I was asked to shop for a laptop for my son for school use recently. Hence I did some research for a few days before going down to the tech mall to purchase one.
The more I read into laptops reviews, the more I was amazed at the choices that are now available. Prices have been progressively dropping but new ones are getting ever more powerful, leaving workstation PCs in the dust. One can now do almost anything on laptops and portability is a given. Thanks to the Apple MacBook Air revolution a few years back, you will realize that most manufacturers are now producing Apple Air look-alikes.
In terms of the power of laptops, the CPU should be at least an i5 and with a minimum of 8 GB RAM, preferrable DDR4. Hard disk (HD) drives are so yesterday now. A serious road warrior must have Solid State Drives (SSD) instead of HD as boot up times will improve tremendously to less than a minute. A minimum SSD capacity of 256 GB or more is ideal.
Based on the specifications I wanted, the pricing is generally around the $1,000 to $2,000 range. Every 3 to 6 months I wait, the prices will drop by a few hundred dollars easily. That is how competitive the market is now. About 5 years ago, I asked a global laptop manufacturer what their profit margins were. His answer shocked me. Only 1 to 2% !!!
The China manufacturers are coming on strong in this area. Lenovo (formerly IBM) and XiaoMi are leading the charge, with the Taiwanese names (Acer, Asus) close behind.
I finally settled on a Lenovo laptop that is as thin as an Apple Air and in Champagne Gold too!
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