I’m about to head off for my first year of college and I need a new laptop for class but I’m not entirely sure what to get. I’ve used windows my whole life and am not really a fan of apple, but the mac book is a pretty enticing machine. I was wondering what ultrabooks running windows might rival the same specs/performance as a mac. I’m not looking for a gaming beast, but a portable, large battery, windows machine I won’t have any problems taking to class or starting up quickly.
Thanks!
(not a fan of touchscreen 2 in 1’s and my major is business administration with a minor in computer science)
I'm using the Lenovo X1 Carbon 3rd Gen to type this. Really good battery, as long as brightness isnt cranked up. It is extremely portable at slightly less than 3 lbs. I have the 1440p touchscreen, i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD variant. The battery is 50 Wh if you were wondering.
The Surface Series is something i recommend. using it to jot your notes down is pretty good. and if you need the need to type something. the touch cover is surprisingly nifty.
I would second the Lenovo Carbon series too. Amazing machines...Superior than Apple stuff I believe.
Hefty price though there too.
In terms of specs, MAC give a very bad price/performance ratio imo. In a cheaper choice I would take a look into ASUS and Dell laptops. Very good quality of manufacturing and for the same price of the Lenovo and MAC you will certainly get much better specs.
Budget? If it's going to be a bit before you get it the carrizo laptops should be out shortly, they look to be pretty solid.
Also you should totally like drop the CompSci for programming/engineering.
I got a sager np8651 about two months ago and I really like it.
http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np8651-clevo-p650se-eta-nov7-p-7690.html
If he's not going into a field where programing is useful, compsci would be better.
DON'T DIS HARDWARE GUYS! /s
But programming is always useful.
True, but learning programing on the side is a lot easer than learning some of the stuf that compsci covers on the side.
Not looking to start any kind-of debate here, however something I've noticed about Apple computers generally: Since Apple likes to lock-down the user, and expects them to be using OS X they can specialize how their operating system interacts with the hardware for greater performance (and especially battery life, they really strive for battery life).
In my and many others' personal experiences, other brands have failed to do so to the extent that Apple has.
There is no doubt that their OSs is finely tuned to the locked hardware and does have improved performance. And certainly more stable than Windows could ever be.
But there is so much you can do with that hardware. In the end its the same technology as everywhere else, just locked down to certain combinations of hardware and, in my opinion, it grows old faster than the less finely tuned but more powerful laptops out there (for the same price). I have tested my supervisors´s 5 year old Macbook and my 5 years old ASUS on windows side by side and I really do not see much difference in usability and mine cost 2/3 of the price of the Macbook.
Especially now with SSDs, that the Windows performance degradation over time becomes so much less noticeable.
If you add Linux in the mix, then there is no contest.
Lenovo thinkpad aeries are very good laptops. I used one during uni.
You can get a discount as well as a student.
They also have very good GNU/Linux support if that is a factor.
Yeah, sod the Macbooks at the moment. Some of the latest laptops (such as MSI's GT72) have M.2 SSDs in them, which should piss over a Macbook's HDD speed. Apple will bite back later in the year whenever they decide to release the next-gen 15" systems (probably with a new gen processor too).
I'm not for or against Macs, just to clarify; I'm just pointing out that there are laptops currently that can surpass the performance of Macs.
The down side is at the moment is that you're looking for a system just before the next generation of Intel processors!
Above and beyond anything and everything else, have a look (or ask round) about the operating system that other users are using. Macbooks might be the perfect choice for a laptop for you but if the applications don't run on OSX then you're stuck trying to Bootcamp or use VMs (etc).
Maybe try an Asus ultrabook like the zenbook ux303 or ux305.