Best laptops for students in Singapore that you don’t want to miss

Which laptop to buy?

 This question is quite common at this time of the year. It’s the start of another school year and whether you are a freshman looking for a laptop to carry around for the next four years or an upperclassman who needs an IT refresh, this is laptop buying season.

Choosing a laptop can be daunting because of all the impenetrable list of specs you have to compare, and so people just buy a macbook air because “you can’t go wrong buying a mac”. Well, actually, you can. If you look hard enough there are many laptops out there that are just as lightweight and stylish as a Macbook Air with at least the same processing muscle but are cheaper, and make a good deal.

Here is my shortlist of the best Macbook Air Killers, as well as come budget alternatives that perform just as well and some portable laptops for gamers.

Macbook Air Killers

Same Performance, Same Price Point, More Style and Runs Windows

The benchmark for my review here will be the 13-Inch Macbook Air with i5 processor, 8GB RAM and 256GB of SSD memory, coming in at $1,618 on the Apple store before education discounts, and it weighs 1.35kg.

This is the goldilocks model of the Macbook air in terms of specs, and is the one that will fulfil most of your needs without burning too big a hole in your pocket. All the models I choose to quote later in this section have virtually the same specs, same screen size, same number of ports, except for a few important differences which I will point out.

Lenovo 710s

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Like all the notebooks in this section it takes design cues from the Macbook air. From its thin and tapered body to the simple branding, it gives off the premium vibe. At $1,499, you can get the same Macbook Air specs, but with a significantly better graphics card. In fact, you can even play overwatch on low settings with this thing. That’s impressive considering that its both thinner and lighter than the Air, and  For $100 less! However using lighter materials means its build quality suffers just slightly compared to the Macbook Air, but it is still built solidly.

Asus Zenbook 305UA

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One look at this gorgeous babe and you can tell that it is a flagship product. Built with the same premium metal found on all apple systems, the tapered design and ultrabook thinness, it almost looks like ASUS took a Macbook Air and just slapped their logo over the apple. Under the hood it’s mostly the same story. The same specs, but lighter and thinner than the Macbook Air. At only $1,398 for the goldilocks model (FC013T), it beats the Macbook Air on price too.

Razer Blade Stealth

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If you want a laptop to set you apart, this is the one for you. White on white is so basic, this is the era of black and green folks! Oh wait, did i not mention that THE KEYBOARD IS RAINBOW COLORED? That’s right folks! Each key is individually programmable with up to 16.8million colors! Build quality is great too. The chassis of the laptop is made of the same stern stuff as the Macbook Air, just in black, and its looks sleek AF.

Of course many of you will associate Razer with gaming, and that’s not wrong because they are indeed a gaming brand. However, their Razer Blade Stealth is definitely not a gaming laptop. In fact, you can’t play most games on the Razer Blade Stealth, you need to buy their Razer Core for gaming. If you don’t, the Razer Blade Stealth is an amazing laptop all on its own.

This brings us to price. At $1,799 for the 256GB model, it is slightly more expensive than our reference Macbook Air, and has a slightly smaller screen (12.5” vs 13.3”). However for that you get a QHD+ screen (in layman terms, more pixels than Apple’s Retina), and a more powerful processor, as well as a freaking cool keyboard.

Budget

Dell Inspiron 14 5000

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This is one laptop that is easy to miss. It hardly stands out from the crowd with its If you are willing to carry an actual kilogram around for half the price of a Macbook Air, this laptop is for you. It even has a slightly larger screen, even if it’s short of 4GBs of RAM. Build quality is reasonable, and feels sturdy enough to carry around and maybe even survive a few knocks. Prices start at $799 for the 5459 base model, which has two SODIMM slots so you can probably just stick another 4GB of ram inside an you’re good to go. At an IT show they might even do it for you for free.

ASUS E200

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This one is for someone who is on the tightest of all budgets, with the lightest of all loads. Maybe you just blue all your cash on building a new desktop, but you can’t really bring that to school. Well, this 11 inch laptop costs only $349 and weighs about 1kg. With it you can open a couple of tabs on google chrome, watch some movies, and open a few PDF files. Anything beyond that is going to be a laggy experience, but you as a student maybe that’s all you need. Great portability, decent performance, at a dirt cheap price.

Portable laptops for the Gamers

Aftershock S15

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If you didn’t know, Aftershock is a Singapore brand. If you’re feeling particularly patriotic after Joseph Schooling’s Olympic gold, support local! Even if you don’t the Aftershock S15 is a great laptop.

Many gaming laptops compromise on weight to give you the horsepower you need to drive your games, but the S15 packs the latest Pascal GPUs from NVIDIA at a very reasonable 2.5kgs

Of course, gaming laptops don’t come cheap, but Aftershock, being a small and nimble local company, allows you to personalize what goes into your laptop using their handy configurator, Hard disk, GPU, RAM, Screens are all flexible so you can get the perfect laptop that fits your needs and budget.

The recommended model starts at $2,257, and will go higher depending on your configuration. The reason why it’s so expensive is that, thanks to the innovations of Pascal, it comes with a full-sized gtx1060 desktop graphics card under the hood. That’s performance that’s roughly on par with the full-sized desktop gtx970. This means that theoretically you can play almost any game on this laptop, cooling permitting, including AAA titles. It might even run Crysis. If you don’t understand what I just said in this last paragraph, you probably don’t want to spend 2.2k on this laptop anyway. But if you do, go for it!

Dell Inspiron 15 7000

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If you want a slightly cheaper gaming laptop without the cheesy gamer aesthetic, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 is a sleek-looking machine that packs a GTX960. This guy will handle most games with finesse, but don’t expect it to run the latest and the greatest. At around 2.6kg this is no ultrabook, but you should be able to carry this around in your backpack just fine. Prices start from $1,249 for the cheapest i5 model and goes all the way up to cool $2,099 for a decked out i7 model with an 256GB SSD + 1TB Hdd combo.

Bonus: Microsoft Surface Pro 4

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No student laptop guide will be complete without a mention of the Microsoft Surface. Neither laptop nor tablet, this device is a powerful tool for students. It’s 12.5inch screen is in a 3:2 ratio, more similar to an A4 sheet of paper than the traditional 16:9 laptop screen, and coupled with the surface pen it comes with, it’s the perfect note taking device. It also has a front facing camera so if you are too lazy to take down the whole slide during lectures, just snap a picture. Unfortunately, it costs $1,999  for the 256GB, i5 version with 8GB of RAM to match our benchmark Macbook Air, but I feel the price is justified by the utility. The keyboard type cover is usually sold seperately, but at IT shows you can get them to give it to you for free.

To really get a feel if this device is for you, find a retail outlet near you can give it a try. Most Challenger outlets and big electronic stores like Courts and Harvey Norman will have display sets.

Do some homework!

There is a whole world of laptops out there of all shapes and sizes. The list above is by no means exhaustive – there are so many other awesome laptops that I just couldn’t fit into one article. If you look hard enough, there will definitely be one laptop out there that’s perfect for you. And whatever you do, don’t buy a Macbook Air if you can help it.

Of course, the best place to see them all in one place is at an IT show, which happen every quarter. The upcoming ones for the second half of 2016 are COMEX from 9 – 11 September and SITEX from 24 – 27 November.

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