Just bought a PC laptop for $399. It does everything I need a laptop to do.
Don't want to pay $200 more for street cred.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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RIP to the mid range Chromebook and windows laptop market.
As an IT person that's worked at schools for 20 years I can say this has no place here for us. Too underpowered for adobe products or composer products that our arts/graphics/music labs are interested in and too expensive to replace the Chromebooks that the students use. This is for the wealthy to give to their 4 year olds instead of a MacBook pro like they usually would have. Or a really good porn machine 😁
That's odd, because it is similar in performance to the M1 Air which is still pretty banging at basic introductory media production.
If you are running a proper production lab you aren't using $600 computers anyway, or you are economizing guerilla-film style. If you wanted to introduce 1080p NLE or basic DAW to incoming noobs, probably an okay device... but a lab should be using desktops anyway or your curriculum is badly broken. Definitely get minis if you're doing macs.
This basic laptop in a premium case with great battery life is for folks doing lots of admin or studying and running office, with Pixelmator or Affinity or other mid range production apps. It WILL run photoshop fine if you don't work on large files.