USAToday Column

April 9, 2020
Working from home: Time to buy a new laptop? The choices have never been better

By Bob O'Donnell

FOSTER CITY, Calif. – As virtually everyone works, learns and plays at home, the demands placed on your home PCs have never been more obvious. As a result of our shared at-home experience, you probably have a newfound level of appreciation for how important a good laptop computer can be.

Either that or you feel an urgent desire to upgrade the machine that you or other family members are suffering through. Thankfully, the timing for shopping for a new notebook PC couldn’t be better.

All three of the biggest companies that supply the computing and graphics chips at the heart of today’s PCs – Intel, AMD and Nvidia – have debuted their latest offerings over the past few weeks.

Intel announced the fastest additions to its 10th-generation Core processors for laptops, AMD started shipping its Ryzen 4000 series mobile PC processors with integrated Ryzen graphics, and Nvidia added some more affordable options to its RTX line of graphics chips last week.

Right on cue, the big PC vendors, including Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple, as well as some interesting lesser-known PC brands such as Asus, Acer and even Samsung, are bringing systems that use these powerful new chips to market. We’ve seen some price cuts on computers using previous-generation parts. As a result, there is an impressive range of laptop choices and prices available – from low-cost Windows and Chrome-based notebooks designed for students to higher-end gaming-focused systems.

Buying a laptop: How to get started

To get your shopping process started, you need to take a few points into consideration. First, of course, is your budget. You can find some decent machines below $500, especially for younger students, but the sweet spot for PCs remains in the roughly $700 to $1,000 range.

Admittedly, that’s not super cheap for some budget-constrained households or for families looking to buy multiple machines, but considering that most people hold onto their PCs about twice as long as they do smartphones (for which they often pay even more), the value equation for today’s laptops is really quite good.

Next, you need to think about how you plan to use the PC.

Even laptops that are primarily intended for work at home or educational purposes are going to see a lot of action as video streaming screens and gaming devices. Ideally, you want to look for something that has the flexibility to cover the basic work and education tasks you need to do, supports the creative tasks such as photo and video editing that you’d like to do and handles the high-resolution streaming and rapid-response gaming that you may want to do (you know you will).

To that end, you’ll want to consider the varying levels of overall performance that the new range of CPU chips from Intel and AMD offer, and if you have any interest in creative applications or gaming, give serious thought to a system with a separate, or discrete, GPU graphics chip.

Nvidia’s new RTX2060, for example, supports a technology called real-time ray-tracing that brings lifelike reflections and other visual enhancements to new games that support it. Starting next week, you can find it on systems starting at $999, including the HP Omen 15, the Lenovo Y540 and the ASUS ROG G512.

If you’re more interested in streaming, you might want to look at larger screens or those that support full HD or even 4K resolution. HP, for example, unveiled the HP Envy 17, starting at $1,249, which offers a huge 17-inch full HD screen – an ideal personal Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV Plus or other streaming service viewer.

From a connectivity perspective, you should look for a laptop that supports Wi-Fi 5 (sometimes called Wireless AC or 802.11ac) and, if possible, the Thunderbolt 3 port (an extension of USB-C) for connecting to a wider range of peripherals. 

If you’re a Mac person, Apple released a new version of the venerable MacBook Air using a 10th-generation Intel Core CPU and support for both of these connectivity options, starting at $999.

More mobile? Think about a modem

For those who expect to travel more once things settle down, or for those who want the flexibility of being able to use their laptop from anywhere, I’m a huge believer in PCs with built-in modems.

These chips, made by companies such as Qualcomm, are the same ones used in our smartphones that allow us to connect to cellular networks. In a PC, they offer the incredibly powerful flexibility of an always-connected broadband link no matter where you are. Most of the modem-equipped PCs available still use 4G LTE (which, by the way, is just fine for PCs), but expect to see some 5G-equipped PCs soon.

After years of being written off as a category headed for the dustbin of history, it’s encouraging to see people rediscover how valuable PCs can be. In fact, PCs and related peripherals are some of the few product categories (other than toilet paper, of course) that have benefited from the stay-at-home situations in which we’ve found ourselves.

Thankfully, the choices for buying a new laptop are great, so if you do invest in a new one, you’ll undoubtedly find your digital life at home to be significantly more rewarding.

Here’s a link to the column: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/reviewedcom/2020/04/09/new-laptop-pc-notebook-computer-options/2974569001/

USA TODAY columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. His clients are major technology firms including Microsoft, HP, Dell, and Intel. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.