Laptop recommendations for college student

Surface laptops are nice. Wife has one for work curenty 6 years old and no real sign of being a hindrance.
I deployed 3 in the office. The 13” models are great. One 15” had a hinge break (it’s loose and floppy with no “catch”, but the user has kids and that is almost certainly to blame.



If considering such “premium”‘options, give a little attention to Lenovo Thinkpad x1 and t14 models (T14 will likely be my choice going forward for employees. Has a rugged/performace/price ratio that I think is high) as well as the Dell XPS.

The XPS build quality I think is a slight notch above (surface 3 laptop is my basis vs the 1gen old XPS. May not be true now, but I think XPs 13 is exactly 13” and not 13.5 or larger.



All now solder RAM, which is pretty lame.

I’m a fan of the name brands that are last year’s models. Lenovo, Dell, HP, eMachines( ), etc. I’m assuming your requirements mean that the student will be doing some heavy use and not just word processing and spreadsheets? Both my kids have Yoga’s bought on sale less than $1k and love them.

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If considering such “premium”‘options, give a little attention to Lenovo Thinkpad x1 and t14 models (T14 will likely be my choice going forward for employees. Has a rugged/performace/price ratio that I think is high) as well as the Dell XPS.

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I’ve looked at the Lenovo Thinkpad. Seems like a pretty decent device. Have not looked at the Dell XPS though. Solid suggestions that I’ll look into more. Thank you sir.

Software compatibly can be an issue with the snapdragon processors.

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Doorbuster Deal at Lenovo on this ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD (14") Mobile Workstation - $889: LINK The X1 Carbon is a little lighter than the P Series. Here is a Gen 11 (current is 13) for $1099: LINK

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These are incredible deals. Kinda wish I’d had one more to buy.

Yep, really good deal on the P14s.

I bought the Gen 4 last year for $989 and thought that was a deal.

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Doorbuster Deal at Lenovo on this ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD (14") Mobile Workstation - $889: LINK The X1 Carbon is a little lighter than the P Series. Here is a Gen 11 (current is 13) for $1099: LINK

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These are incredible deals!

I just started law school in August and bought the Surface Laptop with Snapdragon Elite processor. It has been great so far and no compatibility issues with school programs and systems.

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Any reason not to splurge and grab a MacBook of your choosing just to save 200-300?
With an MBA/JD you will be laughing about overthinking it.

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A MacBook Air is certainly a capable laptop that’s in the discussion. The Pro, of course, is too. But they’re not exactly head and shoulders above what we are talking about. Comparison between the p14’s cpu and an m4 chip has them both performing very well, the AMD with a better multi core, graphics, memory capability (and just look at the link above at the price of that laptop with 1tb SSD and 32gB RAM. The battery life is comparable to MBA- I have two very similar ones in use right now). The m4 has a better single core performance. For most practical purposes, you’re not going to notice either is “faster” than the other, so it comes down to software preference.


I’ve daily used an m1 MacBook Air since they were new. If I were in school, I’d give consideration to both. But I wouldn’t want the OSX file system to sort/store my notes. I just hate it, even still. App-switching is ok but prefer it on windows, too. They did finally release a window management tool that was better than zero. It’s a more limited copy of the windows “snap to” sections, and it’s more limited than the well known third party applications Rectangle and Magnet. But it’s at least now usable.

OpenOffice is free and on both platforms.
Student editions of MS Office are practically free
The embedded Apple productivity suite isn’t truly terrible once you get to know it, but it’s significantly behind the other two for several features that can be very important in the world she will exist in (mail merge, database management being the first two that come to mind. And the spreadsheet functions of Numbers is OK, but when it comes to organizing, reorganizing, and moving large batches from one section to another (which I do quite frequently in my workflow), Excel and Calc blow it away (and when I can’t make something do exactly what I want, I spend a lot of time learning every shortcut, hidden feature, and workaround. It just simply doesn’t have them).


Embedded music production obviously goes to the Apple side of things. But there’s a ton of freeware in the space that levels the playing field quickly, and double the RAM for half the cost open at the door to buy professional tools at a much lower all-in cost, but we aren’t probably dealing with that.


I’m yet to use any Copilot features, but the speech to text on Apple blows away anything that isn’t paid and expensive on other platforms (last test about 2y ago for me)




Certainly not a “slam dunk, buy Apple” endorsement. But they would be in the discussion for a capable box that’s well made with a couple unique perks if you can tolerate the drawbacks.

Wish you would have asked last week.

Best Buy had an Asus Zenbook with the i7 evo and 16 GB Ram for $699.