Best mac to buy for college student 1080p#

No Touch Screen: If you want both a laptop for writing papers and a tablet for taking notes in class or watching movies in bed, you'll need to buy both a MacBook Air and an iPad. By contrast, the Air's screen can show only 66 percent of the gamut, which means duller images. The Dell XPS 13, our favorite consumer laptop, is available with a 1920 x 1080 or 3200 x 1800 display that can reproduce either 93.6 or 105.7 percent of the sRGB color gamut. By contrast, the MacBook 12-inch and MacBook Pro 13-inch have panels that output at 2304 x 14 x 1600, respectively. Lackluster Screen: The 1440 x 900 display on the MacBook Air isn't as sharp as those on other MacBooks and competing PCs. The HP Spectre x360 13-inch, our favorite 2-in-1, starts at just over $1,000, and can be found on sale for under $1,000 with the new Core i5 CPU, a 256GB SSD and a touch screen.

Best mac to buy for college student 1080p#

For example, the 2.68-pound Asus UX330UA costs just $699, $100 less than the best sale price for a MacBook Air, but it comes with a 1080p screen, a 256GB SSD and the latest 7th Gen Core i5 processor. Some PCs Offer Better Value: If you don't have your heart set on a MacBook, you can find a more powerful PC ultraportable for around the same price as the Air. But don't expect great performance from 2022-era software. The MacBook Air is from early 2015 and uses an Intel 5th Generation Core Series processor, whereas, in 2017, the latest PC laptops are on a 7th-Generation Core.To be fair, if your main computer activities are surfing the web, editing documents, sending emails and updating social media, you'll probably be able to get by with the old processor in the Air four or five years from now.

Outdated CPU: A college freshman buying a new laptop should expect it to last at least through graduation. So, if you need to pop in a flash drive, attach an external hard drive or use a wireless mouse that has a dongle, you'll really appreciate the Air's pair of standard USB ports. The MacBook Air is the only MacBook with regular USB 3.0 ports, the most common type. Regular USB Ports: Nobody likes carrying dongles with them everywhere they go, especially not students.