Are "School" Laptops a SCAM?

I work at target in the tech section. Our laptop selection isn't huge and the default prices are a joke, but they frequently go on sale for crazy discounts and are actually competitive. So if nothing good is on sale, just don't buy from Target

macs are great until the schools use apps that dont work on them.

Having a gaming laptop sounds good til your battery dies during your 2nd class of the day.

Kinda wouldn't expect too much from school laptops, just not built to last

school laptops suck

What more do you need than something that can run a search engine and word processing software for school? Outside of certain college classes that require 3d modeling or video rendering.....a base level reliable laptop is all anyone needs.

I got an Asus ZenBook for $400 at a back to school deal from BestBuy and been pretty happy with it, just takes some shopping around.

Tip - when you do videos reviewing sites selling refurbished tech, instead of buying multiple different items, buy 3-4 of the same item in different conditions to properly assess the quality control of the site.

Why wouldn't you target a price point or form factor for testing? There are way too many variables here for any valid conclusion to be made, especially when comparing them to each other. There's a reason laptops are rated by category ie. best budget, best small form factor, etc.

In my opinion pricing on laptops nowadays are really improving. Laptops in 2018-2023 had the worst value ever that i had to stick with old thinkpads and precisions. I think I might upgrade soon!

13:00 On the upside, unlike the other laptop with 8 GB of RAM on the table you can actually upgrade it yourself (the SSD too)

You made 2 major mistakes. 1. No student carries a small bag. You forget they have to carry textbooks and other school items. 2. You were using the laptops all wrong. The only one you did right was the iPad. You don't hunch over your laptop. You hurt your back when you hunch over the laptop.

Wow the iPad keyboard was a megascam.

There's a multitude of reasons why i say you should pick the lenovo over the MacBook in this scenario, but only one that isn't biased on my own opinion: compatibility. How many school apps are available on Windows vs macOS (or even ChromeOS for that matter)? We, at one of my schools, had some students with MacBooks. The school had classes in a program that didn't work with the M1 for some unknown reason (it wasn't a macOS issue, as the older ones with intel cpu's faced no issues at all) So they had to either use vm (and we know what apple thinks of doing that) or get/borrow a windows laptop. So while i say the MacBook and Lenovo is a tie, you should think about what kind of OS is needed, although it's certainly a small percentage that doesn't work with apples proprietary cpu's today anyway, but it can still happen.

Can't go wrong with MacBook Air (M1 & above) as a back to school laptop. Powerful enough for most task, great battery life, and lightweight. The TUF is amazing too if you're into gaming.

As a student, the speakers are usually replaced by headphones

I remember when i was in school if you had a laptop with you it would be taken till end of the day. Wild how times have changed.

When I started college they specifically told us MacBooks would not work for most of our school work. This rang true as when following along in lecture all the professors used windows and they had little to no knowledge of how to communicate differences in excel hotkeys etc. They recommended an ASUS Zenbook. I got a Dell XPS15 and have liked everything about it except the placement of the webcam and some initial microphone issues that were fixed with an update.

Never buy a new macbook. I got a M1 13" macbook pro with 16gb of RAM for $650 in very good condition on ebay.

I graduated college last year and used a Acer Nitro 5 with the 17” screen for 2-3 years. I don’t regret it all. It was harder to carry around and the battery sucked but the speed, screen quality, and keyboard made it worth it. There’s just so much performance in it and I can game literally anywhere I have internet and a power plug. I would strongly not recommend a MacBook. I’ve never been a fan but the big problem is a lot of our software’s we would have to download is only windows compatible. Many of the people with MacBooks had to buy cheap laptops just for school.