My school hands out crappy $80 chromebooks, and they're starting to get on my nerves. I'm also a member of my school's robotics team (we do FRC) and the laptop we use is a garbo $100 laptop as well (2 gb ram AFAIK). I'm looking for something to replace both, preferably around $700-800.
I won't be doing any heavy gaming on this; mostly just programming in Java. I might also do some light CAD work if we need to mill out any parts. I'll also be doing schoolwork (mostly just Google Docs) for around 6-7 hrs a day, so good battery life would be nice.
I'm looking at the Acer Swift 3 and the Thinkpad E/T480. My main concern is build quality - I've heard that Acer's laptops are poorly built. I'm used to badly built laptops, but considering how infrequently I use them, I'm not sure how they'd hold up to daily use. Bumping up the E480 to an i7 + rx550 seemed enticing but the thermals drove me away from using a dGPU.
Do you have any suggestions? Thank you