Best College Laptops 2018. The MacBook Air earns its place back on our list of the best laptops for college students. The 13.3-inch machine costs a bit more than its predecessor, but the. The 13-inch MacBook Pro is a top pick for college students because of its excellent cross of price, performance, battery life, features, and support. The best laptop for your student.
This photo is unrealistic because it looks like only one person is checking Facebook. Photo: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images
I’m about to graduate from high school and am headed off to college in the fall. I’ve got some money saved up, and I’m going to buy a laptop before I go (ideally for less than a $1,000, but I wouldn’t mind spending even less). I’m having trouble figuring out what to get. Any advice?
The Graduate
Hey, congrats! And you’re not wrong to be confused. The laptop market is kinda weird right now. A few years ago, your choices basically would have been to spend a lot on a Windows laptop or to spend even more on an Apple, and then you’d be done. But thanks to low-end laptops like Chromebooks suddenly becoming viable, and an explosion in midrange laptops, there are a lot more choices that probably fall within your budget.
So, first off, you probably want to check in with the college itself. The college’s IT department likely has some minimum requirements for personal machines, and many campuses (and computer manufacturers) offer student discounts — it’s just a matter of knowing where and how to get them. If you know what you’re going to major in already (no pressure!), check in with your program as well. A history major can probably get by on a low-powered machine to write papers, do some research, and watch movies, but if you’re gonna study architecture or graphic design, you may need more power and some default software.
In the world of Windows machines, you’ll find the most options (and the biggest range in prices, from $4,000, behemoth gaming laptops to crazy-cheap budget laptops).
At the high end, you can get an Asus ZenBook 3 for $1,000. It’s a slim ultraportable that looks almost exactly like a MacBook from across the room, but runs Windows 10. It’s the best compromise between weight, power, and having a nice screen to watch Netflix on when you’re not studying.
For a more midrange option, take a look at the Lenovo Miix 510, available for $570. It’s easy to carry to class and gets good battery life, but it also has a nice extra feature: You can remove the screen from the keyboard and use it as a tablet. I’ve find this tremendously helpful when I have to read a long document — you can still highlight or make notes about important parts, but if you have to go through a hundred pages of something, the tablet makes it easier. If you have a little wiggle room in your budget, you can invest in the version that has 8 GB of RAM for $720, which should future-proof you and make sure memory hogs like Chrome keep running smoothly, even as web apps get more demanding in the coming years.
Finally, if you really want to save some money, there’s the Lenovo Ideapad 110s, which you can get for $150. It’s light enough to carry to class, and it’ll do fine for browsing the web and typing up papers, but it’s relatively underpowered, and you may need to get a an external hard drive of some sort (even just a USB thumb drive), since it only comes with 32 GB of internal storage. With just 2 GB of RAM, you may find that you’ll need to replace it for something a little beefier before you graduate. But since it only costs $150, that shouldn’t be too much of a heartbreaker.
If you decide to get an Apple laptop, you’re in luck. The MacBook Air, while being discontinued by Apple, is still a great laptop — light, good battery life, and still fast enough to do everything you’ll need to do, but now available for (relatively) cheap. The 13-inch 2015 model is available for under $850. Just make sure you’re getting the model with 8 GB of RAM, so it’ll make it through all four years of school.
Until recently, I would have steered you clear of a Chromebook. They’re cheap, but they weren’t great personal machines — everything is meant to be run in the cloud, which meant you couldn’t store much on your hard drive. It also meant that you’d be unable to run MS Excel, and while Google Sheets can do a lot, if you’re taking any sort of business, economics, or statistics classes, you’ll likely need to have Excel to do everything you need to do. But the Chromebook Samsung Plus is available for $450 and can run Android apps, which gives you access to Excel. It’s also a convertible, so you can flip the screen 360 degrees and have a tablet to go over a reading assignment. Still, I’d check in with your campus IT department before jumping all-in — they may have some reservations or advice about using a Chromebook as your main personal machine.
Best of luck, and I hope your roommate isn’t a psycho!
Got a question for Select All? Sure you do. Email [email protected].
Launch Safari [or your favorite browser] and make sure that it is your default browser. Best unzip for mac. As for your inability to download, the fact that you are on a wireless connection should have nothing to do with it.
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Picking the best laptop for college can make all the difference. Take a look at some of our favorites, and why you may consider picking one up for your next semester.
Most individual computing tasks don’t require a specific operating system or brand anymore. With many tasks becoming browser-based and the line between Windows and OS X becoming less relevant every day, the lines in the sand about what computer you should take to school have been significantly diminished. Instead, the challenge in deciding what laptop would serve you best now depends more on hardware. Battery life, whether or not you need touch, and screen size and quality now have a much greater influence in the decision. With that in mind, we’ve put together a quick list of which laptops would be best for your day-to-day needs based on those categories. (Note: we didn’t factor in specific school requirements, these are the general, all-around best laptops for college students that we could think of.)
The secret weapon: Chrome OS
Maybe you’ve got a powerful desktop that you built yourself, and so don’t need a laptop to handle every single task in your world. Maybe your school is super cool and lets you write everything in Google Drive instead of requiring Microsoft Office, so you can use a browser-based OS that lets you move every aspect of your schoolwork to the cloud. Or maybe you’re just not attached to any one particular OS, and do everything in the browser already anyway. Chrome OS is a good all-around idea for school, as most of the hardware running this lightweight OS can be picked up for about $300.
Chrome OS puts everything in the browser, so as long as you’re connected to the internet you’ve got access to the same web experience found on any other computer. The advantage here is the inexpensive parts used to drive most of these laptops. While you could go all out and drop $1500 on the Chromebook Pixel, the most common versions of Chrome OS hardware exist in the much cheaper Samsung and Acer Chromebooks. These cheaper experiences offer 6-8 hours of battery life and are quite light. You also never have to worry about anything happening to your data of your Chrome OS laptop gets in an accident, which could be the most important feature for the forgetful student.
Today the best-selling Chromebook is Samsung’s 11.6-inchExynos 5000-powered system ($249) and the Acer C7, while the newest, best performing models should be the new Haswell systems. These Chromebooks, which were just announced last week, include the Acer Chromebook and the HP Chromebook14. More details on them should be available soon.
The standard: Windows ultrabooks and convertibles
Windows has, and for a long time will likely remain, an OS with many different kinds of hardware. Right now in particular, with Microsoft shaking things up a bit through Windows 8, there’s a lot of different kinds of hardware to choose from when it comes to picking a Windows machine. Sorting through all of these odd looking machines in search for a winner can be a challenge unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. For most people, it comes down to battery life and the weight of the device itself.
Intel’s massive push into what they call “ultrabooks” has created a surplus of thin and light laptops that are perfect for school. Unfortunately the thinner you make a computer the more you sacrifice, and a lot of the early Ultrabooks took a hit when it came to battery life or screen quality. Fortunately, we now live in the wonderful world of Haswell, and those problems are slowly going away. Ultrabooks with a Haswell-based Intel processor are going to offer much better battery life than their predecessors, and still be able to deliver a great computing experience. Currently the Asus Zenbook UX 301 and 302 ultrabooks are some of the best on the shelf, offering a high quality display and a great overall experience.
The addition of touch is one of the most interesting changes to Windows 8. The ability to reach right out and touch your screen feels a lot more natural now in such a smartphone saturated world, and the latest version of Windows really gives you a reason to consider making it your default input mechanism. There are some laptops that now focus directly on touch, with the added flexibility of using them as a traditional laptop if you need to. These machines are commonly known as “ultrabook convertibles”, because they either are able to bend all the way back on themselves (to use as a tablet) or the screen can detach from the keyboard to use as a tablet. Many of these machines come with a Wacom stylus, which when combined with the handwriting recognition of Windows 8 turns them into fantastic note taking machines. Chief among these machines is the Lenovo Yoga 2, a Haswell-powered convertible ultrabook, that can fold back on itself as well as function as a regular laptop.
The student’s choice: Macbooks
Best Mac Laptop For Students
Of course if you’d rather avoid confusing version names and really have no love of touch on your laptop yet, you could just get a Macbook. Apple’s laptop line is very straightforward, and there’s some clear benefits and drawbacks to each of their models for students.
If you’re looking for battery life, you couldn’t ask for much better than the 2013 Macbook Air. This incredibly thin machine will get you through a whole day of classes without needing to bring out the power cable, and it’s light enough that you can sling it in your backpack when you’re rushing out the door with no problems. The display on this Air is the lowest quality of all the Macbooks as a trade-off, but it’s decent enough to get things done.
I searched high and low for a replacement to the Mac OS default Notes app, which is incredibly limited in functionality and insufficient for my needs. I had one twist - I needed to find a note taking app for Mac that did not sync or store notes in the cloud. Bear does just that and it happens to be great. Todoist is one of my favorite to-do apps on iOS and the Mac version is just as awesome. I recently discovered that it works with IFTTT for hundreds of different task-managing options, which frankly makes it the best to-do app for my needs. After moving to the Mac, I fell in love with Cultured Code's Things, and I've used it successfully for the last decade.But I do love to play, so I keep five or ten of these apps installed on my Mac. How can the answer be improved? Mac OS X is blessed (or perhaps plagued) with more to-do apps than you could ever use. Our favorite is Wunderlist thanks to its solid set of features, syncing capabilities, cross-platform. Best todo apps for mac.
The Retina Macbook Pro is a great all-around machine, striking a decent balance between display quality and battery performance. You won’t get a whole day out of either the 13-inch or 15-inch version of this laptop, but the display is one of the best in current generation laptops. It’s heavier than the Macbook Air, and nearly twice as thick, but in exchange you get the ability to add more RAM, more storage options, and an overall more powerful computer. If you’re looking for one machine to handle all of your needs, including maybe a little casual gaming, this could easily be the machine for you. The 13-inch MacBook Pro is a top pick for college students because of its excellent cross of price, performance, battery life, features, and support.
The best laptop for your student
Picking the best computer for college is a as simple as knowing what all the best options are, and what kind of user you are buying for. Your portable computer needs could be minimal, or you could want to make your laptop the only computer you need. You may be interested in touch, or you may just want the longest battery life you can get without sacrificing too much else. Either way, there’s at least one great option out there for you.