The Best New Laptops at CES 2025
Having tested and reviewed laptops for around 20 years (!), seeing what's new and interesting in portable PCs at CES is always one of the highlights of my year. This year is no different, with a wide range of systems that subvert norms, add fascinating new features, or just cram in as much powerful hardware as possible.
Photo: Dan Ackerman These are the laptops that caught my eye so far, and all should be available to buy sometime in 2025.
Razer Blade 16 (2025)
Photo: Dan Ackerman One of my all-time favorite gaming laptop lines, the Blade makes a few big leaps this year. This new version is the first 16-inch Razer Blade with an AMD processor, and it's also adding a top-end NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU, despite being about 30 percent smaller than last year's model. Read more about it here.
Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6
Photo: Dan Ackerman Lenovo continues to experiment with flexible displays. Instead of folding in half, like the ThinkPad X1 Fold, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 hides half its display inside the chassis, until you use a button or hand gesture to extend it, rolling out a taller screen that goes from 14 inches to 16.7 inches. I can see this being great for long documents, and it's a novel solution for using a flexible screen but avoiding the crease that folding displays have.
Acer Aspire Vero 16
Photo: Lenovo A very capable laptop that has some interesting sustainability hooks. The Vero 16 is made from more than 70 percent post-consumer recycled plastic, and part of the chassis is actually made from a very tough bio-organic material that starts with ground oyster shells. In a clever touch, the E and R keys on the keyboard are printed in mirror style, to remind you of the importance of recycling. Read more about it here.
MSI Titan 18 HX AI
Photo: Dan Ackerman I'm very pleased to see 18-inch gaming laptops are here to stay, and MSI's Titan 18 HX AI is about as high-end as one of these can get, with a new Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU and NVIDIA 5090 GPU. I reviewed last year's model here. New for 2025, however, is a very limited special "Dragon Edition" that has an etched dragon motif on the back lid (see first image!) and a 3D printed dragon coin under glass embedded in the palm rest.
I'll update this list as I find even more interesting laptops to highlight, in the meantime, check out all our CES 2025 coverage here.
Read More CES News:
- Everything We've Seen at CES 2025: Laptops, All-In-Ones, GPUs, Handhelds, Monitors, and More
- What to Expect from AI and PCs at CES 2025
- This Week in AI: Time for CES to Show What AI Can Be
- Dell's Great PC Reboot: Meet the New Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max
- Nitro Blaze handhelds and AI-powered laptops highlight Acer's CES 2025 lineup
Micro Center Editor-in-Chief Dan Ackerman is a veteran tech reporter, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of noted tech news and reviews website Gizmodo, Editorial Director at CNET, and as the long-time tech expert on CBS Mornings. He's been testing and reviewing laptops and other consumer tech for almost 20 years.Dan’s non-fiction business history book, The Tetris Effect (Hachette/PublicAffairs), covers a tangled web of software licensing deals in the Cold War Soviet Union, and has earned rave reviews from the New York Times (“The story shines”), Fortune, WIRED, LA Review of Books, and many other publications.
