12 Years ago I had a Sony Vaio. I quite liked it. Then in my next job, 2017 or so, I went for a Toshiba Portege, and absolutely loved it.
Guess what the above two have in common? Yup, they stopped making laptops for the professional market. So now I’m a bit at a loss. Any recommendations?
Requirements:
- Lightweight and easy to carry around.
- 13-15" display, preferably
- Decent battery life
- It absolutely must have an RJ45
- Works well with linux
- Good keyboard quality
- ISO keyboard availability
- Touchpad. Bonus points if it has the touchpad buttons ABOVE the pad itself.
Dell’s Precision series is really good these days. Their Latitudes are all over the place quality-wise, especially their 2-in-1s. XPS’s have been alright.
Which did you hate? I deploy a ton of these and there are definitely ones that were awful.
Latitude 5540. Someone designed this thing as a prank.
The power button is a keyboard key. It has a key just for calc.exe. It’s a comedy show all over.
Yeah their Latitude line is basically the boring no frills business tier that veers between ‘okay’ and ‘bad’. I talked my company into dropping that junk and instead we now lease their more premium Precision series. Build quality is higher and they have a discreet GPU. People have been way happier and I get a lot fewer complaints. I’m hoping to buy mine once the lease is up.