Laptops

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I’m thinking of buying a laptop, I haven’t had a laptop since around 2010. Are they the same or different since over a decade?

I'm not the best person to comment on this, as my most recently made laptop is an Acer E1-572, which was manufactured in about 2014. I've owned it for four-and-a-half years, have used it almost every day, and it's performed superbly with 100% reliability. If you could find one of these from a reputable source, you could probably get it for around $150, and I think it would run Windows 10 until that system is withdrawn by Microsoft (in 2025). My own machine runs Windows 8.1 by the way, which will not be supported after January 2023.

If you were thinking about keeping a machine for longer than that, you need to ensure that it's capable of running Windows 11. That's not necessarily straightforward, as quite a few very recent machines apparently won't be able to run it, because of its very demanding specifications.

In more general terms, I think the most modern laptops are 'smarter' than the older ones, often have touchscreens and things like USB C ports, etc, but I'm not convinced they're better built than many older ones. Certainly if they go wrong, they can be much more expensive to fix, as some important components (eg hard drive, RAM modules, batteries, etc) are often very difficult to access, and can even be soldered in place, making removal impossible.

If you already own iPad and iPhone it makes sense to get Apple laptop. Recent m1 models are great.

If you were tech-savvy and on a tight budget, I would suggest picking some of older, about 2013-2015 models with 8Gb or RAM or more, because these are still decent and it's easy to replace battery and upgrade storage.

Don't make my mistake and go for a bottom of the range laptop because it's cheap but does the job. Turns out there are ever-increasing demands on memory size and processing speed, which means that a cheap laptop rapidly becomes obsolete. I learned that lesson eventually, and splashed out twice as much as before to get a laptop I wouldn't have to replace within two years!