 What's up, guys? It's Josh. We're back in with another video. Today's video is going to be kind of another video in a series that I kind of started last year. Kind of a back to school series, me giving some tips and tricks for people that are either starting college for the first time this year or coming back for another year at their university. For those of you that don't know if this is the first video of mine you've seen, my name is Josh Beasley. I am going to be a junior at Yale University in a couple of weeks. I'm studying electrical engineering and computer science. I make a lot of different videos on this channel that pertain to my life and college life and life at Yale and my interests and hobbies. So feel free to subscribe if you knew that sounds interesting. So to the topic of today's video, today I'm going to be talking about laptops for college. I've gotten so many DMs and snapchats and comments about what laptop I use and what laptop I would recommend for anyone that's going into college and possibly anyone that's even studying engineering or computer science. So I'm going to open up the video talking about my specific laptop and laptop that I use. I use the Dell XPS 15 which is the Dell XPS like the 15 inch model. It's the 9570 I believe is the model number. So I kind of break down the stats. There is a base model online. I did not get the base model. I tricked mine out a little bit because I needed certain stats and certain memory for the stuff that I'd be doing on the laptop like video editing and computer science stuff. So the stats are as follows. It has 16 gigabytes of RAM. It has a 1 terabyte solid-state drive. This screen is actually pretty special. It's a 4k ultra HD screen that also has a touchscreen built in which I'm a huge fan of. So and then it has a I think it's an NVIDIA GTX 1050i graphics card that came as part of the bundle. I think that's just the base graphics card. I didn't do anything to that. Then it has like a fingerprint reader that lets me into my laptop really easily. So like I said Dell XPS 15 I'm gonna do pros and cons, why I use it, things I like things I don't like. First of all this thing is an absolute workhorse. I don't think I talked about the processor and the stats but basically this thing has a six core eighth generation i7 processor so it is an absolute animal especially when it comes to like video editing. I think like even some of my bigger projects like my bigger ones that have a lot of fancy edits they might be like 20 minutes long. This thing I never rendered a video in Premiere Pro on this laptop and it taken longer than like 10 minutes. Like this thing absolutely cranks it out. You can hear it like once it starts rendering like the gears start turning this thing gets loud but it is so fast. Not only will it render videos but I'll be rendering a video in Premiere and then I'll also have Photoshop open and I'll be editing the thumbnail for a YouTube video and I'll also throw that thumbnail in a light room adjust the colors and throw it in Photoshop put the text on it. So all of like three pretty like heavy-duty programs running at the same time in addition to maybe like music on Spotify playing and like or like a YouTube video in the background in Chrome with like a ton of tabs open. So it is it is an absolute beast at multitasking and the processing power with six cores you know you have a lot of different tasks running at once. Also it's super slim it's not like MacBook Pro slim but it's it's I mean look at this it's it's very slim and slips into the back of my backpack pretty easily it's light I sometimes I forget I have it on me. Also that the 4k LED screen is absolutely beautiful especially when it comes to photo editing getting kind of those true colors and editing off of those and then the 4k is nice a lot of times it sucks the battery in addition to the touchscreen but it is pretty useful a lot of times just to tap and it's not like it's not a two-in-one so it doesn't flip around or anything but the touchscreen is useful for like scrolling through documents or scrolling through like textbooks and then like even like drawing little notes or scribbles in the margins of some of my notes. It's definitely it's definitely more convenient than you think but the laptop is by no means a two-in-one. All right things I don't like battery life isn't great mainly this it's not the XPS 15 that the XPS 15 the base model does have great battery life but since I have the 4k touchscreen that sucks a lot of the battery life it almost cuts it cuts the battery life down by like 33% but most time if I'm not doing anything too intense and like video editing it'll last me six to eight hours on average which is enough to make it through school day easy. Also it is not macOS it's Windows which is another big decision you need to make when you're considering which laptops you buy so I have had some problems with viruses but nothing too big and then also as a computer science student a lot of my science requires something that's Unix-based and unfortunately Windows does not have a Unix-based command line which I'm still mad so a lot of my computer science assignments have to be done through a Linux virtual machine but that's not a problem with the computer itself that's just a problem with Windows. Don't get me wrong I love Windows and that's what I've used for most of my life but it does have its downsides especially when it comes to computer science. So why did I choose a specific laptop? Like I said I knew I would be using this laptop for for school first and most so I needed something that would I'd be able to code on and that would be able to handle heavy programming assignments I needed something that would be able to run a lot of the heavy engineering programs that I'm using like Solidworks, Matlab, all that stuff and be able to do some heavy computation so the the processor helps a lot with that and obviously as a youtuber I needed something that would be able to handle these long video edits and be able to run Premiere with no hitches and no problems at all. So that's what ultimately led me to this guy and the slimness and everything something that's easy to carry around I carried around on me every single day it goes right in the back of my backpack and I've never had any problems. So I basically now when it comes to choosing your laptop I've given a little rundown of what I use now I'm going to give you tips for choosing yours. So first of all I'll give you a little crash course and what all those stats actually meant if you didn't know it. So I talked about mine as a 1 terabyte solid state drive so that's the the static memory that's going to be on the computer that's we're gonna be storing all your photos your videos all your assignments and everything like that's actually stored on the desktop so there's differences between a solid state drive or you might be looking at computers that have an HDD which is a hard disk drive HDD's hard disk drives are great but they they're actually spinning drives so they can like you or your bump your computer or something they're a lot more likely to fail or like get messed up whereas a solid state drive has no spinning disk and it's much faster than a hard disk drive so that's what I went for and obviously I needed a terabyte because I need a lot a lot of storage for my photos and videos. RAM stands for random access memory so that's basically I like to think of it as how many tabs can I open on Google Chrome at once or like how many different programs can be running so that's just like how much how much random access memory so just like memory that's like temporary it's not anything that's being stored can I have open it once. Then your processor I'm not like I don't know you talk about computer processors but they have I did a lot of look studying and looking at like how the different computers and different processors would do for video editing and what the times looked like so that was my main kind of decision factor when it came to that. There's two things you should choose your laptop on like so you're going to college you need to choose a laptop. The two main things you should consider are hey what will I be using this laptop for because most of you will not need the crazy tricked out laptop that I have because a lot of you aren't going to be doing heavy video editing or heavy or trying to run heavy engineering software so you shouldn't worry about that you think about what am I going to be using this laptop for if I'm just going to be using it for you know surfing the web or writing assignments or essays for my classes you might be able to go something way cheaper like a Chromebook or something but if you are going to be an engineer and need to run these heavy programs you might lean towards something like this and then also you need to think about kind of the surface level things like size slimness whether it's a 2-1-1 or not am I going to be using this like with the stylus and I want to take handwritten notes also you need to think about like operating systems do I want Windows do I want Mac OS that's something more of a personal preference obviously Mac OS has the Unix based command line for CS guys out there you wouldn't have to run a Linux virtual machine like I do but it also has a lot of that integration with you know your iPhone and the other Apple technology which is nice if you want to just stick all in that ecosystem those are the main things you should consider now I'm going to run through a list I did a little research into some of the best college laptops for 2019 at different price ranges and different different things you would want so obviously we'll start with we'll start with Macs so you're like if if you need something more powerful you definitely want to look at the MacBook Pro that's definitely going to have more options for more powerful processors more space for your SSD and more more RAM but if you want to if you're not don't plan on doing as intensive like photo or video editing you could probably consider the MacBook Air which is a cheaper version a little bigger and not as powerful but definitely better for kind of your everyday student now moving over to the Windows machines obviously there's the Dell XPS line which is what I have I the XPS 15 but there's also an XPS 13 which is a little smaller and they have two-in-one options for those so those can flip around and makes the time and obviously those are at a wide range of prices depending on how much you want to trick it out there's a lot of kind of flexibility when it comes to these Windows machines because you can kind of replace parts on your own even if you wanted to and then there's a Microsoft Surface which is probably one of the best two-in-ones on the market right now if you like taking handwritten notes if you like kind of having that flexibility from being able to go to tablet to iPad while still having a very powerful powerful machine that's going to be great option for you and then HP also has a line of laptops I think they're called the Spectre which also have options to be two-in-ones they're pretty slim pretty small and are like kind of similar to the XPS in terms of quality and power now those are kind of your your top of the line from the different brands but if you're looking for some cheaper options and you don't really care about your laptop being super slim you can carry out something a little bigger that will give you a little more flexibility there's definitely some slightly middle-tier options when it comes to laptops like I know Dell has like the Dell Inspiron which is slightly bigger than the XPS but way cheaper and you can you can trick it out with a lot of the same stats HP has the HP Envy I think so that's kind of like a slightly lower tier HP computer as well similar to the Dell Inspiron and then I definitely look into like Lenovo has a lot of great options as well and it really if you just need a bare bones computer I'd highly recommend looking into Chromebooks because those are going to be your cheaper option if you don't really know what a Chromebook is basically Chromebooks are computers that don't have a lot of internal memory and aren't really designed to be used offline they're great for college students though because you're always going to be on your college Wi-Fi you're always going to be connected to the cloud so Chromebooks are really designed to do most of your work while connected to Wi-Fi and while having access to the cloud so you can just do like just put most of your storage on the cloud because a lot of times your Google Drive at your school is going to have unlimited storage like mine at Yale has unlimited storage I get there was much stuff on my Google Drive as I want so if you have a Chromebook you don't need a ton of internal storage you can get away with like not a lot of internal memory at all if you have everything on the cloud and you don't really need that powerful machine if you're just going to be using it for your kind of bare bones internet surfing paper writing stuff like that so that's definitely like that's probably the the cheapest option if you want to look into that like I said at the end of the day I gave you guys a lot of different options I did a lot of research into this video to kind of see what the new laptops because I bought my laptop a year ago but a lot of the options are still the same they're just newer models I highly urge you to consider the two main factors when buying your laptop though is what am I going to be using this for what specs do I need and then once you have the specs figured out find the body or and the operating system that that's best like fits you so do you want Mac or do you want windows and how big or slim do you want to be do you want to be a 2-1-1 or not so that those are kind of your secondary considerations once you figure out the stats but realize at the end of the day the stats in the computer and like how much RAM it has how much internal memory what the process like it's going to be the biggest determination and how your computer performs not whether it has a Dell logo or an Apple logo on that so keep that in mind so that's about it for laptops for college I hope I did a good job let me know if I missed anything or let me know what you guys thought in the comments down below hopefully I kind of gave you guys a little intro into kind of the laptop market what the different specs and everything mean and how to kind of choose your laptop based on what you plan on doing in college if you enjoyed the video if you found this helpful at all drop a like down below it helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think if you're new to the channel since the first video you've seen there should be more college and back to school content coming very soon if you have any other ideas make sure to drop them comments below