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Insider Picks published a guide to the best laptops. Part of that guide is a "BI Rating," a ten-point scale aimed at providing a rough estimate of our own opinions mixed with those of other laptop reviewers across the web.
Here's how we came to those BI Ratings, and the laptops we chose in general.
Much like the process we use for our other buying guides, the laptops included on the list aren't necessarily the six highest-scoring ones overall. We chose those six based on a mixture of feedback from professional and user reviews across the web, and our own hands-on experience.
Once we narrowed our original shortlist — which consisted of around 15 relatively well-received laptops — down to six, we then assigned them a BI Rating, which takes various sources' opinions into account.
Those sources include CNET, PCMag, TechRadar, LaptopMag, The Wirecutter, PCWorld, and Anandtech.
We took the opinions of many, many other laptop reviewing outlets — as well as user reviews on Amazon — into account as we made our picks, but we felt these seven were knowledgeable and frequently updated enough to give us the fairest general score possible. Device preference is always subjective, but professionals generally tend to agree when something is good or bad.
To get the numerical value for a specific laptop, we did the following:
1. Multiplied its star rating on CNET, PCMag, LaptopMag, PCWorld and/or TechRadar by two, wherever applicable.
2. Added our own BI Rating out of 10.
3. Took the resulting sum and divided it by the number of sources that reviewed the laptop in the first place. The Asus Zenbook UX305 was rated by five of the above sources (including us), for instance, so its total review score at this point in the process was divided by five.
5. Added 0.5 points to the resulting number if The Wirecutter and/or Anandtech gave the laptop positive feedback, if applicable.
6. Rounded the new resulting number to the nearest whole number.
So, going back to the Zenbook, it received scores of 8 (4 x 2 from PCWorld), 7 (3.5 x 2 from PCMag), 8 (4 x 2 from LaptopMag), 10 (5 x 2 from TechRadar), and 9 (out of 10 from us). The resulting 42 was divided by 5 to get 8.4. The Wirecutter and Anandtech recommended it as well, so we then added 1.0 to that to get 9.4. Rounding that down got us to a final BI Rating of 9 out of 10.
Like any system that tries to distill personal opinion into a number, this has its flaws. Our personal score often differed from the BI Rating by a number or two, and some laptops on the list weren't formally reviewed by some sources. And it's not like we're not going to highlight any low-scoring devices in a buying guide.
However, ratings make things simple, so if we were going to have one, we wanted one that reflected the ideas of many tastes, not just our own. Again, device preference is mostly a subjective thing, so it seemed right to include as many insights as possible.
These buying guides are by no means static, and we plan on updating them in the future. We may always update our BI Rating metric as well, but for now, we hope that clears up any potential confusion. Thanks for reading.