Welcome to our list of the best family laptops money can buy in 2018. If you're looking for a laptop that the whole family can enjoy, then you'll want something that is versatile enough to serve the needs of every member of the family.
So, it needs to be able to handle games and media for younger family members (or just adults who are still young at heart), while also powerful enough to help with homework projects, or for working on.
Being well built, with a battery that can last for hours, is also incredibly important. The best family laptops have an important duty in providing the tools everyone in your household needs, and being able to cope with the changing demands as your family grows.
The Lenovo Yoga 920 is one of the best laptops for family use, and offers brilliant performance and versatility for the asking price. For anyone who’s looking for value, rather than a detachable screen, the Lenovo Yoga 920 has a lot to offer. It's powerful enough to play indie games and movies, to keep the kids in the family entertained, while also offering an excellent traditional laptop experience for homework, web browsing and general productivity.
Chromebooks, like the Acer Chromebook R11, make brilliant family laptops thanks to their relatively low cost and ease-of-use. The Chromebook R11 runs ChromeOS, rather than Windows 10, which makes it almost impervious to viruses and other internet nasties, which means you can hand it over to your kids without worry. It's also a great productivity tool for adults, does a great job of web browsing, and gives you full access to Android Apps on the Google Play store. What’s better, it does so on a touchscreen display that can be rotated around into tablet mode, complemented by an all-metal finish that looks fantastic.
If your family has a number of serious gamers - as well as anyone who needs a laptop that's powerful enough to handle heavy-duty tasks such as photo and video editing, then the Alienware 17 R5 is a great choice. It is a beast of a gaming laptop with an overclocked GTX 1080 graphics card. It's big and bulky, so younger members of the family may struggle carrying it about, but older kids - and parents - will love this machine.
The Acer Swift 3 is a superb laptop that's more than powerful enough for work and study, which makes it one of the best family laptops for households where kids are at school, college or university. For an impressively-low price you get a solid all-aluminium body that can withstand knocks and bumps. It offers an excellent trackpad and a backlit keyboard that makes typing on a breeze. Sure, it's not the most powerful laptop in the world, but for the price you'll be very pleased with it indeed.
The Dell G3 15 is another great gaming laptop that is suitable for family use, and it's a fair bit cheaper than most other gaming laptops. It comes with a decent graphics card for playing modern games at 1080p, a huge 1TB hard drive for photos, videos and documents, and plenty of RAM as well. If you want to treat your family to a gaming laptop, but you understandably don't want to spend huge amounts of money on the device, then the Dell G3 15 is a brilliant choice.
- Check out our list of the best laptops of 2018
