Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
Beverly asked: “I want to know about the best prices for laptops.”
Beverly, there’s no such thing as a best price for everyone. To give you an idea, an MSI GT Series TITAN 18” laptop will cost you around $4300. If you need the power, it may not be a bad price. It comes with a 1TB SSD, 64GB of RAM, a powerful graphics card, a nice big screen. But for most consumers it would be ridiculous.
For about $185 you can get a 14” HP Stream, that may seem like a very good price for someone looking for a basic Windows computer, but those types of machines tend not to last very long, and they’ll struggle with any task that isn’t basic. It also has 32 GB of storage, which after Windows probably means closer to 16GB that you can actually use.
For most users a good price is somewhere in between, probably something in the $500-$1000 range will satisfy most users.
For example, you can get an ASUS VivoBook Flip with a 14” touchscreen, an included pen, which can function in laptop, tent, and tablet more for $750. This particular laptop comes with 6GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage which should be more than enough for the vast majority of users.
While it’s not the least expensive option, it would probably serve most people well, since it’ll have enough power for typical business and personal activities.
An HP Elite x2 with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD can be had for about $580, it’s very portable and, again, likely enough for most people’s needs.
If you’re leaning more towards consuming content than producing it, you can look at an older Surface. Even a new one can be had for around $800, but the previous model goes for around $350 and it’s a capable device that you can use as a tablet or attach a keyboard and a mouse to.
The reason we bring up consumption over production is that being able to use it in pure tablet mode can be a nice perk for people that mostly want to watch videos, browse the web, or read, but who still want to be able to plug in a keyboard and have a comfortable computer they can use for complex tasks, or extensive typing when they need to.