The best PC hardware and software of 2024/2025

It was most evident in laptops: Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips kicked off Microsoft's Copilot PC era with long life and surprisingly competitive performance, only to be rivaled by Intel's Macbook-killing Lunar Lake chips months later. AMD, meanwhile, focused on bringing high-octane speed to Copilot PCs, zigging for oomph while the others zagged to endurance. With competition flourishing, PCWorld expects to review over 120 laptops by the end of the year, by far a new high water mark! This year, cutting-edge monitors became the norm, Thunderbolt docks and SSDs embraced newer, faster standards, Intel and AMD launched overhauled desktop CPUs, gaming handhelds got truly competitive, and the software that runs on all that hardware kept getting better and better, too. With such a gluttony of choice, it became harder than ever for PC hardware and software to impress us. Few products earned our rare Editors' Choice award.