For College and Beyond! Need a high end Laptop. Macbook Pro? $2500 Budget

[Pyr0monk3y]

I'm having a terrible time convincing myself to buy something other than a macbook.  Don't get me wrong, I like macbooks, I just have this feeling I'm overlooking something.  If you could read through my ramblings and reassure me or make a recommendation, I would really appreciate it.

 

I have seen the razer blade, dell xps 15, and I work at a lenovo dealer.  I have problems with all of those options.  The razer doesn't quite have the resolution I'd like, the XPS has a very high res display but 8.1 sucks at scaling (not impressed with quality of materials either), and after supporting lenovo products for customers, I really don't want to go that direction.  Some might say I'm too picky but for $2500, I hope you can understand my hesitation to compromise.

 

I'm really drawn to the 13" Macbook Pro.  It hits all the marks for battery life, build quality, screen resolution and portability.  I'm ready to submit an order for a macbook but I wanted to reach out one last time to make sure I'm not overlooking something.

 

*I stole this from Reddit*

•  Country of purchase: US
• Budget range: $2500
• Purpose: College laptop, photo and video editing.   (I use: Microsoft office, Adobe premier, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver)
• Screen size preference:13"
• OS preference (Windows/ Mac/ Linux): None. 
• Gaming requirements (example games and desired fps/settings): CS 1.6 will keep me occupied until I can get home to my desktop.
• Performance requirementss: I would like to use it for reviewing in-car video and telemetry at the race track.  I need ram and battery life.  8GB is barely sufficient on my desktop for editing 1 hour chunks of video and overlaying telemetry. 

My biggest needs are battery life and build quality.  I'll be a college student and I spend my weekends at the track racing my car or supporting other teams.  We use cameras and other gear to gather data which has to be analyzed all day long.  I'll overlay our data and render it so I or the driver can review the video over lunch and at the end of the day.  Nothing needs to be super fast, just needs to get done.  I'm fully prepared to use VMware or bootcamp to run windows 7 for certain tasks.  I want this to be the last laptop I buy at least until I graduate college.

I really appreciate the help!

[Katsu-K1L]

http://www.amazon.com/G750JZ-DS71-17-3-inch-Gaming-GeForce-Graphics/dp/B00IAACWH6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1404845577&sr=8-3&keywords=ASUS+GAMING+LAPTOP

How about this?

Asus laptops have excellent build quality

it has enough ram

SSD

1TB HDD

i7 for your editing needs

and a GTX 880M for playing pretty much any game on High - Ultra

[ROK]

The new razer blade has a 3200x1800 display.

I'm in the same market and find myself waiting for the broadwell MacBooks as I am not in urgent need of a laptop. Battery life and a slim, well built device is key IMO.

[NInety]

For video editing/rendering, you might want a workstation GPU. You're going to want a high resolution screen above 15". You're going to want more than 8GB RAM too. Here's what I got.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834300698

[Wferr]

i would wait for the broadwell macbook pro with retina maxed out.

[qwertywarrior]

dont recommend a razer laptop for gaming

my friend bought one it sounded like a jet plane

the GPu burned and died the next day

 

never buy thin gaming laptops

 

since u dont want to buy a lenovo then buy a macbook

[Pyr0monk3y]

What kind of performance bumps can we expect from broadwell?  From what I have read so far they are only shrinking the die this time around. 

[ROK]

What kind of performance bumps can we expect from broadwell? From what I have read so far they are only shrinking the die this time around.

Main thing is much lower power consumption which means more battery life and less heat. We might see some DDR4 laptops as well.

Also, the Gigabyte aorus line is a line of some great sleek gaming laptops. Gigabyte designed the first razer blade, and the aorus has some damn nice build quality.

[qwertywarrior]

What kind of performance bumps can we expect from broadwell?  From what I have read so far they are only shrinking the die this time around. 

with a shrink comes higher clocks and lower temps

 

thats pretty much it and Broadwell will adopt the Multi-Chip Package design which also means better power efficiency