Laptop suggestions for CS majors?

@CT1417 Thank you for the response! Honestly it seems like every laptop has some sort of trade off at this point. I think I might just buy a battery pack at this point haha.

@ProfessorPlum168 Yeah the XPS line was honestly one of my favorite options but the newer models only come with either 256 or 1 TB of storage, which also equals being either way out of my budget or me running into the risk of not enough memory. Perhaps I’ll look into getting an older model since I’ve heard great things about it. The same pricing problem exists with the XPS 13 2 in 1-it’s either storage in my budget or way too much at a price I can’t imagine. Thank you for your response! Two years with one fixable quality issue seems pretty great.

@juillet Thank you so much for your input! I’ve also heard great things about the Lenovo build quality, which is honestly making me want it more than the HP Spectre x360 (which I’ve heard there’s a decent amount of quality issues/heating problems). The Spectre is definitely cheaper for the same specs (i7, 16 GB, 512 GB of storage), but I’m probably going to see if I can hold out for a price drop in the Yoga. I’ve also heard really positive things about the Surface Laptop, but I think that it might be a bit tricky with the fabric keyboard. The risk in build quality probably isn’t a great move for a college student either. I appreciate your answer! I think you’ve helped me narrow down my list quite a lot. I’ll probably see if I can get the Yoga 920 first, if not possibly the Spectre x360 or a Dell XPS.

@jimochimin you should never let storage get in the way of decision making for a peripheral. The world is going toward cloud storage. And getting an externally connected drive is so cheap - in fact it’s probably more secure since you probably are forced to do backups and organize your data to put data in different locations.

Another Lenovo fan here. S was provided a new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon for his summer job. He likes it. 14", light easily transportable. If you’re in CS, the vast majority of the code that you will develop wont require that much horse power, and don’t forget you will have access to CS department compute nodes.

The XPS 13” is $300 off this week at Costco.