Best 15-inch laptop 2020: top picks with 15-inch displays
The best 15-inch laptops are just the right size for most people. They’re not too big, not too small; you might say they’re the Goldilocks of notebooks. Unlike their 13-inch counterparts, they have enough display area for multitasking and creative tasks. Yet in contrast to the massive 17-inch notebooks, they keep its slim, lightweight and portable.
More importantly, the best 15-inch laptops also have a decent amount of room under the hood to accommodate more powerful components like the best processors and the best graphics cards. This means that these portables are very much capable of handling intensive tasks like video editing and gaming, making them a favorite amongst professionals and content creators.
We went ahead and gathered the best 15-inch laptops 2020 has to offer. Whether you’re looking for a versatile hybrid laptop, a tough business machine or a lightweight Chromebooks, you’ll find something on this list to suit your needs.
The Dell XPS 15 might just be incredible enough to tempt hardcore Mac users. It’s easily the best 15-inch laptop in 2020, and in a lot of ways, the best laptop (period). Combining staggering power in a stylish thin and light chassis, this laptop doesn’t hold back when it comes to internals and features that improve your computing experience overall. Among those amazing features are a gorgeous bright display with 500 nits of brightness, an extremely comfortable keyboard, impressive speakers, and a terrific trackpad. We’re not saying that this laptop is perfect, but our coveted 5 out of 5 rating should speak for itself.
Give us a laptop that touts one of AMD’s stellar Ryzen 400 mobile processors, and we’d be more than happy to try it on for size. What we found in the Asus TUF A15, however, is not just fantastic gaming performance, but a great value gaming rig with a long battery life and military-grade durability as well. With the help of Nvidia’s most powerful 1080p graphics cards, this Ryzen 4000-powered laptop will see you through all your 1080p gaming demands without burning a hole in your pocket. Further bolstering the TUF A15's gaming credentials is its large, 15.6-inch 1080p display with 144Hz refresh rate. Whether you play a lot of competitive esports, or need one of the best 15-inch laptops, this one’s a winner.
If you want a 15-inch convertible with versatility in spades must consider HP’s popular Spectre x360. It’s a gorgeous-looking laptop with an elegant design, albeit with a few oddities, including an awkwardly positioned trackpad. However, this laptop isn’t just pretty – it backs these good looks with enough power to cut through any computing task you might wish to tackle. Of course, it helps that the very latest incarnation of this hybrid has updated its hexa-core CPU to a 9th-gen Intel Core i7-9750H.
Creative types will also appreciate the bundled Tilt Pen that can be used for drawing and designing on its exquisite 4K IPS touchscreen display. This 2-in-1 also packs a discrete GTX 1650 graphics card, which means it can even tackle 1080p gaming to boot.
As we said, this 15.6-inch laptop delivers versatility in spades, but it also doesn’t come cheap. At least, it’s more affordable than Microsoft’s Surface Book 2.
If you’re after a powerful notebook in a 15-inch form factor which is ideal for creative usage – such as video editing or Photoshop – then you’ll be well served by taking the macOS route rather than Windows, with the larger MacBook Pro.
This year Apple has boosted the power of the MacBook Pro 15-inch with new 9th-generation Intel processors, with options that run up to a mighty 8-core Intel Core i9. So you most certainly won’t be left wanting on the performance front, with our review benchmarks showing that this incarnation is a considerably more powerful MacBook than its predecessor.
This 15-inch laptop is ideal for heavyweight editing with a choice of AMD Radeon Pro graphics solutions and the possibility to spec up the notebook to 32GB of RAM. And don’t forget the high-quality Retina display along with that improved Touch Bar which can certainly prove a very useful tool with creative applications.
While Asus VivoBook S15 has been designed to become among the best ultra-portables on the market this 2020, it also aims to provide a large enough display for those who need it. That’s a hard undertaking, but one that this top-performing laptop has achieved with high marks. It boasts a 15-6-inch display and a solid performance without compromising its slimline design. You might not be able to do some heavy gaming on this, but you should get some photo editing done.
CPU: 10th Gen Intel Core i7-1065G7 | Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with Max-Q Design | RAM: 16GB or 32GB 3733Mhz LPDDR4x | Screen: 15-inch 3240 x 2160 (260 PPI) PixelSense Display | Storage: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB PCIe SSD
Beautiful design
Comfortable keyboard
Gorgeous screen
Weak U-series processor
Tiny trackpad
Lackluster speakers
In many ways, the Surface Book 3 is an example of just how far the best laptops have come in just a few short years. With an extremely premium piece of kit – with one of the best displays we’ve used in a laptop and a keyboard that will put the MacBook Pro’s new Magic Keyboards to shame – this follow-up to the outstanding Surface Book 2 is truly one of the best 15-inch laptops 2020 has to offer. Unfortunately, it’s held back by a weaker processor (next to its rivals), lacklust speakers and a high price tag. Still, it’s an excellent portable, if you’ve got the money for it.
Rocking 8th-generation and 9th-generation Intel Core processors – not to mention, powerful graphics and a gorgeous display to boot, the Razer Blade isn’t just one of the best gaming laptops on the market. It’s also one of the best 15-inch laptops to consider, if you’re seeking to update your aging gaming laptop. That’s more than impressive for a laptop this thin that is also upgradeable. Expect to pay a lot for all that, but you’re paying for style and power that will last you a while.
We didn’t think that gaming ultrabooks were ready for RTX graphics until the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED proved us otherwise. This isn’t just a solid gaming laptop; this is a solid gaming laptop that delivers incredible RTX gaming experience and touting a reasonable price to boot. It’s not that it’s cheap, especially at higher configurations. However, for what you’re paying, you’re getting a lot of power for your gaming needs.
We hoped for great things in the next Surface Laptop model. However, when this installment of the 15-inch laptop came out, it fell a bit short on both power and versatility. However, if it’s spec above are satisfactory to you and you require a device that will last you the whole work day on a single charge, then the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-inch) might just be the best 15-inch laptop for you. During our review, this device lasted 10 hours and 18 minutes in our TechRadar battery test. As long as you can forgive the lack of ports.
The good news for those after a business laptop in the 15-inch form factor is that there’s an incredible machine available in the form of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme. The bad news, though, is that the price tag is as extreme as the superb performance levels you’ll get with this portable.
It’s difficult to know where to start in describing just how good this machine is. Maybe the 15.6-inch multi-touch display, which in the 4K HDR option is simply stunning and benefits from top-notch color accuracy? Or the speedy performance driven by a six-core CPU, GTX 1050 Ti graphics and superfast NVMe SSD? Or just the little things, like the well-featured connectivity, the refined keyboard, or the potential for upgrades with this laptop?
As we already mentioned, the price may cause the odd eyebrow to rise or jaw to slacken – possibly both – but some corporate users will doubtless want to own the ultimate business laptop for their mission-critical tasks. And the ThinkPad X1 Extreme definitely fulfils that ‘ultimate’ billing, and arguably not just in the 15-inch world.
These countries made the most Google takedown requests this decade
As the number of websites and online services that make up the internet continue to grow, so too do the number of takedown requests made by countries around the world.
After Google announced the number of content removal requests it receives from national governments and their agencies since 2009 in its annual Transparency Report, VPN provider Surfshark analyzed these files to spot any particularly intriguing trends.
According to its report, Russia had the most takedown requests of any country over the past decade, followed by Turkey, India, the US and Brazil.
Top requests
Although Russia had the most requests in the past decade, a quarter (25.39%) of its 123,6060 requests were made in 2020 alone, Surfshark reported.
While Turkey and India also found a spot in the top three when it came to historical takedown requests with 14,231 and 9,989 respectively, both countries were nudged down a spot in 2020's figures by South Korea, which nearly doubled its previous tally with 2,397 requests in 2020.
It's worth noting that a single 'request' can cover multiple pieces of content and that multiple requests can be made to take down the same content. For instance, Google took down 54,330 items on behalf of South Korea in 2020 which is 5.37 times more than the search giant took down for the US during the same period.
Content removal requests
When it comes to why countries are requesting that Google remove content from its search engine, national security was the top reason in Russia, the UK, France, Kazakhstan and Indonesia.
Meanwhile in Turkey, India, the US, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan, Argentina and the Ukraine, defamation is the top reason governments have requested that content be removed. The governments of Spain, Australia, and the Netherlands cited privacy and security as their top reason for removing content while Canada and China stand out from the other 25 countries on Surfshark's list for citing fraud and violence respectively as for why they wanted content removed.
Content removal requests are applicable to all of Google's platform and not just search. In the past decade, YouTube actually saw more takedown requests (101,015) than Google Search did (60,898). Surprisingly, there were even several takedown requests in Google Docs, Gmail and Google Photos.
As Google is responsible for 91.66 percent of all search traffic (according to StatCounter), we can expect to see the number of takedown requests continue to increase as people around the world spend more time online.
Flipkart gets $3.6 billion in funding - Fight with Amazon, Reliance to get intense
Homegrown e-commerce company Flipkart has raised $3.6 billion in a new funding round from a clutch of big-ticket investors. The funds will give the company the firepower in its fight against Amazon, Reliance and the Tatas.
