Best Cheap Laptops For College Students 2020 - The recommendations are freely chosen by the editors. Purchases made through the following links may earn us and our publishing partners a commission.
The mission is to help you buy the best stuff and get the most out of what you already have. Our team of product experts thoroughly review every product we recommend to help you cut through the clutter and find what you need.
Best Cheap Laptops For College Students 2020
The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus sits at the intersection of productivity and gaming thanks to its hardware typically found in budget mid-range gaming laptops. Read more
Microsoft Surface Go 2 Review 2020: A Small, But Mighty Laptop
Acer has finally entered the OLED laptop game with the value-focused new Swift 3. It has more cons than pros, but it's a solid, fast machine that's still worth the price. Read more
The HP Envy x360 is a great 2-in-1 laptop. It's well built and fast enough for most tasks. Read more
The new MacBook Air looks the same as always, but its incredible battery life and powerful new M1 processor won us over. Read more
Apple's MacBook Pro 14 gets an M2 Pro chip upgrade, improving on its predecessor's excellent performance and class-leading battery life. Read more
Best Budget Laptop 2023: Our Favourite Low Cost Picks
For students of all ages, a reliable laptop can mean the difference between a passing grade and missing your final paper deadline. To take some of the stress out of the decision, we tested a variety of Windows machines, MacBooks, 2-in-1s, and more to find the best laptops for students.
Our top pick for student laptops is the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (available at Dell), which has more graphics power than standard productivity laptops thanks to its discrete graphics card. It's also the consistent best performer in all of our benchmark tests, even with the best gaming laptops under $1,000.
Students who need a traditional laptop and prefer to use Windows will benefit from Dell's Inspiron 14 Plus, a classy all-rounder that outperforms most Apple MacBooks. The screen isn't particularly sharp or bright, but colors are vibrant and contrast is decent. It also has a comfortable and responsive low-profile keyboard, similar to Dell's XPS laptops.
The audio quality is soft and thin, with no bass and little mid-range, but somehow it's loud. You can clearly hear podcasts or other audio with rich dialogue from up to 30 feet away.
Best Laptops For College Students In 2020 In India
Its battery life is low for a productivity laptop, but 7.5 hours isn't bad. The notoriously power hungry Intel chips make it hard to find a laptop this good with longer battery life. But with a little planning, you can easily keep your laptop charged and leave the power pack at home.
The Inspiron 14 Plus is a great machine but hard to count. Still, it's a great laptop for students. It's a fast PC with a great chassis, a decent battery and a great screen.
The Acer Swift 3 OLED has a beautiful display that any student will appreciate – it's one of the best laptops with an OLED display for the price.
During testing, we measured a peak nighttime brightness of 421 nits, which is more than most people need from a laptop. The Swift 3's OLED display covers 99.1% of the PCI-P3 color gamut, as well as 100% of the sRGB gamut and 97.4% of the Adobe RGB gamut.
Best Macbooks For College Students In 2023
The Swift 3 OLED also features an Intel H-series processor, which is more commonly found in gaming laptops. (Most other mid-range laptops use one of Intel's slower P-series processors.) While it's not as fast as Apple's M2 chips, it beats Apple's M1 Pro by single-core and multi-core processing power.
With just under six hours of battery life, however, the Swift 3 ranks near the bottom in productivity among the laptops we tested last year. The price and OLED screen make it a great value, but keep in mind that other laptops are more aesthetically pleasing, have better key feel, and are thinner and lighter.
HP's Envy x360 is the best budget option for students who need the flexibility of a 2-in-1 laptop. There are also several configurations available, including a 32GB RAM version, a 2 TB and one with a faster AMD Ryzen 5 7530U processor.
The Ryzen 5 5625U processor is no slouch when it comes to performance. In all of our benchmarking data, the HP Envy x360 is one of the best performing laptops under $1,000. Battery life on this laptop is also excellent, thanks in part to the power-efficient processor. The 51 watt-hour battery can be charged for more than eight hours.
Best Amazon Prime Day Laptop Deals Of The Early Access Sale
Typing on this laptop is comfortable and the keyboard has large, springy keys that are perfect for working on papers or reports. The trackpad is also well-built and responds to taps and complex, multi-touch gestures quickly and accurately.
We want to make HP easy on bloatware, as we've removed more than 15 pre-installed programs that offer everything from cloud storage to free antivirus software trials.
The Apple MacBook Air M1 isn't the latest version of this popular laptop, but it's just as good as the MacBook Air M2 and cheaper. The faster clock speed of the M2 processor will not have a significant impact on the type of work that most undergraduate or graduate students do during their academic career. That's why we think that, for the money, it's a better choice for students.
The MacBook Air M1 has the same aluminum chassis and Retina display that we loved in the previous 2020 Intel MacBook Air. Since you can't upgrade MacBook M1s after purchase, we recommend you go with a model with at least 512 GB of storage.
Best Back To School Deals (2021): Laptops, Headphones, And More
With a surprisingly good battery life of nearly 12 hours, performance that beats most Windows laptops, and an incredibly smooth trackpad and touch keyboard, it should come as no surprise that the MacBook Air M1 has become so popular. Unless you specifically need Windows 11, the MacBook Air is a great all-nighter laptop for writing essays and streaming high-resolution video.
Apple's MacBook Pro 14 M2 Pro is a jack of all trades. It's fast, super portable, packs a stunning display in a slim profile, and can get an incredible 24 hours of battery life, the longest of any laptop we've tested.
It outperforms most laptops with 12th Gen Intel or AMD Ryzen 6000 chips (even the current generation), achieves extreme brightness levels in HDR content thanks to mini-LED, Apple's Liquid Retina XDR display, and still offers more hardware upgrades than most Windows laptops. of similar size. However, the MacBook Pro 14 M2 Pro's $2,000 price tag is steep.
There's no technical reason Apple can't make this laptop with a standard M2 chip at a lower price, and there's an awkward gap between the Pro 14 and the Pro 13, which starts at $1,300.
Top Laptops For Architects And Designers (new For 2023)
Windows alternatives like the Dell XPS 13 and the HP Specter x360 are attractive alternatives at lower prices. But they can't beat Apple on battery life, and they struggle to deliver the same performance on both the CPU and GPU without increasing the weight or size.
The Acer Swift Go 16 is faster than our top pick in almost every way, but it's often the more expensive of the two, and its graphics power can't match the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus, making it a machine most used But if one of your must-haves is a 13th generation Intel processor
It chews through large Excel spreadsheets with complex formulas and data, and its processor keeps up with (or beats, as tested) Apple's MacBook Pro 14 M2 Pro. The integrated graphics performance is enough for "light" games if you need a break from your work.
One thing we didn't like about the Swift Go 16 was how hot it got under load. (We attribute this to the H-series chip making a lot of power inside). Its battery life is a touch shorter than the Dell Inspiron 14, but the way this laptop handles thermals is no less impressive than our top pick. You don't have to worry about the laptop getting hot to set up your laptop, but it may be uncomfortable for some.
Best Student Laptops 2023: Back To School Devices To Suit All Budgets
The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i is a solid and reliable 2-in-1 laptop that starts at $650, a more affordable price for students looking to buy a new laptop than the others on this list. The model cost us $800, and that's it
Its processor runs on Intel's 12th generation Core i7 H series chips, has all kinds of ports you could need and also
More expensive than the real thing. We were very impressed with the responsive touchscreen, an important aspect of any 2-in-1 laptop.
Screen brightness is lower than we'd like, but it only starts to cause glare issues if you're using the laptop outside on a very sunny day. You also want to listen to rich, layered audio, such as music, through headphones. The laptop's speakers are small and quiet compared to a 5th generation iPad Air.
The Best Cheap Gaming Laptops For 2023
MSI's Prestige 13 Evo is one of the slimmest laptops on the market, and its overall design is one of its biggest selling points, enough to rival the likes of the Dell XPS and Apple MacBook Air. The keyboard subtly balances a streamlined design with perfect key spacing to accommodate a wide range of hand sizes
Best laptops for college students, best budget laptops for college students 2020, best laptops for college students cheap, best laptops college students, best 2020 laptops for college students, best hp laptops for college students 2020, best affordable laptops for college students 2020, cheap laptops for college students 2020, cheap laptops college students, best windows laptops for college students 2020, best laptops for college students 2020 reddit, laptops for college students