When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The 2026 Asus Zenbook 14 provides almost the same quality experience as the luxury ZenBook A14 at half the price. Asus strikes the right balance with the ZenBook 14, delivering a laptop that feels premium without costing a fortune. A small SSD and a small battery bring the rating down slightly. But if you use the laptop wisely, these drawbacks are less of an issue.

You can get much better laptops than the Acer Aspire 14 AI, but it brings a lot to the table at 699. As a result, it proves a capable, utilitarian laptop that shouldn't disappoint those who need a productivity machine. The Acer Aspire 14 AI is a budget-minded laptop aiming to bring reasonable performance and the latest Microsoft Copilot capabilities in a laptop that's modest and affordable. To that end, Acer has built a fairly simple machine that has many of the qualities -- for better or worse -- I've become accustomed to from laptops bearing the Aspire badge. You'll get a modest machine in the Acer Aspire 14 AI.

The Intel-powered Dell XPS 13 was already a letdown next to the competition, and this Snapdragon-powered XPS 13 winds up downgrading most of the package without a meaningful reduction in price. It just makes a disappointing experience worse. The Dell XPS 13 (9345) takes most of what we already saw in the Dell XPS 13 (9340) -- a thin, light, and stylish system that focused a little too much on style and not enough on substance next to its competition -- and loads it with new brains in the form of a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip. While the Intel-powered XPS 13 was already on shaky ground, the shift to Snapdragon only gives this new version even less stable footing to compete with the many great laptops out there. Snapdragon might promise advanced AI capabilities over the current field, but with so many AI capabilities in wait-and-see limbo, it's probably worth waiting and seeing if the impending AMD and Intel mobile chips don't just catch up on the NPU front and then continue to score easy wins in the CPU and GPU department. As it stands, the 1,299 Dell XPS 13 (9345) has a rocky path ahead of it.

Remember, I think that it's time to switch to Windows 11, but that's in part because Microsoft will likely tie AI into its latest feature release of the Windows 11 operating system. But really, it could be anything: an AI-powered character that is dropped into a hot new game, perhaps powered by Nvidia's ACE, might prompt an AI-powered gaming shift. Maybe it will be updates to Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet that will all use AI.

Suddenly, your boss requests a video chat. Do you scramble to turn off Spotify? You're probably used to thinking of AI in terms of AI art, or chatbots, or how AI blurs or filters out your background on video calls on Teams or Zoom. But AI audio filtering has now become so sophisticated that you can literally play music in the background, and your laptop will filter it out entirely. We tested it to make sure. You're probably unaware of this, because it's the people you talk to that hear your voice, and not you.