The 3 Best Business Laptops of 2026

Top pick

The Dell 14S has a slimmer design, a better screen, and longer battery life than the competition, and it’s designed to be repaired.

Key specs

All laptops are getting more expensive — a trend that analysts expect to last for years — and business laptops are no exception. But the Dell 14S is an outlier. It offers strong processing power, a good selection of ports, and 17-hour battery life for half the price of some of its enterprise-focused competitors.

It easily handles multitasking with tons of tabs open. In our testing, the Dell 14S easily ran multiple daily-workhorse apps, such as Google Chrome, Slack, Microsoft Word, and Spotify, simultaneously. We also opened more than 100 tabs in Google Chrome before the laptop started to lag, limited by the laptop’s 16 GB of memory rather than its processing power.

It has USB-A and HDMI ports. Though Dell is removing USB-A and HDMI ports from its business laptops, such as the XPS 14, it still includes them in the Dell 14S, so you can use older accessories with it or easily connect it to a TV or projector. On the left side of the 14S are an HDMI port, one USB-A port, and two USB-C ports, while an USB-A port and a headphone jack sit on the right.

It has a great, 17-hour battery life. Many of the laptops we tested this year lasted for more than 12 hours, but the Dell 14S lasted even longer, 17.6 hours on average. Our battery-life test simulates real-world web browsing, including opening new tabs, scrolling, and playing YouTube videos.

It has a sharp webcam and loud speakers. The Dell 14S is well equipped for Zoom calls or Teams meetings, with a webcam that looks sharp even in lower-light situations. Its speakers are more than good enough for attending meetings and watching videos, but they can get tinny and shrill at its very loud maximum volume.

Its webcam supports Windows Hello facial recognition. Unlike many other business laptops, the Dell 14S doesn’t have a fingerprint reader. Instead it uses an infrared sensor next to the webcam to enable Windows’s facial-recognition login. The feature works accurately and quickly.

Its OLED display is vibrant and adaptable. In contrast to previous business laptops we’ve tested, the Dell 14S doesn’t pay a huge battery-life penalty for having an OLED screen. The OLED screen isn’t included in Dell’s prebuilt laptops for sale on its website, but if you click the “Build your own” option, you can add the superior display to our preferred configuration for no additional charge. While the 1920×1200 display is lower-resolution than those of some competitors, it’s still sharp and easily usable at 100% to 125% scaling. (I like 115% scaling on this one.)

You can easily find its repair manual. Dell has published a complete repair guide for the 14S and made it openly accessible online. You can replace nearly every component of the laptop, except for the RAM, which is soldered to the motherboard.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It’s kind of heavy. We’ve become used to laptops’ getting lighter and thinner with each generation, but the Dell 14S is a bit chunky. It’s about half a pound heavier than a 13-inch MacBook Air and more than a pound heavier than our upgrade pick, the newest Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

Dell has yet to release parts for the laptop. Unfortunately, you typically can’t repair a laptop with just a manual. You also need replacement parts to swap out whatever broke. Though Dell regularly sells parts directly to consumers and through third-party websites, it hasn’t released the parts for the Dell 14S yet.

Its price could increase. The ongoing chip shortage is causing consumer electronics prices to rise even higher as artificial intelligence companies buy up the world’s stock of RAM and other components. The price of the Dell 14S increased by $200 while we were testing for this guide; we still think it’s the best option we tested, but we can’t guarantee that its price won’t increase again.