Need a new laptop?
How much should you spend?
With so many cheap laptops around these days we regularly get asked the question: “how much should I spend on my new laptop?”
Whilst everyone has different needs and every laptop brand sets their own price range (think Apple!) we have come up with a general guideline to help you decide how much to spend:
1.If you plan to spend less than $800 on a laptop then you should leave your laptop on its desk most of its life. Whilst spending under $800 can buy you decent performance (Corei5, 4GB RAM), the build quality is usually quite poor. Therefore, these cheaper laptops tend to wear out if you carry them around too often. A one-year back-to-base warranty is the norm for cheap laptops so there is a risk relating to big repair costs and delays if the laptop breaks after the first year.
2.You can get a decent laptop for work if you spend between $1,000 and $1,500. The keys won’t wear out as quickly as a cheaper model and the laptop will probably be lighter. You should get a 3-year warranty and consider business-grade features such as encryption, hard drive protection and firmware to track lost laptops.
3.If you spend more than $1,500 then you can find laptops with a premium build, longer battery life and lighter materials such as magnesium alloy. Most Ultrabooks with 3-year warranty fall into this price bracket. Interestingly, the price of your laptop has nothing to do with screen size and some of the more expensive laptops are 13 inch.
4.If you stretch your budget to over $2,000 then you enter the world of high-performance laptops ideal for complex computing (multimedia, design software) and gaming. At this price bracket you pay a premium for the internal componentry and not the chassis.
Don’t fall into the trap of paying a lot more to future-proof your investment. If you invest in a decent-performing laptop today then the internal components will likely last you 3 years. What you need to watch out for is build quality and warranty because the shell and screen will most likely fail you before your memory or disk space runs out.