allowed on domestic flights in the United States. However, the 14-inch version has a smaller, 70-watt-hour battery, which mostly accounts for its slightly shorter battery life.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
Repairing or replacing components is essentially impossible. Apple has soldered the processor, RAM, and storage to the computer’s motherboard. The inability to repair these parts shortens their lifespan.
The camera notch can be annoying. If an application has more than seven or eight menu tabs, the notch can block some of them. Apple has released a simple workaround, allowing you to switch certain apps to display their menu items below the menu bar.
There are no USB-A ports. That means older peripherals won’t work without a dongle. USB-C has been around for a while, however, and although fiddling with a dongle is a little annoying, we’ve found that few of our accessories still require the older cable.
It’s pretty heavy. The 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs 4.7 pounds without the charger or any additional accessories. If you’re tucking it into a Pelican case with other gear, that might not be a big deal, but the weight adds up in a backpack or bag. (The laptop actually weighs about the same as a standard brick. If you’re unsure about whether you can tolerate the weight, carrying around a brick in your backpack could be a fun test.) We’re recommending the 16-inch version of the laptop over the 14-inch model because it provides more real estate for video editing. But if weight is a concern for you, consider the smaller laptop.
Budget pick: Apple MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2024)
Dave Gershgorn/NYT Wirecutter
Budget pick
Recommended configuration
| Processor: | 10-core Apple M4 CPU | Screen: | 2880×1864 IPS |
| Graphics: | 10-core Apple M4 GPU | Weight: | 3.3 pounds |
| Memory: | 16 GB | Tested battery life: | 14.5 hours |
| Storage: | 256 GB SSD |
The Apple MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025) is a great laptop for editing photos and videos because it has a big screen with fantastic color accuracy, surprisingly nice speakers, and Apple’s capable M4 processor. Many photographers and video editors with simple workflows should consider buying this latest MacBook Air instead of a MacBook Pro to save money, as well as to save weight in their bag. In our testing, we found editing on the M4 Air to be nearly as fast as on our top pick, which is much pricier and heavier.
It’s best for lighter workloads. Our top pick, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, is better for video and photo editors in many ways, since it runs significantly faster, has a higher-resolution screen, and offers far more ports. On the other hand, the MacBook Air is 1.4 pounds lighter, which might be a bonus for some people who need to carry a lighter backpack. For students, 1080p video editors, and photographers, the MacBook Air is up to the task. Even short 4K content will export in a minute or two. If you’re editing dozens or hundreds of gigabytes of 4K footage, however, choose the MacBook Pro.
Color-accuracy test results
| Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro, 2024) | Apple MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025) | Asus ProArt P16 | |
| Grayscale | 0.83 | 3.60 | 1.00 |
| ColorChecker | 0.90 | 2.17 | 1.82 |
| Saturation | 0.66 | 1.93 | 2.06 |
Lower numbers are better. The Calman color-calibration software generates these scores by using the Delta E 2000 equation to determine the perceived difference between colors. Scores under 2.0 indicate that inaccuracies can be found when the viewer closely compares the results against the original, and scores under 1.0 mean that inaccuracies are imperceptible to the human eye.
It has an accurate display. The 15-inch M4 MacBook Air also has a great screen for media work, with a 2880×1864 resolution and 500 nits of brightness. It’s not quite as color-accurate as the MacBook Pro, covering only about 80% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and it lacks the HDR capabilities of the XDR display. However, for social media content and other lower-stakes media, it has a reliable display.
You might want some extra memory. Apple’s M-series processors have unified memory, which means that the CPU and the graphics processor use the same memory. This is a boon for media editors, as laptops are typically equipped with puny amounts of memory dedicated to graphics. Having more memory is kind of like getting a bigger desk—it allows you to work on bigger projects or more things at once. Most photographers and video editors who typically cut together short 4K projects of a few minutes will require only 16 GB of memory. If you’re working with longer projects or large galleries of photos, it’s worth stepping up to 24 GB, but if you’re considering 32 GB of memory, you’re about to spend enough that you might get more value out of a MacBook Pro.
If you’d like to read more about the 15-inch MacBook Air, check out our guide to the best MacBooks.
Other photo- and video-editing laptops worth considering
If you want to upgrade the same laptop over time: The Framework 16 laptop is a large, powerful, customizable laptop that best serves tech enthusiasts who want to upgrade their laptop like a desktop, as you can deeply customize your laptop’s specs build and swap out components over time. The 16-inch laptop has a modular design that allows for a keyboard with or without a 10-key number pad, as well as an option to add a modular graphics card. It also has six slots for modular ports that you can swap at any time; the ports can be USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, Ethernet, DisplayPort, a headphone jack, a microSD card reader, or even more storage. The laptop was as fast as other modern Windows laptops in our tests, but its customization fundamentally makes it a different machine than other laptops and a bit more difficult to recommend. Buying a Framework laptop means buying into the company’s ecosystem of upgrades and ports, which means you have to trust that Framework will continue stocking the parts you need and making the parts you want in the future. This guide prioritizes the ease of getting media work done above a laptop’s upgradability or repairability, so unless you’re excited by the prospect of selecting each of your ports, we think our top picks are better editing machines.
What to look forward to
Apple just announced an updated $1,600 14-inch MacBook Pro with a new M5 processor, which is designed to be better for running AI and graphics-based tasks. While most people typing up documents or doing homework won’t see the gains that this M5 chip brings, photo and video editors who are now awash with new AI tools might be well-served by this new laptop. Apps like DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, and Logic Pro all have started to add features that use on-device AI processing, like automatic subject masking, generative image editing, and generative audio.
However, based on the specs that Apple has released, it looks like the current M4 Pro and M4 Max chips will still be faster than the M5, so people who need the most processing power should still stick with those older chips. This new M5 MacBook Pro looks best for those who want the MacBook Pro’s excellent Liquid Retina XDR display and extra ports, but don’t benefit from shaving seconds off an export time. In the past we’ve only recommended the base M3 or M4 chips in the MacBook Air, which is lighter and thinner with similar performance. But Apple hasn’t made those yet, so the new chip is limited to this MacBook Pro, the M5 iPad Pro, or the M5 Vision Pro.
The M5 MacBook Pro is available for pre-order now, and ships October 22. It costs $1,600 for the base model with 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage, or it can be configured with up to 32 GB of memory, 1 TB of storage, and Apple’s excellent anti-reflective nano-texture coating for $2,350. We’ll be testing the new laptop to see how it compares to previous models with pro-level chips.
We’ll also be testing a new round of laptops for photo and video editing, including the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i, Dell 16 Premium, LG Gram 16 Pro, Asus ProArt P16, and Asus Vivobook S16.
The competition
The Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025) is the smaller version of our budget pick, and it’s equally as good if you don’t mind the smaller screen size. If you go for the 13-inch version, however, make sure to get the option for the 10-core GPU for $100 more. It provides a performance bump of about 10% in various graphics tasks, based on our testing, and is probably worth the investment if you’re reading this guide.
Apple also sells a 14-inch version of the MacBook Pro with the M4 processor, a more basic version of the M4 Pro chip. Our tests found the M4 to be very fast, within seconds of the M4 Pro on 4K video-encoding tasks in both Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve Studio. However, the M4 Pro performed better at a wider range of graphics benchmarks due to having more graphics cores than the M4 chip. The biggest reasons to get the M4 MacBook Pro are the processor, the upgraded display, the webcam, and more ports. However, we’ve found that the MacBook Air is nearly as accurate in the sRGB color space, where a vast majority of content is made and consumed.
The Acer Swift X 14 is a premium editing laptop that performed well on many of our tests, and it’s paired with a sharp 2.8K OLED display. But like previous Acer laptops, it has a loud fan that fires up every time the processor is under any load. The fan is so loud and persistent that we just can’t recommend this laptop.
The Dell XPS 16 is a newer, larger version of the XPS 15 that we previously recommended in this guide. However, we found that the XPS 16’s OLED display had an un-ignorable amount of “grain,” which looks like a pattern of tiny translucent dots over the screen—it was especially noticeable on white or lighter backgrounds. Dell told us that the effect is created by the touchscreen layer of the display, but we can’t recommend the laptop due to this issue. And the XPS 16’s other display option is too low-resolution for us to recommend on a professional device.
Apple has discontinued its M3 lineup, but you can still find some models on sale at third-party retailers. But the MacBook Pro (M3, 14-inch) is too expensive even to be a budget pick. Creative professionals who were to buy a MacBook Pro with the M3 chip would be underwhelmed by its performance in comparison with a MacBook carrying Apple’s M3 Pro chip. And typical home users don’t need its XDR display with 120 Hz ProMotion, the main reason to upgrade; Apple’s MacBook Air displays already offer 500 nits of brightness (compared with 600 nits on the MacBook Pro), they’re about as color accurate, and most people wouldn’t notice a lack of HDR support. The M3 MacBook Pro is also about a pound heavier than our budget pick, the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air.
The $2,000 Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2’s main differentiator is its hinged screen, which allows for the bottom of the touchscreen display to pop away from the laptop and tent over the keyboard and trackpad in two different orientations. Whether this flexibility is useful is completely based on your preference, but we couldn’t find any obvious or universal benefits for photo or video editors. The screen is also just a bit too heavy for the laptop’s hinge—when we picked up the laptop when it was open, the screen flopped back under its own weight.
We like the power and battery life of the Acer Swift X, but we can’t recommend it due to its 1080p screen. If you need a small and powerful laptop with Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics but use only external monitors for your editing work, you might want to consider the Swift X. Note that the charging jack is flimsy, and we question how long it would last before breaking.
In testing the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE, we found that it was hotter and louder than the competition, with worse editing performance. Its screen also has a lower resolution than that of our budget pick, the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air.
Dell laptops outside its XPS line, namely its Latitude, Precision, and Alienware lines, generally don’t meet our minimum specifications for media-editing machines, especially in their display resolution. Most of the laptops that Dell offers don’t have resolutions higher than 1440p, which is low when you’re spending $2,000 or more for an editing laptop.
We considered the Razer Blade line of gaming laptops, which offer high-end components and a sleek design. But when we tried configuring one for media-editing tasks, certain upgrades such as a 4K display brought the total to more than $1,000 beyond the price of our top pick.
This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry.