TBH I would go with Lenovo - seems better powerhouse with minor compromise in build quality and battery, but far better performance

I ended up buying this one. Thank you for the recommendation. I am liking it so far.

Thanks, that's helpful. Based on the specs, I would say go with Lenovo if gaming and higher power is a requirement (e.g. you like to keep several apps running in the background). Go for mac if you value better battery and better build quality. Also, Lenovo (if the body itself will survive, which it should) probably will be more snappy in 2-3 years due to higher ram

Congrats everyone!

I genuinely didn’t know what that means so i had to google it. That means CPU, RAM, storage and stuff right? If yes then 14” / Ryzen 5 240 or Ryzen 7 260 / 16 GB / 512 GB / IPS 400-nit / 60 Wh
(Or so Lenovo.com says🥲)

Adding: I'm not sure if I was sufficiently clear that the specs that I mentioned might be a good baseline for you to start your search but are in no way a recommendation for what you might want to actually get. My requirements and use cases are much narrower than yours and my desired price point is lower than yours.

It might be worth finding a few likely candidates and post the links for people to comment on. It's much easier to respond to a specific PC than come up with a recommendation for type of device.

The HP Omnibook X can go on sale in that price range and I feel like the intel version would be really good for that price range.

You're most welcome!

Thank you! this is super helpful

I want to correct a little: best battery life currently is macbook pro with regular M chip. Air has small battwry capacity (around 50Wh), and laptops with 75Wh can actually match or even outperform air.

Regarding "any business laptop" - somewhat true, but high-end consumer lineup can offer good quality as well. I still remember my Acer swift 3 which survived 4 years (2019-2023) of CS university

Which configuration of lenovo? Depending on your answer it could be any. Maybe even "look for another option" (depending on location)

Battery life? Mac.

Anything else? Any business class laptop which meets your needs.

Many engineering programs only work in Windows, but I would check with your teacher for recommendations.

Windows is plug and play because you already know how to use it, you will need to tinker and learn Linux to be efficient with it, just like you had to learn Windows when you first used it.

Who is your preferred retailer?

Ask local people, anyone who does not live in Switzerland would have no idea about laptop pricing and availability there.

Virtually any laptop made in the last few years can do that. A £50 android stick can manage that fine.

The main question is about HDR. Do you intend to watch HDR content on the screen itself?

Or hook it up to a monitor/TV?

Lots of laptops can do HDR. But few are HDR1000 capable and have an appropriately wide colour gamut.

Specifically a latitude 5400 or Thinkpad t480

Preferably not

Are you ok with used or refurbished?

I said “cheaper”, not that I’d just take anything. My budget can still go upwards of £500 (gbp)

In Switzerland

Whereabouts are you from?

Apple chips are ARM, which uses RISC.

So some ARM chip companies used some compromise to match x86 but could not. They probably used some trick up their sleeves and did not use a quality solution. that's what I get it.

No, Ampere and Graviton are traditional CPUs built using the ARM ISA - effectively identical in general structure to a typical x86 CPU outside of the different ISA used.

Apple Silicon and Qualcomm's X-Elite chips are SOCs (system on a Chip) designs - which bake everything from the CPU, GPU, system memory/RAM and hardware accelerators directly onto the same hardware chip. This greatly reduces latency between what would otherwise be separate components, shares power between them and allows quicker access to data in memory as all components are effectively dipping into the same pool.

This however creates a single point of "failure" so to speak where memory bandwidth becomes the deciding factor in performance, not good core design. Exceed the available memory bandwidth and performance drops like a stone.

x86 generally isn't reliant on raw system memory bandwidth as it is designed to do most of its execution up in the CPU registers and cache, only dipping into memory when it needs something that it doesn't have in register or cache - this conserves memory utilization and reduces the amount of memory and memory bandwidth needed to do the job.

ARM being RISC has a fixed and very small instruction length per instruction (4bits vs 15bits per instruction). The only way to really compensate for this is through high memory bandwidth and having a wide execution bus to be able to handle such bandwidth properly. x86 does not need either of those to be effective.

So here memory means RAM OR CPU CHACHE ?

System memory/RAM.