CES 2025: The Best Laptops That Wowed Us From Lenovo, Asus, Acer, HP and Dell

There were few surprises at this year’s big electronics show in Las Vegas, but we did get a good look at what laptop maker’s have coming in 2025, and here’s the best of it.

This is the best of CES 2025 laptop edition where I quickly run through our favorites announced for the big electronics Show in Las Vegas. There were a lot of laptops this year, but most were pretty straightforward refreshes with new components from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Q Qualcomm. But there were a handful that stood out, so let’s have a look. Laptops and computers in general are usually a big part of CES, and we typically get some fun prototypes and concepts along with stuff that people will actually buy. Lenovo never fails to show up with some of both, and this year it returned with its ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 rollable, a laptop that’s a grower, not a shower. It has the body of a 14-inch laptop, so nice and compact for mobility. But with a hand gesture or the press of a button, the OLED display inches its way upward, unrolling to nearly 17 inches. The rest of the laptop is pretty standard with an Intel Core Ultra CPU and up to 32 gigs of memory. So this really feels more party trick than useful, but you will be able to buy one later this year. Aus also tends to come to CES with something unusual, but not so much for 2025. Aside from Some cool gaming laptop refreshes. The most interesting thing and the best from the show is its new Zenbook A14, the world’s lightest co-pilot plus PC. It’s a 14 inch that weighs a hair under a kilogram, about a half pound less than a 13.6 inch MacBook Air. The entire body is made from the company’s sealuminum material that has the strength of aluminum but a scratch resistant ceramic-like look and feel. Asus says the Snapdragon X based A14 will get up to 32 hours of battery life too. While I’m sort of on the subject of unusual materials, Acer had some interesting announcements, including a new 16-inch Aspire Vero, with a chassis made from more than 70% post-consumer recycled plastic, and a bio-based material made from oyster shells, which is a first for laptops. This laptop line is also known for its durability, and this is Milspec certified and Acer also says it’s easy to repair. Next up we have a pair of Lenovo 14-inch laptops, one for consumers and one for business. First is the Yoga Slim 9 I which has a 98% screen to body ratio. That means almost no bezel and an OLED display with the world’s first camera under display technology in a laptop. The laptop’s lid is also. Pretty special with a unique impact resistant glass and what Lenovo calls a cat eye-like finish, and I can tell you in person it looks amazing. Uh, it’s an Intel copilot Plus PC2. It weighs a little over 1 kg and claims up to 17 hours of battery life. On the more businessy side, there’s the ThinkPad X9, uh, like a MacBook Air for professionals, this 14-inch laptop has a fresh design, at least on the bottom. It’s got this ridged texture that adds some grip while you carry it, plus this bottom strip that Lenovo calls the engine hub that optimizes cooling performance and simplifies servicing. It’s also loaded with the company’s own AI assistant that’s built on a local LLM using Metas Llama 3.0. There’s one other work laptop that deserves some attention, and that’s the HP ZBook Ultra G1A, which it bills as the world’s most powerful 14-inch mobile workstation. It’s definitely plain looking, but inside is a new AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro processor with up to 16 desktop class CPU cores and discrete like integrated graphics and unified memory up to 128 gigs and. 96 of that can be used by the GPU. That’s pretty incredible for something so small and slim. Rounding Things Out is my gaming laptop pick which sadly wasn’t at the show but was announced alongside Nvidia’s new RTX 50 series graphics chips. Because of these chips and those from Intel and AMD we’re getting a lot of updated gaming laptops in 2025 and desktops too for that matter. So if you’ve got a favorite brand like Republic of Gamers, Predator, Legion, Omen, or others, they all have some great looking laptops coming in the next few months. But I really liked the revived Alienware Area 51 models. Available in 16 and 18 inch sizes with next gen Nvidia graphics and up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU. Their anodized aluminum bodies have a liquid teal color shifting iridescent finish and the rear exhaust shelf is translucent and has lighting animations that imitate the motions of northern lights. The bottoms also have gorilla glass windows that are a literal showcase for the new Nvidia and Intel hardware announced at the show. OK, so that’s it for me. Hope you enjoyed this look at the best laptops from CES 2025. It was a pretty tame year, but I’m excited to see the performance from everyone’s new chips. If I missed one of your favorites that you spotted from the show, leave it in the comments and also check out CNET’s full coverage of CES 2025 over at CNET.com. Happy New Year. Thanks for watching and you’ll see me when you see me.