Advice needed- which laptop should I buy? Questions about apple laptops

[dottytablecloth]

I need a new laptop, I fed up with my current one taking about 10 minutes to actually be ready to use after I turn it on.

I have an iPad and iPad mini which we really love but would I be wise to buy an apple laptop?

I need it for school work at home but I worried about not being able to use Microsoft word on it as all school documents use word and I can use USB to work between home and school.

I don't want to spend £££

Is there a laptop that would be better for me?

Any advice appreciated

You can use OpenOffice on the Mac but it's a real pain. Microsoft do MS Office for the mac but i don't really like that either.

How about this one? Asus Transformer T100

It's basically a Windows 8.1 laptop that turns into a tablet. You won't be playing games and stuff on it but for word processing and stuff it'll be fine. And it comes with a copy of MS Office Home & student.

Buying a Mac will cost you £££ which is exactly what you don't want to do.

Office Home and Student can be picked up for around £70 which is fairly reasonable, but I suppose you'd need to look at the bundle deals, as already pointed out, to work out the best price combo.

Failing that, Open Office is Microsoft compatible and free.

Office365 can be used on the ipad now. Does school provide you with an NS Office subscription or will you need to factor in cost of buying an educational license?

PC laptops are from around 300, I can't see an Apple costing that amount.
Consider what you actually need - screen size and keyboard size may be important to you rather than weight/portabiliy if you use your iPad quite a bit.

The cheapest apple laptop you can buy is the MacBook Air which has just been updated and price dropped to a still rather heafty £749 but you'll be able to get an educational discount, I love my Apple Mac, it syncs everything from my phone and my ipad wirelessly and saved passwords and web history from all my devices, you can use MS word on your mac, it all depends how much you want to tie in with your other apple products, or just buy a cheap windows laptop for work and keep your apple products for fun

The whole issue of 'syncing everything' between iPhones/iPads and Macs has always been strange to me. By the Apple owners it's made to sound like it's a unique thing, but I'm able to do exactly the same between my Android devices and my Windows PC. As long as you are using cloud storage options available universally on all platforms, it really doesn't matter what combination you go for.

Sounds like you want to keep the cost low, this automatically excludes Apple because they don't do low cost devices. And by the time you get up to the price you'd have to pay for a Mac, you almost certainly want to have a bit more autonomy over the specific set of requirements you want to fulfill for your money. Again, this excludes Apple because you only get what they want to give you.

Agree that if money is a big factor don't go with apple. Dell do laptops from £250 and up, lenovo from £350 and up. But if you have money to burn go with a macbook, they are awesome :)

If you want fast boot-up go for a Chromebook. You can do Word stuff through Google Drive (free) on it.

Most people buy machines that they don't need and are sold high spec machines for mega bucks when they only do the basics on them.

You have to ask yourself what you are going to do on the the device and if the answer is facebook and a little word processing a bog standard generic cheap laptop will do everything you need and more.

Likewise if you are doing video processing such as encoding video for dvd or streaming then having a fast quad-core processor will reduce the time it takes but can be very costly.