As much as I generally abhor HP, I think their Envy laptop is probably the one I'd recommend. Linus Tech Tips just did a review and it seems to have absolutely insane battery life, which is a huge...
As much as I generally abhor HP, I think their Envy laptop is probably the one I'd recommend. Linus Tech Tips just did a review and it seems to have absolutely insane battery life, which is a huge benefit for college life in particular. Plus their pen accessory is supposed to be pretty decent.
I'll add that honestly, since reading this it seems you are in CS-y field, performance matters very little. I have a computer at work that cost $3,600 as speced and a macbook air I use for...
I'll add that honestly, since reading this it seems you are in CS-y field, performance matters very little. I have a computer at work that cost $3,600 as speced and a macbook air I use for personal work. I really don't notice much of a difference. A terminal, web browser, VSCode, and maybe an IDE isn't going to stress your CPU very much. Make sure ram and storage are plentify and it'll be more or less the same.
So while the AMD CPU is no doubt a better bang for your buck in numbers than the rest, honestly that bang is not going to be that noticeable if you don't do things which regularly push your CPU to max for hours at a time like video rendering.
Size, feel, screen quality, weight imo all matter more.
I went from an powerful 15 inch windows laptop to a macbook air in college because I realized that I was getting very little of the 15inch's benefit and feeling a lot of the cons carrying it around everyday.
I'm going to counter this with a personal anecdote, I've been working from home for 3 months and have recently started going back into the office. At home I have an 8-core overclocked i7-9700k...
I'm going to counter this with a personal anecdote, I've been working from home for 3 months and have recently started going back into the office.
At home I have an 8-core overclocked i7-9700k with 32G of RAM, at work I'm still using an old quadcore Thinkpad. The difference was instantly noticeable, even in basic office work (Google Docs/Sheets, whole bunch of Electron stuff like Slack, VSCode, Spotify etc) everything is taking longer, the system feels sluggish.
Performance future-proofing is important. Don't underestimate how resource-intensive the modern web is. Open a big slack chat with a bunch of embeds, start scrolling up and feel the burn.
I wouldn't say that it's grinding my workflow to a halt, but it was surprising how slow it felt after spending more time behind a proper desktop.
Working from home has allowed me to shift my work from a work provided laptop to my personal Ryzen desktop and have noticed a similar improvement. I mostly build webapps, but one of them...
Working from home has allowed me to shift my work from a work provided laptop to my personal Ryzen desktop and have noticed a similar improvement.
I mostly build webapps, but one of them occasionally has to do some backend data crunching. This process takes about 15 minutes on my laptop vs. 5 minutes on my desktop, making it way easier to debug.
Are you sure it's not the storage and/swap memory? The thing is, even with a bunch of electron apps, on CPU side you are unlikely to be at 100% CPU usage. Increases in cpu performance will only...
Are you sure it's not the storage and/swap memory?
The thing is, even with a bunch of electron apps, on CPU side you are unlikely to be at 100% CPU usage. Increases in cpu performance will only really hit in those circumstances.
Computer snappiness has more to do these days with other factors than cpu once you get past, say, an modern i5 (the true 4 core mobile one) /AMD equivalent.
This is going to be a your mileage will vary thing, but I personally spent very little time at my dorm (then apartment) working. I was usually in a club room (as in, a room owned by a school club,...
This is going to be a your mileage will vary thing, but I personally spent very little time at my dorm (then apartment) working. I was usually in a club room (as in, a room owned by a school club, not that kind of club), or a library, or in class, or sometimes even outside.
I had a Dell Ultrasharp monitor at home, but I ended up just using it for my ps4/switch most of the time.
"only" 1080 on a 14" screen isn't that much of a problem. I can't see pixels on mine when it's on my lap, although my eyes are getting a bit creaky these days. Not sure what the PPI works out at...
"only" 1080 on a 14" screen isn't that much of a problem. I can't see pixels on mine when it's on my lap, although my eyes are getting a bit creaky these days. Not sure what the PPI works out at but it's quite enough.
The T14s is the laptop I had in mind buying in my workplace for a while now, but a sudden change in providers has now left me having to choose an HP computer. I have discovered there is an HP...
The T14s is the laptop I had in mind buying in my workplace for a while now, but a sudden change in providers has now left me having to choose an HP computer. I have discovered there is an HP Elitebook 845 G7 which shares a lot of specs with the T14s, but that is still not available. Maybe you want to also check those Elitebooks as they seem decent (for instance, both ram slots are interchangeable).
I would choose Thinkpad before an HP computer because of personal preference (trackpoint, good linux support, etc) but specs-wise they seem fairly similar.
I'm holding out for a Schenker VIA 15 Pro [1]. I'm in the UK and I've been waiting 2 months for the Lenovo laptops with 4800U to come available but Lenovo have pushed the date back at least twice,...
I'm holding out for a Schenker VIA 15 Pro [1]. I'm in the UK and I've been waiting 2 months for the Lenovo laptops with 4800U to come available but Lenovo have pushed the date back at least twice, and the IdeaPad 5 still isn't even listed on the site, so I've decided I'm taking my money elsewhere. I was originally shopping for a 4800U because of the 15W TDP, but the Schenker has a 91Wh battery so even with a 45W 4800H, I can expect 10+ hours of surfing time. If the review for the previous generation [2] is anything to go by, I think I will be very happy.
I currently have a T440s. It's rock solid. Rock. Solid. If something does break or need replacing, I can strip the whole thing down in a few minutes. I've never had a laptop I easily do that with...
I currently have a T440s. It's rock solid. Rock. Solid. If something does break or need replacing, I can strip the whole thing down in a few minutes. I've never had a laptop I easily do that with before, previous machines have been clipped together rather than screwed like the Thinkpad is, and I hate those stupid clip things.
The Thinkpad keyboard is the best laptop keyboard I've ever used, and I'm hyper-fussy about keyboard quality. There is zero flex in the frame and the keys are individually switched. I've used worse desktop keyboards. It might not be the thinnest machine around but that's a trade off I'm prepared to make.
I'm much more interested in build quality, ease of repair/upgrade and hardware quality than raw power. Power is largely irrelevant except in specialised cases and as you're looking at a T-series, you're not one of those cases. All the HP, Dell, Asus and so on machines I've used and owned over the years just pale in comparison to the Lenovo when it comes to build quality. HP are particularly terrible, although I've only really used their budget machines.
When I eventually run out of cpu power for the things I want to do, I will buy another Thinkpad.
This post not, unfortunately, sponsored by Lenovo (although if Lenovo are reading this and want someone to rave about Thinkpads I am accepting hardware donations)
As much as I generally abhor HP, I think their Envy laptop is probably the one I'd recommend. Linus Tech Tips just did a review and it seems to have absolutely insane battery life, which is a huge benefit for college life in particular. Plus their pen accessory is supposed to be pretty decent.
I'll add that honestly, since reading this it seems you are in CS-y field, performance matters very little. I have a computer at work that cost $3,600 as speced and a macbook air I use for personal work. I really don't notice much of a difference. A terminal, web browser, VSCode, and maybe an IDE isn't going to stress your CPU very much. Make sure ram and storage are plentify and it'll be more or less the same.
So while the AMD CPU is no doubt a better bang for your buck in numbers than the rest, honestly that bang is not going to be that noticeable if you don't do things which regularly push your CPU to max for hours at a time like video rendering.
Size, feel, screen quality, weight imo all matter more.
I went from an powerful 15 inch windows laptop to a macbook air in college because I realized that I was getting very little of the 15inch's benefit and feeling a lot of the cons carrying it around everyday.
I'm going to counter this with a personal anecdote, I've been working from home for 3 months and have recently started going back into the office.
At home I have an 8-core overclocked i7-9700k with 32G of RAM, at work I'm still using an old quadcore Thinkpad. The difference was instantly noticeable, even in basic office work (Google Docs/Sheets, whole bunch of Electron stuff like Slack, VSCode, Spotify etc) everything is taking longer, the system feels sluggish.
Performance future-proofing is important. Don't underestimate how resource-intensive the modern web is. Open a big slack chat with a bunch of embeds, start scrolling up and feel the burn.
I wouldn't say that it's grinding my workflow to a halt, but it was surprising how slow it felt after spending more time behind a proper desktop.
Working from home has allowed me to shift my work from a work provided laptop to my personal Ryzen desktop and have noticed a similar improvement.
I mostly build webapps, but one of them occasionally has to do some backend data crunching. This process takes about 15 minutes on my laptop vs. 5 minutes on my desktop, making it way easier to debug.
Are you sure it's not the storage and/swap memory?
The thing is, even with a bunch of electron apps, on CPU side you are unlikely to be at 100% CPU usage. Increases in cpu performance will only really hit in those circumstances.
Computer snappiness has more to do these days with other factors than cpu once you get past, say, an modern i5 (the true 4 core mobile one) /AMD equivalent.
This is going to be a your mileage will vary thing, but I personally spent very little time at my dorm (then apartment) working. I was usually in a club room (as in, a room owned by a school club, not that kind of club), or a library, or in class, or sometimes even outside.
I had a Dell Ultrasharp monitor at home, but I ended up just using it for my ps4/switch most of the time.
"only" 1080 on a 14" screen isn't that much of a problem. I can't see pixels on mine when it's on my lap, although my eyes are getting a bit creaky these days. Not sure what the PPI works out at but it's quite enough.
The T14s is the laptop I had in mind buying in my workplace for a while now, but a sudden change in providers has now left me having to choose an HP computer. I have discovered there is an HP Elitebook 845 G7 which shares a lot of specs with the T14s, but that is still not available. Maybe you want to also check those Elitebooks as they seem decent (for instance, both ram slots are interchangeable).
I would choose Thinkpad before an HP computer because of personal preference (trackpoint, good linux support, etc) but specs-wise they seem fairly similar.
I'm holding out for a Schenker VIA 15 Pro [1]. I'm in the UK and I've been waiting 2 months for the Lenovo laptops with 4800U to come available but Lenovo have pushed the date back at least twice, and the IdeaPad 5 still isn't even listed on the site, so I've decided I'm taking my money elsewhere. I was originally shopping for a 4800U because of the 15W TDP, but the Schenker has a 91Wh battery so even with a 45W 4800H, I can expect 10+ hours of surfing time. If the review for the previous generation [2] is anything to go by, I think I will be very happy.
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Schenker-VIA-15-Pro-A-15-6-inch-Renoir-laptop-with-up-to-an-AMD-Ryzen-7-4800H-64-GB-of-RAM-a-2-TB-SSD-and-a-91-Wh-battery.479001.0.html
[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Schenker-VIA-15-Laptop-Review-a-lightweight-AMD-notebook.460698.0.html
I currently have a T440s. It's rock solid. Rock. Solid. If something does break or need replacing, I can strip the whole thing down in a few minutes. I've never had a laptop I easily do that with before, previous machines have been clipped together rather than screwed like the Thinkpad is, and I hate those stupid clip things.
The Thinkpad keyboard is the best laptop keyboard I've ever used, and I'm hyper-fussy about keyboard quality. There is zero flex in the frame and the keys are individually switched. I've used worse desktop keyboards. It might not be the thinnest machine around but that's a trade off I'm prepared to make.
I'm much more interested in build quality, ease of repair/upgrade and hardware quality than raw power. Power is largely irrelevant except in specialised cases and as you're looking at a T-series, you're not one of those cases. All the HP, Dell, Asus and so on machines I've used and owned over the years just pale in comparison to the Lenovo when it comes to build quality. HP are particularly terrible, although I've only really used their budget machines.
When I eventually run out of cpu power for the things I want to do, I will buy another Thinkpad.
This post not, unfortunately, sponsored by Lenovo (although if Lenovo are reading this and want someone to rave about Thinkpads I am accepting hardware donations)