CNET's laptop reviewers pick their favorite 2020 laptops

2020 started with some great laptop announcements and despite some shortages and delays, many of those are now available. These are our favorite laptops of 2020 so far. For this list I along with c|net's other laptop reviewers Dan Ackerman and Laura Gruden. Tested a bunch of laptops over the past few months and went through and selected a few of our favorites to put on your shortlist. Let's dig in. [MUSIC] First on the list, but not in any particular order is the Dell XPS 13. We really like the whole 2020 XPS lineup, but the XPS 13 has been our go to ultra portable windows pick for a couple years now and for 2020 Dell gave us more screen in a smaller body. It has a new 13.4 inch display. And really the thing is pretty much just a display and a keyboard and a lot of power and battery life inside. Next up is our ultra portable mainstay Apple's MacBook Air, the 2020, 20 air is a winner mostly because Apple switched to a new magic keyboard. The older butterfly keyboard design was a bit of a literal sticking point for buyers. And this new design is definitely an improvement. Apple also returned to a 999 starting price, which makes Apple's least expensive laptop slightly more affordable. Now I'm moving on from big names to a boutique PC with the main gear element. The 15 inch gaming laptop was born from a collaboration with Intel. It's a slim stylish four pound slab that hits the right gaming notes for its size like a 144 Hz display. Optima mechanical keyboard with perky RGB lighting and either in Nvidia 1660 TI or RTX 2070 max q graphics card There's no bloatware here either and main gear has great support to back it all up. And here's another gaming laptop meet the ASUS ROG zephyrus duo 15 a monster name for a monster laptop with a 15.6 inch main display and a secondary tilt in 14 inch touchscreen. Which comes in handy than you might think especially if you don't have room for an external display on your desk. Inside you'll find up to an Intel Core i nine processor and Nvidia RT X 2080 Supermax q. So plenty of gaming performance, but you'll pay for it with a starting price of $3,000 Way down the other end of the laptop market is the Lenovo Duet Chromebook. The little detachable 10 inch two in one is $300 and includes it's snappy magnetic keyboard cover. It's a great around the house or a work anywhere device that delivers above it's price. And while I'm talking about Lenovo It's Yoga lineup this year has been very strong, including and especially the C940. It's top of the line premium model. It's one of my favorites and it really shows how good the two in one category has gotten over the years. There are also a few laptops that showed up toward the tail end of June that we've started testing but aren't quite finished with yet. But look promising, like this GIGABYTE AORUS 15G. It's a gaming laptop with a Pantone certified display and a mechanical keyboard with Omron blue switches. And we're also getting laptops with the latest AMD RYZEN chips, like this 13 inch HP ENVY X360, that looks pretty sweet for less than $800. And then there's this 14 inch ACER SWIFT3 with a RYZEN 740 700U that is just a straight up good value, it's $650. So there you have it. That's our list of some of our favourite laptops of 2020 so far. Thanks for watching. And are there any that we missed? Let us know down in the comments and check us out on cnet.com for all of our laptop and tech coverage.