Every now and then I think about upgrading my Windows laptop. At the moment I have a Samsung that may be seven or eight years old. It has a 17.5 inch screen, a 2GHz Pentium, a 500GB HDD, 4GB of RAM and a basic video card. The body is plastic and the keyboard is only for light use, and I mean maybe ten minutes at a time. It does the job I want it to do, and I suspect the video card is a part of that.
So I’ve been looking at laptops and mini-PC’s.
At the bottom end of the price range, say about £300 or so, are Celerons and Pentium with 2GB of RAM. At the other end are 4k video editing machines for photographers. These have GeForce 1040 or above video cards, 8GB+ of RAM, an i7 HQ, some SSD and a 1TB drive or a lot more SSD, and USB 3. / 3.1 to connect external HDD’s with decent transfer rates. MacBook Pros and Dell XPS 15’s are get a lot of mentions. (High-end gaming laptops are way over what I need.) These machines have good keyboards and aluminium unibodies (the Dell is almost an aluminium unibody).
In between is a mass of i5 / i7 U-series machines, with or without graphics cards, random amounts of SSD, rarely an HDD, random combinations of USB / HDMI / VGA ports and build quality that ranges from awful to okay-I-guess. These can vary in price between about £600 - £1,000. The only way to make sense of these component salads is to assume that Wintel manufacturers design a high-end model, a low-end model and a mid-range model, and all the others are put together from excess parts and left-overs.
The decisions are much simpler than all those fancy specs and combinations make it look.
Want to browse the net, do text-based work, basic photographic editing and adjustment, and send e-mails? But don’t do 1080p and upwards video-editing or scientific computing? Take a serious look at an iPad and an external keyboard.
Get a Macbook Pro if you want to do iOS, Mac or UNIX / Linux development.
Get the high-end £1,100+ video-editing capable machines if you want: the aluminium body, high-quality keyboard and sharp screen; a large HDD; to use Adobe Creative Cloud or the equivalents on 1080p and 4k movies.
Want to do lots of calculations but not much graphics? (Very rare). Then you can get one of the component-salads with an i7-HQ, 256GB of SSD and integrated graphics.
Sustained daily typing and use - because you’re an author, or journalist or other content-producer? Consider a Mac Air or one of the top-end machines. (The price difference is not that large, especially if it’s how you make your money.)
Anything else? Get the mid-range Wintel.
It’s the build quality. Once you’ve had Mac, you can’t go back. At work, they hand out POS HP’s with Win 7, VGA adapters, and a keyboard with the Page Up / Down / End / Home keys in the wrong place. But that’s institutional companies for you. Cheap. The Adobe Creative Cloud Suite user in the family does so on an MSI gaming machine with an i7 HQ and 16GB of RAM with a 17-inch screen. It’s wicked fast but it’s got that corporate cheap build feel. And he doesn’t work for a big company.
I don’t want to come home and use something similar to the junk they give us at work. It’s my home, not an office. Computers are one of the things I’m willing to Pay Good Money for. (Not Silly Money, but Good Money.) As a tool to do a job. And the video-editing performance laptop is a tool for a job I’m not going to do.
The outsider for my needs is an Asus mini-PC, which has the 1TB drive, an i5-7U series, a mid-range graphics card, some SSD, Wireless-AC, and ports out the wazoo. It can drive two external screens, which is a nice-to-have I’ve wanted for a while. It will be an ace media centre, but would need hi-fi to make nice sound, but then, so does a laptop. It costs £650 and already I have an external screen (the TV), a mouse and keyboard. At a pinch I could get a 21-inch monitor for about £150 and work on a table if I wanted to use it as a computer. Back to the future.
PS: I didn’t do any of this. I did something else instead that didn’t involve spending money. I’ll talk about that later.
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