Advice asked on portable laptop

[BelgianBear]

What am I looking for? A light and portable Windows laptop with a nice screen and good battery life.

Budget: Preferably under $1500, the budget can be stretched a bit though. 

Nice to haves: Would be nice if the laptop also had some decent speakers to enjoy content with.

I/O: Would like to avoid the dongle life, so a USB A-port and HDMI would be highly considered and an RJ-45 preferred.

 

I'm not sure what to watch out for since comparing laptops can be tricky. I have been on the lookout for a while and some recent laptops that I've been considering will be listed below, but I'm certainly open to others. 

• Asus Zenbook 14 OLED
• Lenovo Yoga 
• Acer Swift GO 14

 

Use case: In September I'll be going to University, so I'm looking for a laptop to comfortably take notes on and get some work done during a whole day on campus and my hour-long train commute. I'm not considering gaming performance since I'm still more than satisfied with my current gaming laptop but is on the older side and only goes about 2 hours on battery and only did about 5 hours in its hay days.

 

Thanks in advance for your ideas and help!

[jaslion]

You can have a good battery life gaming laptop for that price a non intel cpu asus flow x13 or x16 is in budget as well as the asus g14. Both of those devices IF amd cpu versions reach 8hours of battery quite easily.

 

If that isn't important like AT ALL there's many cheaper devices available I'd avoid oled since burn in is still a real thing to contend with.

 

However I'd hold on just a little more since the amd hx370 and hx360 laptops are launching RIGHT NOW as in this week more models are coming out and between now and September at least 10 more as far as I've seen. Ranging from more buget offerings to full on powerhouses. The current easiest to get on is the asus zenbook which seems to be going around 1600 but well it's a zenbook not something you'd normally buy anyway. These things are very very powerfull whilst also being extremely efficient.

 

Else plenty of other 1 gen older amd chips available with 780m graphics which are surprisingly good again too so depending on the gaming laptop you have it may even be outclassed :p.

 

The reason I am overlooking intel right now aside from their all cpu's have a major hardware defect ongoing issue is that their battery life is just behind as well as their on battery performance depending on the device is kinda ass. The config of their cpu's is also a bit weird with their efficient i5 u series having only 2 performance cores + 8 e cores which on paper sounds quite good but in practice here at the office is just kinda poor performance to the point the older ryzen 5600u laptops EASILY beat them in all cases which sucks since these were supposed to replace them. 

 

 

 

 

[BelgianBear]

Hi Jaslion,

 

I'll indeed probably be waiting till the second half of September to maybe be able to make use of a back-to-school deal. But I'm already starting to do some light research to be less overwhelmed then. So I will now for certainly be on the look out for the upcoming AMD HX370 & 360 laptops. Thanks a lot for the advice!

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, BelgianBear said:

Hi Jaslion,

 

I'll indeed probably be waiting till the second half of September to maybe be able to make use of a back-to-school deal. But I'm already starting to do some light research to be less overwhelmed then. So I will now for certainly be on the look out for the upcoming AMD HX370 & 360 laptops. Thanks a lot for the advice!

Entirely loose from that

 

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-rog-flow-x13-13-4-qhd-gaming-laptop-amd-ryzen-9-7940hs-with-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-1tb-ssd-off-black/6578923.p?skuId=6578923

 

This is like a baller laptop