1. The list in brief
2. Best overall
3. Best business laptop
4. Best 2-in-1 laptop
5. How to find the best 13-inch laptop
6. How we test
7. Why trust Laptop Mag
13-inch laptops seem to be the sweet spot where sleek meets powerful. Students breeze through campus with these lightweight wonders, while pros tuck them into briefcases for on-the-go productivity (or just conquering emails from the couch). You'll love the convenience and portability they bring, making the perfect companion for any busy, on-the-move individuals.
But just because they're small, doesn't mean you should underestimate their bite. These machines handle most tasks with ease thanks to the strongest processors available today, and when combined with a sturdy chassis, enchanting display, and long battery life, it makes for the best work-friendly laptops available. So ditch the bulk and embrace the possibilities – 13-inch laptops are where portability meets powerhouse. If you need a laptop today, these are the best 13-inch laptops that we've reviewed.
Momo Tabari graduated with a bachelor's degree in Journalism & Media Studies at Brooklyn College and has been covering tech for four years. She has written around fifty reviews and has plenty of experience testing and critiquing laptops.
The Quick List
Best overall
The MacBook Air M3 features an excellent 13.6-inch display, combined with surprisingly powerful speakers, an ultra-comfy keyboard, and battery life that will make you question reality. That's why it's at the very top of our shortlist.
Best business
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 is the best 13-inch business laptop thanks to its incredibly bright display, solid productivity performance, and phenomenally light design that comes in at just 2.2 pounds.
Best 2-in-1
The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is a fantastic dual-display laptop with competitive performance, a stunning OLED panel, excellent portability, and a great design. Multi-taskers will love using two screens at once.
Best 13-inch laptops in 2024
Why you can trust Laptop Mag Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Best 13-inch overall laptop
Apple's MacBook Air M3 is staggering, asserting itself as one of the best overall laptops. If you're in need of a 13-inch, most people would not go wrong with it, as its excellent performance and miraculously long battery life are impossible to deny.
The MacBook Air M3 towers above the premium laptop average in performance with its Geekbench 6 overall multi-core score of 12,087. Its SSD speeds are also hyper-fast, hitting an average of 3,031 megabytes per second in our file transfer test. Plain and simply, there's very few scenarios in which you can go wrong with the MacBook Air M3.
On the Laptop Mag battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits, The MacBook Air M3 lasted 15 hours and 13 minutes. No, you didn't misread that, as its battery life goes above and beyond reason and is one of the longest lasting laptops you can buy today.
It's also impressive that this is a whole hour longer in longevity when compared to the M2 MacBook, meaning there's no better time to invest in the latest model. MacBooks are also famous for their great-feeling keyboards, and if you want a springy and quiet one to keep your fingers happy while typing the day away, look no further.
Otherwise, its 13.6-inch, 2560 x 1664 Liquid Retina display is crisp enough to perform in-depth work. Its 77.8% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut is solid, but what really sets it apart is an average brightness of 476 nits. This is enough to handle even the sunniest days, as there's nothing worse than intense glare making it impossible to see what's happening on-screen.
See our full MacBook Air M3 review.
Best 13-inch business laptop
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 is the perfect business laptop for those who need a quality ultraportable. Its total weight of 2.2 pounds is as light as a feather, and if you're in need of something truly capable with solid performance and a bright display, look no further.
Our configuration costs $1,599 and is built with an Intel Core i7-1360P processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage space, and a 13.3-inch 2K IPS touchscreen. While it's important to keep in mind that it's using a last-generation processor, its Geekbench 5.5 multi-core performance of 9,268 is good enough to handle a heavy workload.
We were pretty disappointed by its longevity, though. In the Laptop Mag battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits, its subpar 8 hours and 28 minutes of battery life is enough to sustain a full workday, but depending on how demanding your workflow is, you might need an outlet nearby. This is also worse than the original's 12 hours of battery life, and is significantly below the 9 hour and 45 minute ultraportable average.
The laptop can also get bright enough to survive blinding sunlight, with an average brightness of 483 nits. That's even higher than the MacBook Air M3, which hits 476 nits. However, its color depth leaves much to be desired, coming in at a 70.9% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut.
We also wish it had more ports, but considering it's a thin and lightweight laptop, it's typical for these products to have a small selection. At the very least, its two Thunderbolt 4 ports will allow for the best laptop docking stations to be attached. You also get an audio jack, so there's that.
See our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 review
Best 13-inch 2-in-1 Laptop
It might be cheating to count the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i as a 13-inch laptop, as it features two 13.3-inch 2,800 x 1,800-pixel displays, but this simply adds to the diversity of its use cases. How does it work, you ask? Simply pop the lid open and use it as a normal laptop, but when you want to use two screens at once, detach its Bluetooth keyboard and get to work. You can even use an included external mouse and Lenovo Digital Pen.
It is absolutely worth keeping its price in mind, though, as you'll be paying $1,999 for this beast. But beyond just its incredible foundation, its 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1355U is solid with a Geekbench 5.5 score of 7,765. While this is the slightest bit below our 7,767 premium laptop average, it's not drastic enough of a drop for us to avoid recommending the product.
The dual OLED displays are also a glorious sight to behold, covering 136.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut on the top display and 136.7% on the bottom display. This isn't a surprise as they're identical panels, and it pulls ahead of competitors like the MacBook Air M3 (77.8%) without issue.
It also sports battery life within our recommended range, lasting for 9 hours and 18 minutes on the Laptop Mag battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits. While that's not quite as impressive as the MacBook Air M3's 15 hours, it's still great for a 2-in-1 laptop.
The brightness could be better, though, coming in at 335 nits on the top display and 344 nits on the bottom display, which is lower than the 392 nits average for this category.
See our full Lenovo Yoga Book 9i review.
How to choose the best 13-inch laptop
Do your intensive daily workloads require more RAM than the average Joe? Are you a video editor who needs extra storage? Are you a gamer who wants a powerful GPU? Sorting through the best laptops to fit your lifestyle is a tricky business.
Budget: What you get for your money
You can find decent Windows laptops and high-quality Chromebooks for under $500. However, better mainstream laptops usually cost more than $700 and premium Ultrabooks can run over $1,000. The best gaming laptops can cost $2.000 and up, but you can play the latest titles at decent frame rates on gaming laptops under $1,000.
Design: 2-in-1 or Clamshell?
More and more of today's laptops are 2-in-1s with screens that either bend back 360 degrees or detach so you can use them as tablets. If you like the idea of using your laptop in slate mode for drawing, media consumption or just using it standing up, a 2-in-1 could be for you. However, you can often get better features or a lower price by going with a traditional clamshell-style laptop.
Battery Life: 9+ Hours for Portability
Unless you only plan to use your laptop on your desk, battery life matters. Even within the home or office, having plenty of juice enables you to work on the couch or at the conference table, without being chained to the nearest outlet. For the best portability, we recommend getting a laptop that lasted over 9 hours on the Laptop Mag Battery Test. The longest-lasting laptops endure anywhere between 10 and 15 hours.
How we test the best 13-inch laptops
Over the course of a year, we review over 150 laptops covering every price point and use case. Whether you’re looking for a productivity workhorse, a badass gaming system, or a multimedia machine to kick back and watch a movie or two, we can help you find your ideal match.
In order to make our list, the system needs to score at least 4 out of 5 stars on our reviews and deliver on the things shoppers care about most. In our evaluations, we focus on design and comfort, display quality, the keyboard and touchpad, performance, battery life, and especially value.
Our expert reviewers also use each product to see how it looks, feels, and performs in everyday situations. Because we see so many different notebooks, we can compare each to its direct competitors and give you an idea of how it stacks up to the average laptop in its price band.
When we bring a laptop into our laboratory, our goal is to see how it would work if you brought it into your home or office. While we use a number of industry standard benchmarks such as Geekbench and 3DMark, we focus heavily on real-world tests that we have developed in-house.
To test endurance, the Laptop Mag Battery test surfs the web at 150 nits of brightness until the system runs out of juice. To judge pure processing power, we use a giant spreadsheet macro that matches 65,000 names with their addresses, a video transcoder that converts a 4K video to 1080p, and the Geekbench 5 synthetic test. We measure graphics prowess with both 3DMark Ice Storm / Fire Strike and a series of games including Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Metro: Exodus, Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption just to name a few.
We use a colorimeter to measure screen brightness and color gamut while other instruments help us determine a laptop's key travel and ambient heat. See this page on how we test laptops for more details on our benchmarking procedures.
Why Trust Laptop Mag
Laptop Mag reviews over one hundred different laptops every year, from paperweight ultralights to everyday workhorses to lumbering gaming notebooks that scorch the frame rates of even the hottest AAA games. We're not just experts in the laptop field, as we go one step further by meticulously testing smartphones, tablets, headphones, PC accessories, software, and even the latest in gaming.
We are 100% independent and have decades of experience to help you buy with confidence. In fact, Laptop Mag has been testing and reviewing products for three decades, and we continue to deliver trustworthy reviews you can rely on.
Our experienced team of writers and editors scour the available information about the laptop and put it through its paces to determine which is best for you. But before they start, the testing team subjects each system to a rigorous regimen of synthetic and real-world tests to see how a system handles the type of work and games you’re most likely to throw at it.
Our editorial trustworthiness is enforced by one of the world's largest technology publishers, Future Publishing. As a company, we have unrivaled experience across every tech sector — and we're the group's specialist for all things mobile tech.
