What laptop should I buy in 2021?

For $1200, the M1 MacBook Air with as much RAM you can afford.

The machine is super well built, ridiculously fast, silent (not “whisper silent”, actually “silent silent”) under any load, battery life is incredible.

It’s as big of a leap in laptop hardware as I’ve ever seen.

My job provides me with a not-awful HP EliteBook, and it’s less than a creaky and noisy toy in comparison.

At this point I would wait for the new Apple M1s slated to come out in a few months. Apparently the current M1s have impressed many all around and probably worth the wait to at least see final specs and not have buyers remorse

A Thinkpad that runs OpenBSD!

OpenBSD developers mostly use Thinkpads, so everything works - suspend, hibernation, wifi, camera, etc. Packages for firefox, chrome, and all the usual other open source software are just a pkg_add command away. Two commands and a reboot to upgrade the system and all installed apps a couple times a year.

It might not be the right OS if you are a gamer, or you gotta have the latest phone-app-thingy, but if you're a unix person and want a rock solid well organized and documented system that you can trust it's bliss.

Refurbed Thinkpad/Latitudes, spec it out to the max (RAM, storage) with the leftover money. It would still come out to less than $1200.

Lenovo X1 Carbon. Fantastic form factor, reasonable price, durable (mine has seen more kms in my backpack than some of my running gear!). Runs Ubuntu just fine.

If you want a linux machine, I would strongly suggest going with https://system76.com/ rather than getting a thinkpad or dell or whatever, if one of their options work for you.

The main thing I dislike about them is too many of their laptops come with 10-keys on the keyboard, with no option to not have it.

If you're not sure if you want a linux machine or not, I can't really comment since you know better than me how much this matters.

I'm going to give an anti-recommendation for the Dell XPS 13. It was considered the top Macbook alternative back in 2017-2018. The design is good, but the parts are flimsy and the customer service is poor.

My wife and I both bought one: me a 9360 and later her a 9370.

Around a year into using my laptop, the power button started to occasionally get stuck behind the case and turn off the computer. After 3 years, it's gotten so bad that this happens any time I close, open, or adjust the angle of the laptop screen. The screws that hold the bottom of the case together tend to get loose, but the root cause of this problem is a crack in a metal part of the internals of the laptop that's probably been there since day 1. Currently, I'm using KDE Neon since Plasma gives a good warning when the power button is pressed.

Additionally, I had to replace the battery since after 2-3 years just outside of warranty, it went down from 10 hours to 45 minutes.

Dell Support refused to fix either of the issues.

You might think this is just a case of getting a lemon, but my wife's 9370 had problems too.

The computer came with several keyboard keys not working. Dell Support took over a month to ship a new one, and I spent forever on the phone with them figuring out why the repair was still "processing".

Now after 2 years, the battery has started to swell and has cracked the outside of the case a little. No luck from Dell Support getting this issue fixed.

Unless you buy a good support plan like many large companies do that have large amount of Dell Laptops for employees, I'd stay away from the brand.

I'm waiting for the new Macbook Pros. Rumors suggest return to magsafe, sdcard reader, no touchbar, old keyboard and of course the new Apple silicon.

For me the best laptop I've owned is the 17 inch LG Gram.

a 2560 x 1600 pixels screen with less than 1.5 kilos in weight.

another one that looks very interesting is the kfocus.org laptop.. preinstalled with linux and plenty powerful.

If you are are already familiar with apple software you'd be crazy not go with the new M1. Super power efficiency without compromising on power? Yes please. It's the first big advancement in a while. It's priced very well for what you get.

The only reason I'm not jumping on the M1 train is I'm die hard linux. I also prefer desktops and never work outside of a home/work office. So I can get the same/better performance with AMD Ryzen and not need to care so much about power/battery.

You haven't even said what you plan to do on it. What are your fave apps and why do you care about Docker? Do you actually do anything compiles to native code that couldn't target the M1 with a simple switch with your toolchain?

Merely by omission, I'm guessing that these are not serious points of contention and any MacBook will do, either an M1 if you don't mind a few bumps or get it next upgrade cycle. If I were in that boat, an M1 Mac Mini would likely be it.

I have a dell latitude 7390 from work and it's an amazing little machine.

it's basically an dell xps13 but with all the ports you might need, and ram and disk that you can upgrade.

that machine really made me change my opinion about dell as a laptop vendor: you mostly have to look at the latitude line and you'll find sturdy and boring laptops that you can count on (without the flashy fancy things that are basically impossible to fix/replace if/when they break).

If only the latitude 7390 had the trackpoint... I'd throw my old thinkpad in the trashcan and I'd buy an identical unit for myself.

I agree with sticking to the M1 macs. I stayed with my older 2015 MPB for now until the new MPBs come out and by then there will be better Apple Silicon support. Instead I bought a used System76 Meerkat, which is an Intel NUC essentially, and I have that small thing sitting in my desk. So, I can ssh into it, or when at home sitting in front of my desk, I can connect it to my monitor and have a Linux machine.

I just bought an M1 MacBook Pro (just with 8GB of ram, I wanted the high battery life as my top priority)—it’s the most incredible device I’ve ever owned. It’s so fast, I’ve almost never heard the fan spin, its battery lasts forever.

Coming from a thinkpad x1 extreme (which I still use on occasion), this machine blows it out of the water in every conceivable metric at a fraction of the price.

I would suggest first to get something used and cheap, like ThinkPad and try it out for a little bit. Get something for around or less then $500 and see if you can make it yours.

I got Thinkpad, I love a lot about it, it’s keyboard is supreme. Touchpad didn’t work well for me and I turned it off and use the nib.

Still for daily driver I use desktop and macbook air (m1).

I'm real happy with my Pixelbook Go. It's like having linux with a good windowing system and UX. Linux APP is Debian 10 in a VM+container, haven't really missed being native linux since the switch about a year ago.

m1 mac pro, then when new ones come out later this year upgrade.. I'm not even a apple person until this m1 mac, love this thing, best laptop purchase i've made in a long time