Holiday Gift Guide 2025: The Best Laptop Gifts
From massive gaming rigs to all-day battery champs, this year’s lineup delivers on all fronts.Buying Guides
This has been a huge year for laptops. The leap in GPU performance we’ve seen in 2025 is huge, and that's fueling two parallel revolutions.
First, PC gaming is in the midst of a renaissance, for everything from 18-inch gaming laptops to handheld portable PCs, pushing visual fidelity to places consoles can’t reach. Second, that same graphics horsepower is unlocking the reality of on-device AI. We’re moving away from relying on cloud servers for every smart feature. Now, the heavy lifting happens right on your PC.
That means nearly every laptop on our list has an AI-capable CPU, GPU or NPU, and we expect that trend to continue in 2026.
Here are some of the laptops that actually matter this holiday season, no matter if you're shopping for a gamer, AI coder, student, or anyone else.
Alienware 18 Area 51
This was one of my favorite laptops to review in 2025. The version I reviewed was packing an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 and Intel Core Ultra 9, meaning there is virtually nothing you can’t throw at it. For the laptop gamer who refuses to compromise, it’s a top choice.
Besides a massive 18-inch screen, it utilizes the new Alienware 30 design language, named for the brand's upcoming 30th anniversary, which smoothes out the edges and adds a stunning pearlescent Liquid Teal finish.
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i
This has been my main gaming rig for the past few months, thanks to its combination of an Intel Core i9 and NVIDIA GeForce 5080, plus an excellent 16-inch OLED display. While it still has some of the forward design of a gaming laptop and plenty of customizable RGB lighting, the Legion Pro 7i walks the line between gamer rig and a subtle, almost professional aesthetic, likely thanks to Lenovo's long lineage of buttoned-up ThinkPad business laptops.
Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch
Throughout my 20 years of reviewing laptops, I've often said that Apple's MacBook line represents some of the most universally useful laptops you can buy. The 14-inch MacBook Pro has the latest M-series Apple Silicon chips, but the biggest thing to me is up to 24 hours of battery life, found on both this and the larger 16-inch M4 MacBook Pro. Many of the benefits also trickle down to the 13-inch MacBook Air, which is still under $1,000.
HP EliteBook X G1a
This laptop is particularly notable because it’s running an AMD Ryzen 9 HX processor, which is a pretty powerful CPU to have in a 14-inch business laptop. That chip also gives it access to a Neural Processing Unit, or NPU -- If you’re using AI, there’s a good chance you're using a mix of local and cloud-based tools, and you need that NPU to make sure you can run things locally for speed, privacy, and efficiency.
Microsoft Surface Laptop (Snapdragon X Elite)
You've got options beyond the traditional Intel and AMD chips for a modern laptop. Systems like the slim Microsoft Surface Laptop now offer Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, including the Snapdragon X Elite found here. Those chips offer excellent battery life -- in some cases surpassing 20 hours, while maintaining overall performance on par with other premium laptops, and, of course, extra juice for running AI tasks on your local hardware, including Microsoft's own Copilot AI assistant.
Razer Blade 14 (AMD Ryzen AI 9 365/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070)
The 2025 iteration of Razer's iconic 14-inch gaming laptop brings something especially exciting to the table, a rarely seen laptop combination of an AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU. While mixing AMD CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs is standard practice in the desktop DIY market, it’s a genuine rarity in the laptop space. The Razer Blade 14 is a precisely engineered premium machine that effectively solves for the "one laptop" problem by combining high-end gamer-friendly components with a slim, portable body and a killer 3K OLED screen.
Honorable mention: handheld gaming PCs
It's impossible to talk about gaming laptops without mentioning the slow-but-steady growth in the handheld gaming PC market. Largely kicked off by the Steam Deck in 2022, the category has seen several interesting releases this year, including the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go S.
The ASUS ROG Xbox Ally has the best ergonomics of any handheld gaming PC I've tried, with gamepad-like grips. A partnership with Xbox gives it deep integration with the Windows Xbox app for a smoother, more console-like experience. The Lenovo Legion Go S has a larger 8-inch display (vs a 7-inch one on the Ally) and includes a tiny touchpad for better Windows navigation. Both are a great way to access your deep library of PC games on the go, and I think we'll see even more new products in this category next year.
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Dan Ackerman is the Editor-in-Chief of Micro Center News. A veteran technology journalist with nearly 20 years of hands-on experience testing and reviewing the latest consumer tech, he previously served as Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo and Editorial Director at CNET. He is also the author of The Tetris Effect, the critically acclaimed Cold War history of the world's most influential video game. Contact Dan at dackerman at microcenter.com.
