Laptop for Christmas present - help! Touch screen or standard chrome book?

[Cherryblossom200]

Hello!

My daughter is starting secondary school next year, I would like to get her a laptop in preparation. She has ADHD and her current school already has her using a standard chrome book for tasks where there are long periods of writing.

I’m terrible with tech! I don’t know if it would be more beneficial long-term to invest in a touch screen laptop or just stick with the basic chrome book for her?

What has worked for your children?

The Black Friday sales have started early so I wanted to make use of the discounts 😊

Many thanks

Touchscreen laptops are pretty much useless for school tasks, they're only good for graphic designers and artists and only if the screen can be used as a tablet for digital art.

Chromebooks do not support some applications that are not web based.

I'd buy a standard laptop, they're versatile and not as expensive as touchscreen ones.

Thank you!

Do you know which school she’s going to? I would check which operating system they use. One of my DCs school is Google, the other is Microsoft.

We have touchscreen laptops at school - 1:1 devices - and really disagree it’s only for art. We use in English etc to annotate texts and sources too so touchscreen and stylus really important.they use the screen all the time. Trackpads are horrendous for hands so if you don’t get touch get a wireless mouse too (or maybe anyway!)

I absolutely disagree that touchscreen laptops are only for design/they are great for everyday work. I hate Chrome books. They are a bit slow and useless for a lot of things.

Never, ever a Chromebook. They’re awful, slow clunky.

Do you mean convertible/flip laptops? I had Dell XPS touchscreen and it would have been an occupational hazard to constantly annotate texts on it as the screen is too far and the hand would be constantly strained.

It was also the most glitchy piece of tech I've ever had, the touchscreen was freezing all the time - all that at the price tag of 2K+ 🤷‍♀️

Yep it’s the sort of flip laptops I keep seeing. I don’t know if they are a bit gimicky! I have a MAC book which she can use for stuff the Chromebook won’t do. But I’m thinking for a basic first laptop the chrome book should hopefully be ok!

Some of the flip ones like IdeaPad are also chromebooks, not proper laptops.

It does depend on the school as PP said - none of ours did digital annotations but some required apps that were not supported by chromebooks.

They’re really not ok