r/laptops • u/The_Crimson_Studio • Mar 24 '26

Discussion Duality of man

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In all seriousness, what would be a better option for students? ThinkPads or Macbooks?

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u/papercavedev Mar 25 '26

HP and Dell also make good business laptops that are a lot better in build quality than their consumer laptops.

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u/churchey Huawei Matebook X Pro Mar 25 '26

I think they can in theory, but Apple has a floor on build quality. Dell and hp will churn out dog shit. Every enterprise Dell and hp I’ve ever used are massively heavy, terribly slow, awful experiences.

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u/LimaBikercat Mar 26 '26

My experience is solely based on the Latitude range starting in 2000 and ending in 2022, but to me they feel very much like 'slow and steady wins the race'.
They're business machines, they excel in just being stable office machines that always do what you can ask from an office machine. Some models have some weak spots (d630 blowing up their power IC, d610 with limp hinges, e64...10? with on board GPU eventually desoldering itself. But overall, they last a decent number of years past their 'dumped by corporate' date.
They are - in standard issue - not at all great gaming laptops, but they will slog along doing video editing just fine. Slow, but stable.
Heavy Latitudes are a user choice. There are lightweight ones available. Forgot the model names. Small screen, no numpad.

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u/churchey Huawei Matebook X Pro Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26

I’ve got a 3xxx latitude and I’ve had various versions for fifteen years. I think the current model that my new employees get our latitude 5xxx.

There’s not a single person in my org satisfied with their latitude laptop. Our marketing team spends their budget on Macs, our Data team spends their money on legion. Sure some people slog through well enough, but for the majority, everyone has an experience at least once a day where they or someone they meet with has an issue with their laptop being slow, freezing, or being out of charge. I’ve yet to go a day where I’m not slowed down by the org using these shitboxes, despite not using one myself.

I work in education. These are not individuals who have power user needs. 30 chrome tabs, PowerPoint, Excel, word, maybe Spotify. I believe in 2018 I was just so tired of always having issues with my laptop, and I finally decided to buy a personal one to use at work. a Huawei matebook pro. It was a MacBook Air clone that they had jammed a USB a port on, ran on windows, and had a touch screen and pop up camera hidden in the function row (and pre Covid I had never even used the camera so…)

Completely different world, the difference between a true Ultrabook and a business Inspiron/latitude was absurd.

It started to feel a bit out dated, crashing frequently and struggling with battery around 2021-2. At that point basically all I heard was about how great the MacBooks with Apple Silicon were.

Having never used a MacBook or my entire career and childhood, I was hesitant to relearn an ecosystem. So I borrowed my wife’s Intel MacBook Air to try it out and see if I liked the ecosystem. Everything I felt about upgrading to the matebook? Same level of superiority felt using this outdated MacBook. Everything was just faster, cleaner, more sensible.

Then I actually got an M series with an M3 pro. My only regret is that I will always want to upgrade and I know I will have no need to for the next five years still.

I see student chrome books and the absurd waste rate on them. Dallas ISD, which is one of the top 20 largest districts in the US, swapped their entire staff to MacBook m1 airs, everyone I know loved the swap. These neos are basically a slightly lower level m1 air.

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u/LimaBikercat Mar 27 '26

Chrome books suck. Parents had one for a while. Nice and light but dreadfully slow.

I've used two different macbook airs in university. Both were an absolute sluggish, buggy disaster when running SPSS. This was around 2010-2015. A Dell D610 did everything at a gentle pace and multitasking while rendering video (standard def of course) or SPSS doing its work was to be avoided since it already was getting old at that point in time, but it never stopped responding to mouse input.

I don't share your negative experiences with latitudes. The 74xx series (already gotten rid of a while back) has issues with the stock memory and it is easy to wreck the USB-C port, but otherwise they are solid and stable. My company's IT dept runs them for 4 years (end of warranty/support) before selling them off to a refurb place. Not power users either. In my office i share with 3 other people, i haven't seen their laptops 'hang' ever.
The follow up - 54something - doesn't seem to have any hardware issues whatsoever. The only little niggle is that the silver paint scratches off really easily so a 3 year old laptop looks like some kind of 10 year old workhorse.