How Hange works

Last updated September 2026

Hange asks you a few questions and recommends laptops. This page explains how it decides, because a recommendation you cannot check is not worth much.

The ranking is arithmetic, not an opinion

The same answers always produce the same laptops in the same order. Nothing is asked to judge which laptop is best at the moment you press submit — the ordering is computed by code that does the same thing every time, and it is finished before any text is written about it.

A language model writes the explanation you read on the results page. It does not choose, rank, or reorder anything. If it were switched off entirely, you would get the same five laptops in the same order with plainer wording. That is deliberate: it means “why is this first?” has a real answer rather than a plausible one.

We score from what nearly every laptop has

Detailed reviewer ratings — measured screen brightness, build quality scores — exist for a small slice of the market. Building a recommender around them would mean scoring that slice properly and making up numbers for everything else.

So we score from the chips instead. A laptop’s processor and graphics are listed almost everywhere, and an RTX 4060 performs like an RTX 4060 whatever chassis it is bolted into. We keep a hand-curated table of 238 processors and graphics chips with published benchmark figures, and map each laptop onto it. Where richer per-machine data exists, it raises our confidence in that row — it is never a prerequisite for appearing at all.

Six things we measure

Every laptop gets six scores from 0 to 100, computed once and identical for everyone:

• Processor — multi-threaded and single-threaded performance, kept separate — a 24-core chip is not better for writing documents
• Graphics — 3D performance, with integrated graphics scored honestly rather than as zero
• Screen — resolution density, refresh rate, panel type, colour coverage where known
• Build — chassis class, density, and reviewer assessments where they exist
• Portability — weight and thickness
• Battery — capacity measured against how much power the machine actually draws

Your answers change how those six are weighted. They never change the underlying numbers, which is why two people with different priorities see the same laptop scored identically and ranked differently.

What we will not do

• Invent a number — a visible gap is better than a confident wrong figure, because you can see the gap
• Treat missing data as zero — a laptop we know less about is not a worse laptop, and it is not a better one either
• Claim a battery life in hours — we estimate runtime from capacity and power draw, and that estimate is roughly plus or minus 25%. So battery is something we weigh heavily when you ask for it, never a filter that claims to know which machines last ten hours
• Rank Chromebooks against Windows laptops — the benchmarks we use do not run comparably on ChromeOS, and scoring a Chromebook on whether it can export 4K video answers a question nobody asks of one

Every answer you give produces a visible outcome

Each recommendation comes with a list of what you told us and what happened to it: which answers narrowed the field and by how much, which ones changed the weighting, and which ones we could not act on.

That last category is the point. If we know whether a laptop has a touchscreen for only a fraction of the catalog, filtering on it would either throw away hundreds of machines nobody checked or do nothing at all. Neither is honest, so we say so — on the option itself, before you pick it, not buried in the results.

Where the data comes from

Specifications come from published laptop reviews, and every row records the exact page it was read from. That sounds like housekeeping and is not: a figure that cannot be traced back to its source cannot be re-checked or corrected later, only guessed at. Anything we cannot trace, we do not use.

Prices carry the same requirement, plus one more. A price we hold in a different currency can tell us roughly which budget a laptop belongs to, but converting it into a dollar figure would mean guessing at tax and exchange rates. So those prices place a laptop in a budget range and are never displayed to you as a number.

How it is paid for

Hange is built and run by one person. When you buy a laptop through a link here, we may earn a commission from the retailer at no additional cost to you.

Commission does not affect ranking, and it cannot: the ordering is computed from the six scores and your answers before any retailer link is attached to a result. See the affiliate disclosure for the full statement.