Charles Lindbergh knew a thing or two about traveling light. When preparing The Spirit of St. Louis for his transatlantic flight in 1927, the pilot jettisoned everything—from his parachute and radio to the traditional leather seat. (He used a wicker chair.) He even designed special lightweight boots.
You probably delegate worries about your plane's range and fuel capacity to the airline, but odds are you hate to carry any excess ballast in your carry-on. That's why laptop vendors strive to trim every ounce from their designs, and why we at PCMag pay so much attention to the results—starting with this guide to the lightest laptops you can buy for 2023.
We'll lay out our favorites in the section below. Following those is a buying guide for lightweight laptops and at the end of this article, a detailed spec breakout of our picks.
What defines a lightweight laptop? Most would agree that the upper limit is three pounds, possibly stretching to four for a system with a big 15.6-inch screen. Neither of those figures counts the computer's AC adapter, an often-overlooked bit of baggage that can be anything from a compact shirt-pocket gadget to an ungainly brick.
(Credit: Brian Westover)For manufacturers, crafting an ultralight laptop is all about compromise. A smaller battery pack will save weight, but it won't last as long—a risky move in a market where many buyers expect to get through a full workday plus a Netflix movie in the evening. Exotic chassis materials like carbon fiber and magnesium alloys weigh less than ordinary notebooks' plastic and aluminum, but they also increase cost. A touch screen is convenient, but its glass overlay adds a few grams.
(Credit: Molly Flores)For you, shopping for a svelte laptop is all about choices. Some aren't particularly obvious, such as a system's expandability—the lightest machines may have their memory, for instance, mounted directly on the motherboard, rather than in the upgradable SO-DIMM sockets of bulkier models. Similarly, virtually all will use solid-state drives (SSDs) rather than cheaper but heavier hard drives for storage, though the upgradability of these drives in the lightest laptops will vary from no-can-do (the storage is soldered down) to potentially upgradable (on a PCI Express M.2 SSD module, if you can crack the case to access it).
Other choices will be, well, in your face starting with the obvious one: the display panel.
What Screen Size Is Best in a Light Laptop?
At the risk of insulting your intelligence, the biggest factor in laptop weight is the physical size of the chassis. And for a laptop, that correlates with screen size. If you're cool with an 11.6-inch display, you've got plenty of low-cost ultralights to choose from; if you want a jumbo 17-inch screen, your only choice, to our knowledge, is the LG Gram 17, a Core i7 system carved from 2.95 pounds of nano carbon and magnesium. The flagship of the lightweight Gram line offers 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel native screen resolution.
Most weight-savers, as you'd expect, are smaller than that, though it's up to you how small is too small. Many shoppers don't realize that the 2.7-pound MacBook Air was not always Apple's traditionally lightest laptop—that's the discontinued 2.03-pound MacBook, though you may prefer the former's 13.3-inch to the latter's 12-inch display. (The MacBook can still be found in refurbished and used form.)
(Credit: Molly Flores)The most popular panel sizes for light laptops are 13.3 and 14 inches. Resolution is usually either 1080p, also known as full HD (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), or 4K, also known as UHD (3,840 by 2,160 pixels). Many laptops fall somewhere in between, with a better-than-FHD resolution that's still less detailed than 4K.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)While it can be tempting to revel in the ultrafine detail of a 3K or 4K display for applications such as image editing or video streaming, don't be ashamed if your needs (and budget) favor the everyday productivity of a 1080p panel. Besides getting a perfectly adequate screen (something that can't be said for the older standard of 1,366 by 768 pixels), you'll get substantially better battery life, all else being equal.
Light Laptop Trends in 2023: Slim Bezels, Squarer Screens
Excess bulk is the enemy of light weight, so look for a laptop with a high screen-to-body ratio—in other words, thin rather than thick bezels surrounding the display. (Ditto for a unit without wide borders on either side of the keyboard.)
(Credit: Molly Flores)One other detail related to screens and bezels concerns a panel aspect-ratio migration that is underway. A big trend in 2023 is the move of many popular laptops (from Dell, HP, Lenovo and others) away from the typical 16:9 screen aspect ratio to a squarer 16:10 or 3:2. This allows for more vertical viewing space for webpage viewing, spreadsheet browsing, and more. It's something to watch for, especially if you'll use your light laptop more for productivity work than video viewing. (The 16:9 ratio is the best literal fit for the latter, but not much else.)
Light Laptops That Turn Into Tablets: Detachable 2-in-1 Laptops
What if you'd like to indulge your inner Lindbergh and redesign your laptop for travel? There used to be notebooks that let you replace their optical drives with empty weight-saving slices, but designs of that kind (not to mention optical drives) are history.
You can opt, however, for a tablet that lets you remove its keyboard cover. This gives you two choices: carry just the tablet, if you're viewing videos or jotting short notes with a stylus, or take both parts if you need to type something. A tablet plus its thin keyboard cover or folio usually weighs less than a conventional clamshell laptop.
(Credit: Molly Flores)Of course, detachables aren't the only 2-in-1 hybrid laptops—there are convertibles whose screens flip and fold from laptop to tablet mode, propping up for kiosk or easel-like presentation modes in between. Several of these qualify as light, though their versatile hinges add some weight compared to clamshells.
What Are the Features to Look for in a Light Laptop?
If you're an avid gamer, you should know that nearly all ultralights rely on their processors' integrated graphics instead of faster dedicated graphics—a discrete GPU is one of the first things that gets taken off the cargo roster when designers are trying to hit a weight target. Light laptops also tend to have fewer ports and expansion options than their heavier cousins. Having just a couple of ports is common.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Shop carefully if you're looking for, say, an HDMI video output or a full-size SD card slot, and realize that some ports seen on larger laptops (such as an Ethernet port for wired networks) are seldom seen on the lightest laptops.
Fortunately, the days when light laptops lacked battery life are more or less over. Though a beefy battery pack is still the easiest route to long runtime, today's lithium-polymer cells are both weight- and energy-efficient. You can cross-index this guide against our roundups of the best battery life laptops and the best ultraportables. But rest assured that we factored battery life into our top picks here.
So, What Is the Best Light Laptop to Buy?
By now it's clear—you don't have to strain your arm and shoulder to carry real productivity power. Below is a detailed spec breakout of the best light laptops we've tested. It's not comprehensive to every model, since we review so many systems, but we refresh it frequently with the best of the best. Meanwhile, safe travels and happy landings.
