Gadgetory

hey how's it going Dave Judy here so if you're looking for a laptop for school or college there's a lot of really good inexpensive options and I'll probably do a video on those shortly but if you have a larger budget like twelve thirteen hundred dollars you can get something that's really really premium that'll last you many years and with the new surface products out right now I thought I would do video talking about what I think are the best laptops for students so we have the surface laptop the fifth generation surface pro the 13-inch MacBook Pro the 12 inch macbook the XPS 13 and I'll throw in a razor blade stealth now this isn't an exhaustive list but in terms of popularity general availability and pricing those are my picks now when you choose the laptop for school there's a few things that kind of come to my mind as being really important and in just no particular order build quality and portability are some of the more important things you want your laptop to be light but also to last a long time and these all have excellent build quality they're durable enough to toss in and out of your bag without too much worry and you can get some inexpensive skins to cover them up so you don't scratch the surface these are from D brand another important thing is the keyboard you want something that you actually enjoy using and you feel comfortable typing on now all of these have great keyboards it's more about preference some people will and some people won't like the macbook butterfly switches but in general you'll get comfortable on any of these keyboards the surface probe is a two and one device with a removable keyboard so if you're in a classroom that doesn't have a lot of table space and you're often typing your lap I probably skip this one and just get a regular clamshell laptop the other thing is that most of these don't have dedicated page up or page down keys you can do the same kind of thing with function up and down but if you deal with a lot of code or large documents and you want dedicated keys the surface products have them another thing that I think is important for college students is battery life your laptop just has to have good battery life at least for a lot of students because there is a lot of really good devices out there that have great performance and good value but they just don't have good battery life and for those devices I didn't include them in the list because I don't feel comfortable recommending a device with a 5 hour battery life the ones here all have full day batteries so you don't need to bring the charges with you some of these laptops use use BC to charge so you can share some chargers and there's even battery packs that can charge laptops over USB see now I'm not going to talk about performance too much because truthfully you're not buying these laptops for like blistering gaming performance they do all feel pretty similar in terms of how quick the overall system is and gaming performance is also going to be pretty mediocre but anything with the sunwell 3 port like the Razer Blade stealth can connect to an external GPU for playing games in terms of pen input depending on the person you are and type of courses you're taking you may or may not find it useful personally I think they're amazing you can use it for note-taking annotating course materials drawing whatever you want iPad pros also have the Apple pencil but like I mentioned in an earlier video the overall usability of an iPad pro as your one and only computer isn't great even in iOS 11 so I don't recommend it as your only device without a doubt the surface pros the King 4 pen input the surface laptop can do it as well but it's not as good because it's got a wobbly screen you kinda have to hold the screen while you write I mean it's usable but the surface pro would kind of built around the whole idea of pen input now I've done individual reviews for all of these and I'll link them below if you want some more information but just some quick notes about them first the two Mac books they're both expensive both have awesome screens with great speakers my only real issues with them are the u s-- PC ports now my stance on you PC has always been pretty positive especially in 2017 I don't mind Apple being as aggressive as they have been in terms of pushing the whole you specie thing but I don't think it's the right choice for students because all it takes just one time one time when you need a USB a port on your device and you just don't have an adapter that's going to suck but if you can afford a MacBook can you think you can handle the dongle Student Life then go for it the new Razer Blade stealth with a 13 inch screen is actually one of my favorite ultra books on the market right now it's really expensive though at $1,400 the older model with the 12 and a half inch screen is $900 you're definitely getting better value there but overall it's a really good device and there's actually nothing I'd really dislike about the razor blade elf really thick bezels and the trackpad isn't great on a 12 and 1/2 inch version but it's solid device the Dell XPS 13 is also really good the design is been around for a few years now so it's a little stale for me but that's about it I mean I wish it had pen input there's an XPS 13 - and one that does have pen input but I don't really like that device the regular XPS 13 is boss and if you're on a tighter budget you can always give the older versions like the 93 54 deep discount and those fill kick-ass alright the surface laptop was supposed to be built for students and visually it's appealing with the cool colors and stuff I do like the keyboard I like the fantastic screen I don't look at the screen wobbles when using the pen the other thing I don't like is the Alcantara material first students you're often eating and drinking when you're using your computer so it's going to get gross and lastly we have the surface pro and I still think this is the best all-round device for students it's expensive especially once you add I like the pens and this keyboard and stuff like that and it's not the prettiest device it looks okay but it's not like super gorgeous like the surface laptop but it's very versatile and a lot of the features set is geared towards students and productivity now I wish it was cheaper there's always the option of getting the surface pro for the previous generation that's a little bit cheaper than this with really similar qualities but yeah I mean any one of these devices are good this is still my favorite