My tombstone won’t be too impressive—”He Saved 50 or 60 People from Buying the Wrong Laptop”—but in decades of testing and reviewing for PCMag and other outlets I’ve learned a few things. I’ve watched laptops grow from barely functional super-calculators into formidable desktop replacements, workstations, and gaming rigs. I’ve seen innovations that transform the way people work (Lenovo’s Yoga convertibles) and ones that make everything worse (the old Dell XPS webcams that looked straight up your nose). With that perspective in mind, I’ve collected all of the laptop features that don’t live up to the hype, along with a bunch that are truly must-haves.Along the way, I’ve learned that high prices and whizbang specs don’t always translate to real-world productivity. (Sure, Microsoft 365 and Copilot are impressive alongside 16GB of RAM and a 20-core chip, but talk to us geezers who used AppleWorks with 128K of RAM.) My lists of invaluable and unnecessary laptop features may not match yours, but they might open your eyes to what truly matters. (Spoiler alert: It’s never geeky codenames like “Meteor Lake” or “Ampere.”)But First! My List of Demands From Laptop KeyboardsBefore getting into separating the laptop wheat from the notebook chaff, let’s get the most divisive topic out of the way and establish some ground rules for it: keyboards.1. Cursor Arrows: Inverted T Is the Only WayTo begin, let’s all agree that Up is a full-size key located above an identical Down key, which is found between Left and Right arrow keys that are also full-size. Got it?
Memo to manufacturers: This is how you keyboard—inverted-T cursor arrows; dedicated Home, End, Page Up, Page Down; and Ctrl, then Fn, at bottom left. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Half-size, hard-to-hit Up and Down arrows stacked between full-size Left and Right arrows are an abomination that I’ve excoriated in approximately 1,100 HP laptop reviews, plus not a few from other manufacturers. (I think Apple originated this sin, but it has restored its honor and changed its ways.) You’ll thank me the first time you need to scout around a giant spreadsheet, cell by cell. 2. Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down: Only Real Keys Will DoMaybe it’s because I spend most of my day word processing, but I can’t live without these cursor-control or navigation shortcut keys. Laptops that foist them off as a key combination (onto the Fn key, plus cursor-arrow keys) are a pain. Chromebooks that expect you to alternate between Search+Up, Alt+Down, and Ctrl+Search+Right are even worse.3. Put the Right Keys in the Right CornersFor one more keyboard-layout rant before we move on, the Ctrl key belongs in the lower left corner, with the Fn key to its right—not vice versa. I’ve praised Lenovo laptop keyboards (like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 shown above) as the best in the business, but the company came to this crucial realization only this year.Also, the Delete key belongs at the top right, not pushed leftward to make room for the power button or something else. I don’t want to unlearn muscle memory to avoid turning off my laptop by accident. Underrated Laptop Features: Essentials for Any Well-Liked SystemAs you can tell, I’m obsessive about small features that have a big impact on power and convenience. Let’s enumerate some more underrated but essential laptop items. 4. Don’t Short My Ports: USB-A and HDMI Still MatterApple and Dell have led the way in limiting laptop connectivity to only Thunderbolt 4 ports. It makes systems a few millimeters thinner, and it’s great that USB-C ports have no right side up or upside down. But they aren’t handy for much besides charging cell phones and wireless keyboards and mice. (Yes, you can find Thunderbolt docking stations and disk arrays, thanks for reminding me.) Why would anyone use a USB-C-to-DisplayPort dongle when you can just plug a monitor into an HDMI port? What are we supposed to do with all our USB-A flash drives? What was Dell thinking when it released some notebooks without even an audio jack? Until you’ve had to live the dongle life, you may not realize how underrated the humble HDMI and USB-A are.
Apple’s latest MacBook Air has a MagSafe charging port. Yay! It has two Thunderbolt 4 but no USB-A or HDMI ports. Boo! (Credit: Brian Westover)
5. Give Me a Webcam That Works for WorkIt’s 2024 and high time to boycott any manufacturer that still sells laptops with crappy 720p webcams. You should consider 1080p resolution a bare minimum for video calls in this age of remote work, and more vendors should be like HP, which has taken the lead in providing 5-megapixel or sharper cameras. Come to think of it, another thing we shouldn’t be doing in 2024 is sticking duct tape or Post-It notes over webcams that don’t have sliding privacy shutters or on/off switches. The pandemic really moved these components from second-banana consideration to a starring role. They’re not going back into obscurity.6. Power Move: An Ambidextrous AC Adapter Is BestMore and more laptops nowadays have power plugs or bricks with USB-C rather than barrel-plug connectors, which is fine. It’s especially fine when such systems have charging-capable USB-C ports on both their left and right edges, so you can arrange the cord as you like and keep it out of the way if you’re using a mouse. (And, let’s be honest: Sadly, gaming laptops are the thickest and heaviest around, but having ports at the rear is even better for reducing cable clutter.) 7. A Topnotch Top Row Is…Um…KeyThank heavens for Fn+Esc and the option to toggle the F1 through F12 keys from their Windows defaults to system shortcuts such as volume and brightness controls. (Bet you can’t name any except F1 for help! I still use F12 for Save As in Word.) Smart laptops add handy functions such as microphone mute or launching Windows Settings; dumb ones still bother with media play/pause or next/previous track—or, shudder, an emoji function.
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Yes, this is a Logitech Wave Keys desktop keyboard, but the top-row icons are noteworthy: Volume and microphone mute, good. Smiley-face emoji, bad. Same applies to laptops. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Overrated Laptop Features: Things I Can Do Without Actually, the emoji key reminds me—I look forward to reading your favorite underrated features (or strident dissents) in the comments. But how about overrated or useless laptop design choices? Believe it or not, I have pet peeves other than the cursor arrows not being all in a row… 8. Hoity-Toity Screens in Ordinary MachinesDesign professionals appreciate mobile workstations with Pantone-certified displays, but I confess I don’t pay attention to Eyesafe or other blue-light-reducing screen labels. To paraphrase George Washington reaching for his spectacles, I’ve gone gray in the service of technology and am now going blind. And HP Sure View and other laptop screens with built-in privacy filters don’t work. Okay, technically they do: Yes, they discourage your airplane seatmate from sneaking a peek at your spreadsheet. But they do so by making the screen so dim you can’t see it yourself. At that, they’re more useful than IMAX Certified displays. Do you know what IMAX Certified means? A few more pixels at the top and bottom of Marvel movies on Disney+—big whoop. 9. SD and microSD: The Slots That Time ForgotFlash-card readers are cool for cheap Chromebooks that need ways to expand their limited eMMC storage. But because most of us have ditched digital cameras for smartphones, those slots have lost their value as file-transfer media or the last heirs of floppy disks. Unless you’re a photo pro who needs to swap cards from your dSLR into your laptop for fast bulk file access, you’ll seldom use these slots. Bluetooth utilities like Windows Phone Link, Mac AirDrop, or the excellent Google Quick Share do the job better.
Owners of the Alienware m16 R2 will use its two USB Type-A ports often. Its microSD slot, not so much. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
10. Haptic Anything: C’Mon, Give Me a Real ButtonLines from laptop reviews are rarely carved for posterity in granite, but last summer I wrote: “On-screen virtual keyboards suck eggs and are tools of the devil.” So was Apple’s Touch Bar. So is the skinny strip that replaces mouse buttons above touchpads on the latest ThinkPad Z series machines. Whether it’s laptops, washing machines, or cars’ climate controls, trading good old pushable buttons for fussy touch panels, touch strips, or touch “areas” is never a smart idea. 11. Carrying Sleeves: Like Laptop Pants With No PocketsAsus bundles these fancy fabric envelopes with a few of its notebooks. A nice gesture, but they’ve always struck me as useless. When am I going to be carrying a laptop and nothing else? Where am I supposed to put the AC adapter…strap it to my ankle? Have you ever heard of a briefcase? Sleeves may seem like a nice throw-in, but I bet you’ll seldom use yours.
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