Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Best Laptops of CES 2023”.
I’M back at CES in person this year after two years of attending the show remotely and being back here in prison. One thing has really jumped out of me, and that is this feels like a very traditional CES in one very important way, and that is, it is a show full of new laptops. It’S really one of the big topics every year, there’s a lot of new models. A lot of upgrades, a lot of new components that go in models and we always get to see some very exciting laptops, tablets, hybrids and this year is no exception. All right now, one of my favorite laptop lines for the last many years has been LG’s gram line. It’S not the most popular best known laptop line out there LG better known for their TVs and other things, but the gram is really good. It’S called Grand because these laptops are usually very light, also usually very thin, and we like them actually because they have very long battery life. This year’s LG gram is called the LG gram style and it jumped out at me because it’s taking a couple of bold moves in terms of design they’ve got the thin and light nailed. They got the long battery life now so now they’re working on the style and look and design, and they have done something that I think is potentially dangerous, but they’re handling it in a smart way. They’Ve taken the traditional touch pad and they’ve, basically gotten rid of it. It’S just one big piece of glass along the front: the touchpad is there, it’s a haptic touch pad, but you can’t see it until you put your finger down on the touchpad area and then it lights up the little border that lights up around it and that At least gives you some visual scent to where the touchpad is, because I always tell people if you mess with the placement of things like a touch panel, a laptop you’re, doing that in your own Peril, because the muscle memory is very important. I’Ll. Give an example of where this did not work out, and that was in the Dell XPS 13 Pro from last year, where they did something similar, an invisible touchpad basically, but they did not have those light up demarcations that little border that goes around it.
So you were just completely lost here on the style, they’ve kind of balanced, Both Worlds here very Sleek, looking very minimalist, but you can still see where the touchpad is. That’S pretty important for people there’s also another new LG gram and it’s called the ultra slim. It’S a 15 inch laptop 11 millimeters thick. That is not the thinnest laptop ever, but it’s pretty close, especially for a 15 inch one.
It’S a 2.2 pounds also very light, and both of these the style and the ultra system have OLED displays, which I think is another theme. This year everyone is finally almost defaulting to OLED, which is a really great screen technology for a laptop to have. If you’re. Looking for something that really pops out at you, almost literally the Asus Pro Art, Studio 16 is really one of the laptops everybody’s been talking about here at CES.
I get a chance to see it in person. It has one big thing: that’s trying to sell you, which is auto stereoscopic. 3D. What does that mean? That means no glasses. 3D. So you look at the screen. You see the 3d effect. You don’t have to wear glasses. Now it’s not an entirely New Concept, something like the Nintendo 3DS has Auto stereoscopic 3D. There were laptops, including gaming, laptops that tried it maybe about 10 years ago, but they never got past the first generation because frankly, it did not work very well. So the 3d effect works better now because it uses the lenticular screen and pairs that with eye tracking, so two little sensors see where your eyes are looking and it can line up the image. So it looks correct, looks like in 3D. So if you look at it like this, you’ve moved your head.
It follows and that’s something older, Auto, stereoscopic 3D screens could not do now. The thing it can’t do yet is line up the image for two people at once. If I’m looking at the screen and you’re over my shoulder looking at it, it’s going to look fine for me not for you we’ll have to switch places, that’s an upgrade that may come at some point soon.
I think that if people get used to and like these no glasses, 3D screens they’re going to have to make the eye tracking work for multiple people, it also helps that this has an OLED screen which has a faster response time, which is going to help with The 3D and Asus says that this is going to add, maybe about 500, to the cost of a laptop they’re, adding it to this model, and I think another one and a few other companies might have something similar you’re already paying a lot of money. So an extra 500 on top of that may not seem like too much. There are always a lot of gaming laptops at CES. This year is no exception.
Really too many to choose a favorite from so I’m going to choose the Alienware x14, which stands out because Alienware says it is the world’s thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop. There are not a lot of 14-inch gaming laptops, so that may not be that huge reclaim. But I’ve seen it in person, it is very thin. It is very nice. It takes alienware’s design language and evolves.
That they’ve had this very distinct look for a couple of years and every generation they evolve it a little bit so now you’ve got more of a silvery look rather than the matte white, that last year’s versions had the backfit has been flattened out. A little bit makes a little bit easier to carry and they’ve updated. The little fins on the bottom of the system that it sort of rests on gives you better airflow in there, like a lot of the other new gaming laptops at CES, you’re, going to be able to get the newest Intel chips in their 13th Generation stuff uh.
The 4000 series Nvidia gpus uh, new AMD, CPUs and gpus – that’s pretty much stable Stakes for any new laptop here, but it’s nice to see all that stuff and something is thin and small and light as this 14 inch laptop. Now you can do a multi-colored effect. Uh on the backlit touchpad, so you can have you know a rainbow effect or different colors mixed together, rather than just choosing one color. Now, that’s not the only other new Alienware here M16 and an M18 that new, bigger 18 inch screen size and there’s also a new g-series laptops come down, which I actually like a lot they’re, very inexpensive, decent components, and for this year they’ve got some cool new Designs, I think they’ve really gone interesting places with the colors, which is something that can really make a budget gaming laptop stand out because otherwise they all look kind of like gray and black and generic.
So if you add a splash of color to them, that really counts for a lot, and I really like the new G Series budget gaming laptops from Dell. Now I mentioned the Alienware M18 18-inch gaming laptop. It’S not something, we’ve seen in a long time.
It’S not brand new. I remember reviewing a couple of 18 inch gaming laptops, maybe back in 2012, or so they didn’t last very long. No one made one in a long time now. Suddenly everybody has one Alienware has one Acer has one is Zeus: has one Razer has one so the one I’m going to pull out the Highlight for you? Is the Acer model, the Acer Predator Helios 18.? It’S one of this new generation of 18-inch gaming laptops. I’M pretty excited about it because I think a lot of people work at home a lot now or they do hybrid Styles, so they want something.
That’S a little bit bigger on their desk a little more desktoppy. Rather than working off a small 13 or 14 inch laptop and of course, it doubles as a great gaming laptop and with a big display like this, it’s also great for design for office work for video meetings. A good big screen gaming laptop, can really be an all-purpose computer for you and, of course this has got all the latest 13 gen Intel chips.
The Nvidia 4000 series gpus. I like that it has a mini, LED display option, there’s some other display options, but that’s the fanciest one very power efficient. It’S the new technology that is eventually going to replace, OLED and TVs a couple years down the road, probably, but they have it in this laptop and they also have mini LED lights under the keyboard.
So those keyboard backlights are individual per key, but very uniform. Very right and don’t use a ton of extra power if you want to get that, you know cool colorful, backlit, look to your laptop! Now all these new 18-inch gaming laptops they’re, not inexpensive, but the Acer model starts at Seventeen hundred dollars which, for an 18 inch gaming laptop, does not sound bad to me now. Every year, Lenovo has a bunch of regular laptops of regular updates, but they also have a bunch of kind of bold experimental, almost prototype laptops, except you can actually go out and buy them, and I really appreciate that this year, they’ve had some very interesting things, including A hybrid laptop that has an OLED screen on one side and a color e-ink display on the other side, and I love e-ink.
I think it’s a really underutilized technology. This is the one I’m going to highlight for you here is the Lenovo Yoga book 9i. Now it’s a yoga, so it’s got that hinge that folds back 360 degrees. So you can fold it up like a tablet table tented, kiosk it or just hold it like a regular clamshell laptop. But the key is instead of a screen here and a keyboard here, like 99.9 of all laptops, it’s a screen here and a screen here. It’S two OLED displays no keyboard. So now you can type on the screen with an on-screen keyboard, but it also comes with a little mini bluetooth keyboard that sits right on top of one of the screens and connects automatically and you can type on it and when it sits on there it senses You have it there and gives you a little virtual touch pad right below it on that bottom screen. So you get your keyboard, you got your touchpad, you can actually move the touchpad around to different places or you can just take the two screens and stand them up and put the Bluetooth keyboard in front of it and use it almost like a mini 2 screen. All in one, this is going to be a practical laptop for everybody. I don’t think so, but I think that taking the two screen idea and finding a way to make it actually work for people is very interesting and of course, I love one OLED screen. So I’m going to lift two OLED screens even more so.
What we’ve seen at CES 2023 is a lot of laptops that are small, incremental upgrades, so things that already exist sure, but also a lot of pre-bold experiments. Things like taking two screens and no keyboard and putting that into a laptop something like adding a color e-ink display a laptop taking a laptop and bumping it up to a gigantic 18 inch display, the type of which we have not seen in many years. Going back and experimenting with auto stereoscopic 3D again, which has been a dead end before, but might actually have its time in the sun right now. So I’m very excited to see how all of these interesting bold experiments to play out and whether these laptops that we think are the best ones at CES, we’re going to come back and say at the end of 2023 that they were some of the best laptops Of the year, and of course, you can read more about each of these laptops in our Hands-On impressions of them, you’re going to find some of those links down below .