our goal was perfectly simple to create a back toschool laptop buyer guide but
recommending a laptop these days is anything but simple let me explain this
Dell Inspiron was the best laptop as was
this Acer Nitro and this HP Spectre was
too that's because the best ,000 laptop
is always going to be a $1,400 laptop on
sale for $1,000 so instead of telling
you what to buy I'm going to do you one better and I'm going to teach you how to
buy a laptop so that you can shop with confidence and get a great deal on the
right machine for you we're also going to include some honorable mentions to
give you guys a good starting point whether you're looking for a thin and
light or a mobile workstation I'm also going to be mentioning today's sponsor
Lexar this entire video was shot on iPhone directly to their armor 700
portable SSD it offers blazing fast performance is IP 66 rated to protect
against both water and dust and its rugged design is built to withstand up
to 3 m drops and Falls making it perfect for outdoor and extreme environments it
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and comes in two attractive colors we're going to have it linked down below the
most important thing to do is be honest with yourself and look for a laptop that
excels at what you actually do not at what what you think you might like to do
someday maybe if you have time so for
most people topof the line components aren't necessary and a mid-range machine
will not only save you some money but it could be lighter quieter and last longer
on battery with that said if you are looking for performance I would start
your search with gaming laptops even if you don't game they typically have the
best cooling fastest processors and better upgradeability than laptops that
are marketed towards professionals or creators on top of being priced more
aggressively at almost every performance tier as for the gamers out there if your
primary use is school or work something with an RTX 4050 or RTX 3060 is going to
handle 1080P or even 1440p gaming in
most titles at least if you reduce the settings a little bit here are a couple
of budget friendly options with any of these being worth picking up if you can
find a good s on them not everyone wants to turn down settings though so intense
Gamers should buy something faster right well yeah but it's not that simple in
front of me are two laptops one with an
RTX 4070 and one with an RTX
460 guess which one of them is faster go
ahead I'll wait yeah it's the
4060 see these days you don't just worry
about which GPU is in your laptop you also also have to worry about the
wattage of your GPU in this G14 here
that 4060 gets fed up to 90 watts of
power while the 4070 in this more professional oriented Acer gets just 50
watts to add insult to this confusing injury laptop gpus share almost nothing
in common with their desktop counterparts with the same names and the
only way to break through this deceptive branding is to painstakingly test
everything single one of them thankfully
Jared's Tech has done all the work for you he tested a truly incredible number
of games in gpus and has made this incredible resource for the community
and there's more good news if your idea of gaming is planting turnips in stardew
Valley there's a solid chance that you can completely forget about a dedicated
GPU at all many recent CPUs can even
handle AAA games speaking of how do you
choose the right CPU for your laptop well if you simply want the best it's
Apple yeah you're stuck with the Notch and macOS and whether the ecosystem is
a feature or bug is subjective but their battery life is fantastic and their M3
chips have single core performance that is currently unmatched by Windows
machines getting a Macbook does have a couple of problems you can't play many
games and they're expensive but if you're a student or you don't mind
factory refurbished there are deals to be found out there on the Windows side
we're going to start with AMD whose mobile naming scheme is so bad that we
made an entire video about how they are intentionally misleading consumers their
most recent chips are the ryzen AI 300
series and these offer a small uplift in performance over the last generation but
with a huge Improvement in efficiency with our ryzen AI laptop getting an
additional 3 hours of battery life you
can watch our full review at the link down below but the too long didn't watch
is that if you can afford a laptop with a ryzen AI 300 chip you're going to have
a pretty good time moving back a generation though things get really
confusing look at the ryzen 57640 U the
most important number in there is not the seven but it's actually the 4 which
signifies that this CPU uses AMD's Zen 4
architecture so you could be easily tricked into thinking that the ryzen
37320 U would be similar but with a
little bit l performance but remember I just said the seven means nothing it's
going to be way slower because the important number is the two it's using
the Zen 2 architecture from 2019 yikes so if you're looking for a
deal on a slightly older ryzen 7000 or
8000 series chip they can be good bets
but just make sure there's a four in this spot or that price better be really
good as for Intel their new Ultra 100
series CPUs actually offer a tiny bit less performance than the 13th gen chips
that they replaced but with a big Improvement in battery life making
realistically either a decent Choice depending on your priorities in the
coming months Intel is going to be launching their lunar Lake lineup which
they promise is going to be really really good but okay what am I going to
do drive my Roadster 2 to the future mart and buy one the hard truth is
Intel's a little behind on mobile right now but not by so much that you should
buy an AMD machine with a keyboard you hate versus an Intel one that's more
comfortable and as long as the Price Is Right you can safely go back I'd say to
about 12th gen without missing out massively on performance or efficiency
speaking of we are not done yet because the laptop CPU Market was just massively
disrupted by Qualcomm and their Snap Dragon X chips which offer unmatched
battery life with performance that is comparable to am ryzen AI line the only
catch is that these are ARM processors and if your application doesn't run
natively on Windows on ARM you could be looking at a 30 to 50% reduction in
performance if it works at all we did a
live stream where we tested a bunch of games on Snapdragon X and found that
only about half of them worked and it's
more than just games Adobe Premiere works but only the 2023 version at the
moment and other parts of the creative Suite like after effects are currently
Mia altogether so there are two groups of people then that these laptops could
be great for users who know for sure that they're going to be doing things in
a web browser or just using common apps
always or the Geeks who love to be the first to test obscure programs on new
hardware and then work with the dev team to resolve them if you're in either of
those categories hey enjoy that laptop that you only need to plug in every few
days we really like the surface laptop 7 Samsung Galaxy book 4 Edge and HP Omni
book X though we have a full video looking at over half a dozen different
options which you can check out down below of course if you looked at all of
those and thought gee there's nothing really in my budget that's
understandable and there's lots of options For You especially if you're willing to consider something
unconventional Chromebooks might not be very sexy but will serve you very well
if everything that you do can be done through an internet browser or through
Linux apps and and they tend to be better speced for their price thanks to
manufacturer saving on the cost of a Windows license on the Windows side of
things though there are budget friendly options as well and Acer was kind enough
to send us over a few machines ranging from
$230 to $400 to see just how much
performance you can get on their most basic models the build quality of the
$230 Aspire go is surprisingly okay but
the Intel n100 processor that powers it
is like it's not just slow it's struggling to do basic tasks meanwhile
the $300 Aspire go with a ryzen CPU is
literally twice as fast for not that much more money while the $400 Aspire 3
is not a huge upgrade in raw performance but gets 16 gigs of RAM meaning it can
complete our full test suite and actually seems very worthwhile it uses
AMD's older Zen 2 architecture so neither perform nor battery life are
going to be on par with the most modern machines but it's good enough to the
point where the mediocre screen is more of a concern to me than the outright
performance if you have a little more to spend this HP Pavilion arrow is
currently on sale for $600 and the amount better it is is hard to overstate
of course all of this assumes that you need to buy new if you don't mind giving
up things like warranties you could save a significant amount of money University
and offices regularly sell Surplus equipment that is pretty decent just a
couple of generations older here's a listing from the University of Utah that
has laptops for half of what they're worth on the used Market also if you end
up with a machine that seems slow you could potentially give it a shot in the
ARM with upgrades to RAM storage and Wi-Fi just verify beforehand that these
items are in fact replaceable by Googling laptop name teardown if you're
lucky will have covered it on ShortCircuit or I fix it will have a guide
speaking of upgrading RAM how do you know if you need to well in 2024 4 gigs
of RAM is a complete noggo and despite what Apple might try and tell you 8 gigs
really isn't enough either unless you're my grandma my grandma it is going to
slow you down our new starting recommendation then is 16 gigs and
that's only really enough until you start getting into more professional video editing or science ific programs
at which point you'll need significantly more as for the exact amount the most
important thing is that however much you need you'll need to get it right now
because many newer machines do not support upgrading your RAM later if the
ability to upgrade is important for you then look for a laptop that supports
sodm or Cam modules thankfully storage
is simpler just get a 256 gig SSD if you
plan on doing video editing or you want to install a bunch of games then feel
free to increase that number but if your budget is tight storage is probably the
first place that I would try to cut costs especially since it's the most
likely part of your laptop to be easily upgradeable and even if you don't feel
like cracking open your device oh yeah external ssds are readily available like
the armor 700 from Lexar just plug it into your laptop and boom more storage
don't cut your storage budget too much though a hard drive might be tempting
since it can give you a lot of capacity for cheap but but these days it is not
worth the performance hit at all emmc
even though it's solid state is actually a similar story too it is dog slow
compared to a proper SSD and it's considerably less reliable so avoid it
if at all possible what you might also want to avoid is scuffing up your new
laptop so it's finally here maybe
consider the all new LT laptop bag complete with thoughtful layout and
rugged design got freaking love it available
now at LTT Store.com moving on to the
display of your laptop there's a lot to consider there are four main panel types
TN OLED mini LED and IPS TN is the
technology of yesterday and should be avoided while OLED and mini LED are the
best if you can afford them OLED excels in dark rooms with its perfect blacks
and unmatched contrast but it might not
get quite bright enough for well-lit rooms or Outdoors mini LED is the
opposite with exceptional brightness making it Punchy even in bright rooms
while sacrificing contrast in dark rooms meaning your typical use case will
determine which is best IPS is your allrounder offering generally good
viewing angles color and brightness and with the extra benefit of being
sometimes significantly more efficient for instance the IPS version of the Dell
XPS 13 plus got almost 5 hours more
battery life than the p OLED version nice probably most importantly though
IPS is going to be the most affordable making it the right choice for most
people it doesn't suck now we mentioned
brighter panels being better for outdoors but how do you tell what's
bright enough 200 to 300 nits will be fine for most indoor use with 400 to 500
nits being required for outdoors or 600 plus for a satisfying HDR experience be
careful with some laptops that might be claiming huge numbers like5 100 nits
because sometimes that number will only apply for a tiny bright spot on the
display with a much lower brightness when the entire screen is bright an
often overlooked aspect of a display is the aspect ratio for TVs the standard is
16x9 but for laptops the slightly taller
16 X10 or even if you're crazy 3x2 have
become popular in recent years and for good reason this little bit of extra
vertical real estate can be a big productivity boost for office or
creative work alike and it also tends to be a better fit in a laptop chassis
giving designers more room for cooling and large comfortable trackpads as for
what resolution you need we can use Simple Math to find the distance at
which a panel becomes a retina display which is Apple's marketing term for the
pixel density being high enough that you can't see the individual pixels here's
the full breakdown per resolution but the gist is that full HD is good enough
Quad HD will be noticeably sharper if if you have good eyes and 4K isn't really
worthwhile especially considering those extra pixels can negatively impact
battery life and I care about battery life no matter the resolution increasing
the refresh rate above 60 HZ will be a worthwhile Improvement High refresh rate
displays will have the biggest impact if you plan on gaming though there are
diminishing returns above 144 Hertz and
even non- Gamers will benefit everything you do will feel smoother be that photo
editing CAD or even just making a new folder I do that all the time but like
so many other nice things it can negatively impact your battery life one
thing that may or may not matter to you is a touchscreen I'm personally a fan of
them maybe you aren't but the choice is up to you unless you're getting Apple
only the final factor to watch out for in your display is color a wider color
space or gamut means the panel can physically produce more colors while a
smaller color space can leave content looking dull and UNS saturated color
spaces can get a bit confusing since there are a bunch of different standards
but unless you know you need something else aim for near 100% coverage of srgb
that's the standard that web uses for those of you who do need more graphic
designers colorist and like you know who you are you'll need to be concerned not
only with gamut but also the accuracy of your display a poorly calibrated display
might show everything with a slight magenta or a blue hue and this is
usually caused by slight variation from panel to panel during manufacturing so
if you plan on doing color critical work look into getting a laptop with a
factory calibrated display something like an average Delta e2000 of two or
below is generally considered to be accurate enough as that's what the human
eye can typically discern some laptops with excellent displays are the Dell XPS
13 plus MacBook Pro Samsung Galaxy book
HP Spectre and ASUS G14 and g16 I guess
that would be g's 14 and 16 whatever now for a rare Simple Choice
the trackpad ever since Microsoft introduced Windows Precision drivers
almost all laptops come with a trackpad that will be accurate and not slow you
down although the very best trackpads are large glass topped and use Force
touch instead of a physical click standups here include MacBooks and
Windows devices with sensil trackpads like the surface laptop 7 HP Spectre D
XPS and Lenovo ThinkPad Z series will
almost certainly be more difficult is the keyboard these can be very personal
though so the best way to confirm that you like one is just go to your local
Big Box store and try out a bunch the first thing to look for is that your
hands physically fit some 13-in devices
won't have a large enough Palm rest for everyone or maybe there are some sharp
edges on a device that will bother only some folks who end up resting right on
them after that check the chassis Flex of the machine soft spots can throw off
your typing then check how stable the Keys themselves are press the edge of a
key it's a fail if you can get the corner to go too low before the key
actuates and finally just press a whole bunch of keys to see if there are any
obvious differences in force required to press each one the ones that we like the
most are the HP dragon fly Elite Dell Latitude 9440 and alien wear gaming
laptops especially if you choose the optional Cherry switches the last big
things we haven't mentioned are weight and Battery weight is pretty
self-explanatory light is nicer to carry around duh but battery is more complex
the standard measurement for battery capacity is wat hours but even with
identical specs you can end up with wildly varying battery life numbers
since the efficiency of every single part in the chain and how the
manufacturer has tuned each individual part plays a role adding insult to
injury laptop manufacturers battery life numbers are almost always comically
overstated and often cont predictor on
the same web page all of this is to say get your battery life numbers from a
reputable Source such as ShortCircuit and try to use only battery life numbers
from a single source for direct comparisons since everyone tests them
slightly differently finally there are a couple of nice to haves that you might
want in a laptop plan on doing a bunch of meetings with your webcam while
qualcomm's recent CPUs currently support much better webcams than the rest of the
CPU makers even if not every single laptop that has a qualcom CPU has the
best implementation if you're all about privacy then look for a laptop with a
hardware webcam and microphone toggle or even one of the rare machines without a
webcam at all for logging in quickly look for a fingerprint reader or Windows
hello facial recognition the ladder in particular was a game Cher for me and of
course don't buy anything until you know you can live with the I/O if a laptop
has full-size HDMI make sure it's 2.1
not 1.4 and many manufactur pies these
days leave off usba a ports SD card readers and even headphone Jacks in the
name of a little bit of weight savings I'm looking at youell and I'm also
looking at our sponsor Lexar the armor 700 portable SSD held up great for this
shoot handling up to 4K 60fps pror
footage directly from our iPhone 15 Pro
reminder that it comes in two colors black and blue and you can check it out
at the link down below so if you like this video maybe check out our review of
the rise of AI 300 also make sure to hit like get subscribed and maybe go to our
forum and ask us directly what laptop should I get we will be in there and
just have a great all day see you later