The best laptops at CES 2022

  laptops had a good showing at CES 2022

first up our best of cs winner in the pc 

category lenovo's thinkpad z series 

i saw this laptop at a private demo for 

reporters ahead of ces and what i noticed first was the lid which was built to be openable with one hand but it turns out there's more to the z13 and z16 in their sleek user-friendly design the z-series is also one of the more environmentally friendly notebooks we've seen with materials that include recycled aluminum and vegan leather the charger is made from 90 recyclable materials and the packaging is 100 recyclable thanks to compostable bamboo and sugarcane just as notable the thinkpad z series is the result of an exclusive collaboration with amd making it among the first laptops with amd's new high performance ryzen pro 6000 series laptop processors rounding out the spec list or dolby atmos dolby vision dolby ai noise cancellation and oled screens that would be 2.8k resolution for the 13-inch and 4k for the z16 we're excited to test this out soon closer to when it goes on sale in may another great lenovo machine the think book plus gen 3. the gen 3 was too impractical to win best of cds especially for left-handed people but it deserves an honorable 

mention 

the 17.3-inch ultra wide laptop squeezes an 8-inch secondary screen onto the the 

right side of the keyboard it's hardly 

the first dual screen notebook we've seen but we appreciate how a designer or some other kind of power user could use the screen to magnify something in say adobe lightroom or have easy access to a control dashboard additionally, the screen can be used in 

whiteboard mode or as a digital numpad 

and then there's the most unconventional the layout options a waterfall mode that allows content to spill from the primary screen down to the smaller one below what's especially neat here is how lenovo takes advantage of windows 11's built-in screen mirroring and extension options so that third-party developers like adobe don't have to tweak their apps just on lenovo's account to make they work well on that secondary screen 

under the hood, you get a new 12th gen 

intel core processor and up to 32 gigs of ram, there's also a webcam privacy 

shutter and a generous array of ports 

that includes hdmi 2 usba and 

thunderbolt 4. we'll be sure to review 

the gen 3 when it arrives in may the the starting price will be 13.99 

moving on in the love to hate category 

we have dell's xps 13 plus 

is it the best that is debatable 

noteworthy you bet you see with its newest xps 13 dell may 

have messed with a good thing 

that or it beat the rest of the industry 

to a bold inevitable move, they removed 

the headphone jack weed and gadget don't 

like this one bit and we didn't want to 

like this machine 

but we mostly did despite ourselves 

it's a gorgeous ultra portable with a glass haptic touch pad and latticeless keys that means no space between the 

buttons and that's a design choice that 

allows for larger keycaps 

we even have to give credit to dell for 

how pretty the touch sensitive function row is even if it does remind us of 

apple's now discontinued touch bar 

between the missing headphone jack the touch bar clone and the glass touch pad which my colleague devendra hardware 

found tricky to use the xps 13 plus did 

not rise to the level of a best of ces award winner but it's definitely the one everyone was talking about last week okay yes this is, in fact, a cpu refresh 

but it's in the service of helping some 

of the best gaming laptops stay at the 

top of their game the razer blade 14 15 

and 17 will be offered with nvidia's 

flagship gpu the rtx 3080 ti this news 

comes fresh off nvidia's announcement at 

ces last week that the 3070 ti and 3080 

ti will be available for laptops in 

addition to desktop systems meanwhile 

blade 15 and 17 will use intel's new 

12 generation core h-series processors 

with a beastly 14 core i9 

12900h chip available at the high end in 

addition though the blade hasn't been redesigned exactly it has slightly larger keys for quote wellness reasons along with a thinner hinge that promises improved ventilation the blade 15 also 

benefits from a new uhd display option 

while the largest model the blade 17 is getting a larger 82-watt hour battery and eight speakers up from four on last year's model you can pre-order the blade 15 and 17 later this month starting at 2500 and 2700 respectively the blade 14 goes up for pre-order on february 10 starting at two thousand dollars now on to the weird stuff, we have to respect companies for putting out some experimental products even if we're not so sure yet we'd buy them ourselves 

asus dreamt big ahead of ces with not 

one but two funky devices on hand at the 

show the zenbook 17 fold is as the name 

suggests a giant 17-inch moldable tablet 

in the box, you also get a bluetooth

keyboard with a built-in trackpad 

fold the tablet upset the keyboard on 

top and you've got yourself a modular 

window 11 pc that's equivalent in size 

to a 12.5-inch laptop meanwhile Asus rog z13 flow is like a 

surface pro for gamers a 2.43-pound 

tablet that manages to pack in an Nvidia 

RTX 3050 ti GPU and 12th gen intel core processor if you need even more power 

you can plug in Asus mobile external GPU 

which supports up to AMD's Radeon RX 6850m in addition to Nvidia's mobile RTX 30 series cards, either way, the pitch here is that you can use it to play your pc games pretty much anywhere like I said it was a really good year 

for laptops at CES 2022 ces is not 

historically always a very exciting laptop show so which was your favorite are there any that we just didn't include on your list that you were especially fond of let us know in the 

comments

 engadget.com for even more stories about ces that we published last week thanks