Besides which university to go to, and which halls of residence to live in, the tech you bring with you to campus is one of the biggest decisions to make when you go to university.
And given that many unis have moved to predominately online teaching, having a laptop able to handle streaming lectures and the programs usually used on computers on campus is vital.
Harry Pike, who hopes to study management at Bristol University, debated which laptop to get for months. A lockdown job at Tesco that he got when his college was cancelled allowed him to earn enough money to buy a MacBook Pro (£1,299). He also paid to double the storage to 512GB – easily enough to store his whole programme’s worth of lectures. Pike had tried out a Chromebook at college in October. “I could never really get to grips with it, so I gave it back,” he says. “It was especially difficult when trying to do coursework.”
Adam Speight, computing writer at Trusted Reviews, recommends a Dell XPS 13 (from £899), Surface Laptop 3 (£1,079) or the MacBook Air (£949), if you’re able to splash the cash. The steep price tag can also be brought down by using student discounts if you can wait until you’re on campus, as your student card can give up to 20% off at many retailers.
Of course, not everyone can afford to spend more than £1,000 on a laptop, and there are plenty of high-powered but cheaper alternatives. “There are some great new devices around the £500-£700 mark, like the Honor MagicBook 14 (£529), which are super-capable and also better looking than what you’d traditionally think of as a cheaper laptop,” says Speight.
If your coursework is limited to essay writing, and won’t put the pressure on your hardware caused by video editing, specialist software or data analysis, Speight recommends a Chromebook, which costs much less than a normal laptop but can clog up when asked to do more than basic tasks. Regardless of which laptop you pick, Speight recommends prioritising the speed of your processor and RAM rather than storage space. “A 10th-generation Intel Core i5/AMD Ryzen 5 processor with 8GB RAM is the sweet spot for most student tasks,” he says. That’ll allow you to stream your video lectures, take notes, and even have a WhatsApp chat window open without any issues.
