What windows laptop

[ant1973]

Clearly the M1 Mac in base form is an astonishingly good laptop. It seems pretty much in a league of its own for single core performance and battery life.

This thread proceeds on the assumption that whatever windows laptop you buy, it's probably not going to be as "good" as an M1 Mac. I say this in the hope of avoiding another pile on from the Judean People's Front, per the M1 thread (just kidding, now )

For most businesses (excluding creatives, etc) the M1 may be overkill. The complications of expanding hard disk space and the cost of upgrading at the time of purchase, renders it somewhat less cost effective for many as well. Some people may want to stay in the windows environment and can't be bothered with parallels, etc.

I currently have a 4th Gen i7 Desktop with 16gb of RAM and an SSD and it feels very quick doing all that I need it to do. I suspect that for many people doing fairly mundane stuff, finding something "good enough" may suffice.

I'm focusing on thinner and lighter laptops for occasional use.

I thought this Honor laptop looked like very good value for money at £599. The Ryzen 4 series posts just over 1000 on geekbench and has a similar multi core score to the m1 Mac.

https://www.hihonor.com/unitedkingdom/product/hono...

I have no problem paying up to £1000 for something with a 1TB SSD and 16gb of RAM. Can't lay my hands on an XPS13 for the price, nor the usual suspects from HP and Lenovo.

Any thoughts of what is worth buying?

[JulianHJ]

Does it absolutely have to have a 1TB drive? In your position I'd spend an extra £100 on this. I've got a two year old XPS13 and it's excellent.

[ant1973]

Yes. I see that I can get the latest xps13 for 1099 with 512gb drive (upgradeable). I didn't realise the extent to which the 11th Gen Intel has caught up with the M1.

[robsa]

ant1973 said:

Yes. I see that I can get the latest xps13 for 1099 with 512gb drive (upgradeable). I didn't realise the extent to which the 11th Gen Intel has caught up with the M1.

It hasn't.

https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/news/apple-m1-chip-ju...

And that was in March with the old M1, not the new Pro/Max M1 which is even more powerful. Apple are making Intel look like an embarrassment at the moment. Not that that particularly matters if you are only a light user. That XPS13 still looks a lovely laptop.

[ant1973]

robsa said:

ant1973 said:

Yes. I see that I can get the latest xps13 for 1099 with 512gb drive (upgradeable). I didn't realise the extent to which the 11th Gen Intel has caught up with the M1.

It hasn't.

https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/news/apple-m1-chip-ju...

And that was in March with the old M1, not the new Pro/Max M1 which is even more powerful. Apple are making Intel look like an embarrassment at the moment. Not that that particularly matters if you are only a light user. That XPS13 still looks a lovely laptop.

I've read two conflicting accounts of this. Firstly, the Intel camp say all good and produce a plethora of benchmarks showing that's the case. Then there's the Apple camp saying the game is rigged. Geekbench says there's not much in it but how I can judge, I simply don't know...