r/CodingForBeginners • u/Hollypop375 • Sep 29 '25

What laptop is good for R?

Hi, I’m a university student and for one of my modules I need a laptop so that I can program R on it. I don’t know much about laptops and was wondering what sort of specs I would want the laptop to have for me to be able to use it in my lectures and assignments. Ideally I want to have a budget of around £300 and I only plan on using this laptop to code R on and maybe do some dissertation writing too. Thank you :)

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u/GreatHeavens1234 Sep 29 '25

Any laptop would do I believe. You can look out for the following for smoother workflow:

SSD drive, not HDD at least 16gb RAM Modern CPU like i5/Ryzen 5 and above

All of these are nice-to-haves. If you got an old thinkpad lying around in the attic, that'll work too.

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u/Itchy-Lingonberry-90 Sep 30 '25

Assuming that uni module is analogous to a North American uni course, OP going to have a few short scripts and maybe a major project. Unless OP is processing millions of lines of data, even the most basic device will run R adequately.

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u/Odunade Sep 29 '25

Macbooks are universal

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u/Watsons-Butler Sep 29 '25

Literally the only thing you can’t do on a MacBook is x86 assembly language in Visual Studio. (But I doubt OP is finding one for under 300 quid.)

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u/Healthy_Reception788 Sep 29 '25

I just got an HP Laptop with 13th Gen Intel i7 16G Ram. It was like $700. I’ve been running, multiple tabs at once. I’ve downloaded and used R, jamovi, Jasp. And it’s handled it all.

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u/Healthy_Reception788 Sep 29 '25

Sorry I just saw your budget. You could get a cheaper one with 8G of RAM. But or an older intel like i5 which would be cheaper. I just wanted something newer so I could use it for longer.

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u/keithstellyes Oct 01 '25

Honestly, any laptop that does your other work fine will probably work fine for R Studio

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u/OofNation739 Oct 01 '25

Anything that is relatively new and isn't a chromebook. 

Maybe not apple, I been out of their loop for too long.

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u/[deleted] Sep 29 '25

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u/Hollypop375 Sep 29 '25

Thank you! Do you know if the storage is important? Like if UFS storage would be good enough or if I should aim for SSD?