Introduction:
Whether you're a student or a parent, today we're going to help you find the perfect laptop for school. I'll start with some quick tips to guide you through this important buying decision, after which we’ll dive into the best laptops for your needs.
If you want to jump straight to the recommendations, no worries—I won’t feel offended! You can find all the laptop links on our website and in the video’s description. And here’s something cool: we’ve launched a laptop buying guide for students on our website, which helps you quickly narrow down the vast sea of laptops to the ones that are right for you. Since it's on our website, we can keep it up-to-date long after this video is published.
Choosing the Right Laptop: Key Factors to Consider:
For school, we recommend buying a laptop that is small enough to be portable yet has a screen large enough to get real work done. Students move around frequently, and no one wants to lug a heavy machine with them. You’ll want a laptop that weighs less than 3 pounds but no heavier than 4 pounds. As for the screen, we recommend a display of at least 14 inches, preferably 14.5 inches. This will enable you to see a decent amount of content without straining your eyes.
It’s not just the laptop screen size that determines how much content you can see. It’s also its resolution and brightness. A higher resolution display increases clarity, allowing you to more comfortably make out small text. A brighter display means better visibility in bright environments, like schools with lots of windows, so you won’t need to squint or increase the font size. Ideally, look for a laptop with a resolution greater than 1920 x 1200 pixels and at least 400 nits of brightness.
What to Look for When Buying a Laptop for School
For school, we recommend buying a laptop that is small enough to be portable yet has a screen large enough to get real work done. Students move around frequently, and no one wants to lug around a heavy machine. You want a laptop that ideally weighs less than 3 lbs, but certainly no heavier than 4 lbs. To get real work done, we recommend a laptop with at least a 14-inch display, but preferably 14.5 inches. This will enable you to see a decent amount of content.
But it’s not just the screen size that determines how much you can see. It’s also the resolution and brightness. A higher resolution display increases clarity, allowing you to comfortably make out small text.
A brighter display means better visibility if you use the laptop in a bright environment (which schools often have plenty of windows!). This will help you avoid squinting or increasing the font size. Ideally, look for a laptop with a resolution greater than 1920 x 1200 pixels and at least 400 nits of brightness.
Apple’s MacBooks are a fantastic choice for students. They have the best build quality of any laptop we’ve tested, which means you’ll have less to worry about. Due to Apple’s excellent M-series processors, MacBooks deliver best-in-class battery life, almost never have fan noise, and don’t feel that warm to the touch. They are also still very powerful. For students in disciplines that require high-performance computing, Apple’s higher-end Pro laptops, with powerful graphics, are a great choice.
The downside, however, is that they are pretty pricey, especially when considering upgrades, which many students will need, particularly those studying disciplines with higher computing needs. You may also hear that some software doesn’t work on Macs. However, as Apple has been a dominating force in the laptop space for years, this issue is now pretty limited. It's mostly limited to AAA games and running Linux.
Our Favorite Laptops for Students:
Let’s get to the fun part: recommending our favorite laptops for students. We’ll introduce you to a few student types to help you understand which laptop is right for you:
The Yoga Pro 9i is a portable laptop when you travel and a powerful laptop at home where you won’t feel heat because your hands won’t be on the laptop's keyboard. In fact, this setup highlights why we haven’t recommended any 16-inch laptops in this roundup.
We feel that most people would be better suited plugging a smaller, more portable laptop into an external monitor when at home. But if you do want a 16-inch laptop, nothing beats the all-around package that is the Yoga Pro 9i. It does everything well to very well at an extremely competitive price.
It has no application compatibility issues, as it’s a traditional Windows laptop with Intel, and you can enjoy AAA gaming on it with its RTX 4060 or even 4070 in some markets. It comes fully equipped with 32GB of memory, and its screen is a bright mini-LED one with a fast refresh rate. Its keyboard is very comfortable, and its trackpad works well enough. It is also relatively compact for what it is, but the icing on the cake is we've seen it go for as low as.
The Yoga Pro 9i is far and away one of the best options for a 16-inch laptop. Every other high-powered 16-inch laptop has significant downsides, like heat, fan noise, or throttled performance, but this one stands out.
It’s the only one that feels cool to the touch while gaming, and although there is some fan noise, it’s as good as you’ll get for a laptop of this caliber. The Yoga Pro 9i has a large display, and it extends its lead over its competitors by offering incredible value for money.
It’s not perfect, though—it’s relatively compact for its size, but still, it is bulkier than some other options. Its graphics max out at the RTX 4060 or 4070 in some markets, but it still offers impressive AAA gaming performance.
If you want a more premium setup, other laptops like the Asus G14 deliver a more portable experience with even more powerful NVidias graphics, but they can get quite warm during use. The Yoga Pro 9i’s great price, performance, and overall experience make it the best all-around choice for those who need both portability and power.
conclusion,
it's more expensive now, but we're going to up the ante and talk about more powerful laptops for students like Trinity Wade and Henry, starting with the GOAT.
If you don't specifically need Windows or Linux, you really should be buying the MacBook Pro 14. This laptop is as close to perfect as you can get. It gives you incredible performance, and that includes graphical performance, yet it still gives
