Best & Worst Laptop Brands 2020

Gandalf_The_Grey

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We put the top brands on the hot seat. Who will take this year's crown?

For every student working on a class project, creative professional making their next masterpiece or businessperson putting the finishing touches on an important presentation, there’s a laptop to match their needs and budget. However, many shoppers have brand affinities that might keep them from venturing beyond the rivers and the lakes that they’re used to. It’s the reason we see a certain brand of laptop occupying so many coffee shops.

But just how good is your favorite brand? The Laptop Mag staff put the top brands to the test every year, evaluating each brand and the laptops we’ve reviewed during a designated time period (May 15, 2019 to May 15, 2020). The brands and their eligible laptops are judged using several important criteria: Reviews, Design, Support & Warranty, Innovation and Value & Selection. The scores are tallied and a winner is determined.

This year finds Asus as our best brand. Throughout the year, the laptop OEM consistently produced systems that were equal parts powerful, beautiful and innovative. Plus, the company has a robust offering of laptops from Chromebooks to gaming systems. It’s only weak spot was its showing in the Tech Support Showdown, but even that wasn’t enough to keep the company from the top spot.

Read on to learn how your favorite brand ranked this year.

  1. Asus (88/100)
  2. Dell (85/100)
  3. HP (82/100)
  4. MSI (78/100)
  5. Lenovo (77/100)
  6. Acer (76/100)
  7. Razer (76/100)
  8. Samsung (75/100)
  9. Alienware (75/100)
  10. Apple (73/100)
  11. Microsoft (70/100)

Full article and individual report cards are available at the source:
 
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Soulbound

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I would take that article with a very big pinch of salt.

MSI is superior in terms of quality over HP and Dell to begin with.
Asus, Razer and MSI are the go to's.
Theres also other brands not touched, such as for example Origin and Toshiba's gaming sub brand.

Even within Asus you have ROG has dedicated gaming brand and Asus sub gaming machines under the Asus brand.
 

Ink

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Good to know, but everyone should do their own research before purchasing any product.

Design will always be subjective.

1600604749435.png
 

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Of course, one should always draw their own conclusions and do their own research before buying anything, but it's a nice overview of the most popular brands, their support and more. IMO it's not realistic to speak of a whole brand. There are good and not so good laptops from all manufacturers.
Support also depends on if you have the consumer or business line of a laptop.
Some sites I use for reviews:
From personal experience: I still use an Acer Aspire VN7-791G laptop (from 2015). At the time it was the best (compromise and budget wise) laptop for me.
A big 17" screen, SSD and HDD, background lighting on the keyboard, 4 USB ports, fast and quiet.
Things I found are less ideal: No more support/updates (even on their own utilities) from Acer, flat keys and no TPM (no BitLocker).
Opposite to that: I just did a clean install on an old Lenovo ThinkPad E520 (from 2011) and Lenovo System Update found a missing driver and installed (up to date) utilities for the OSD and power management.
 
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Gandalf_The_Grey

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Asus definitely on top but I would place Lenovo last due to reliability issues.
User/laptop depended?
In my family all Medion (from Lenovo) and Lenovo laptops are working without any problems...
The only problem I see is the new trend of soldered memory, limiting the number of USB ports and not providing memory card readers.
 

ZeePriest

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User/laptop depended?
In my family all Medion (from Lenovo) and Lenovo laptops are working without any problems...
The only problem I see is the new trend of soldered memory, limiting the number of USB ports and not providing memory card readers.
I can't remember which model it was but I had issues with the screen flickering all the time and then it went completely off...turned out to be something to do with the leds knowing that it was a brand new laptop. My friend had similar issues with his along with a hardware issue and his was new too. I've had 3 hp laptops(I still have them) and my current laptop is an hp and I've never had any issues at all. I'll never buy a lenovo laptop unless I'm 100% sure that they've improved reliability.
 

jerzy601

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My favorite is Asus as well. I've never had problems with it.
I use it less lately because it is a bit old so I gave it a little rest but I use it from time to time.
I have been using HP for about 3 months now and so far it works very well.
I was supposed to buy Lenovo but somehow there were no interesting opinions about it recently, so I decided to go with HP.
 

Cheeseman

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I have an Asus Rog gl553vw (6th gen core i7 + gtx960m 4gb and 8gb ddr4 @2133mhz, with hdd+ssd). The build quality is still excellent, fespite it being ~4 years old, yet the gpu is dying, the cooling system seems to sometimes (very rarely) misbehave in terms of working. As a laptop it really served as a main computer, but just like everything good it has to come to an end. If I were to buy a new laptop it will be an Asus, they make some of the best (if not most or all) gaming laptops in terms nearly everything
 

roger_m

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One thing you need to consider is that quality often varies greatly between different model laptops from the same brand. For example, business laptops usually have much better build quality than cheaper consumer laptops of the same brand. So you can't judge a brand just based on a single laptop. If you buy a budget laptop, no matter what the brand, then usually the build quality won't be too good, because decent build quality costs money. Most brands make both good and bad laptops.

I use business laptops from Lenovo, HP and Dell and they all have very good build quality. I'd much rather use a second hand business laptop than a brand new consumer one. I like my main laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad L530 a lot due to excellent build quality and thermal management. I can't hear the fan running 99% of the time. It just very occasionally ramps up for a split second. After using business laptops, I find that consumer laptops usually feel cheap in comparison.
 
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vuksha_xc60

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User/laptop depended?
In my family all Medion (from Lenovo) and Lenovo laptops are working without any problems...
The only problem I see is the new trend of soldered memory, limiting the number of USB ports and not providing memory card readers.
In Serbia and neighbourhood, Lenovos are pretty cheap and heavily advertised in media, but the quality is very bad. In term of quality I mean simpleness of build and reliability in practice. Most of the people who I know bought them because of design and sent them to trash after a year because of too expensive repair of motherboard, CPU that was overheating. I talk about models about 300-350 USD and less (with Celerons, older AMD APUs etc.). In countries where people can't afford something better it's a problem.
When you look for more expensive models, situation is better but not enough since rivals (Acer, Dell) offer simpler machines to maintain and more reliable in general.

The machines I assume you're talking about are from 2014-2015 when they actually paid attention to things I mentioned above.

After many posts I've read, I saw that it's the problem that users from other countries are dealing with.
 

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