Tech
How to read a TV spec sheet without being upsold
The panel and its processing decide how a television looks in your living room. Most of the numbers printed on the box are there to justify a higher price.
Best laptops
Sustained performance, repairability and display quality — ranked once our testing round is complete.
Research in progressPublished rankings appear only after testing is complete.
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Our picks
Nothing published until testing is finished.
Peak benchmark scores are the least useful laptop specification. We test sustained performance under a long workload, measure display output with a colorimeter, log real battery life on a fixed task loop, and check what the manufacturer's own service documentation says about replacing a battery or an SSD.
No picks published yet
This guide is in the research stage. We will not list a "best" product before the testing round behind it is complete — an unranked page is more useful than a ranked guess. When picks go live, each one will state what we tested, how long for, what it is good at, and who should buy something else instead.
What we score, and why
Written down before any product is considered.
- Sustained performance after thirty minutes under load
- Measured battery life on a repeatable workload
- Display brightness, uniformity and colour accuracy
- Keyboard, trackpad and thermal behaviour in normal use
- Repairability: parts availability and service documentation
- Warranty terms and software support horizon
How we will decide
- 01
Criteria before candidates
We write down what would make a product the right pick — and how each criterion is measured — before we look at what is on sale.
- 02
Documented specifications only
Anything we state about a product comes from our own testing or from the manufacturer's published documentation, linked on the page.
- 03
Real-world testing
Where a category can be tested, we test it over weeks rather than an unboxing session, and we publish the conditions we tested under.
- 04
Pricing checked, not quoted
We do not print a price we have not verified, and we do not treat an RRP as evidence of a discount.
- 05
Commercial relationships disclosed
Affiliate links, if present, are labelled on the page. No partner can buy a placement, a rank or a verdict.
The full process is documented in our review methodology and testing process.
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Four numbers decide how a machine feels after a year. Most of the others exist to differentiate models that are otherwise identical.
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