Laptop Recommendations
What is the best laptop to buy as a computer science and electrical engineering student? Keeping in mind: portability, performance and affordability.
I'm an electrical engineering student myself, though I'm focusing on computer engineering side.
I have 3 laptops that I use.
I mostly use my Acer C720 Chromebook with crouton installed to dual boot Ubuntu. Cost me $105, has an 8 hour battery life, is light like a feather, and has been able to throw everything I throw at it so far. Even with 2 gigs of ram, I can open up dozens of tabs. (I have 25 open on chrome right now with no slowdown). The storage space is a bit low at 16gb, but its an easy upgrade to a bigger one, 128 or 256gb is very affordable now (m.2 ssd only). The i3 version with 4 gigs of ram is probably more than enough for your classes. I highly recommend it.
My other laptops is a Lenovo Y500 which is a powerhouse. I use it mostly for gaming and windows dev. Its shortcoming is that the battery life is 2.5 hours, which is understandable since it has SLI graphic cards and a i7 HQ model. The current version of this is the Y50, which packs a GTX 960M, which is great if you're a gamer as well, though don't expect battery to be better than 4 hours or so.
My last laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X61t. Like other users suggested, used Thinkpads are some of the best value in computing. I spent 120 for this one, and it has a built in wacom digitizer, 4 gigs of ram, and a core 2 duo. It is noticeably slower than my chromebook, but thats probably because I'm running windows on it instead of Ubuntu. I can highly recommend getting a thinkpad and making some upgrades, namely an SSD and maybe a ram upgrade. They're sturdy like tanks so you don't have to worry about damaging them.
If its mostly browsing, music, documentation and a bit of development - then a netbook would meet all your requirements. I bought myself an asus x205ta laptop, and can't recommend it enough. It has good build quality, and has one of the best screens at its price range.
Weighs less than 1 kg (~980 gms), A 11.6 screen size, easily one of the best trackpads in its price range, full chiclet style keyboard, 2GB ram that can easily handle a dozen open tabs.. Although the built-in storage is a mere 32GB of which approx. 20GB is available to the user. This can be expanded with a microsd card. As i said, it all depends on your use cases. For me, this is the laptop with the right tradeoffs ( tradeoffs i was willing to give up anyway ).
Did i mention, the sound quality is good too. No usb 3.0 though.
I have setup vagrant on this machine and ssh into it to do any linux stuff ( am a sys admin and i like to have a terminal to try out stuff / setup local dev environment ).
Offtopic, but I have the same model and the trackpad is atrocious! And the wifi disconnects every 15 minutes.
And I got it from microsoft store as a signature edition model.
On the positive side, it is extremely lightweight and the battery lasts for a long time.
I would also like to add, that i was impressed with system76 laptops. I seriously considered buying them, but i changed course since i was unsure of the after sales service since mine would come under international sales.
Btw, i get about 10 hours of battery usage :)
Thinkpads have the advantage that they are available cheap refurbished and you still get access to spare parts (anything from keybord, screen, mainboard...)
x201t is a cheap tablet PC with digitzer, available with i7 processor extended battery life about 8hrs.
T410 and T510 are nice ones too.
each about $200-$250 refurbished, add RAM+SSD for $350 total.
Samsung, Toshiba, Thinkpads all can be found refurbished with a reasonable warranty and are of decent quality. I personally, go with Toshiba and Samsung over others just because my luck has been awesome with them. Apple is my primary development machine now, but even a low end version isn't a budget machine.
By the time you buy a refurb and swap the SSD and Ram you are looking at ~$500 is my bet. Say $300 for the machine, $120 for the SSD and $80-100 for Ram + paying taxes and any shipping etc.
portability: 0.76 x 12.46 x 8.7 in * 3.46 lbs * 6-7 hours battery
performance: i7-4600U * 8GB * 256 GB SSD * 12.5" 1080p touchscreen (very bright too) * awesome keyboard * good trackpad (if you click over the raised nubs in the top center you get a middle click which is handy too) * convertible with very sturdy hinges * overall superb build quality (has passed a number of MIL-spec tests) * all hardware has linux support
affordability: seems like they are going for $700-800 for refurb. w/ man. warranty on eBay http://www.ebay.com/dsc/Laptops-Netbooks-/175672/i.html?_fro...
1. The whole point of a laptop is portability (but not to the excess of a device that doesn't sit on a table with an attached keyboard. You'll find tons of "power" users that justify their MacBook Pro with a docking station to a 27" monitor, an attached mouse, a bigger keyboard, and, and, and... why not just get a iMac or Windows-desktop at that point? They think it's the best of both worlds, but the reality (for me) is that my data is synced online (via iCloud, dropbox, and other tools) and that having 'one machine to rule them all' seems pointless if I'm trying to dock the thing and really make it two machines. Also, again, portability. No Pro comes close to the portability of an Air. I wanted as absolutely as light and small as possible (I hear the new MacBook (2 lbs) could also be good, but I don't know about it's power internally).
2. I did not want Windows. Why? Besides that it blows chunks on any sort of development standards? Because of two reasons: First, all development tutorials are almost always done in Macs with long convoluted exceptions for Windows. If I was doing .NET development, I would of course consider Windows, but unless I worked in an exclusive MS environment, with no outside coding interests, I'd still just install parallels or something and use my Mac. There are some naysayers who will point out minor differences between OS X and "true Linux". As far as I'm concerned, they might as well point out differences between Linux and Unix. Nobody runs a 'real' machine only on Linux except very obscure people with long beards who think the MP3 is the death of music. Sorry, but I can't relate. Which brings me to subpoint two... That I want my machine to "just work" for all OTHER aspects of computing that I use it for besides development. Meaning, I'm happy to hack around with Ruby on Rails, iOS development, WordPress plugins, and the like, but I want my music to "just work", my contacts to work (and auto-sync with my iPhone), and for the rest of my life to be as simple as possible so that I can save my brainpower for becoming the best programmer possible, not so I can spend a Saturday afternoon wondering how to sync my playlists on my laptop with my iPod so that I can listen to cool music while coding. Or having to hack some schema to see my family's pictures while I'm on a business trip. No, the simple matter of the fact is that Apple makes everything else super-easy. Some developers seem to think that its a weakness to carry anything but a command-line tool to create their offline blog posts - and hey, that's cool and all - but I have a life and my education and career is one thing, and the rest of my life I prefer the simple. Sorry, but basically, I've had it after 20 years of Windows.
3. After having a few 11" Chromebooks for a while, I realized that 11" is actually a BETTER thing because I can focus on just what's on screen. Big screens might be good for designers, or when working on storyboards in iOS (but really, how long are you in that mode, versus looking at code?), but for the most part, it's just more distractions. I love Mac notification controls - very precise and all in one place (unlike Windows). There is a 13" Air for the compromisers, but again, I have found the portability is the best factor. Most people don't even realize I have a laptop on my person when I whip it out.
4. I would say that if you can afford it, to get the better processors, more memory and storage. If you really want to multi-purpose it, get an external HDD and a Super-Drive for backups and Time Machine (but leave them at home when traveling).
5. They keyboard on the Mac is still hard to beat. The screens are okay (and you can go Retina now for the new MB), but honesty, you don't need Retina for typing code or reading. That's just crazy talk.
Bottom line: Keep it simple, stay with something strong (metal), highly portable, useful (in all other aspects) and from a company that supports quality development. You'll be using it a lot, so make it easy to carry, type, and get stuff done on it.