The 4 Best Laptops For Programming – Winter 2023 Reviews

The best laptop for programming we’ve tested is the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2021). This premium mobile workstation feels incredibly well-built and provides a fantastic user experience. Its 16-inch display looks sharp, gives you plenty of room to see more of your codes at once, and gets bright enough to combat glare. You get a spacious keyboard that’s comfortable to type on all day, a gigantic and responsive touchpad, and a wide port selection that includes three USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports. As for its performance, the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs are incredibly fast and powerful. These chips also include a very capable GPU, which is great for game development or any industry requiring high graphical horsepower. The downside is that you’ll be paying for the graphical performance even if you don’t need it.

If you prefer portability over a large screen size, go with the smaller Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2021). It performs almost identically as its 16-inch sibling but has a slightly shorter battery life. One final note about the MacBook Pros: Apple has already released the M2 MacBook Pro 14 and 16. These new models are identical to their M1 predecessors in design; you just get a faster M2 SoC, HDMI 2.1, and increased memory support (up to 96GB). Apple no longer sells the M1 models on their website, so just get the M2 versions. You can likely find a good deal on an M1 model through a third-party seller or marketplace, but they usually only have the base configurations.

Finally, if you prefer working on Windows, get the Dell Precision 5570 (2022), a 15.6-inch mobile workstation available with Intel 12th Gen. processors. Depending on your workload, you can get it with integrated graphics only or with a discrete NVIDIA GPU. The tradeoff is that its battery only lasts six hours of light use or less than an hour of intensive tasks.