Best creator laptops under £1000: top budget machines for creatives

Laptops are complex to buy and often complex to run. But you don’t need to have the latest and greatest to create superb content – you can still find your audience without having to shell out for a beast. Here’s our guide to the best creator laptops, though also do check out our guide to the best laptops overall.

Here’s our guide to the best creator laptops, though also do check out

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro

Video editing is the No1 job of a content-creation laptop. That leads us to a checklist that the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro nails, even in its lower-spec versions.

We want 16GB RAM, because you’re going to feel the pinch with 8GB. Tick. At least 512GB of storage is a must because video eats through data like nothing else. Done. And a 12th-gen Intel CPU is top of the list, because the Quick Sync feature offers a real speed boost when working with high-quality 10-bit video. Well, all Slim 7i Pro Gen 7 models use ’em.

Of course, a lot of laptops tick these boxes, but this one does it with real style. At a seriously tasty price, the Yoga Slim 7i Pro offers an attractive metal casing and a keyboard with a bit more key travel than a MacBook’s. And the touchpad is a fairly massive sheet of glass, so you don’t feel the need to plug in a mouse as soon as you turn it on.

The 14in screen avoids the obvious pixelation of Full HD panels by jumping up to 2240×1400 resolution; and while the colour depth isn’t going to match an OLED, it is rich enough not to look undersaturated to the average set of eyeballs.

This is a laptop you’ll enjoy working on, which is at least half the battle given how hard most content creators work. And if this all sounds too sensible, you can jump to the Yoga Slim 7i Pro X instead. It has an even punchier H-series CPU and the top-spec has Nvidia RTX 3050 graphics.

Gigabyte G5

Find a good-value gaming PC and there’s every chance it’ll also excel at content creation. The Gigabyte G5 is one of the best-value gaming laptops, and it goes beyond the basics with a vivid, colour-rich screen. A super-practical option – but shop around carefully, as a 12th-gen Intel version came out recently.

Asus Vivobook 15 K513

This seems to be just about the most affordable OLED laptop money can buy. Those rich colours are awesome if you want to get serious and colour-grade your own video content; but we’d recommend calibrating it with a meter like the X-Rite i1Display Pro at some point, as accuracy won’t be pro-grade.

Acer Spin 5

Check out the Spin 5 if you want to get into the more arty side of things – it’s definitely one of the best creator laptops around. It includes a stylus with a bunch of advanced features like 4096 pressure-sensitivity levels, palm rejection and tilt detection. It uses tech from the original graphics tablet master Wacom, and has a hybrid 360° hinge

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus

Who needs Dell’s pricey XPS series when there are laptops like this? For loads less cash it offers an aluminium shell, a 3K screen, CPUs from the meaty H tier and the 16in of display space we prefer for creative work. Slightly pricier specs also have solid gaming cards. The speakers aren’t killer, but it’s a great deal.