HACKER Q&A
📣 LogHouse

Best Personal Laptop in 2024?


With the Copilot+ (i.e. Windows ARM) computers on their way, and the M-series Macs already setting the precedent, what do you consider to be the best personal laptop option in 2024?

  👤 runjake Accepted Answer ✓
What do I consider the best personal laptop option?

- Current gen MacBook Air

- 14" MacBook Pro

- 16" MacBook Pro

But I don't play any games on my MBP. If you want to game, don't choose a Mac laptop, even if you're thinking about doing streaming gaming online. It's terrible unless you're only in the most ideal of circumstances.

I have a 14" MBP M3 Max (waaay overkill, should have gone with an MBA) and a cheap $700 gaming PC (i5-12600K and an RX 6600). It's kind of the best of both worlds. The gaming PC spends its time booted to Linux when I'm not gaming.

👤 SamPerson
Personally, I have got a MSI modern 14 with debian installed and its the best laptop for work I got till date. It gets all the job done, no fuss. Pretty cheap as well, got it for ~600 usd + 8 gigs of RAM for ~59 usd on top of the existing 8 gigs.
👤 adamomada
I’m thinking a used or refurb MacBook Air M1 , for the price to what you get cannot be beat
👤 twoquestions
What are you going to be using it for? Gaming? AI model training? Wordpress dev? Writing?

Your answer will change radically depending on these things. Personally, an out-of-support Macbook Pro from 2016 with Fedora on it has worked really well for me.

👤 999900000999
The best thing with a return policy.

Unless your buying a Mac, theirs no real reason to go over 1k USD. All laptops share one weakness, you can drop them.

I just ordered a new X86 ( no recall for me) laptop and I'll be putting Debian on it.

👤 smarm52
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-laptops/
👤 verdverm
Very happy with my M2 Air after trying out alternatives for a few years.
👤 gregjor
Your questions seems like asking "What's the best grocery?" or "What's the best car?" No one can answer the question, but you will collect some opinions and anecdotes.

You would have to define "best" in terms of both how you intend to use a laptop, and your personal tastes and preferences. "Best" doesn't describe a quality of laptops, or a metric by which we can objectively compare laptops.

Personally I use an iPad Pro with keyboard as my personal and professional "laptop." Although it works for me and suits my preferences I would hesitate to recommend my setup to everyone or call it "the best." iPads do not (yet) have Copilot or other so-called AI features, though I expect that's coming, and I expect Apple will let me turn it off as they do now with Siri.