Tell me what laptop to buy

[mindutopia]

Help, I need to buy a laptop and there are too many options and I need someone to tell me what to buy. 😩

Going back to work self-employed, so it will be used across our two family businesses. I literally need it to run Microsoft Office, for web browsing, and to do Teams meetings.

So good webcam/sound is important and a decent keyboard for typing as I do a lot of writing. But it doesn’t need to run anything more specialist than that.

Budget of £500-800 as can’t really justify higher cost than that. Lots of lovely looking high powered ones at £1700, but I just don’t need all that. I don’t want a refurbished one, so must be new.

Previously, when I’ve been employed, we just got whatever procurement gave us and were expected to be grateful, so don’t even know where to start. What do you have that you really like?

I have a 2022 Mac book Air, I find they last around 9 years with a battery replacement around 6 years.

Takes very little time to adapt from MS Windows, and MS Office / Teams are the same.

The base spec 13" should be sufficient at £999, or £1,199 for the 15" provided you only want to connect one external monitor.

I know both are more than your budget, but I would suggest it's worth the extra investment (and is deductible!)

I'd get a dell. I find mac/apple annoying for 'traditional' non creative work as excel/powerpoint/word just aren't quite the same on there and unless you are a macbook native they take a lot of getting used to.
I'm self employed and have found my dell laptops to be really solid and last for years. My laptop was actually stolen last month, and when I replaced it I used Backmarket and got a refurbished dell precision, which i think is from a big corporate that has handed over unused stock. So i've ended up with a really good quality laptop for under £800 - probably would have been nbearly £2k otherwise. they have other brands too and they come basically like new.
i also don't need anything whizzy for processing etc however i do find having a good standard of memory/processing power means it lasts longer and doesnt get slow/clunky after a couple of years.

also to add if you do decide to go down a macbook route there are refurbished ones on backmarket (i've had a refurbished ipad, phone, apple watch as well as my dell and honestly you can't tell they aren't new) - which might bring them under your budget.

I use MS Office on Windows and Mac OS, and they now appear to be exactly the same, unlike a few years ago when MS office on a Mac was a complete horrible.