Popular Laptop 2014

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

Mixing business and pleasure can be a recipe for disaster, but Lenovo got it entirely right with its ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Achieving the ergonomic excellence we'd expect from a ThinkPad in a chassis that weighs 1.36kg can't have been easy, and the result is an Ultrabook to aspire to.Breakneck performance partners with business essentials such as mobile broadband, TPM and a fingerprint reader, and the matte 1,600 x 900 display is both bright and colour accurate. The top-end model nudges the £1,600 mark, which is significantly more expensive than its consumer-focussed rivals, but it's a price worth paying. It's been around a while, but remains the best boardroom Ultrabook.
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Asus N550JV

The Asus N550JV is a high-powered laptop with a dash of glamour. Brushed metal covers the lid, and the detailing on the aluminium keyboard-surround makes for a laptop that looks to be worth every penny of the £1,000 asking price. Up front, a fine 15.6in Full HD touchscreen pampers the eyeballs, while Bang & Olufsen ICEpower audio serves up surprising levels of clarity with a little help from a coke-can-sized sub woofer. Inside, a quad-core Intel Haswell processor and Nvidia GeForce GT 750M GPU join forces to serve up serious performance across the board, from spreadsheets to first-person shooters – this laptop is an all-round class-act. If you're looking to downsize from an old desktop PC, or replace a decrepit old laptop, the Asus N550JV should be top of your shortlist.

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Dell XPS 12

With the XPS 12, Dell's engineers have managed to splice the carbon-fibre XPS range with the ingenious spinning hinge of the Inspiron Duo, to produce a hybrid like no other.The Gorilla Glass-clad Full HD touchscreen drips with vivid, saturated colours, and the range-topping model we tested delivered scorching performance thanks to a Core i7 CPU and nippy SSD. The arrival of Intel Haswell swells battery life to stunning levels: the XPS 12 lasted nearly 13 hours in our light use test.If the asking price is too much, fear not - the cheaper Core i5 model with its smaller 128GB SSD delivers the XPS 12 experience for a touch under £1,000.

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