The best touchscreen laptops are highly responsive to your touches, swipes and taps. Additionally, they support stylus input for digital drawing and note taking. As a cherry on top, they should treat your eyes to stunning, vibrant colors and offer adequate brightness.
The best touchscreen laptops also unshackle you from the confines of your keyboard and touchpad, allowing you to interact with their immersive, interactive displays. Woo-hoo for freedom! They add a extra layer of fun that their non-touchscreen counterparts can't offer, which can be activated by hand gestures, fingers and styli (yes, styli is plural for stylus).
Traditional laptops with touchscreens are great, but if you really want the full benefits of touch support, buy one of the best 2-in-1 laptops. And if you're a student, check out our list of the best college laptops. If you're not certain you'll need a touch screen, then check out our best laptops page, which includes non-touch models.
The Quick List
Best overall
Our reviewer couldn't stop gushing over the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1. She kept raving about its stellar 14-inch, OLED touchscreen display, adding that its stunning 2,800 x 1800 panel has “mouth-watering vibrancy” and gorgeous color depth. It also has a zippy SSD, prominent speakers, and great battery life. What more do you need?
Best Chromebook
Yes, touchscreen laptops are popular among Windows PCs, but don't forget about Chromebooks! If you're a big consumer of Google products within the ecosystem, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and more, you may want to consider snagging a Chromebook. But not just any Chromebook — get yourself a good one like the Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook.
Best 14-inch convertible
If you’re not only seeking a touchscreen, but the best convertible (meaning it can transform into a number of different postures), the Spectre x360 14 is one of the best — if not the best — 2-in-1s you can grab today.
Best 16-inch convertible
The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is excellent for digital artists. After all, it comes with the beloved S Pen right in the box, so you don’t have to worry about purchasing it separately. Paired with a gorgeous display, solid performance, and battery life and you have a winning combination.
Best Acer
The Acer Chromebook 514, packed with a 14-inch, 1920 x 1080-pixel touchscreen, made this list because of its incredible battery life. It can last more than 14 hours on a single charge. Did I mention it's also less than $500?
Best design
The HP Dragonfly Folio, packed with a 13.5-inch, 1920 x 1280-pixel touch display, will throw off your co-workers because it can transform into a leather journal-like form. However, with a little more bending, it can fold back into a clamshell laptop. What's even better is its pull-forward mode, allowing you to use the display like it's a digital easel.
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Best Dell
Dell has a swath of touchscreen displays, but the one laptop that caught our eye is the Inspiron 16 2-in-1. Not only did it wow us with its incredible 14-hour battery life, but it also has a decent 16-inch 1920 x 1200-pixel display that will meet your needs. As mentioned, it's a 2-in-1, so that means you can bend it into a number of different postures.
Best overall
Not many laptops earned our prestigious Editor's Choice badge this year, but the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 managed to snag one. This touchscreen beauty won our hearts with its slick, sharp and attractive 14-inch vibrant OLED display. It lasts quite long on a charge, too, delivering a battery runtime of 10 hours. Its SSD is extremely fast, and it offers top-of-the-line performance for anyone seeking seamless productivity for work or school.
See our full Lenovo Yoga 9i review.
Best Chromebook
There's a reason why we called the Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook a "near-perfect" laptop in our review. It has a spectacular OLED touchscreen display, a compact detachable 2-in-1 design, and comes with a cover and keyboard. As a cherry on top, it lasts more than 13 hours, so you don't have to be tethered to an outlet all day, whether you're a busy worker bee or a student. The only downside is that if you want the stylus paired with this Chromebook, you'll have to purchase it separately, but it's well worth the purchase.
See our full Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook review.
Best 14-inch convertible
The Spectre x360 14 is one of the best 2-in-1 laptops ever. This 13.5-inch model builds upon its predecessors, but adds useful new features, including 12th Gen CPUs. Highlights of this laptop include a stunning design, bright and vivid 1920 x 1280-pixel IPS and 3K2K OLED display options, epic 10+ hour battery life and fast overall performance.
Add to that a generously sized touchpad that is silky to the touch as well as a comfortable keyboard, excellent security options (fingerprint sensor and facial recognition), and a good selection of ports, and well, it's easy to see why we like this laptop so much.
We recommend buying the Spectre x360 14 over the Envy 13 if you have the money, especially if you need the flexible design. In fact, the Spectre x360 14 is the best laptop if you want a convertible notebook, period.
See our HP Spectre x360 14 review
Best 16-inch convertible
Looking for a touchscreen 2-in-1 that is perfect for your content creation and digital artistic needs? Stop looking right now. The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 fits the bill. First of all, it ships with the beloved S Pen, the stylus that is one of the biggest selling points for the Samsung Galaxy S-series flagship phone line. Now, you can use that stylus to take notes and draw with precision on the Galaxy Book 3 Pro's 360 display.
It also has a sweet, vivid, 15.6-inch AMOLED, 1080p display. It also outputted outstanding performance in our benchmarks, outpacing its rivals. Our only serious complaint is that the battery life has fallen off since last year, but overall the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 remains an outstanding option for artists or anyone looking for a solid big-screen 2-in-1 with stylus support.
See our full Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 review.
Best Acer
Whoa! Can we talk about the battery life on the Acer Chromebook 514 for a second? On the Laptop Mag battery test, which involves the laptop surfing the web over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness (until it taps out), the Chromebook 514 lasted a shocking 14 hours and 8 minutes on a single charge!
The average Chromebook lasts about 9 or 10 hours, so imagine our surprise when we saw Chromebook 514's results. On top of stellar battery life, the Acer Chromebook 514 has excellent good speakers for a sub-$500 laptop, so you can enjoy Spotify, Netflix, and other entertainment apps with decent-sounding audio. It also has a simple, pleasant aesthetic that will fit in any environment. Plus, it's performance is pretty good, too. And best of all, it won't break the bank.
See our full Acer Chromebook 514 review.
Best design
If you like your touchscreen displays to be packed inside a stylish laptop, the HP Dragonfly Folio G3 is the best choice for you. It has an eye-catching pull-forward design that is not only alluring and entralling, but useful, too, particularly if you love to take notes and/or draw. While in pull-forward mode, the display angles itself like an easel, allowing you to make use of the 1920 x 1280-pixel touchscreen display.
Plus, our review gushed about the Dragonfly Folio G3's crisp, colorful panel, accurate and useful stylus, and strong performance. And let's not forget that the Dragonfly Folio G3 is covered in a you-can't-stop-touching-it faux leather material. Whew! I wouldn't pass this up if I were you.
See our full HP Dragonfly Folio G3 review.
Best Dell
Looking for an awesome touchscreen display among Dell's vast laptop portfolio? Look no further than the Inspiron 16 2-in-1. The most attractive aspect of the Inspiron 16 is that it has excellent battery life. Most of the PCs we test barely surpass the 9-hour battery life mark, but the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 managed to last nearly 14 hours on a single charge.
As a cherry on top, on a good day, you can catch the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 with a price tag that under $1,000. Plus, you'll love this 16-inch laptop's sleek, premium design and productivity-ready performance. Packed with a 1920 x 1200-pixel touch display and a 16:10 aspect ratio, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 would be awesome as your next laptop companion.
See our full Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7620) review.
How we test touchscreen laptops
When testing the best touch screen laptops in our lab, we focus on the display. First, we experiment with the screen's responsiveness. Not-so-great touch screen laptops may lag or fail to keep up with our gestures. The best touch screen laptops can handle all our touch gestures, such as pinch-to-zoom and finger scrolling, without any hiccups.
We also look for crispness and high definition when it comes to our touch screen displays. What fun is it to have a touch screen if the display isn't visually appealing? We test the display's sRGB gamut coverage as well as its brightness. We also test the color accuracy by observing its Delta-E score. We also test for display's graphics capability with industry benchmarks.
If the laptop comes equipped with a stylus, we channel our inner artist and we test how well the pen can keep up with our strokes on popular drawing software.
Aside from the display, we also test for battery life, overall performance, multitasking muscle and more. This way, you can choose a touchscreen laptop that best fits your lifestyle.
How to find your perfect touchscreen laptop
You may be wondering, "Which touch screen laptop should I buy?" The answer is dependent on who you are and what you're hoping this touch screen laptop can accomplish for you. If you're an artist, you'll want to keep an eye out for touch screen laptops that have a comfortable, zippy stylus that can keep up with your erratic drawing strokes. You'll also want to make sure you're satisfied with the display's color coverage and screen solution. You may also want to make sure the touch screen laptop has a sufficient number of ports to make file transferring a smooth experience.
If you're a power user who loves the productivity boost that touchscreen provides, you may want to look for a touch screen laptop that is power efficient and doesn't die too quickly while you're plowing away with work and other tasks.
Take a look at some other aspects of a laptop you should consider aside from the touchscreen display.
- Screen Resolution: If possible, get a display with a 1920 x 1080 (aka 1080p, or Full HD) or higher resolution.
- CPU: An Intel Core i5 provides good mainstream performance. Some budget systems will come with Core i3, Celeron or Pentium CPUs, which are good for basic tasks, but not heavy multitasking. Get a Core i7 or Core i9 (serial number ends in HQ or HK) for gaming or high-end productivity tasks such as video editing and 3D modeling.
- RAM: 8GB is ideal for most users, but power users will want 12 or 16GB. 4GB is acceptable for budget systems. Secondary laptops and Chromebooks may have less.
- Storage: Unless you're a gamer or a power user, 256GB of internal storage is probably enough. If possible, get an SSD (solid-state drive) rather than a hard drive, because it's going to make your computer a lot faster.
- Graphics Chip: Gamers and creative professionals need to do some research and figure out which discrete GPU from Nvidia or AMD is good enough to run their favorite software. Everyone else will be happy with the built-in Intel HD Graphics that come with the CPU.
Why Trust Laptop Mag
We put touchscreen laptops through extensive benchmark testing — both synthetic and real-world — before they end up in the hands of our reviewers. We evaluate each aspect of the laptop, including its performance, battery life, display, speakers and heat management.
In our benchmark testing, we use a Klein K10 colorimeter to detect the brightness and sRGB color gamut of the laptop's display. For performance testing, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including Geekbench 4.3 and 5.0 and 3DMark professional graphics tests.
To determine real-world performance, we task the laptop to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution and to duplicate a 4.97GB multimedia file. Our real-world graphics test is the Dirt 3 benchmark with medium settings at 1080p resolution. Gaming laptops go through an entire library of games at high settings to see how their discrete GPUs keep up.
We also run heat tests by playing a 15-minute full-screen video and measuring temperatures in different areas of the laptop. Last but not least, our battery test consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. For MacBooks and premium Windows 10 (and soon Windows 11) laptops, a runtime of over 9 hours is considered a good result whereas gaming laptops and workstations that can stay powered for longer than 5 hours deserve praise.
These tests are complemented with extensive hands-on testing from our reviewers who critique everything from the laptop's materials to the feel of its touchpad.
