Best laptops for photo and video work: 5 picks that deliver

The M4 Air is the laptop most people should buy, and for photographers it is close to ideal. It is fanless, so it never whirrs into life halfway through a quiet edit, it weighs about 1.2 kg, and the 16GB of memory it now starts with is enough to keep Lightroom and a browser full of tabs happy. The screen is sharp and consistent for its class, though it is not the bright wide-gamut panel you get on the Pro. Video is where it stops: short 4K clips are fine, but long timelines and heavy grading will have you watching the clock.

If your work is video, this is the machine that removes the waiting. The M4 Pro chip and its extra graphics cores chew through 4K timelines and multi-layer grades that leave the Air struggling, and it holds that pace far longer before the fans become noticeable. The mini-LED XDR screen is the real draw for colour work: it goes bright enough for HDR delivery and holds its colour accurately. Add an SD card slot, HDMI and three Thunderbolt 5 ports and you can leave the dongle bag at home. It is heavier and much dearer, and for stills alone it is more than you need.

The ProArt P16 is the pick for Windows users who want a big, colour-accurate canvas without sitting at a desk. The 16-inch 4K OLED panel covers the wide colour spaces photo and video editors care about, and Asus pairs it with a discrete Nvidia RTX GPU — which matters if your work involves 3D, GPU-accelerated effects or AI-assisted tools. The built-in dial is a genuinely useful shortcut for brushing and scrubbing. It is a heavy laptop, though, and it is far less efficient than Apple silicon, so expect to be near a socket on long edit days.

The Surface Laptop 7 is the nicest Windows machine here to live with day to day: a crisp 120Hz touchscreen, a comfortable keyboard and genuinely all-day battery thanks to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chip. For photo work in Lightroom and Photoshop it holds up well, and it runs cool and quiet. The catch is the ARM processor. Most mainstream creative apps now have native versions, but some plug-ins, codecs and older utilities still run through emulation and a few will not run at all, so check anything you depend on before committing.

The Swift Go 14 proves you do not need to spend MacBook money to get an OLED screen. The 14-inch panel is vivid and sharp, the Intel Core Ultra processor handles photo editing and everyday work comfortably, and it is light enough to forget about in a bag. Corners are cut where you would expect: the chassis flexes a little under pressure, the speakers are thin, and sustained heavy exports will make it work hard and warm up. As a first editing laptop or a second machine for travelling, though, it is hard to argue with.