The Best 'Back-To-School' Laptops

Laptop recommendations for aspiring coders!

With the new academic school year fast approaching and a busy school year ahead, you’ll want to be comfortable knowing that your laptop is taken care of! Here are a couple of laptop recommendations to get you started.

Generally speaking, we would usually recommend spending approximately €600-€850 on a laptop. You certainly can get laptops for less, but they are often false economies and usually it’s worth spending the extra couple of hundred quid to get something that will last! For our courses, we also don’t allow the use of Chromebooks or tablets (iPads & Android), so do be aware of this if you’re thinking about joining our classes 😊

Samsung Galaxy Book

Price: €769

Samsung’s entry level Galaxy Book is a solid and relatively sleek 15.6 inch model that covers all the basics really well. It’s a lot lighter than most laptops (1.6kg) meaning you or your child won’t need to break your back carrying it around from home to school.

The configuration that costs €769 comes with the latest (11th gen) Intel i5 processor, 8GB of Ram and 256GB of storage. There’s a good selection of ports & connections, including two USB-C slots. one USB-A, a full size HDMI a headphone port (for those Zoom calls) and a MicroSD memory card slot.

Battery life is decent at about 5-6 hours hours between charges. The display isn’t touchscreen but it’s non-glare 108p resolution offers a crisp picture for you to keep an eye on your lines of code!

Lastly, at time of writing you get a free pair of Samsung Buds (€179 RRP) when you purchase this laptop & who doesn’t love free stuff!

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go

Price: €739

The 12.4 inch Surface laptop Go is a relatively cheaper model when compared with other Surface options. The biggest attractions of this model are design related. It comes in a choice of 3 colours and is very light (only 1.1kg). It also has a relatively good battery life squeezing out 7-8 hours of on-the-go charge.

The main attraction is of course the touchscreen that works with several stylus models including Mircosoft’s Surface Pen (RRP €115) to the much more affordable Timovo Pen (RRP €35).

It’s also powered using a USB C connection - meaning the charging plug doesn’t need to be a monstrosity of a thing, it can be a simple USB-C(PD) charger.

The main con is the lack of ports. There’s only one USB-C port on the laptop, and one USB-A and a 3.55mm headphone jack. If you envision needing more ports, you’ll likely also need to invest in a dongle adaptor.

It’s also worth flagging that if memory is what you’re looking for, you might be somewhat limited with the base 128GB model, but you will have the option (for a fee) of upgrading to the 256GB model.

In short, this is a great laptop to turn on out of the box and simply get started - whether that be for study or work. It’s light and effective, and comes in at a relatively competitive price point.

Dell Inspiron 15 3000

Price: €649

If there was an all round solid performer, the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 would be it. Although in certain aspects in can feel a little dated quality-wise (e.g. mediocre 720p webcam and 1.9kg weight) - it has a solid keyboard, good screen size (15.6 inch), and the specs will allow you to handle pretty much any task school or college (or coding classes!) can throw at you.

It comes with 8GB of RAM and the latest Intel i5 processor - plus with 256GB of storage, you’ll have plenty of room for saving your work and projects.

If photography or videography is your thing, this model might be useful as it comes with a full-sized memory card reader and a HDMI port. Although you might think these adaptors are industry standard, many modern laptops have removed them and now ask you to pay for dongle adaptors in order to get this functionality (Apple, we’re looking at you…).

The Intel i5 (11th Gen) model also has both types of USB ports as well as a joint headphone/microphone port.

Macbook Air M1 Chip

Price: €999+

The MacBook Air with M1 chip starts at €999 (with no add-ons or upgrades) and is Apple’s entry-level laptop, sitting below the MacBook Pro with M1 that starts at €1,299. These are the first models in Apple’s move away from traditional Intel x86 processors to arm-based chips similar to those used in iPhones and iPads.

The baseline entry model comes with a 13.3” LCD screen and the bullet fast M1 chip. The M1 is faster than any other laptop chip, rivalling the most high-powered desktop chips, while being very power-efficient. 8GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage also helps add to the computer’s speed. The 720p webcam is a little disappointing when compared to the laptops overall quality, but isn’t the end of the world. It’s also very light, weighing only 1.29kg - which is a lot of power packed into a slim machine.

The battery life is also exceptional, with up to 16 hours of working time without needing a charge - meaning you can code away to your heart’s content! Although the laptop is certainly not cheap, you are paying for quality, and quality is certainly what you will get.

Computer Recommendations - 2020

We’ve all been thrust into a brave new world over the past few weeks. Computer hardware is hardly the biggest area where adjustment is needed, but it is the one people have been asking us about, and it’s one of the few areas where we can actually offer meaningful advice.

Our devices at home have probably never been under as much sustained demand as they are currently, with every adult and child in every house dependent on technology to communicate with the outside world and to participate in work, school and play.

Our most common request is something like “I want a windows laptop that’s really cheap/mid-range/future proof”. Let’s take those one at a time.

Budget buy (<€250)

The HP Stream 11 has been our go-to ultra-budget machine for a while now. 2GB of RAM and 32GB storage are both quite limiting, but at €240 it’s a very attractive deal, and a quoted 13 hour battery life is very decent (albeit probably not quite achievable in reality.

(As with all the links in this piece, we don’t explicitly endorse any retailer, and we aren’t taking a cut. Shop around!)

Mid range (€400-700)

If you can stretch a little more you can get a lot for your money in the €400-700 range. We’d always recommend looking for 8GB of RAM and an SSD (solid state drive - a modern alternative to the old-school, spinning disk HDD) with a bare minimum 128GB of storage, preferably more.

Processor-wise you should ideally look for an Intel Core i3 or Core i5 (or Core i7 if you’re pushing the budget a bit further), or any of the AMD Ryzen chips. The difference between all of these chips is obviously important as you move to more expensive machines, but at the this price point any of them will fit the bill. Less desirable are the older/cheaper Intel Celeron/Pentium/Atom chips and the AMD A-series chips.

That’s all a bit much for the non-technical, so let’s get specific. Adrian Weckler had a recent piece (worth reading in its entirety) where he recommended this Inspiron 15 3000. At €599 it ticks a LOT of boxes: i5 processor, 8GB RAM and a massive 512GB SSD. There are slightly cheaper versions available too - this €499 version looks pretty good to us too. Both come with Full HD screens.

Bigger budgets (€700+)

Our favourite ultra-premium recommendation is the Dell XPS 13 - expect to pay well upwards of €1000, and don’t bother with any of the lower specced models (there are a few with 128GB SSDs which really aren’t worth the money). The 15” model (the XPS 15) is also a powerhouse.

That recommendation is tempered slightly by the new trend for ultra-premium laptops to dispense with standard USB ports in favour of the new flavour, USB C. While USB C is undoubtedly the future, you may want to budget for a few adaptors while we’re waiting on that future to arrive!

Coming into this price range also brings Apple computers into your price range, and in spite of recent keyboard issues with some of the Macbook Pro models there is scarcely a bad machine available from Apple - but you’ll need to get your wallet warmed up first!

The new Macbook Air, from €1229, has been very well received, and is probably the go-to model for most people. Like the XPS 13 it has ditched the old school USB ports, but it has at least dispensed with the derisory 128GB storage options. The base model, with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD, is probably the one to go for, and should be more than capable of any office or education task for years to come. The 10+ hour battery life is not to be sneezed at either.

Then there’s the generally excellent Macbook Pros. Ignoring the model with 128GB of storage you’re looking at anything from €1,799 for the 13” model up to €3,299+ for the high spec 16” version. If you need them, great, but probably overkill for most of our students.

Other options

Buying a new laptop is in many ways the easy option, but there are other choices too. When we were adding 20 machines to our mobile lab we went to RefreshedByUs.com and bought refurbished laptops with upgraded RAM and SSDs. Again, 8GB RAM and an SSD is your golden rule here! You may have to settle for something a bit bulkier than a brand new system, but this Dell Latitude E6420 is only £268 (~€300) with those upgrades, and if portability isn’t a concern would make a great home computer.

If you have the space you could of course also consider a desktop PC. While it may seem like everyone these days buys laptops, when we were kitting out our new office in 2017 we opted for desktop computers with huge, 28” 4K monitors. You can get a LOT more for your money when you aren’t cramming it into a laptop case, especially if you’re willing to buy the parts and assemble yourself. But that’s probably a post for another day…