Best laptops for home use: Moving beyond the desktop replacement

While there’s certainly plenty of us out there that can’t leave the house without more than one gadget tethering us to the digital world, there’s at least as many people out there who appreciate the internet from a more casual perspective. These users don’t need the most powerful experience or the most mobile one, but instead desire something that just plain works. We’ve taken a look at some of the best laptops for home use, meaning something you can enjoy using while wasting a Saturday on the couch, preparing a big meal in the kitchen, or curled up in bed.
The home laptop (what was once dominated by clunky “desktop replacements”) is a unique category because it is currently in the middle of a serious shift. When your work computer is your dominant computer, the machine you use at home is usually just for fun. With the rapid increase in the capabilities of smartphones and tablets over the last couple of years, the computer you use at home may not be a laptop at all — it may be a tablet, whose job is to offer you mostly entertainment.
Tablets are fully capable of being laptop replacements for some people, but not everyone is ready to detach the keyboard just yet. As a result the devices that made it to our list of best laptops for home use may not be laptops in the most conventional sense, but that’s really due more to how we use these devices today than anything else.

Acer C720 Chromebook

If the purpose of a home use laptop is to be dependable, simple to use, and capable of surviving eight or more hours of being tossed around the home, Acer’s C720 Chromebook easily offers the best bang for your buck. At $200, this 11.6-inch laptop is more than capable of handling tasks like browsing, instant messenger, streaming video, and anything else you would do on the web.
It’s a Chrome OS laptop (aka a Chromebook) so you won’t have access to things like Steam unless you get a little crazy and install full blown desktop Linux on it, but as a strictly browsing machine it is light and fast. Plus, at $200 you won’t cry too much if it falls off of the makeshift perch you made for it in the kitchen while trying out a new recipe.

Apple MacBook Air

Being light and thin with decent battery life are important parts of a home use laptop, but if you’re looking to occasionally do a little more with your laptop there’s a good chance you’re looking for a MacBook Air. The Haswell-powered 11.6-inch sliver of dense aluminum that is a MacBook air does a really great job being a decent all around laptop. It feels nice and durable, it’s powerful enough to handle gaming or browsing, and the battery life on this machine outclasses most other laptops on the shelves today.
You won’t get something this nice without shelling out for it, so if the MacBook Air is what you think you need in your life, be prepared to spend $1000 for the base model and work your way up for more storage or a larger display.

Dell Venue 8 Pro

Portability is an important part of a home use device, which is usually where tablets come in. Intel’s partners have spent the last year trying to refine their Windows 8 portfolios to create compelling hardware that can offer laptop capabilities in tablet form. Dell seems to be one of the closes to delivering on this goal with the Venue 8 Pro, an 8-inch tablet designed to offer you everything a laptop can.
The Bay Trail processor inside the Venue 8 combined with a great screen allows what seems like a clearly lesser experience really surprise you. Dell’s latest tablet is one of several to try and fill the 8-inch Windows tablet space, but the Venue 8 Pro is the only one to hit the $300 price point without taking anything away from the experience. With a 7 hour battery and optional active stylus, Dell has a surprisingly good machine here to take advantage of the touch friendly Windows 8.

Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro

If you’re not quite ready to get rid of the keyboard but are still most comfortable in Windows, Lenovo’s latest multimode ultrabook offers a great no compromise machine. The Yoga line specializes in being able to rotate its screen completely back on itself, so you can use it in four different configurations. If you’re looking for the best laptop for home use, the flexibility of the Yoga 2 Pro can’t be ignored.
Lenovo has crammed a 3200×1800 resolution touchscreen into a 3lb 13.3-inch frame with a promise of 6-8 hours of battery life. The frame for this laptop offers the perfect couch surfing option, the ideal kitchen computer option, and still works well as a tablet or laptop. The size and weight take a bit away from it being as postable as some of the other machines, but in return you get 8GB of RAM and a Core i3 processor for the base mode. For under $1,000 you’re not going to find a better all around Windows 8 machine.

iPad Air

While technically running a mobile operating system, Apple’s latest 9.7-inch tablet has proven itself more than capable of serving as a home use laptop for many people. The iPad air is the lightest tablet in its class, offers an incredible display, and is capable of delivering a laptop class browsing and computing environment for a huge group of users. Additionally, there’s more than a couple exceptional keyboard accessories out there for the iPad Air that make it easily as functional as Chromebooks or low-end Windows 8 devices.
The iPad Air boasts 10 hours of battery life for both their WiFi and LTE capable models, and offers a massive selection of apps for users to choose from. For gaming, word processing, entertainment consumption, or just causal web browsing, Apple’s $500 tablet is a perfect option for users who just want something that works.
The cool thing about the home use laptop is that usually there’s more thought that goes into purchasing it than most other electronics, despite how it typically gets treated. These are personal machines that we reach for in order to settle a debate about what move that one actor has been in last, or to grab a new recipe for dinner tonight. They are our Facebook machines, YellowBook replacements, unlimited cookbooks, and most importantly they are there when you need them to do simple tasks without getting in the way of your daily life.

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