Back-to-School Laptop Buying Guide: Tips and Recommendations

Choosing the right laptop requires understanding personal needs and specifications, rather than simply following trends.

### Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right Laptop for Back-to-School
* 💻  Our goal was to create a back-to-school laptop buyer's guide, but the **complexity of recommending laptops today is significant**.
* 🛍️  Instead of simply recommending specific models like the Dell Inspiron or HP Spectre, this guide aims to **empower you with knowledge** on how to **confidently choose the right laptop for your needs**.
* 🎮  For performance seekers, gaming laptops often provide **superior cooling and upgradeability**, making them a great choice even for non-gamers.
* 🔍  Understanding GPU wattage is crucial, as seen in the comparison between RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 laptops, where the **4060 can outperform the 4070 due to power allocation**.
* 🍏  On the CPU front, Apple’s M3 chips lead in **single-core performance**, while AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series offers **good efficiency**, but be wary of **confusing naming schemes**.
* 💡  When it comes to RAM, **16GB is now the minimum recommendation**, and storage should ideally start at **256GB SSD**, as these are **easily upgradeable later**.
* 📺  Display quality is also important, with IPS panels generally being the **best value for most users**, while **high refresh rates and color accuracy** are key for gamers and creatives alike.
* 🔌  Lastly, don't overlook the importance of **I/O ports and webcam quality**, which can greatly enhance your laptop experience, especially for **remote work and online classes**.

our goal was perfectly simple: to create a back-to-school 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 $1,000 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 supports Apple ProRes recording, has a unique thermal control design to ensure consistent performance, and is compatible with basically anything with a USB-C port. It 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 you think you might like to do someday, maybe if you have time. So, for most people, top-of-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 deal 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 4060. 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 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 every single one of them. Thankfully, Jared's Tech has done all the work for you. He tested a truly incredible number of games and 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 Mac OS, 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 less 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 Snapdragon X chips, which offer unmatched battery life with performance that is comparable to AMD 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 OmniBook 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 they tend to be better spec'd for their price thanks to manufacturer savings 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 performance 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. Universities 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 short circuit, 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 scientific 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 SODIMM 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 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 LTTstore.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 all-rounder, 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 like 5,100 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 16x10 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 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 Hz, 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 unsaturated. 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 the web uses. For those of you who do need more—graphic designers, colorists, 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 E 2000 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, standouts 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 to 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 Dragonfly Elite, Dell Latitude 9440, and Alienware 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 watt-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 contradictor on the same web page. All of this is to say

get your battery life numbers from a reputable source such as short circuit, 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 Qualcomm 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 latter in particular was a game-changer 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 manufacturers these days

leave off USB-A ports, SD card readers, and even headphone jacks in the name of a little bit of weight savings. I'm looking at you, Dell, 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 ProRes 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.

How to Buy a Laptop - Ultimate Guide (2024)

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Recommending a laptop is challenging due to fluctuating prices and varying needs.

The guide focuses on teaching buyers how to choose the right laptop, emphasizing the importance of mid-range machines and gaming laptops for performance.

It also highlights the significance of GPU wattage and offers resources for testing GPU performance, while mentioning Apple's M3 chips as a top choice for single-core performance and battery life.

Finding Deals on Laptops: AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm

Laptops can be expensive, but students and those open to factory refurbished models can find good deals.

AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series offers improved efficiency and battery life, while the confusing naming scheme makes it crucial to look for the right numbers.

Intel's Ultra 100 series provides similar performance to the 13th gen chips, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips offer unmatched battery life, but may have performance issues with non-native Windows applications.

Budget-Friendly Laptops: Performance and Upgrades

Linux apps and budget Windows machines offer better specs for their price, with Acer's models ranging from $230 to $400.

The $300 Aspire Go with a Ryzen CPU is twice as fast as the $230 model, while the $400 Aspire 3 offers 16GB of RAM for better performance.

For those on a tighter budget, used laptops from universities and offices can provide significant savings, and upgrading RAM and storage can also improve performance.

Upgrading Your Laptop: Storage and Display Tips

External SSDs, like the Lexar Armor 700, are a great way to boost your laptop's storage without opening the device.

Avoid hard drives and eMMC for storage, as they offer poor performance and reliability.

When choosing a display, consider panel types (TN, OLED, mini LED, IPS), brightness levels, aspect ratios, and resolution for optimal productivity and viewing experience.

Choosing the Right Laptop Display and Features

Full HD is generally sufficient, with Quad HD offering a sharper image and 4K being less worthwhile due to battery impact.

A higher refresh rate above 60 Hz is beneficial, especially for gaming, but can also enhance overall smoothness for non-gamers.

When selecting a display, aim for near 100% sRGB color coverage and consider a factory-calibrated display for color-critical work.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Laptop

Check the stability of the keys by pressing their edges and testing the force required to actuate them.

Weight and battery life are important, with reputable sources providing the most accurate battery life numbers for comparison.

Look for nice-to-have features like a better webcam, hardware toggles for privacy, quick login options, and sufficient I/O ports.