Battery life is an often overlooked feature when looking for the best photo editing laptops. When you’re on the go or out of the office, you need a laptop that can last as long as possible without charging. When I ran a battery benchmark that cycled through a series of tasks and videos until the laptop died, the Dell Inspiron 16 lasted a marathon of 16.5 hours on a single charge. This allows you to edit to your heart’s content without worrying about draining your battery. It’s not the most portable, however, weighing 4.7 pounds with the same battery.
It’s also affordable, but it comes at a price sacrifice. Under the hood is an Intel Core i7-1260P CPU, Intel Iris Xe graphics, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD storage. This should suffice for most photo editing tasks, but you may run out of storage and need an external drive to store all your high resolution photos.
As a bonus perk, the laptop comes with a surprisingly powerful quad speaker system so you can jam while editing. As for ports, you get two USB Type-C, one USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, one HDMI, one SD card reader, and one 3.5mm audio jack.