Touchscreen laptops don't come cheap, and quality models from reputable brands often cost thousands of dollars. However, savvy buyers never pay full price when they can get big discounts, like 40% off the Asus Vivobook S16 laptop, and save $1,000 to spend elsewhere.

NVIDIA wants the RTX Spark to be the laptop chip for running AI agents on your own machine, so I expected my $3,200 HP OmniBook Ultra 16 to run circles around a Snapdragon laptop. Instead, Hermes took one look at the 32GB RTX Spark and said every model I wanted was too big. The Zenbook A16, with 48GB of memory and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, loaded three of them in one click. It was slow, but for local AI agents, the cheaper laptop ended up actually getting the job done.

HP’s first RTX Spark laptops are here, and I've spent the past two weeks with the 32GB OmniBook Ultra 16. It really is a fantastic laptop in almost every way. I was able to game on it with basically no issues, and both its keyboard and OLED screen are among the best I’ve used. Then I asked it to do the thing NVIDIA is pitching hardest: run AI agents locally. With only 32GB of memory, that’s where this laptop hits a wall.

I wasn't particularly satisfied with the Googlebook launch. As a tech writer and product reviewer, I was basically obligated to spend two weeks with a product that felt grossly unfinished and super confused about its identity. But one feature, the Glowbar, just can't escape my mind.

Most people hang onto an old laptop out of guilt, or because they're not sure what to do with it. It feels wasteful to recycle it, but a second laptop doesn't have to be a backup device or an emergency spare. It can make your main machine better by taking over the background tasks that would otherwise slow you down or eat your battery.