1000 or Below Laptop for College

Honos · August 3, 2023

Hello, I need a laptop for college but I don't know what to get. I don't intend on gaming with it; however, I would like it to be fast enough so that im not waiting around for programs/pages to load like I did with my schools chromebook. I also might do CAD stuff on it? I'm not really sure what else besides writing papers and browsing, but I will be in engineer school. Any suggestions or help will be appreciated, I never bought or owned a laptop before, so thank you alot for your help!

Catzzye · August 3, 2023

You don't need to go super hard for your use case it seems.

I still recommend getting a dedicated GPU just so the tasks that you do are accelerated, but you can aim for the Nvidia -50 class paired with a decent enough CPU.

For the rest, having a good battery, build quality and I/O are always great to have.

Just some things to keep in mind.

Good luck!

P.S. If you're having trouble deciding between few models, ask here!

Darkseth · August 3, 2023

Heya. If all your Applications run on Apple Silicon, get a base Macbook Air M1 or M2.

If it has to be Windows, Lenovo Ideapad 5 Pro series is really great. Solid quality, great screen, good performance.

Slottr · August 3, 2023

1 minute ago, Darkseth said:

Heya. If all your Applications run on Apple Silicon, get a base Macbook Air M1 or M2.

Adding on: Apple has very good student discounts. Make sure you take advantage of this if you do go with a macbook.

djksm · August 3, 2023

35 minutes ago, Honos said:

Hello, I need a laptop for college but I don't know what to get. I don't intend on gaming with it; however, I would like it to be fast enough so that im not waiting around for programs/pages to load like I did with my schools chromebook. I also might do CAD stuff on it? I'm not really sure what else besides writing papers and browsing, but I will be in engineer school. Any suggestions or help will be appreciated, I never bought or owned a laptop before, so thank you alot for your help!

I also do cad and my 8gb 128gb macbook air m1 works just fine. It is also pretty fast for everything else. I got it for 849 dollars at best buy. I would recommend speccing up though. If you need it cheaper, then buy refurbished

Agall · August 3, 2023

41 minutes ago, Honos said:

Hello, I need a laptop for college but I don't know what to get. I don't intend on gaming with it; however, I would like it to be fast enough so that im not waiting around for programs/pages to load like I did with my schools chromebook. I also might do CAD stuff on it? I'm not really sure what else besides writing papers and browsing, but I will be in engineer school. Any suggestions or help will be appreciated, I never bought or owned a laptop before, so thank you alot for your help!

9 minutes ago, Darkseth said:

Heya. If all your Applications run on Apple Silicon, get a base Macbook Air M1 or M2.

^^ M1/M2 macbook air/pro are the best general purpose laptops out there. If everything you need can run on it, then its by far the best option and fall below $1k.

M1/M2 Apple silicon appears to support AutoCAD. I'd just grab the list of software you'll be using for the program and we can work out whether it'll be supported.

Otherwise, a basic Windows laptop within the budget will do nicely. $1k is a decent budget, where you can either get a budget gaming laptop or an ultrabook in that price range with solid specs and decent battery life.