so this is kind of how i imagine this whole thing went down some execs at best
buy were sitting around going how can we help students get geared up with the
hashtag best college yes in my imagination executives speak in hashtags
laptops this year and some bold soul
stood up and said let's have Linus give them the lowdown yay and that's what
they did welcome to my top four laptops
for back to school showdown drop a like on the video if you're one of the 30 000
or so people who have been asking me to do one of these roundups for so long
that you've actually graduated with your post-secondary degree already
now i'm gonna start by explaining a little something something i don't really do the traditional top five or in
this case top four thing where you rank
a bunch of products from worst to best when it comes to stuff that i'm
suggesting that you buy the only thing that you should buy is the best thing
for your needs let's see how many people can guess uh where you can get all this
stuff i'm talking about hey so why list four things to buy that aren't the best
no instead i'll be tackling four different use cases and choosing one
model that i personally picked out as a great choice let's start with number
four for the ultimate bang for the buck shopper i'm calling this category super
basic this is actually my first time hands on with an hp stream device and i
gotta say while the 1366 by 768 tn
screen takes me back to my college days and it doesn't feature the you know
finest craftsmanship with the egyptian cotton keycap covers or whatever the
build quality is certainly not as bad as
some laptops that i've seen for twice the price and for 280 bucks you are
getting a surprising amount of computer the one i picked out has a 13.3 inch
display a celeron n2840 processor 2 gigs
of RAM and 32 gigs of onboard solid-state storage and yeah those
aren't amazing specs or anything but for 280 bucks you also get a free year of
office 365 a hundred dollar value so
instead of spending twice as much on a machine that doesn't have the office
bonus and hoping it'll last you effectively three times as long for the
price you could just buy new ones every year taking advantage of the rapid pace
at which modern technology evolves and then passing the hand-me-downs to a
sibling friend or fellow student which isn't to say that buying something a
little nicer won't yield some extra creature comforts if you don't mind
keeping your devices for a little longer number three weighing in at a very
reasonable 900 is the lenovo yoga 3.
build quality gets a very significant upgrade with that sick 360 degree hinge
design that is the calling card of lenovo's premium yoga lineup and there
are some very healthy spec upgrades as well a 5th gen core i5 processor means
more performance without sacrificing battery life eight gigs of RAM means
more than three chrome tabs at a time it's more like six haha storage
increases to 256 gigs of solid-state storage that's eight times the capacity
of our bang for the buck machine not to mention that it's a lot faster and the
display gets a nice upgrade to a 1080p ips panel which is way better for
content consumption especially if you want to sit next to a friend while
watching a movie thanks to its more vibrant colors and better viewing angles
for screen size i stuck with 14 inch because from my experience as someone
who legitimately carries a laptop in a backpack every day i find 13 to 14
inches is the sweet spot for carryability if you don't really need
the larger display which i guess leads us really nicely into number two the
first of our more premium options MSI's ge62 apache pro while there are a lot of
gaming laptops out there for folks who want to do more than just study few of
them strike the balance between size weight horsepower and cost that the ge62
is found it's big enough to handle cooling the core i7 quad-core inside but
not so large that it's horrible to carry like MSI's bulkier gt72
it's got 16 gigs of RAM for great multitasking performance and it uses a
dedicated 128 Gigabyte SSD for the operating system with one terabyte of
hard drive space for bulky files and games a less convenient but higher
performance approach to hybrid storage
now to be clear there are gaming laptops
out there that are less expensive and also feature quad-core processors this
ASUS model would be a great one to check out if you want a powerful CPU in a
reasonable size machine that could pull double duty as a portable workstation
but for me to truly consider something to be a gaming laptop i need to see a
gtx 970m so that's why i went with a
1500 option for the all-rounder gaming
box which speaking of expensive i guess
leads us pretty well into number one a product whose inclusion in this list
will definitely leave some of you scratching your heads after how much i
rained on its parade in my launch review the microsoft surface pro 3. i picked
out a 4th gen core i5 dual core equipped model with 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of
solid-state storage that set me back a touch over 1200 although account for a
bit extra because you're going to want to use a type cover accessory since it's
not too useful for typing without that and the reason for it is that while the
surface pro 3 doesn't do much for my personal daily workload thanks to its
easy-to-use stylus responsive high-resolution touchscreen and flexible
form factor that allows it to really be used as either a notebook or a notepad
thanks to the included onenote software that lets you take notes markup existing
documents or pictures that you take with the rear camera and sync everything to
the cloud as you work and there's more good news if you don't want to pony up
that much for the pro model unlike early step down models like the surface rt the
third generation non-pro surface uses an Intel processor
now for a similar if not as powerful Windows 10 experience that the pro has
so you get that outstanding app compatibility which i guess wraps up our
list here so all that's left is to give a big shout out to best buy thanking
them not just for sending us the laptops that we asked to check out for this
roundup but also for being really cool about it and not trying to you know
guide us to the laptops that they wanted to sell leaving us instead to pick
whatever we wanted off their site based on what we thought was right for our
viewers so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider
supporting us directly by buying a cool t-shirt like this one or with a direct
monthly contribution through our forum now that you're done doing all that
stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out
this video where we took a gtx 480 to see how its performance has evolved in
the five years since it launched with NVIDIA's regular driver updates so i'll
see you there and then i'll see you next time