What is a good laptop?

If you have even a shred of computer expertise, one of the things that everyone in your life (from friends to distant relatives to strangers on the Internet) will ask you is: Good laptop What is it and what are its features?

What are the characteristics of a good laptop?

Unfortunately, the answer to this question, like most things in life, is subjective. Sometimes I hate a laptop that my colleagues like and vice versa. (Of course, I’m always right. Don’t listen to them.)

But this question made me take a step back and think to myself, what is a good laptop?

First of all, it’s much easier to think about what makes a bad laptop. One hour of battery life is not good. A USB-C port is not good. It takes 12 minutes to set up? Not good. Does it cost $8,000? Probably not good unless it comes with a free car or something.

But I think the question of what is good is much harder, because a lot of devices depend on the audience and how they use them. Seven hours of battery life might be necessary for a good ultraportable, but not for a good gaming device. A discrete GPU is probably needed for a good gaming laptop, but for a student laptop it’s certainly a bit different.

There are a lot of features (specific ports, screen resolution and refresh rate, keyboard, frame size) that people can reasonably disagree about their value. But I think there’s a set of things that a general purpose laptop (like anything remotely resembling a MacBook Air) needs to have to be “good”. If you are buying a general purpose laptop, you need to make sure that the laptop you buy meets these criteria.

Screen resolution It should be at least 1080p, and if you see a laptop with a screen lower than this resolution, those models are not good. (On screens 16 inches or larger, you can actually see the pixels with your eyes.)

At least two ports and a headphone jack It is another thing that we need at least. I wish I could put a much higher number here, but many of the best laptops on the market today come with exactly two USB-C ports and a headphone jack. I don’t care how much you love your Thunderbolt dock, a laptop is no good with less than two ports.

If five Google Chrome tabs make your laptop chassis turn into a toaster and laptop sound symphony orchestra, your laptop is not good.
Keyboard backlight, is essential for late night work and is especially useful for people with low vision. Good laptops need it.

Keyboards with a minimum 1 mm height tolerance. It makes perfect sense that we love smoother keyboards. However, even if you like a flat keyboard, I promise you that you don’t want keys less than 1mm apart.
Battery life of seven hours or more for public use. There’s no excuse for five-hour battery life (even at the low prices) in this category. (Of course, this is the opinion of the author of the article, not the translator! In our dear country, due to the high prices, there are much lower standards in all these categories)
A usable processor! Let’s face it, the era of the Celeron processor is over! A Ryzen or Intel processor is the least we can afford.
RAM and storage. For a Windows laptop, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is the minimum a good laptop should have. I’ve experienced this with 128GB laptops, Windows itself takes up a lot of that space, leaving you with very little capacity. I know sometimes people see these models as good buys for their kids, but I’ve talked to kids about this and they need more.

Now, if you’re shopping for a specific purpose, not all of these apply and there may be others.

What are the characteristics of a good laptop for university? The portability of a good laptop is very important for a student.
What is a good laptop for business? build quality It’s something budget-minded people can get for lower prices in the general space, but business laptops, as a category, are expensive and need to stand the test of time to earn their value.

A good business laptop should be made of aluminum, carbon fiber, or other non-plastic material, and the frame should not bend anywhere when you rotate the screen or press the keyboard. Generous storage space and excellent security features also make a good business laptop affordable.

Good laptop for gaming? A good laptop for gaming is a laptop that gives you both a good image resolution and on the other hand a good configuration for the price you pay.