I will be starting university in the fall, and I am in need of a new laptop. However, I can't seem to come to a solid conclusion, so I would like some assistance.
What I'm looking for
Portability: I need something portable enough to both take with me on international flights (I am attending a university in the UK, but I am from the US) and to carry with me to class every day. Thus, the typical gaming notebook is likely too large to fit my needs. I'm thinking that the 13-14 inch form factor would be ideal. In terms of weight, 2-4 lbs seems reasonable. My current, 5-year-old laptop weighs nearly 5 and is 1.2" thick, so I'm not particularly worried about that.
Power: I currently use a PC I built back in 2013 as my main computer, and I do play games on it. While I tend to play reasonably performance-light games like League of Legends and Old School Runescape, I do occasionally play more intensive games like modded Skyrim and Insurgency. I am willing to give up the latter while at school, but I still want something at least reasonably powerful in the CPU and GPU departments. I had initially considered building a small PC to take with me to play games on like Tek Syndicate's The Colugo and buying a modest ultrabook for class, but even a case that small would be a pain to take abroad. I expect that a dual-core Skylake i5/i7 and an Intel Iris 540 or NVIDIA 940M or better should be sufficient.
Notation: Since I'll be studying chemistry, I think having a pen digitizer would be a massive plus. A regular laptop would probably not suffice for drawing chemical structures, formulas, and reaction mechanisms so I would have to do so on regular paper. Digital notes would be much easier to keep organized, transport, and to store as well as being better for mistakes as I prefer to write in pen.
Price: My budget is around $1500, but I am willing to stretch that a bit if necessary.
Here is my shortlist of laptops I am currently considering:
Again lacks the pen, but is extremely compact, very good looking, and is reasonably priced. It also has Thunderbolt 3 so an external graphics card is a possibility.
Has essentially everything I want at a very steep price. I can get it for about $1700 from Micro Center, but that still goes over my ideal budget. I've also heard some people have had issues with drivers and the like, making this more of a Beta device than daily driver material. @wendell pointed some of these out in his review of the Surface Book, and I'd love to know how things have come along since then.
Has the pen, but sacrifices laptop functionality. A friend of mine recently bought the i5 model, which is what convinced me of how viable a pen and touch screen can be for notes. Its price tag is a bit easier to swallow though at around $1500 including the type cover.
tl;dr - I want a 13-14" laptop with specs suitable for light to moderate gaming. I would prefer to have a pen digitizer for note taking, but this is not essential. My budget is flexible around $1500.
You can configure it with a quad core i7, 16GB of RAM, GTX 950M, 500GB Crucial MX200 M.2 SSD, 750GB WD Black HDD, Windows 10, and a US layout keyboard for just under £1000 (under $1500).
Downsides - It weighs 2KG and it's 26mm thick.
If you can stand the gamer aesthetic, these could be possible options.
Asus Pro UX501 - Pros: * Best performance of the bunch by far, double cpu performance of all other laptops on list. * Best graphics performance by far as well, much better than anything else on this list. Makes gaming viable. Cons: * Lacks pen support * Lacks a tablet esq mode
Dell XPS 13 - Pros: * Very thin and light * Nice screen Cons: * Lacks serious compute power * Lacks pen support
Surface Book - Pros: * Very convenient form factor * Good cpu performance (dual core), better then average gpu performance * Very good pen support Cons: * Price * Some people had early driver issues but supposedly those have been remedied.
Surface Pro 4 - Pros: * Very good pen support * Very nice screen and screen ratio Cons: * No proper laptop hinge * Can get hot
Out of the 4 options your looking at I would go to either the Surface Book or Asus. I really like Asus laptops and the horsepower of the Asus is unmatched in your price range. But, for notes, the pen is really handy, which is where I look back to the surface book. I would like to also mention my daily driver, the HP Spectre X360. Its an ultrabook that has a full Tablet mode. Its pen support is great for notes and such, its super thin and light, and the pricing is really competitive.
It is not a gaming machine at all (neither are the Pro 4 or XPS), but for school stuff its about as good as it gets. It has a digitizer so you can use a pressure sensitive pen, and it works great from my experience. When I'm taking text notes I can type on the great keyboard and when I need to make diagrams I just flip the keyboard and use it in tablet mode. It works great, and its on my short list of competitive $1000 ultra books.
What about used stuff? I sell off-lease HP Elitebooks, Probooks, and Dell Precision and Latitudes, they are HILARIOUSLY cheap compared to an equivalent PC. Major downsides seem limited to mildly worn batteries and some occasional scuffs and paint chips. Also, GPUs tend to be integrated Intel or low-end Nvidia NVS, so games won't be great. If you're actually doing productive stuff like CAD, the Nvidia and AMD cards should be punchy enough. Maybe you'll actually get work done on it, heh. I'd get a base model config and add more RAM and a big 'ol SSD.
You do have to keep in mind the quirks of Dell and HP's draconian restrictions. HP's won't let you change the wifi cards without a bios mod, but they tend to include dual-band cards which isn't awful. Dell's are fussy about some aftermarket power adapters and batteries. Lenovo's do the same crap as HP.
HP 8470p tend to have Ivy Bridge i5's for cheap. Newegg tends to have a good selection, if I was shopping for me I'd get something like that (maybe Haswell for better battery life). If you want a tablet, Wacom's "Manga" tablets are pretty popular at my school, they're $80-$100CAD. Way cheaper than a proper pen-based laptop.
I do have the Ghost on my list, but I don't think it puts its focus in the right areas for me to consider it. 16 GB of ram and a quad core i7 are a bit more than what I need and the battery life would likely suffer.
That HP Laptop does look interesting. It certainly an impressive feature set for the price. The pen doesn't look quite as nice as Microsoft's offering though and it only has up to an Intel HD 520 iGPU. Worth a look though, for sure.
my sister uses a zenbook for her graduate program, it's got good battery life and is super easy to carry around. She's like 5'1" so she's not big on a big laptop.
what about something like this? it can game decent and isn't a monstrosity
The pen works pretty damn well honestly. I bought it and use it for just drawing graphs and formulas in math classes and science and its much more then enough for that. The accuracy is damn good and it is much more then enough for notes, although the extra layers of sensitivity of the microsoft pens are better for drawing and other things if your doing serious art.
Get an IBM Thinkpad either the $200-400 used or a brand new one. Or get a Sager/Clevo. Anything else are like overpriced alienware crap. I've gotten M$ surface and older XPS laptops and repaired many of my Friend's Asus laptops. They are just bad in general, you're bettter off with a ipad than surface or a cheap chinese andriod tablet. If you truly are into gaming get a Sager or Clevo don't go for these 'domestic' value brand or you'll be looking like a laptop peasant whom will build a gaming PC in 6 months to a year later. Laptops aren't Desktop replacement unless you buy one that's 20-30 lbs.
As an owner of an IBM Thinkpad as a Student and current Lenovo Thinkpad user I concur with this. Buying a laptop to match a desktop defeats the point of a laptop. And that 'desktop' class of laptops usually have bad battery, weight and usually quite impractical. Get a business grade laptop and a proper desktop on the side.
PS: Forget your idea for digitzer pen notes. It's a pipe dream that doesn't work. Get a good notebook (the paper variety) and a good trusty pen. Then if you want summarize the work into a digital document later.
May I ask, how does the Surface Pro 4 lack the functionality of a laptop with the keyboard add on? Granted, it isn't the most graphically powerful piece of kit in the world, but I'm sure it'll suffice.
The type cover/kickstand design really doesn't work well enough to replace a laptop on anything other than a flat surface like a desk or table. If you try to use it on your lap or on the arm of a chair, for instance, it doesn't really stay put and the keyboard isn't rigid enough to be particularly comfortable to type on. A friend of mine actually has one and after playing with it for an hour or so, it becomes fairly apparent that the Surface Pro 4 is a tablet first and laptop second.