Hi guys I want to buy a laptop for programming, but I couldn’t figure out what i really want .

my budget range from 600$ to 1200 .

I found these laptops in the market

(i3 - 4g ram - 256 giga ssd) for 600$

(i5 - 8g ram - 512 giga ssd) for 800$

(i7 - 16g ram - 512 giga ssd) for 1200$

and also ryzen 3 5 and 7 .

here what I want you to Know :

1- I want to use this laptop for programming only (and browser of course),

2 - I will programming for android (for now ),that’s mean i need to install android studio , IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse (maybe other).

so I’m afraid if I buy 1200$ laptop i will regret it , because don’t need that much ram or cores or ssd capacity.

and if i buy 600$ i will regret it too ,because it will be too slow or not ideal for programming,less ram -less capacity -less core

I was depressing for long time and I’m slowly back on track so i don’t know what going on ( on tech world).

and also there are laptop 2 in 1 (laptop and tablet) with pen, is it worth to buy ?.

dose the laptop now upgrade-able in terms of ram , saying this because of what going on in part replacement issue (like apple ).

so help please what should I buy.

pardon my English not my first Language, and thanks in advance.

Edit : thank you guys very much , that’s really help and very informative. 👍 😍

  • terribleplanEnglish
    22•1 year ago

    I am a big fan of my Framework laptop. It is super easily upgradable and repairable so should last a good while. They are a little sold out of all of their old models so they only have pre-orders right now. They have options for a 13th gen i5 and a Ryzen 5 that both start at $850. The intel ones ship sooner and are have cheaper DDR4 RAM (vs DDR5 for Ryzen). The $850 is “base”, an i5 configured with 16g of RAM, a 500gb SSD, and no OS (assuming you’ll use linux or already own windows) is just under $1100. You can go as low as just over $1k for 8g of ram and 250g SSD.

    If you’re concerned with cost they do have refurbished 12th-gen i5s in stock now for $720, but you’ll need to buy RAM and an SSD (which if buying from them would bring your total to $820 for 8g of RAM and 250g of SSD).

    I can’t comment on the tablet/pen stuff. I have never owned a laptop that does that. It might be worth it if you do drawing or whiteboarding and stuff, but those are the only people I know of that actually use that sort of stuff.

    • @h0rnmanEnglish
      12•1 year ago

      Be careful with the Intel laptop chips and make sure you understand what you’re getting. My work laptop has an i7 with 12 “cores” but it’s 10 of the low powered e-cores and 2 of the hyperthreaded p- cores, so for heavy applications (like compiling) it’s a glorified dual core i3.

      • terribleplanEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Yeah, my current one is 11th gen, just before they started doing that, so I don’t know how good or bad the “efficiency” cores are or if the power savings is worth it.

      • terribleplanEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        Under load it can get pretty hot, might be better with a less power hungry processor (I’ve got an i7). Battery is reasonable 4-5ish hours (55wh and they recently announced a drop-in replacement with better chemistry that is 61wh) with what I would consider to be “normal” usage in Windows 10 including WSL, browsing, running the software I am working on (usually node or golang), etc. It’s also better if I lower my screen brightness, but I usually keep it pretty high/max.