At a minimum I would recommend: 1. 500GB SSD, a laptop with an SSD is vastly faster than one with a hard drive 2. 10nm or smaller CPU lithography - the smaller this is, the more energy efficient it is which results in both better performance and battery life. 3. WiFi 6 - this will give you the fastest and most reliable internet connection 4. 16GB RAM so you can multi-task

I'm partial to ASUS because they tend to be a great value while having top notch OLED touch screens in economy models. They also have an exceptional number of AMD models which tend to be better performing and have better battery life than Intel. For example this is under-budget and has AMD integrated graphics and a high resolution OLED touch screen: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSNF2N4Q

If you want to pay more than that, then you should expect a nice graphics card in there.

This has a super powerful 5900HX CPU, decent Nvidia 3050 Ti, 1TB SSD, OLED touchscreen, and a backlit keyboard: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LYJZ8YC

If you don't want an OLED, then Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte and Acer tend to be the best values.

If we look for max performance, you will lose the touchscreen. This has the best gaming performance with an Nvidia 4060, but has a 500GB SDD: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZQMXLZP

This is a notch worse with a 4050, but has 1TB SSD and still lacks a touchscreen: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BWHDWFHR

This is more balanced performance, but lacks a touchscreen. You get 2,000 GB storage, 32GB RAM, a 3060 graphics card, Thunderbolt/USB 4, and an Ethernet port: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BP1F2KMG