Work laptop recommendations?
Getting started at a boutique firm where I can purchase a laptop of my choosing and get reimbursed. I’m not intimately familiar with PC hardware specs, and so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations with regard to minimum RAM, storage space, number of USB-C ports, etc.
I’m leaning towards the Lenovo ThinkPad since that’s generally seen as the industry standard, and because I’ve also used one before at a prior employer, but there are a few different RAM options, etc.
I’ll be mostly using the laptop for Excel and PPT work, but I’d ideally like to have enough processing power to have several models open at the same time without issue. My new employer also didn’t give me a specific price cap, but I’d like to be reasonable here. I personally don’t see a need to pay over $1,000 for a work laptop, and if there’s a suitable laptop significantly cheaper than that, it’d be perfect.
Lenovo Thinkpad all day. I personally don't know much about the specs so I'll let someone else opine on that but definitely don't skimp out on processing power. Do you need a fully loaded laptop? Probably not. But having enough compute to run a few models while on calls is very important. There's not much worse than having a model lag while sharing your screen on a call with a client.
Thanks for the reminder that performance while on a Zoom call and screensharing is incredibly important. I’ve had a prior employer who issued HP laptops where Excel would often freeze up if you had too big of a file open and tried sharing your screen. I’d like to avoid that headache going forward lol
Personally I'd go for a thinkpad. If you want something nice for about $1000 you can pick up a solid X1 or a T14 if it has to be much less
Thanks for the rec. I’ve been doing a bit more digging on my end as well, and came to othe same conclusion that the ThinkPad T14 is the way to go.
For the benefit of future viewers, the X1’s price point is closer to $2k while the T14 tends to hover around $1k.
Yea my bad I always buy ThinkPads refurbished so I had the used price point in mind
T14 is great though
Lenovo every day. Their website has great prices, and you can usually combine with cash back with Rakutan.
$1-1.5k on a thinkpad will be fine, if you are docking it, would get a smaller one since those are cheaper and easier to carry. Just make sure 16gb of RAM, i7 series processor will be great but i5 is fine, and make sure to have at least 500gb+SSD.
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-21KC00A8US-Thinkpad-G12intel-6416-0gb1x512gb/dp/B0D383G3HP?gQT=2
Something like this would be great, i got a slightly larger one with the 10 key numpad, paid like $800 a year ago so worse processor I think and its fine. Only issue has been some aids excel files have been slow but aids excel files are slow on basically any computer so not too big a deal. This laptop above has the right ports for a dual charging / external monitor and peripherals so you're fine on ports.
Dell XPS 14 for financial modeling and BAU tasks!
You want a laptop with 16gb or more RAM. Get a core 5 or better processor. plus, laptops with discrete cards are a better choice.
i7 and up processor, 32gb ram, 512gb memory and up
how important is 32gb of ram? Price jumps a lot from 16 -> 32
really depends on what you are doing. i just bought a personal one and decided to go with 32. i run a lot of claude code apart from the regular use, so to avoid the situation where i need to buy a new computer in 1-2 years (in this fast changing tech environment), i decided to bite the bullet and pay for 32gb.
you are probably gonna be fine with 16gb if you just use for excel/pptx/etc
For office work?
I also always overspec, but 99%+ of people don't need 32gb RAM
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