However, if you plan to be working in 4K and/or editing video files with high bitrates, you'll want a beefy laptop with a performant CPU, speedy hard drive, lots of RAM, and a discrete graphics card. Ultimate back to school guide 2021: Laptops, Chromebooks, headphones and more.
Just make sure you're using the best video editing software for your needs. Intel, AMD, and now Apple have met consumer demand for smaller, more powerful laptops with some beefy laptop CPUs (or SoCs, in the case of Apple's remarkable M1 chip), so if you're chiefly interested in doing recreational video editing and plan to stick to 1080p resolution, there are lots of thin and light laptops powerful enough to get the job done. Luckily, you have more options than ever thanks to recent advances in the state of CPU development.
