Need something ultraportable? We've got you covered with the best 13-inch laptops you can buy right now. Out of the over 50 laptops our team has reviewed this year, we've spotted 5 incredible small-models that give you amazing performance, strong battery life and value for money.
Right now we typically recommend Apple's MacBook Air M3 as the best 13-inch laptop for most folks because it's light and easy to carry, yet packs great speed and remarkable battery life thanks to Apple's M3 chip. If you prefer Windows, the Dell XPS 13 is a great choice. While I'm not a huge fan of the laptop's design, I can't dispute its performance and remarkable MacBook-beating battery life.
What I am a huge fan of is an owner's right to repair or tinker with their PC, which is why I recommend DIY types check out the Framework Laptop 13: it's a workhorse 13-inch laptop designed so the average owner can easily swap out ports, components, and even the screen, keyboard and webcam.
Read on for a detailed breakdown of why we recommend these and more as the best 13-inch laptops you can get right now.
The quick list
In a hurry? Here's a brief overview of the laptops on this list, along with quick links that let you jump down the page directly to a review of whichever laptop catches your eye.
The MacBook Air M3 is the best 13-inch laptop for the money. The M3 chip delivers speedy performance, the Air's display is brighter than ever, and battery life exceeds 15 hours.
Dell's XPS 13 (2024) is an elegant ultraportable with a great screen, speedy performance and MacBook-beating battery life. The capacitive touch row can be a stumbling block and the fact that it's an Arm laptop limits what software runs well, yet this remains the best 13-inch Windows laptop for most.
The Asus ProArt PX13 is a mini creativity powerhouse of a 2-in-1 — packing one of the best OLED displays we've ever seen on a super-versatile shell. On top of this, the top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX and RTX 40-series combo makes it a monster for performance too
The 13-inch Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 is a premium Chromebook that will get you through a day of work or school for not much money. The 2021 model is our favorite, and despite its aging internals the bright QLED touchscreen still makes it feel premium. It looks even nicer if you can find one in the fetching Fiesta Red color scheme.
The Framework Laptop is a truly unique ultraportable that's remarkably repairable and upgradeable. It's basically the anti-MacBook, designed to be easy to upgrade and repair while delivering style and performance without compromise. Plus, the unique Expansion Card system is a must-see.
Jason brings a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a Managing Editor of Computing at Tom's Guide. He has previously written for Laptop Mag, Tom's Hardware, Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you'll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza (if he isn't already).
The best 13-inch laptops you can buy today
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The best 13-inch laptop overall
Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air M3 delivers great performance and remarkable battery life in a slim, elegant design. If you're comfortable working with macOS and want something small and light, the M3 Air is a go-to choice for browsing the web, getting work done or some light gaming on the go.
The only real downsides of the M3 Air is that it shares most of the same flaws (and strengths) as its predecessor, so unless you want the cutting-edge speed of the M3 model there's not a ton of reason to upgrade. But on the bright side, Apple dropped the price of the old model, so if you're on a budget you can get a nearly comparable laptop for less in the older MacBook Air M2.
Read our full MacBook Air 13-inch M3 review.
The best 13-inch Windows 11 laptop
Judging by the name, you might think that the Dell XPS 13 Plus is a bigger version of Dell’s iconic laptop. But it’s actually quite the opposite. This is as minimalist a design as we’ve ever seen from Dell. There’s just two ports. There’s no headphone jack. And Dell even took away physical function keys, replacing them with a capacitive row. There’s not even lines to denmark the touchpad; the entire area beneath the keyboard is one smooth piece of glass.
But the XPS 13 Plus isn’t just a design statement. Dell managed to pack a 28W 12th gen Core i7 processor into this sleek 2.7-pound machine. And the result is a system that can outperform even the mighty MacBook Pro M2 on some tests. However, the short battery life and capacitive function row will give some pause. We also found the bottom gets a bit toasty when running at full power, so keep that in mind.
Read our full Dell XPS 13 Plus review.
Not interested in the Plus? Don't miss our Dell XPS 13 OLED review -- the base XPS 13 is still a great laptop that we recommend often.
The best 13-inch 2-in-1 laptop
The Asus ProArt PX13 is a dreamy 13-inch 2-in-1 to use for creators and prosumers alike — thanks to its useful AI apps, lightning quick AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 performance, stellar RTX 4070 graphics, that 3K OLED panel, and so much more.
So while we are calling this the best convertible, it is so much more than that as well. It's the best OLED, the best for creators, and even one of the best for gaming with those insane specs. If you need the raw horsepower in a sleek shell for portable creativity, this is an ideal option to pick up.
Be warned, though, even though the Ryzen AI 9 does have good energy management, the battery does get used rather intensely compared to other systems on this list, and at a starting cost of $1,699, it is a pricier option on this list.
Read our full Asus ProArt PX13 review.
The best 13-inch Chromebook
If you're looking for a great 13-inch Chromebook, Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook 2 is our top recommendation. While it's a bit old at this point that just makes it even more affordable, and it still offers a great QLED display and good battery life — 7:50 vs the previous gen's 5:55. Plus, the speakers sound great.
We weren't as happy with the vertical travel in its keyboard, which is a bit shallow. This creates a slight learning curve you'll adapt to over time. But to get a Chromebook that looks this good — wow that Fiesta Red color option stands out in a sea of silver Chromebooks and PCs.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 review.
The best 13-inch laptop for DIYers
The Framework Laptop is the anti-MacBook, a modular 13-inch laptop that promises to let you customize, repair, and upgrade it to an unprecedented degree, all while remaining affordable and ultraportable. Each laptop Framework ships comes with a screwdriver so you can crack open the case and swap out parts yourself, and everything from the memory to the screen bezel to the mainboard is user-replaceable.
It's not for everyone, but if you're the DIY type and love the idea of being able to tinker with your laptop's innards this is the best laptop for you. The Framework laptop is currently only available for purchase from the Framework website, and the price tag starts at $1,099 — though you can pay as low as $849 for the DIY Edition if you're willing to assemble your laptop yourself and provide your own memory, storage, operating system, and Wi-Fi card.
Read our full Framework Laptop 13 review.
Battery benchmarks: comparison
Battery life is one of the key things you should look at when deciding which laptop to buy, which is why we run every laptop we review through a series of battery tests to see how long it lasts on a full charge.
These tests do not reflect real-world use patterns since we have to set every laptop to the same settings in order to do fair comparisons. Thus, while the times listed here are accurate and useful as a comparison point, your own experience with a laptop's battery life will likely vary.
This is because when we run our battery test we set the laptop's display to 150 nits of brightness and have it endlessly browse the web via Wi-Fi until it dies. However, when you use your laptop you're likely adjusting brightness on the fly, doing all sorts of different tasks while perhaps listening to music or watching a video at the same time, and generally putting the machine through more of a workout than it gets in our test.
So while I stand by our testing and the battery life results we compare in the chart below, I want to be clear that your own experience will vary!
| Laptop | Battery life (tested) |
| Dell XPS 13 (2024) | 19:41 |
| MacBook Air M3 | 15:13 |
| Framework Laptop | 10:17 |
| Asus ProArt PX13 | 09:28 |
| Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 | 07:31 |
How to choose the best 13-inch laptop for you
What kind of power do you need? If you only need something basic for surfing the web, consider a Chromebook like the Galaxy Chromebook 2 or a cheap Windows laptop If you want something that feels speedy and can handle more than basic browsing and typing, consider starting specs such as a Core i5 CPU, 8 to 16GB of RAM and a 256GB to 512GB SSD. Most of the laptops on this list are at least this powerful, since they're the best 13-inch laptops we've yet reviewed.
What kind of games do you want to play? Most mainstream laptops feature integrated graphics, which may be able to run simple, well-optimized games like Minecraft and Fortnite but can't handle graphically-demanding games or heavy visual work. For that, you'll want a laptop with a discrete graphics card, and we don't currently have one on this list.
Do you want Chrome, macOS, or Windows? Windows is the most common operating system, while macOS is more ideal for folks already tied into Apple's ecosystem. Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system built to allow for cheap, fast systems, though it has gotten a bit more robust over the years with support for full Android apps.
Whichever system you decide on, you may also want to consider investing in the best mouse and best keyboard for your needs so you can have some more ergonomic options for getting work done on your new laptop.
I also recommend getting yourself an affordable laptop stand, as a $45 stand revolutionized the way I work on the go.
How we test the best 13-inch laptops
Our path to finding the best 13-inch laptops for you is littered with test results. To help us better compare and recommend the best machines for you, we run every laptop we review through a rigorous suite of benchmarks and real-world tests to gauge how it will perform during everyday use.
We measure the average brightness and color quality of each laptop's display using our in-house light meter and colorimeter. For general performance, we run our machines through tests that include Geekbench 5 (CPU performance), as well as various 3DMark tests to measure graphics capabilities. We also run a file transfer test to measure how fast a machine's hard drive is, plus a video editing test to see how good it is at crunching video and a custom battery test that has the machine browse the internet over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice.
We know many people also love to play games on their laptops, so we test the gaming horsepower of every laptop we review by putting it through the Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm graphical benchmark. This is an ideal test for us to use on 13-inch laptops because almost none of them have discrete graphics cards, which means they have a hard time running more modern or graphically-demanding games. Civilization VI is also one of the few relatively modern games with a graphical benchmark that runs on both Windows and MacOS, meaning we can easily compare the performance of MacBooks against that of Windows machines.
