The Best Laptops of CES 2020

This is a 5G laptop, yeah it's probably gonna be the first 5G laptop you can go out and buy okay and it's the only one so far that combines the Qualcomm arm platform and 5G so it puts those two things that we've been talking about together in one product and it's also a great example of that for yeah and obviously we haven't tested this yet but I was impressed that you put it on the list cos you've been skeptical of arm laptops over the years especially Windows s you know running Windows and I remain so and maybe 5G will be the combination that it needs to really be universally useful for people. Yeah, very good.

Classic Brands Leading the Way

It's a classic brand like the Yoga brand has done a lot it's obviously influenced laptops as you mentioned Dan so it really is good to see this is another one the design is really solid it's another one's a little bit heavier than than some of the other ones we looked at but you still have to feel really good when you when you look at the design of this one it's it's got a lot going for it. So, you know you're gonna be pretty happy with your purchase. When you fold this into tablet mode it's also one of the ones that I feel like we're the the finish of it is I can hold this and and like read a web page or read something especially in either portrait or landscape mode and have a good handle on that's the hard thing about some of these when they fold over. I don't always feel like I have a good place to grab my hands and because they've been doing this longer I feel like they have a good sense of making these so that the places that you're gonna grab have some nice tactile miss to it and get a good grip.

Innovative Design

It's a subtle thing but it's something that that shows that they've been doing this for a while and are the leaders in that area and I like they put it in the the mainstream consumer Yoga line and not just shunted off the 5G stuff of the Qualcomm stuff just a business only laptops which which are not always as cool-looking and is nice. They just put it in the product that really anybody might like it's true and one of the interesting things about 5G to watch is one you know that 5G or LTE even today in laptops is a lot more common in Europe and in Asia because they don't necessarily make you buy like a $10 a month carrier. You can buy a SIM and that sim gives you a certain amount of data to say it gives you you know five gigs of data that might last you four or five months yeah and that's perfectly fine and a lot of people are more comfortable doing that than adding on another fixed cost or bumping up the price of they're already really expensive.

The Future of 5G Laptops

That's the big question mark about about this 5G laptop the other one any of them is what's the 5g service gonna cost you per month because you're adding an ongoing cost to that and if we had a way to do it yeah just buy a SIM card every time we make a lot more sense to people. Yeah, that was one of the things we talked about the original Google pixel which has now been you know six years ago now that was the best thing about that product it was heavy and it was expensive but it had LTE built in and the fact that it could easily and it would automatically move between is like oh you don't have a very good Wi-Fi connection right now we're gonna walk you over to LTE and it was really effective in doing that.

A Potential Game-Changer

And we have a story coming up out about this you know one of the potential disruptors when we get to 5g NLT laptop as could be Google five he's remember they've done some interesting things with with data plans and so they could have an interesting say on some of this in in 2020. We'll see how that goes but look for an article on on CNET about that coming up here as we finished up.

The Final Thoughts

Thanks to all the companies for bring these laptops files to show all the time and that's it for the best laptops of CES 2020 you can find all of my laptop coverage for CES and the year ahead at cnet.com.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI'm Dan a carpenter with me Jason Heiner who is in charge of reviews and advice here at scene that and we're here with what we think are some of the best laptops of CES 2020 and I'll tell you why we're talking about these particular guys because we spent a lot of time earlier this week talking about a lot of the concept pieces and prototypes the folding laptops the things with double screams and things that pop off we decided for this show which we do every year to focus on the real workhorse laptops that are actually going to come out in stores and you'll be able to buy and do practical laptop e things yeah you know the cool thing is there's self-driving cars and huggable robots and all kinds of stuff here but this is the thing you're gonna be spending your day on getting your actual stuff done right so it still matters a lot and you say okay I got myself something cool and new I guess it's not a robot but you know I can shop online with it the first one I want to talk about with you is the latest version of what I call a very good iterative laptop and that it gets a little bit better every year and they've done that for so many years it's almost the Platonic ideal of a 13-inch laptop and that is the XPS 13 yeah I've got the latest version right here and it's a pretty darn good a very light 13-inch laptop and over the years they've shaved the bezel around the screen it's really good this thing is really thin and light I remember when the last iteration of this one came out you saying you know because you've been reviewing these for years you saying I I've run out of things to ask for that they keep you know the things that we say it still needs they keep adding and keep adding and it's gotten to the point where this is just a really functional really really usable laptop the big problem always was because the screen bezel was so narrow they put the webcam down below and there was the old no shot and they moved it back up to the top so I thought okay what more could I possibly ask for well now they've managed to make make it an IR camera so you can use that Windows facial recognition login and I may be the one guy who actually uses that I think it's great yeah it's great and people have gotten used to it a lot of the phones obviously the iPhones been using it for a few years Google pixel now as well as Samsung so it's it's getting to where people are getting used to that and they know how to use it there are some quirks with it that you have to know you know your face and how far away you need to be in all of that but once you get it down it can be just super super convenient and the other the other interesting new addition for this year is a 13.3 inch screen it's now a thirteen point four inch screen that 1/10 of an inch but it's something it's a big screen so you got to give him credit for that and that I why I continue to love the XPS 13 all right tell me about this next guy here yes so this is the Samsung I want to get it so you can see the the cool red color on this thing this is the samsung galaxy Chromebook they've put the galaxy which is of course super popular in phones they've brought it to laptops and this thing I was not expecting to like as much as I did obviously a Chromebook is a Chromebook in many cases they're aimed at low cost you and I both recommend a lot of Chromebooks to people especially people that are gonna be calling us for tech support because then they're hard screwed they are hard to yeah exactly and every time you reboot it it boots really fast and it's sort of a new new deal but what they've told us what we've learned is and looking at the market stats as more and more people are buying these things not just in education where they have sixty percent market share but to use this their own laptop so people are wanting if you're using a Chromebook you want something that has a little bit of oomph to it and some pizzazz because still a lot of the local processing still happens on this machine you want an ice cream yeah and what a nice keyboard experience your flipper drones we can see that the keyboard is so great yeah and just the contrast there between the different shades of red now a court of course a lot of Chromebooks are $200 $300 maybe $100 we both recommend the Samsung plus or a pro the they're to mid-range Chromebooks to a lot of people and they have a stylus built in they're very nice they're about 4 or $500 how much is the galaxy this one is $9.99 please there's the thousand-dollar Chromebook question companies have tried to solve that for years is true this is like the spiritual successor to the original Galaxy yes right that was a nice Chromebook really really great build this is half as thin as that and half as heavy I like this one a lot better yeah this I would say I could see this as a thousand dollar Chromebook they won't be a pixel but I couldn't really it's true it has a a card slot an SD card slot it's got USB see it also has a stylus so you can pull it out for those who are fans of the note the Galaxy Note it has that same functionality so it's it is if you want a Chromebook this is one of the best ones you're gonna be able to buy if you're if you're a worker a consumer and you really want a nice one this one is is the top of the line yeah I feel like everyone who's seen this this week has come away very impressed like I mean this has been one of the kind of like we're desirable new laptops here from a design standards exactly one of the best designed laptops in any category that we've seen this year I mean let's all generally do the same thing and for Chromebooks that goes even more so so good design counts for a heck of a lot very good alright so next HP EliteBook yes this is the dragonfly it's one of their business laptops and it adds a couple of new features I think are pretty interesting first of all it's got this sure view technology they've had this in some products in the past but this is a slightly newer version so I hit the I hit the screen like this and if you're looking at it from an off I saw yeah you can't see what's on the screen yeah and then boom there you go so that stops the old airport somebody peeking over your over your shoulder and and and stealing your password or reading whatever you're writing that's always a big deal so that's number one that feature and I feel like this is one of those things like how did we not think about this before because there are things I'm they're signs when I'm on a plane and I'm looking at documents or pull stuff up kind of like gosh I really hope that there's nobody next to me that you know could read some of it there i say the perfect solution for for OpenOffice problems yeah an open offices that's a good point too because there are times when you have to deal with whatever confidential information you know for in our cases journalists sometimes we're dealing with stuff that's under embargo and we're looking at that's what I'm thinking of when I'm on plans thinking we're shining and hunting and yes that too so yeah so if you're very excited about you're sure of you laptop but you get so excited you run off to tell somebody and you leave it behind you don't know where it is guess what this is the first laptop with you ever see this little tile tracker or that you put on your keys so you don't lose your keys yeah as tile technology built in from that company so this is a tile trackable laptop and I would love to see that frankly in every laptop because I'm always losing stuff left and right that's another one of those things of like why didn't we think of this before it's a pretty small chip it's technology that's easily integrated into a device of this size and so what a what a terrific idea I think their design HP's design on these is also really solid we've given them good marks for a number of their laptops in recent years and so this is laptop this is pretty slick-looking yeah yeah for a business laptop very thin very light looks great and I think it also has a very sort of almost like pinstripe sort of look to a business kind of o3 button-down yeah so and of course this guy at some point in 2020 I don't know exactly when who's gonna get 5g option X so that is a big key word we're gonna be hearing a lot about this year so I think business laptops are gonna be one of the first places you start to see that some nice innovations now so way to go dragonfly now all right something a little bit more fun here yeah big time and this is from this is from Acer and it's part of their line called a concept D line and it's really meant for designers and creative types in a very professional sense this is a concept d7 easel Pro and it's called the easel and this is a hinge they've had on a few products in the past a while ago really but I haven't seen it lately so the screen goes like this I'm gonna do a little click right here bring it forward let me and there you go you could go all the way down here like this yeah fold down into kind of like a tablet but I just like putting it like right by the keyboard there and then you can pull out the little stylus aren't you and you can draw on the screen here and I got you I got you very good there we go okay bear oh very original yeah all right see yes 2020 excellent excellent I'm gonna do my little uh every time I draw I try Silas thing I can't draw so I just draw the same little cartoon guy I've been doing since like the 90s I'll give a bowtie today oh nice these are really aimed at high-end design professionals it's got an Intel Xeon processor which you do not see very often outside of FD for a lapper yeah and it's got NVIDIA Quadro r-tx graphics not the regular consumer level and of course it's a it's one of those it's a 4k screen and yes they have the Pantone certification but a lot of laptops have that yeah it's very marketing term kind of thing but it's hard to tell on the video but the screen on this it looks so really nice it's really very high definition it looks very easy it's easy on the eyes it's not super bright it's just the colors are are really well saturated it's just a really nice level so I love it has an Ethernet port I know that's not very 2020 but there are times especially if you're doing work like this on a big laptop you know you're probably dealing with big files and you're gonna love to have a Gigabit Ethernet or 10g ethernet to be able to plug into it also has hardwired on the side you know the HDMI port and DisplayPort still so this really is aimed at high-end designers engineers artists photographers this is a really nice if you're nice to play around with the shape and the form and yeah and design things I mean that's what we show with a lot of the folding laptops and dual screen laptops reimagining the shape and form of a computer and this does a lot of the same thing by having the screen pop out and be able to reposition itself if you're doing a lot of pen work where like you're either drawing or a lot of photographers do that where they take the pen and they edit their photos with the pen this is a nice option it reminds me to of like with Apple with the new feature that they have where you can have your iPad side Drive yes and you can use that it is kind of nice to have it directly on the screen though and not necessarily have to do it on a second screen or have a second device too able to do it so it's a good idea and almost every PC company is definitely targeting creatives now true so it's so it's nice to see cool new designs that take advantage to that they buy big laptops expensive laptop they waste them fairly often try to get the company to pay for it there's a big budget out there all right this is one of the cool new gaming laptop designs they were not H super ton of new gaming laptops here there's a lot of good gaming hardware what a good gaming innovation but individual laptops not that many that really caught my eye this is one that did and I specifically sought this out to bring this here this is the Asuza ROG is Republic of gamers it's their gaming line this is the Zephyrus R 14 so it's a 14 inch gaming laptop and you don't see that very often well a bigger right 15 inch or 17 inch so to squeeze that down into a 14 inch screen size and this is pretty compact for a gaming laptop it's actually pretty light also feel that it is you know one of the things I liked which is sort of strange is I sort of like the bigger space bar oh yeah yeah it's easy to find those mechanical style keys they also did a nice thing for us if we can see the cool feature on the back where it has all these little micro spots there you put a custom message out there you know your gamertag or just a pattern of lights and stuff like that I'll try to catch a little bit of the shadow so you can see it a little bit nice or even seen it on there thank you so you can program that to put whatever message you want on the back and these little micro lights so on the reason why they're able to get it down this small is they've they've got a new version of the ante rise in CPU in here that's one of the new announcements here at CES this is one of the flagship laptops with it and you can get up to RTX 2060 graphics card in here which is perfectly fine I I wouldn't want that in my super high-end 17-inch gaming laptop yep but for a 14 inch laptop even a 15 inch you know that's that's perfectly fine and I play a lot of games on 2060 laptops so in terms of something different in gaming laptop design where everything kind of looks and feels the same yeah I like this guy a lot it's the compactness is really interesting because you know there are times if you're a gamer even you're not gonna want to carry that those big laptops they get those big gaming laptops there super-heavy not easy on your back when you're throwing it in a backpack so like that a lot also again built-in HDMI built-in USB C so this is a this is a solid regular gamers are some of the last people who really need all those ports and connections and still want them yeah so they're helping keep it alive for the rest of us good stuff all right and then finally let's talk today about a laptop that really brings into focus a lot of the important trend-setting things that are going on this is a yoga from Lenovo it's a story product line that means it's got the 360 degree hinge and you know that goes like this and we've seen these for years I love the the hint the way that they've innovated this hinge is I think a lot better I remember developed a lot over the years exactly everyone else makes a 360 laptop now but these are the first guys who really went mainstream with it and what this version has is number one it's one of them only it's one of a handful of Qualcomm power laptops so not intel pays as I'm sure a few of those and I have some real advantages they run really long low power consumption you know always they're really they're really built for always-on connectivity and that's why it's important that this is a 5g laptop yeah it's probably gonna be the first 5g laptop you can go out and buy okay and it's the only one so far that combines the Qualcomm the arm platform and 5g so it puts those two things that we've been talking about together in one product and it's also a great example of that for yeah and obviously we haven't tested this yet but I was impressed that you put it on the list cos you've been skeptical of arm laptops over the years especially Windows s you know running Windows and I remain so and maybe 5g will be the combination that it needs to really be universally useful for people yeah very good I this is a classic brand like the yoga brand has done a lot it's obviously influenced laptops as you mentioned Dan so it really is good to see this is another one the design is really solid it's another one's a little bit heavier than than some of the other ones we looked at but you still have to feel really good when you when you look at the design of this one it's it's got a lot going for it so you know you're gonna be pretty happy you fold this into tablet mode it's also one of the ones that I feel like we're the the finish of it is I can hold this and and like read a web page or read something especially in either portrait or landscape mode and have a good handle on that's the hard thing about some of these when they fold over I don't always feel like I have a good place to grab my hands and because they've been doing this longer I feel like they have a good sense of making these so that the places that you're gonna grab have some nice tactile miss to it and get a good grip it's a subtle thing but it's something that that shows that they've been doing this for a while and are the leaders and that and I like they put it in the the mainstream consumer yoga line and not just shunted off the 5g stuff of the Qualcomm stuff just a business only laptops which which are not always as cool-looking and is nice they just put it in the product that really anybody might like it's true and the one of the interesting things about 5g to watch is one you know that 5g or LTE even today in laptops is a lot more common in Europe and in Asia because they don't necessarily make you buy like a $10 a month carrier you can buy a SIM and that sim gives you a certain amount of data to say it gives you you know five gigs of data that might last you four or five months yeah and that's perfectly fine and a lot of people are more comfortable doing that than adding on another fixed cost or bumping up the price of they're already really expensive than the LG iPads and the and getting your Apple watch on the plan and everything yeah that's the big question mark about about this 5g laptop the other one any of them is what's the 5g service gonna cost you per month because you're adding an ongoing cost to that and if we had a way to do it yeah just buy a SIM card every time we make a lot more sense to people yeah that's why I think everyone just tethers to their phone instead of and instead of getting an LTE or a 5g connected laptop I'm always in the cab with my phone in one hand flicking the the shearing off and on trying to get my laptop to recognize it all so I can you know use that phone data it's a pain cuz that was one of the things we talked about the original Google pixel which has now been you know six years ago now that was the best thing about that product it was heavy and it was expensive but it had LTE built in and the fact that it could easily and it would automatically move between is like oh you don't have a very good Wi-Fi connection right now we're gonna walk you over to LTE and it was really effective in doing that and so along those lines and we have a story coming up out about this you know one of the potential disruptors when we get to 5g NLT laptop as could be Google five he's remember they've done some interesting things with with data plans and so they could have an interesting say on some of this in in 2020 we'll see how that goes but look for an article on on CNET about that coming up here as we finished up yes cool well we got a great collection here thanks to all the companies for bring these laptops files to show all the time and that's it for the best laptops of CES 2020 you can find all of my laptop coverage for CES and the year ahead at cnet.com of course I'm Dan Ackerman with Jason Heiner thanks for watchingI'm Dan a carpenter with me Jason Heiner who is in charge of reviews and advice here at scene that and we're here with what we think are some of the best laptops of CES 2020 and I'll tell you why we're talking about these particular guys because we spent a lot of time earlier this week talking about a lot of the concept pieces and prototypes the folding laptops the things with double screams and things that pop off we decided for this show which we do every year to focus on the real workhorse laptops that are actually going to come out in stores and you'll be able to buy and do practical laptop e things yeah you know the cool thing is there's self-driving cars and huggable robots and all kinds of stuff here but this is the thing you're gonna be spending your day on getting your actual stuff done right so it still matters a lot and you say okay I got myself something cool and new I guess it's not a robot but you know I can shop online with it the first one I want to talk about with you is the latest version of what I call a very good iterative laptop and that it gets a little bit better every year and they've done that for so many years it's almost the Platonic ideal of a 13-inch laptop and that is the XPS 13 yeah I've got the latest version right here and it's a pretty darn good a very light 13-inch laptop and over the years they've shaved the bezel around the screen it's really good this thing is really thin and light I remember when the last iteration of this one came out you saying you know because you've been reviewing these for years you saying I I've run out of things to ask for that they keep you know the things that we say it still needs they keep adding and keep adding and it's gotten to the point where this is just a really functional really really usable laptop the big problem always was because the screen bezel was so narrow they put the webcam down below and there was the old no shot and they moved it back up to the top so I thought okay what more could I possibly ask for well now they've managed to make make it an IR camera so you can use that Windows facial recognition login and I may be the one guy who actually uses that I think it's great yeah it's great and people have gotten used to it a lot of the phones obviously the iPhones been using it for a few years Google pixel now as well as Samsung so it's it's getting to where people are getting used to that and they know how to use it there are some quirks with it that you have to know you know your face and how far away you need to be in all of that but once you get it down it can be just super super convenient and the other the other interesting new addition for this year is a 13.3 inch screen it's now a thirteen point four inch screen that 1/10 of an inch but it's something it's a big screen so you got to give him credit for that and that I why I continue to love the XPS 13 all right tell me about this next guy here yes so this is the Samsung I want to get it so you can see the the cool red color on this thing this is the samsung galaxy Chromebook they've put the galaxy which is of course super popular in phones they've brought it to laptops and this thing I was not expecting to like as much as I did obviously a Chromebook is a Chromebook in many cases they're aimed at low cost you and I both recommend a lot of Chromebooks to people especially people that are gonna be calling us for tech support because then they're hard screwed they are hard to yeah exactly and every time you reboot it it boots really fast and it's sort of a new new deal but what they've told us what we've learned is and looking at the market stats as more and more people are buying these things not just in education where they have sixty percent market share but to use this their own laptop so people are wanting if you're using a Chromebook you want something that has a little bit of oomph to it and some pizzazz because still a lot of the local processing still happens on this machine you want an ice cream yeah and what a nice keyboard experience your flipper drones we can see that the keyboard is so great yeah and just the contrast there between the different shades of red now a court of course a lot of Chromebooks are $200 $300 maybe $100 we both recommend the Samsung plus or a pro the they're to mid-range Chromebooks to a lot of people and they have a stylus built in they're very nice they're about 4 or $500 how much is the galaxy this one is $9.99 please there's the thousand-dollar Chromebook question companies have tried to solve that for years is true this is like the spiritual successor to the original Galaxy yes right that was a nice Chromebook really really great build this is half as thin as that and half as heavy I like this one a lot better yeah this I would say I could see this as a thousand dollar Chromebook they won't be a pixel but I couldn't really it's true it has a a card slot an SD card slot it's got USB see it also has a stylus so you can pull it out for those who are fans of the note the Galaxy Note it has that same functionality so it's it is if you want a Chromebook this is one of the best ones you're gonna be able to buy if you're if you're a worker a consumer and you really want a nice one this one is is the top of the line yeah I feel like everyone who's seen this this week has come away very impressed like I mean this has been one of the kind of like we're desirable new laptops here from a design standards exactly one of the best designed laptops in any category that we've seen this year I mean let's all generally do the same thing and for Chromebooks that goes even more so so good design counts for a heck of a lot very good alright so next HP EliteBook yes this is the dragonfly it's one of their business laptops and it adds a couple of new features I think are pretty interesting first of all it's got this sure view technology they've had this in some products in the past but this is a slightly newer version so I hit the I hit the screen like this and if you're looking at it from an off I saw yeah you can't see what's on the screen yeah and then boom there you go so that stops the old airport somebody peeking over your over your shoulder and and and stealing your password or reading whatever you're writing that's always a big deal so that's number one that feature and I feel like this is one of those things like how did we not think about this before because there are things I'm they're signs when I'm on a plane and I'm looking at documents or pull stuff up kind of like gosh I really hope that there's nobody next to me that you know could read some of it there i say the perfect solution for for OpenOffice problems yeah an open offices that's a good point too because there are times when you have to deal with whatever confidential information you know for in our cases journalists sometimes we're dealing with stuff that's under embargo and we're looking at that's what I'm thinking of when I'm on plans thinking we're shining and hunting and yes that too so yeah so if you're very excited about you're sure of you laptop but you get so excited you run off to tell somebody and you leave it behind you don't know where it is guess what this is the first laptop with you ever see this little tile tracker or that you put on your keys so you don't lose your keys yeah as tile technology built in from that company so this is a tile trackable laptop and I would love to see that frankly in every laptop because I'm always losing stuff left and right that's another one of those things of like why didn't we think of this before it's a pretty small chip it's technology that's easily integrated into a device of this size and so what a what a terrific idea I think their design HP's design on these is also really solid we've given them good marks for a number of their laptops in recent years and so this is laptop this is pretty slick-looking yeah yeah for a business laptop very thin very light looks great and I think it also has a very sort of almost like pinstripe sort of look to a business kind of o3 button-down yeah so and of course this guy at some point in 2020 I don't know exactly when who's gonna get 5g option X so that is a big key word we're gonna be hearing a lot about this year so I think business laptops are gonna be one of the first places you start to see that some nice innovations now so way to go dragonfly now all right something a little bit more fun here yeah big time and this is from this is from Acer and it's part of their line called a concept D line and it's really meant for designers and creative types in a very professional sense this is a concept d7 easel Pro and it's called the easel and this is a hinge they've had on a few products in the past a while ago really but I haven't seen it lately so the screen goes like this I'm gonna do a little click right here bring it forward let me and there you go you could go all the way down here like this yeah fold down into kind of like a tablet but I just like putting it like right by the keyboard there and then you can pull out the little stylus aren't you and you can draw on the screen here and I got you I got you very good there we go okay bear oh very original yeah all right see yes 2020 excellent excellent I'm gonna do my little uh every time I draw I try Silas thing I can't draw so I just draw the same little cartoon guy I've been doing since like the 90s I'll give a bowtie today oh nice these are really aimed at high-end design professionals it's got an Intel Xeon processor which you do not see very often outside of FD for a lapper yeah and it's got NVIDIA Quadro r-tx graphics not the regular consumer level and of course it's a it's one of those it's a 4k screen and yes they have the Pantone certification but a lot of laptops have that yeah it's very marketing term kind of thing but it's hard to tell on the video but the screen on this it looks so really nice it's really very high definition it looks very easy it's easy on the eyes it's not super bright it's just the colors are are really well saturated it's just a really nice level so I love it has an Ethernet port I know that's not very 2020 but there are times especially if you're doing work like this on a big laptop you know you're probably dealing with big files and you're gonna love to have a Gigabit Ethernet or 10g ethernet to be able to plug into it also has hardwired on the side you know the HDMI port and DisplayPort still so this really is aimed at high-end designers engineers artists photographers this is a really nice if you're nice to play around with the shape and the form and yeah and design things I mean that's what we show with a lot of the folding laptops and dual screen laptops reimagining the shape and form of a computer and this does a lot of the same thing by having the screen pop out and be able to reposition itself if you're doing a lot of pen work where like you're either drawing or a lot of photographers do that where they take the pen and they edit their photos with the pen this is a nice option it reminds me to of like with Apple with the new feature that they have where you can have your iPad side Drive yes and you can use that it is kind of nice to have it directly on the screen though and not necessarily have to do it on a second screen or have a second device too able to do it so it's a good idea and almost every PC company is definitely targeting creatives now true so it's so it's nice to see cool new designs that take advantage to that they buy big laptops expensive laptop they waste them fairly often try to get the company to pay for it there's a big budget out there all right this is one of the cool new gaming laptop designs they were not H super ton of new gaming laptops here there's a lot of good gaming hardware what a good gaming innovation but individual laptops not that many that really caught my eye this is one that did and I specifically sought this out to bring this here this is the Asuza ROG is Republic of gamers it's their gaming line this is the Zephyrus R 14 so it's a 14 inch gaming laptop and you don't see that very often well a bigger right 15 inch or 17 inch so to squeeze that down into a 14 inch screen size and this is pretty compact for a gaming laptop it's actually pretty light also feel that it is you know one of the things I liked which is sort of strange is I sort of like the bigger space bar oh yeah yeah it's easy to find those mechanical style keys they also did a nice thing for us if we can see the cool feature on the back where it has all these little micro spots there you put a custom message out there you know your gamertag or just a pattern of lights and stuff like that I'll try to catch a little bit of the shadow so you can see it a little bit nice or even seen it on there thank you so you can program that to put whatever message you want on the back and these little micro lights so on the reason why they're able to get it down this small is they've they've got a new version of the ante rise in CPU in here that's one of the new announcements here at CES this is one of the flagship laptops with it and you can get up to RTX 2060 graphics card in here which is perfectly fine I I wouldn't want that in my super high-end 17-inch gaming laptop yep but for a 14 inch laptop even a 15 inch you know that's that's perfectly fine and I play a lot of games on 2060 laptops so in terms of something different in gaming laptop design where everything kind of looks and feels the same yeah I like this guy a lot it's the compactness is really interesting because you know there are times if you're a gamer even you're not gonna want to carry that those big laptops they get those big gaming laptops there super-heavy not easy on your back when you're throwing it in a backpack so like that a lot also again built-in HDMI built-in USB C so this is a this is a solid regular gamers are some of the last people who really need all those ports and connections and still want them yeah so they're helping keep it alive for the rest of us good stuff all right and then finally let's talk today about a laptop that really brings into focus a lot of the important trend-setting things that are going on this is a yoga from Lenovo it's a story product line that means it's got the 360 degree hinge and you know that goes like this and we've seen these for years I love the the hint the way that they've innovated this hinge is I think a lot better I remember developed a lot over the years exactly everyone else makes a 360 laptop now but these are the first guys who really went mainstream with it and what this version has is number one it's one of them only it's one of a handful of Qualcomm power laptops so not intel pays as I'm sure a few of those and I have some real advantages they run really long low power consumption you know always they're really they're really built for always-on connectivity and that's why it's important that this is a 5g laptop yeah it's probably gonna be the first 5g laptop you can go out and buy okay and it's the only one so far that combines the Qualcomm the arm platform and 5g so it puts those two things that we've been talking about together in one product and it's also a great example of that for yeah and obviously we haven't tested this yet but I was impressed that you put it on the list cos you've been skeptical of arm laptops over the years especially Windows s you know running Windows and I remain so and maybe 5g will be the combination that it needs to really be universally useful for people yeah very good I this is a classic brand like the yoga brand has done a lot it's obviously influenced laptops as you mentioned Dan so it really is good to see this is another one the design is really solid it's another one's a little bit heavier than than some of the other ones we looked at but you still have to feel really good when you when you look at the design of this one it's it's got a lot going for it so you know you're gonna be pretty happy you fold this into tablet mode it's also one of the ones that I feel like we're the the finish of it is I can hold this and and like read a web page or read something especially in either portrait or landscape mode and have a good handle on that's the hard thing about some of these when they fold over I don't always feel like I have a good place to grab my hands and because they've been doing this longer I feel like they have a good sense of making these so that the places that you're gonna grab have some nice tactile miss to it and get a good grip it's a subtle thing but it's something that that shows that they've been doing this for a while and are the leaders and that and I like they put it in the the mainstream consumer yoga line and not just shunted off the 5g stuff of the Qualcomm stuff just a business only laptops which which are not always as cool-looking and is nice they just put it in the product that really anybody might like it's true and the one of the interesting things about 5g to watch is one you know that 5g or LTE even today in laptops is a lot more common in Europe and in Asia because they don't necessarily make you buy like a $10 a month carrier you can buy a SIM and that sim gives you a certain amount of data to say it gives you you know five gigs of data that might last you four or five months yeah and that's perfectly fine and a lot of people are more comfortable doing that than adding on another fixed cost or bumping up the price of they're already really expensive than the LG iPads and the and getting your Apple watch on the plan and everything yeah that's the big question mark about about this 5g laptop the other one any of them is what's the 5g service gonna cost you per month because you're adding an ongoing cost to that and if we had a way to do it yeah just buy a SIM card every time we make a lot more sense to people yeah that's why I think everyone just tethers to their phone instead of and instead of getting an LTE or a 5g connected laptop I'm always in the cab with my phone in one hand flicking the the shearing off and on trying to get my laptop to recognize it all so I can you know use that phone data it's a pain cuz that was one of the things we talked about the original Google pixel which has now been you know six years ago now that was the best thing about that product it was heavy and it was expensive but it had LTE built in and the fact that it could easily and it would automatically move between is like oh you don't have a very good Wi-Fi connection right now we're gonna walk you over to LTE and it was really effective in doing that and so along those lines and we have a story coming up out about this you know one of the potential disruptors when we get to 5g NLT laptop as could be Google five he's remember they've done some interesting things with with data plans and so they could have an interesting say on some of this in in 2020 we'll see how that goes but look for an article on on CNET about that coming up here as we finished up yes cool well we got a great collection here thanks to all the companies for bring these laptops files to show all the time and that's it for the best laptops of CES 2020 you can find all of my laptop coverage for CES and the year ahead at cnet.com of course I'm Dan Ackerman with Jason Heiner thanks for watching\n"