Kids ready for new laptops for 6th form, looking to spend £4-500

Seen the following

https://www.ebuyer.com/973061-lenovo-v15-ryzen-3-8gb-256gb-ssd-15-6-win10-home-laptop-82c70004uk

Seems a reasonable spec – is there much difference between AMD Ryzen and Intel chips at this level ?

It’ll be reet! My daughter is in sixth form and uses a 10yr old MacBook! 🙂

The Ryzens are better bang for buck -AMD seem to be back on with making faster processors again (at last)

This one looks the same but has a higher model processor for slightly cheaper…

https://www.cclonline.com/product/lenovo-v15-laptop-15-6-inch-1920-x-1080-3500u-8gb-256gb-ssd-radeon-vega-8-bluetooth-microsoft-windows-10-home-82c70005uk-324371/

That said, the lower spec chips is fine if you can find it cheaper, the Ryzen 3 is a very good chip for the money, they really are showing intel a thing or two with ryzen.

and will probably use a smidge less power if you will be using it on battery a lot, assuming both models have the same spec battery.

Great, thanks all

That laptop is great, probably don’t need that spec, but it’ll last a bit longer before seeming slow.

Whatever you get, get a cloud backup like OneDrive going to save all user data automatically. It’s just saved us again when a glass of water went over my daughter’s laptop. (I’ve fixed it, but it took a while for the new keyboard to arrive, but the motherboard looked bad when I opened it up, thought it was a goner.)

It’ll be reet! My daughter is in sixth form and uses a 10yr old MacBook!

Over the lockdown period Mrs K raised £820 selling off old kids toys and clothes and some furniture.   This all does to Juniors school laptop.  So, we decided we’d get him a MacBook for longevity as he starts Year 7 in September.

We’ve since discovered that he doesn’t need to carry it around, and as we use the Apple eco-system for parental controls already are thinking of buying him a sale 21″iMac for his room, which of course would also serve as a parentally controlled telly.

I’m then thinking should suddenly he need something portable I’d get a <£200 Chromebook for portability.

I did wonder about Chromebooks, but not sure about the whole needing connectivity to work thing

Remember that Lenovo have a discount scheme for students (normally at least 10% off the normal advertised price), and they routinely offer a 15% off first purchase discount. . . so worth having a look at their website.

Can Chromebooks run Word/Powerpoint? You might find you need them, and yes while there are alternatives IME they’re never quite 100% compatible, which is a pain.

I’d go with a windows machine for the average student for ms office compatibility.

The 4000 series ryzen processors are starting to appear in laptops in shops now. They are a massive leap forward in terms of performance, the non-multithreaded 5 beats the i7 in almost every test. It might be worth looking at them, they seem great vfm. It also means the 3000 series will be gradually phased out, so prices should be coming down on them.