The best touchscreen laptop in 2024: top portables with a touch display

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REASONS TO BUY
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best touchscreen laptop
(Image credit: Future)

Experience the benefits of the best touchscreen laptops and revolutionize the way you interact with your computer. These laptops are equipped with touch functionality, providing a unique, tablet-like experience that surpasses traditional clamshell laptops.

The best touchscreen laptops open up a world of possibilities, especially when combined with the popular 2-in-1 form factor. This versatile design transforms your laptop into a multifunctional device, serving as a notebook for work, a portable presentation tool, a tablet for web surfing, and a display for streaming. Investing in a touchscreen laptop not only enhances versatility but also helps you reduce the number of devices you need.

Having tested the best laptops on the market with touchscreen capabilities, we can confidently recommend those that offer the best touch experience combined with excellent performance. To help you make an informed decision, we have compiled a list of the best touchscreen laptops available right now, including some of the best 2-in-1 laptops and the best Chromebooks. Additionally, we’ve included some of the best laptop deals available on our top picks to maximize your value.

The best touchscreen laptop overall

A Microsoft Surface Pro 11 on a desk

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
The best 2-in-1 laptop going

Specifications

CPU: Up to Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite
Graphics: Qualcomm Adreno
RAM: Up to 32GB
Screen: Up to 14-inch 2.8K OLED
Storage: Up to 1TB SSD

Reasons to buy

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Fantastic performance
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Incredible battery life (for Windows)
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Fully-functional OS
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Optional OLED display

Reasons to avoid

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Native ARM versions of popular apps not released yet
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Built-in AI features feel gimmicky right now

With its exceptional design, stunning touchscreen display, and impressive battery life, the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 stands out among the best laptop picks on the market. Its full Windows 11 OS surpasses the iPad Pro in functionality, and while its performance might slightly lag behind the latest iPad Pro with Apple M4, it excels in benchmark tests and has no major weaknesses for most users.

The Surface Pro 11’s design and battery life are particularly noteworthy, featuring an optional 2.8K OLED touchscreen display with incredible color accuracy that is well worth the upgrade. This touchscreen capability enhances the user experience, making it a versatile tool for both work and play. 

Additionally, it boasts a 1440p webcam and a solid, lightweight build. The battery life meets Microsoft’s 14-hour claim, even approaching 15 hours in our local video playback tests, showcasing the power efficiency of Arm architecture.

The Microsoft Surface Pro 11 excels in all areas, pushing the boundaries of what users expect from a top-tier Windows laptop. As more developers release Arm-compatible apps and more AI features roll out, this laptop is set to become even more remarkable.

Read our full Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review

The best budget touchscreen laptop

best touchscreen laptop Lenovo ThinkPad Duet 5 Chromebook

(Image credit: Future)
The best budget touchscreen laptop

Specifications

CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon SC7180
Graphics: Integrated Qualcomm Adreno Graphics
RAM: 4GB LPDDR4X
Screen: 13.3-inch 1920 x 1080 OLED 100% DCI-P3 400-nit touchscreen
Storage: 256 GB eMMC

Reasons to buy

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Gorgeous display
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Phenomenal battery life
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Bigger keyboard

Reasons to avoid

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Flimsy keyboard
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Difficult kickstand

The Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook is a rarity, being as good and as affordable as it. It’s not a premium Chromebook so the specs aren’t high-end, but it still delivers plenty of power for its target users – the ones who rely heavily on Google Chrome workloads and use it for the more casual workloads. In fact, we love using it for sending emails, writing our articles, and naturally, streaming our favorite shows. 

We also adore the fact that it’s incredibly portable, making it easier to take with us if we want to squeeze in a little bit of work whilst traveling. Naturally, its decently-sized keyboard and outstanding battery life – we yielded about 16 hours and 20 minutes of juice during testing – make it a boon for that very purpose as well.

This being a 2-in-1, there’s also the touch display aspect, which by the way got a major upgrade to OLED from its predecessor. Its touch capability has always been nice and responsive, but now you've also got the vivid colors that only an OLED panel can offer.

Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook review

The best premium touchscreen laptop

Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 on a coffee table

(Image credit: Future / Michelle Rae Uy)
A stunner of a premium laptop that’s worth every penny

Specifications

CPU: 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1360P
Graphics: Intel Iris Xe
RAM: 16GB LPDDR5
Screen: Up to 14-inch 3840 x 2400 400-nit OLED touchscreen with 100% DCI-P3, VESA Certified DisplayHDR True Black 500, Dolby Vision
Storage: Up to 1TB SSD

Reasons to buy

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Absolutely stunning design
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Gorgeous display
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Great battery life and performance

Reasons to avoid

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Too expensive for most people
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Display averages at 350 nits

The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 (2023) delivers an elevated design, speedy performance, and wonderful elements all for less than the price of its more popular rivals. Even as we were taking it out of the box, it was already apparent that this was going to be an amazing option, especially for users who care just as much about aesthetics as they do performance. 

This crushed other touchscreen laptops such as a similarly-specced and similarly-priced Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 in benchmarks during our testing. And while it may not have discrete graphics to blaze through creative workloads, it still holds its own, taking less time than we expected to process and export 50 high-res 7952 x 4472 images from RAW to JPEG in Lightroom. It delivers on battery life as well, giving us a little over 10 hours on a full charge when we ran our web surfing battery test.

The OLED display is not as bright as we'd hoped - it averaged around 350 nits in our readings - but its picture quality is stunning nonetheless. To interface with the display, Lenovo throws in a stylus, which is good as it’s pretty steeply priced. Not that you need it because not only is it vibrant but responsive and intuitive to your touch commands as well. 

Read our full Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 review

Best touchscreen laptop deals

Michelle Rae Uy
Contributor

Michelle Rae Uy is the former Computing Reviews and Buying Guides Editor at TechRadar. She's a Los Angeles-based tech, travel and lifestyle writer covering a wide range of topics, from computing to the latest in green commutes to the best hiking trails. She's an ambivert who enjoys communing with nature and traveling for months at a time just as much as watching movies and playing sim games at home. That also means that she has a lot more avenues to explore in terms of understanding how tech can improve the different aspects of our lives.