Choosing a foreign laptop brand can be a bit of a minefield. There are dozens of options, despite US restrictions on some major brands like Huawei. While it would be great to talk about all the budget laptops coming from other regions, like China, unfortunately, none of them can compete with Dell in one area: customer service.
We discovered two brands that have a global presence and have respectable customer service and warranty situations. There are many horror stories that small brands are not the best to contact or solve the problem with. There have also been recent concerns about some smaller brands hosting malware on their own support pages. With Dell, you at least know that there is a customer service agent to contact and that there is a clear warranty.
The chosen brands also give you a variety of options to choose from, like Dell. Gaming-focused or strictly business-oriented, these are the two best options outside of Dell.
Lenovo
Good old classic American brands, presented by a Chinese giant. Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s hardware arm in 2005 stood out as a pivotal moment in the company’s reach in the United States. After a few years of using different ThinkPads, Lenovo gradually dropped the IBM name and started expanding to other brands.
As with Dell, each brand has its own target market. ThinkPads were once aimed at tech enthusiasts, and older models are still actively used in tech spaces, due to their repairability. Some newer models are less robust, but iFixIt rates two 2026 models 10 out of 10. These offer good performance for the price, considering how AI data centers have caused prices to skyrocket recently. For high-end ThinkPads, you may need to turn to a bank loan – and then there’s the Mobile Workstation line, which offers 128GB of RAM and an Nvidia RTX PRO 4000 graphics card for the low price of $10,459. For an extra $1,370, you can get a 5,000 GPU instead.
Lenovo’s Yoga brand offers many hybrid tablet-laptop computers. IdeaPads range from the latest Intel Core Series 3 chips to the Snapdragon X2 ARM processor. Lenovo also has two gaming brands, Legion and LOQ, offering high specifications. That being said, one of the main reasons Lenovo competes with Dell, again, is that there is US-based customer service and reliable warranties to back it up, so you won’t be alone if something goes wrong.
Asus
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Offering a wide range of laptops, from gaming to office, Asus is a Taiwanese brand that can also compete with Dell. Again, this is partly due to a clear warranty and strong customer support – but as you’ll see from the brand’s Trustpilot score, your mileage may vary. That said, at 1.5 stars, it’s still 0.2 points higher than Dell’s score on the same scale. Maybe it’s a good thing that the Asus warranty is easy to find. In fact, it’s currently considered one of the best laptop warranties on the market.
Asus doesn’t skimp on options, with nine categories to choose from in the “Home” section of its online store alone. Currently, the company has ProArt, which focuses on editing work. Zenbooks offer the latest laptop chips, sporting a Snapdragon X or Asus also offers Chromebooks, which online users say are worth the money. Its ExpertBook line recently received a refresh, with a few laptops already available for purchase in the US.
Asus has been in America for decades. It became best known for Eee PC netbooks, then became even more prevalent in the gaming sphere with its components under the sub-brands Republic of Gamers (ROG) and The Ultimate Force (TUF). Its first big hit may have become a weird fad that faded, but for those who need an alternative to Dell, it’s a good option.
