The Lightest Laptop

One of the main reasons for acquiring a laptop is mobility – the ability to carry around with you everywhere you go your computing power.  One small problem with this is weight – most laptops weigh in the range of 6-8 pounds, and that is a lot to carry around everywhere you go.  That leads many people to look for the lightest laptop.

In order to address the topic of what is currently the Lightest Laptop, I’m going to have to break everything down into categories. Obviously by nature, the smaller computers are going to generally be lighter than the larger computers, so I will be looking at the this in different categories. Large (18/17”), Medium (15”), and Small (13/11”).

I think it is important to note that lighter isn’t necessarily better – and I’m not referring to performance factors. While we all want to have a lighter laptop, one should keep in mind the quality of the laptop as well. Some laptop manufacturers may sacrifice build quality in order to achieve a lighter product. With that being said, in general the lighter laptops are more expensive and higher quality.

Aside from different sizes of laptop, there are two main ways that companies will reduce the weight of their laptops. One is by using lighter materials (or less of them), and the other is to remove components or replace components with lighter versions. For example, removing the dvd drive and replacing the hard drive (HDD) with a solid state disk (SSD). The SSD has no moving components and is physically smaller – but more expensive.

So with all that being said, this collection isn’t about the quality of these systems, it is simply a look at what the lightest laptops are out there:

Large Category

18.4” – Acer Aspire AS8951G-9630 – 8.6 lbs

17.3” – HP g7-1260us Notebook - 6.05 lbs

Medium Category

15.6” – SAMSUNG Q Series Q530-JA01 – 5.2 lbs

14” – ThinkPad T Series T420s – 3.68 lbs

Small Category

13” – SAMSUNG Series 9 900X3A-B01 – 2.88 lbs

11” – SAMSUNG Series 9 900X1B-A01 – 2.34 lbs

Each of these is quite simply the lightest laptop that I could find for the category. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other excellent light laptops – the Macbook Airs for example come in just slightly above the Samsung laptops in the small category. Most laptops of the size are around these weights, but these are the lightest.