Hi, I am looking to buy a new laptop for college. I am currently a freshman in mechanical engineering and will need some thing that can handle programs like AutoCad seamlessly and last at least until I graduate. I have gathered some options below and would love to receive some input on which one you guys think is best. Note that I am not concerned about gaming at all, all I need from this laptop is portability and performance. My budget is $1700. Feel free to suggest anything that is not on this list.
I would get a T series Lenovo for engineering. The T450S. The new Dell XPS 13 or 15 are fantastic. The ZenBook is also great but the chipset might be a tad slower for engineering applications.
Whatever you get make sure it has a solid state hard drive.
The T series is the pro grade line and with the student discount should come in well below your budget. You can also get an extra battery.
I’d second anyone who recommends against an HP product. The brand has really gone south. My HP laptop’s hard drive had to be replaced four times in one year.
First I’d check with your college and see what they service on-campus. Generally Apple products are most reliable and have the best service, especially if you have an on campus apple store ; I’ve had Dell and Lenovo laptops fail and they took 3-4 weeks to return from depot service. Even ‘onsite’ service takes a few days sometimes. I switched to Apple in grad school after my Lenovo failure experience, at least it was easy to sell.
I would probably get a 13" macbook pro with 16Gb ram, or a base model 15" macbook pro with quadcore CPU/16Gb (over budget) . You can also get a free copies of development OS and software from Microsoft DreamSpark, and run Parallels, VMWare or Bootcamp. Most of the other software you will use like Matlab, R and others will work on OSX or Windows. Don’t skimp on the RAM, you will need it all to run those apps.
I would completely advise AGAINST ANY Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft Surface laptops. The laptops are filled with bs software, and are often overpriced. Definitely look into boutique companies, such as Digital Storm or Sager, because for the price you simply cannot beat them in anyway. Especially Sager’s 14 in laptop at 4.4 lbs, you get i7, 500 gb ssd, 970m 3gb, 8gb ram, its nearly perfect for only $1399 and 2 years of warranty.
Not necessarily. Sagers have awful battery life (they ARE gaming laptops). And besides, OP doesn’t need a gtx970m. If you read their post, you’d know that they aren’t concerned with gaming.
Business class laptops often run with little to no bloatware, which is why it’s important to specify what product lines OP would look at.
Edit:
If you buy the machine from microsoftstore.com, it comes with a clean install (I believe). Prices aren’t terrible, either.
I would recommend either the Dell XPS 13 or the Macbook Pro 13" w/ Retina Display. Both have high resolution displays (3200x1800 touchscreen for the Dell, 2560x1600 for the Macbook), great battery life (11+ hours), are portable (less than 3.5 pounds) and are high performance (Intel Core i5 with SSD storage). If you plan on doing some really graphics intensive CAD stuff you may want to consider the 15" Macbook because of the discrete Nvidia GPU, although it will be heavier. You could also look into the Dell XPS 15 if you want Windows. I have had issues with HP build quality so I to would stay away. I like the Macs and the dell because they are really solidly constructed. I currently use a Macbook Air and have dropped it numerous times and it’s held up perfectly. I imagine the Pro would be even better. The Dell is made of carbon fiber and magnesium so I wouldn’t worry about it too much either.
As far as the Microsoft Surface Pro line goes it has no bloatware… It is made by Microsoft and basically has a clean OS. As far as using it for CAD it can be done on the Surface pro 4 but I would get the i5 model with 8GB of RAM. It might not be ideal but it is usable.
Ideally I would suggest the MacBook pro or the Dell XPS line. The Surface Book would work but you’ll need to go over your budget.