Are 'School' Laptops a SCAM?

I put four popular back-to-school laptop deals to the test to see which retailer between Best Buy, Amazon, Target and Walmart offers the best value. Through comparisons of performance, practicality, and price, I uncovered some surprising results about these so-called "deals". In the end, an unexpected winner emerged as the clear best choice for students on a budget.

Chapter Titles:
0:00 Shopping
4:37 Comparison
5:40 MacBook Air M1
8:16 Lenovo Ideapad 1
10:00 iPad 10th Gen
12:41 ASUS TUF Gaming A15
15:46 Video Calling
17:19 Gaming
19:48 Conclusion

[LoudFlameKing]

I work at target in the tech section. Our laptop selection isn't huge and the default prices are a joke, but they frequently go on sale for crazy discounts and are actually competitive. So if nothing good is on sale, just don't buy from Target

[robsquared]

Having a gaming laptop sounds good til your battery dies during your 2nd class of the day.

[joeybarnett]

I thought you were going to be buying those $250 chromebooks or something.

[thereedfamily]

School laptop review. Not a single Chromebook… mans definitely doesn’t have kids

[christopherbrase]

As a student, the speakers are usually replaced by headphones

[Ducklordess]

macs are great until the schools use apps that dont work on them.

[itsdeonlol]

I would NEVER use a iPad for a laptop...

[munxcorp]

Just 8GB of RAM in $500+ laptop is ridiculous.

[atvrepairsandmore]

I graduated college last year and used a Acer Nitro 5 with the 17” screen for 2-3 years. I don’t regret it all. It was harder to carry around and the battery sucked but the speed, screen quality, and keyboard made it worth it. There’s just so much performance in it and I can game literally anywhere I have internet and a power plug. I would strongly not recommend a MacBook. I’ve never been a fan but the big problem is a lot of our software’s we would have to download is only windows compatible. Many of the people with MacBooks had to buy cheap laptops just for school.

[Ethanfn-zw]

school laptops suck
edit:mom i’m famous ps why y’all fighting my phone is going to explode

[seancasey]

Why wouldn't you target a price point or form factor for testing? There are way too many variables here for any valid conclusion to be made, especially when comparing them to each other. There's a reason laptops are rated by category ie. best budget, best small form factor, etc.

[jensenleblanc]

When I started college they specifically told us MacBooks would not work for most of our school work. This rang true as when following along in lecture all the professors used windows and they had little to no knowledge of how to communicate differences in excel hotkeys etc. They recommended an ASUS Zenbook. I got a Dell XPS15 and have liked everything about it except the placement of the webcam and some initial microphone issues that were fixed with an update.

[Eazon_]

2:21 you select "tablet" as a filter and are surprised there's tablets in the selection??
+ the one on the right was a laptop. a chromebook and 2 in 1, but a laptop anyway.

Unless those are just images pulled by the editor after the fact but that still doesnt mean there was no laptop to be found

[danielatk]

I got an Asus ZenBook for $400 at a back to school deal from BestBuy and been pretty happy with it, just takes some shopping around.

[marcustmusic]

When I was in school-a few years ago-we didn't get a choice to bring our own laptop. My schools wanted to use their Chromebooks so they can literally see what you were doing on their laptops. Whoever these kids are getting a choice to bring their own device, consider yourself lucky. I know things are different on the college level.

[AudioOwll]

What was Austin talking about? there are a bunch of laptop options at target, all he had to do was just unselect the tablet option...

[RyanR]

Kinda wouldn't expect too much from school laptops, just not built to last

[timeverhartofficial]

I remember when i was in school if you had a laptop with you it would be taken till end of the day. Wild how times have changed.

[Saibanaito]

There's a multitude of reasons why i say you should pick the lenovo over the MacBook in this scenario, but only one that isn't biased on my own opinion: compatibility.
How many school apps are available on Windows vs macOS (or even ChromeOS for that matter)? We, at one of my schools, had some students with MacBooks. The school had classes in a program that didn't work with the M1 for some unknown reason (it wasn't a macOS issue, as the older ones with intel cpu's faced no issues at all) So they had to either use vm (and we know what apple thinks of doing that) or get/borrow a windows laptop.

So while i say the MacBook and Lenovo is a tie, you should think about what kind of OS is needed, although it's certainly a small percentage that doesn't work with apples proprietary cpu's today anyway, but it can still happen.

[bubbledoubletrouble]

13:00 On the upside, unlike the other laptop with 8 GB of RAM on the table you can actually upgrade it yourself (the SSD too)