My use case: I’m an engineering student, I need something with a lot of storage, hopefully SSD (right not I have MatLab, Anaconda and KiCAD taking up most of my 128 GB HD, and I had to uninstall the STM32 cube IDE from lack of storage), and reasonable processing performance so I can actually run these things at a reasonable rate. I need to stay within the windows/ms office world to simplify collaborating and file sharing etc. I’m not using it for gaming. Don’t need a massive screen, or touchscreen or anything fancy. HDMI port would be reasonably important.

I want it to last me at least the next 4-5 years, and I’m hoping to not spend more than about £300.

I know a lot of people reccomend ThinkPads, what’s a good model to get cheap at the moment? Or any other suggestions?

Is Windows 11 so bad that I should only be looking at ones that come with Windows 10 installed?

Thanks for any helpful advice!

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 months ago

    Usually I would be one of the indistinguishable voices saying thinkpad or dell.

    But:

    You might actually be able to get an m1 macbook air at that price and have better experience.

    It would be faster than anything in the price range and I don’t think you listed any software that is a problem for macos.

    Problems:

    they all have ssds and all ssds fuck up over time. You gotta read each block into memory and rewrite it to solve the problem. There’s a piece of software called spinrite that will do this on x86 but the m series aren’t x86. The solution is to boot asahi or some such Linux and use either badblocks or dd (lol!) to do the same thing. Often rather than fix the ssd people will just replace it, but the m1 macbooks have their storage soldered in. This problem is why I suggested the m1 series because you can get them insanely cheap when they inexplicably get slow and the owner can’t figure it out.

    They all have ssds and ssds fuck up over time. For your large storage workloads you will want to use an external drive and have backups. This is true for all laptops with ssds. This is true for all computers.

    You can’t upgrade the ram. Is this a problem? You decide. Buy with the amount of ram you believe you will need. 8gb should be fine for cad and other similar workloads (source: I used a mac with 8gb for kicad last year and it didn’t have any problems. Used one with 4gb for the same but mfs aren’t ready to have that conversation). If you’re worried about the future, pick one with 16.

    Apple fucked up and made a really good computer. You can call this a problem because it’s not clear if they’re gonna go the 2012 12” mbp route and support that thing for a decade or the 2011 15” route and drop it after the minimum support window. You could also say it doesn’t matter because they’re still being sold new in Walmart even though they’re technically discontinued earlier this year and that would make the minimum support window at least the time period you’re looking to have it for. It truly doesn’t matter because no software balks at last years (or often several years old) macos and they’re gonna be on the hook for security updates for a while now.

    • thirteene@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      I just purchased a refurb 16g m1 air for $350 for myself for this exact reason. I hate the osx environment but it’s the best deal right now for a budget device and it doesn’t have windows. Linux doesn’t like the security chip but it’s not a blocker for cutting over you just need to disable a feature flag…

    • Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyzOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      Thanks for your comprehensive reply. It made me realise I’ve never even slightly considered a mac as an option. I was brought up on ‘PCs’, and in later years have only ever thought of moving over to Linux. Instinctively, the idea of moving to MacOS makes me want to throw up a little, but maybe that’s my prejudice based on the people I know who use their phones. I also suspect it would make things difficult for working on shared documents for reports etc at uni, but maybe I’m wrong.

      • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 months ago

        I can understand that perspective.

        Things might be slightly different in the eurozone, but it’s almost impossible to have an incompatibility problem in the us. Macs are extremely popular in higher education and a lot of the software that is used in the academy differs from the stuff used in industry specifically because cross platform is a priority in education.

        I have some macs and some apple phones and tablets and some android phones and tablets and a bunch of linux machines and some virtualized windows environments. They’re all just tools.

        Getting acquainted with macos will cause you to develop a whole new set of psychoses unrelated to “I’m a Mac/im a pc”. Think “I hate systemd/wayland” for Linux or “I hate settings app/centered start button” for windows.

        If you can get past the initial hump of learning it, as a university student you’ll probably never be in a better place to use a mac.

        If nothing else, you’re unlikely to lose money if you hate it because they retain value like crazy.