Working from home is more popular than ever, but that does mean you'll need a good laptop to get all your work done. There are a lot of great laptops out there, but the best laptops for working from home have everything you need to make your home office as efficient as the main office.
The best laptops for working from home include Dell, Apple and more.
Illustration: Forbes / Photo: Retailers
Our favorite work from home laptop is the HP Dragonfly Pro, with its great performance and battery life, but the MacBook Pro 14 M3 and MacBook Air M1 are excellent alternatives if you work with a lot of MacOS apps. They’re all portable and well-built, with a great selection of ports for connecting your favorite accessories. Whatever kind of work from home laptop you need, for whatever kind of workload, though, there's a laptop for you. Here are our recommendations for the best laptops for working from home.
Best for: Completing any work related tasks quickly and efficiently.
The HP Dragonfly Pro is a high-end professional laptop that would make a great addition to your home office. It sports the excellent Ryzen 7 7736U CPU, based on AMD's enhanced Zen 3 architecture. That offers excellent performance in just about any application you throw at it. Paired with 16GB of fast DDR5 memory and 512GB SSD storage, and this is a laptop that will feel snappy and responsive from the moment you turn it on. The battery life is great at up to 12 hours, though it's not as extensive as some of the true kings of efficiency.
At 1080p, the screen is plenty crisp and clear thanks to its compact size and high pixel density, though it won't make your 4K movies look as good as a higher resolution display. Still, it gets bright at up to 400 nits, so you can readily use this laptop in a well lit coffee shop or when relaxing in the shade outside.
Best for: Completing any lightweight work tasks without spending much.
The Dell Inspiron 15 is an excellent work from home laptop with absolutely everything you need for lightweight office tasks, web browsing, and networking. It's built around the Intel Core i5-1335U processor, which while being entry-level by design, is still monstrously powerful. It sports 10 cores—as many as the very best laptop processors from just a few generations ago. Those are made up of performance cores and efficiency cores, helping to give you lots of multi-tasking power, while retaining good battery life. At 10 hours, there's enough for a full work day if you step away from your power source.
The onboard Iris Xe graphics are good enough for casual gaming, and the 15.6-inch display looks relatively crisp at 1080p. However, a fun extra there is the 120Hz refresh rate, which makes this laptop's screen look extra fluid when it's performing any kind of Windows animations. Get one of those casual games going with a high frame rate, too, and it'll look buttery smooth. Port selection on the Dell Inspiron 15 is great, too, with a selection of USB-C, USB-A, a headphone jack, micro-SD card reader and an HDMI output for external displays.
Pros:
Great performance from such an affordable design
Good port selection
High refresh rate display is great for casual gaming
Cons:
Lacks the performance of more powerful laptops
Screen can look dull
The Best MacBook For Working From Home
The Most Powerful MacBook Yet
Apple
Apple MacBook Pro M3 14-inch
CPU: Apple M3 Pro 11-Core | RAM: 18GB Unified Memory | Graphics: Apple M3 GPU 14-core | Storage: 512GB SSD | Display: 15.6-inch | Resolution: 3024 x 1964 | Refresh rate: 120Hz | Battery: Up to 18 hours | Weight: 3.5pounds
Best for: Completing demanding tasks in MacOS applications.
If you need a MacBook with real power, the latest generation of MacBook Pro is ready to take on any task. They have incredible performance and efficiency thanks to the latest generation of Apple M3 processor, with this configuration using the M3 Pro model with 11-cores. That's far from the top model, though, so if you want more cores and more power, there's a greater core count M3 Pro model, or the M3 Max which really cranks up performance to a new level—though you’ll pay for it. The onboard graphics card are great for 3D design work or casual gaming, too.
Battery life is extensive, lasting well through a work day, and the display is a vibrant mini-LED lit LCD display with incredibly brightness, making HDR content look stunning.
Pros:
Gorgeous display with intense brightness and high refresh rate
Excellent performance from any of the M3 processors
The Dell XPS 13 Plus is the best version of one of the best laptops, offering excellent performance, lots of storage space, one of the best OLED displays of any laptop and a gorgeous design which rivals some of the best mobile aesthetics ever made. Its battery life isn't as strong as the standard XPS 13, but if you are mostly using this laptop for working from home, or the odd bit of work during a commute, you won’t notice. The strong performance comes from the Intel Core i5 CPU, with 12 cores delivering excellent multi-tasking performance. There's no dedicated graphics, but the Intel Iris Xe GPU is plenty for casual gaming.
The 4K+ OLED display is one of the best you'll find at any size, let alone in such a compact, pixel-dense design as this. It makes everything from work documents to your favorite TV shows and movies look stunning, so this is particularly good for light video and photo editing tasks. At just 2.8 pounds, this laptop is super portable, and though its battery life means you can't use it on the go all day, it's easy to carry around with you for whenever you need it.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 11 continues the strong pedigree of its predecessors with its mix of excellent performance, rugged build quality and impressive portability. It has great battery life, lasting up to 15 hours of mixed use, and at just 2.5 pounds, it's the lightest laptop on this list. You can carry it around all day or easily hold it in one hand while you use it. Its screen doesn't fold flat, but it's still a touchscreen, giving you additional input options. It's also not super detailed, but its 1080p+ resolution is perfectly crisp for professional tasks at 14-inches.
The build quality is excellent, making sure that this laptop doesn't just not flex when you use it or carry it around one handed, but it can withstand the odd knock and bang without trouble, too. The keyboard feels great when typing over longer sessions, and while the touchpad is responsive, too, you also have the classic Thinkpad pointing stick option, too.
The Forbes Vetted tech team is well-versed in all things digital, having written hundreds of articles in the category. A couple of staffers, including Dave Johnson, our executive editor, have even authored a books on tech-related hardware subjects.
Jon Martindale, the writer of this story, is a regular Forbes Vetted tech contributor. He has bylines in digital publications including Digital Trends and PCGamer, and formerly ran his own PC hardware review website. Collectively, they and the larger Forbes Vetted team have conducted extensive research and testing on the best work from home laptops in order to create this list. The tech vertical is overseen by Rebecca Isaacs, the consumer tech and electronics editor at Forbes Vetted.
How We Chose The Best Laptops For Working From Home
To find the best laptops for working from home, we combined our first-hand knowledge of a wide range of laptops, with the opinions of our fellow tech writers here at Forbes, thoughts of colleagues throughout the industry and robust research. Then we cross-referenced stated stats and features shared by the brands under consideration against ratings and reviews left by confirmed customers.
We've have hands-on time with many of these models in person, so we know their build quality and features, and we've performed extensive comparisons between both professional and consumer reviews.
Long story short, you can rest assured, these are the best laptops for working from home you can buy in 2024.
What Are The Best Laptops For Work From Home Jobs?
If you’re a Windows user, the best laptop for working from home is the HP Dragonfly Pro. It offers a solid mix of performance and battery life in a well-built chassis, and features a great display. The MacBook Pro 14 M3 offers great competition if you'd prefer to use a MacBook and Apple's suite of applications.
For those on a tighter budget, the Dell Inspiron 15 is an excellent alternative.
Can Business Laptops Be Used For Working From Home?
Absolutely, they can. They tend to be more expensive than standard laptops, so try to get your boss or company to pay for it if you can, but their build quality and warranties tend to be better than consumer designs. They often have great battery life and portability too, like our favorite business laptop for working from home, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11.
The Best Laptop By Category
Looking for more options? We’ve got a list to help you find the best laptop for your lifestyle. From MacBooks and Chromebooks, to models under $500, we've got you covered.
