I am looking for a new laptop for my sister. Her budget is 650€. What laptop is the best overall? Macbooks are excluded, as she doesn’t like them. The OS is not important, I can install the OS myself. It shouldn’t be a gaming laptop and it also should have a long battery life. No ARM or RISC-V laptops please. Build quality should be decent.
Thanks in advance.
edit: specific requirements
- Display size: 13 to 15 inches
- Display resolution: +1920x1080px
- Aspect ratio: 16:9
- Thickness: Slim
- Screen color accuracy is not important
- Screen should be anti glare
- RAM: +8GB SODIMM DDR5
- Storage: +512GB SSD
- Touchscreen: preferred
- Foldable screen: preferred
- Upgradeability: RAM and the SSD should be upgradeable
- Keyboard: QWERTZ, DE-AT
- GPU performance does not matter, would be only useful for video hardware acceleration
- CPU performance does matter
Are you married to a new one?
I pretty much exclusively buy used ~3 year old Thinkpads which meet all of your specs and then some. My last two were X1 carbons (7th gen and now a 9th gen). Each cost me about $450.
This was going to be my answer. I only buy used business-grade laptops. Thinkpads are the obvious choice, but I’ve also had good experiences with HP Probook and Elitebook models too.
Where do you usually go for the used ones?
Refurbishers on eBay
She does want a brand new one, yes. Obviously used ones could get her a better one but she just doesn’t want them.
Why?
Ah, well, that limits things a bit then.
I have refined tastes when it comes to laptops, but I’m also cheap, so lightly used high end models are right up my alley. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any [brand new ones] I would stand behind that are in that price range other than maybe a Macbook Neo, but you specifically ruled out ARM (they’re also not supported by Ashai Linux yet, either).
Sorry.