So, I will be attending college as a freshman next year and I am thinking of buying a laptop. Many of my friends are saying that they will be getting some sort of Macbook, but in the past, I have always heard that Macbooks were inferior laptops (aka toasters) when compared to other competitors. Now, I have no experience using a Macbook and only moderate experience with Dell Laptops. From the light searching I have done, I am thinking of either getting a Macbook Pro or a Dell XPS. Each would have an Intel i5 processor; however, I am not necessarily looking at processing power here, more so ease of use. The computer doesn't have to run Minecraft perfectly as my desktop now does. I just need a user friendly, portable, and intuitive computer for use in college next year.
it depends really on what your choice of OS is i personally do not like the mac OS setup so I'd recommend the Dell XPS but they are both decent machines
Although I haven't used a Macbook Pro before (only a very old iMac in my school), I'd just take a Dell laptop, mostly because of Windows - most of the apps are accessible there and it's easy to use. May be cheaper too but Dell is one of the best manufacturers IMO, especially in terms of warranty.
Dell, for all the bad press, does make someplace good laptops. The XPS line is very decent. That said, also look at Lenovo. I used one for 3 years over in Iraq and never had an issue.
I'v had a macbook pro and honestly didn't have a completely bad experience with it, I mean it does have its pro's and con's but honestly i could say i enjoyed my experience using it. Currently i have a razer blade(2015) and overall its amazing. I recommend it but that depends on your money situation as they can get pretty expensive.
I run an ASUS N series atm, if you're looking for good hardware for cheap, N56J(latest of this series) is $800 and is high end with large support for large work while being low cost, works great as a gaming laptop aswell
My personal choice, my gold ol' laptop here, is a Dell Inspiron (2015) with 6 gigs of ram, has an Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3227U CPU @ 1.90GHz with a 64-bit OS and a x64 based processor. it's purchased with Windows 8 home but i upgraded it to windows 10 because i applied to get it when it first came out (it was free for me =D ) sorry if it got technical, but that's basically me explaining my laptop and that i quite like it (on a side note, with some settings modified, i get ~35-42 fps on sf2.5)
x64 based has litterally nothing to do with being good or not, x86 and x64 are CPU instruction sets, and unless you're programming in assembly it REALLY doesn't matter what you use
Friend of me has a new XPS and the keyboard is a nightmare, so also check those little facts before you go for buying some new system xD
I am sure you will love college and I wish you the best of luck during your education experience. I know you said you do not want much but if you are getting a grant to go to school you can include the cost of a laptop in your grant fund request as a item used for schooling and most likely have the system payed for in full. If they will allow you to include the cost of a new laptop for school into your grant then why not go all out and get something like a Alienware Laptop? I mean in all honesty thats is what I would try and do...
lol cheat the system for a free alienware computer (enrolls in college and gets one) heck yeah! 2 days later... (what! a new alienware laptop was released! ughhhhhhh)
I have and Alienware doorstop. When the awesome dual graphics cards go up inside them, you find out it will be 600 bux for a replacement set. you end up withe a flashy doorstop. The asus gaming laptop has held up much better, but its not running SLI so I doubt the heat will be as much of an issue. Literally 4 months out of warranty and the magic smoke come out of the most expensive part of the laptop. Just my experience
Yea, that and buy from microcenter next time. Had a monitor at work die that I got from them as a referbished/repaired model with a 90 day warranty. Died in 6 months, full credit from them toward anything else.
i've seen a 4th generation i3 go like the train that could before, then again that was 7zip on a maximum compression ratio setting... so it was using up 100% of the cpu