Mobility
With back-to-school shopping in full swing, here's a look at 10 (mostly) affordable notebooks for students returning to the classroom. Most of them are helped by Intel's new fourth-generation Core processors (a.k.a. Haswell), which manage to improve both performance and battery life. That will come in handy for those all-night study sessions -- or YouTube viewing marathons.
You can't have a back-to-school laptop roundup without mentioning Apple. Detractors have long complained that you'll pay more than a similarly configured Windows notebook for the right to own a MacBook, but that hasn't stopped it from remaining the leading brand among students. While deep-pocketed power users will consider the MacBook Pro, most buyers (and their bank accounts) will be satisfied with the MacBook Air, which has recently received its Haswell processor upgrade. For $999, you'll get the 11-inch Air with double the amount of solid-state storage as last year (up to 128GB), while you'll pay a starting price of $1,099 for a 13-inch version. (You'll double the SSD capacity of either for an additional $200.) Note that those prices are before any educational discount you can score as a student (or teacher), which makes the high prices a little more tolerable.
Caption by: Sean Portnoy
Join Discussion