It also has a healthy selection of ports so you won't need to remember a separate dongle if you want to plug in a wired mouse or webcam.
It's fairly spartan in regards to features, but its thin and lightweight design makes it well suited to throwing into a bag and carrying around school or college all day.
It won't be winning many beauty contests, but this laptop is perfect for students who need an economic device to get online and run Windows applications.īudget-friendly doesn't mean underpowered either, as there are plenty of configurations available for you to select just how powerful you need the laptop to be, from a capable Intel Core i5 processor up to a beefier i7. The Acer Swift 3 is going to be an ideal choice if you want something that sits between the MacBook Air and a Chromebook in budget, style and power. See our in-depth Acer Chromebook 314 review for more details.
Just because something is budget-friendly doesn't mean it's underpowered either as we found during our review process that it could cope fine with some basic art apps when connected to an Android tablet, which is ideal for those studying subjects like illustration.įinally, it has plenty of ports to support all your peripherals such as a mouse or webcam, and you can work around the minimal 32GB eMMC of storage by keeping a portable SSD or flash drive handy to save all of your coursework or homework onto.
There are some compromises with buying a Chromebook, notably that Chrome can't run all the software programs you can run on a Windows computer or a Mac, but for most students that won't be an issue as many educational services are available within a browser.Īs a trade-off, Chromebooks are less demanding than both Windows and MacOS which results in that impressive battery longevity, as well as Chromebooks typically being a lot cheaper than rival offerings.
The Acer Chromebook 314 has everything that most students need to get their work done: a 14-inch display and over 12-hours of battery life to keep you working through the day, with enough juice to finish up any homework in the afternoon.
See our full MacBook Air (M1, 2020) review for more details. It's also been well optimized for a wide range of applications so regardless of if you're studying economics or video editing, there's very little that this compact, lightweight laptop can't handle. That fast and powerful M1 chip allows the MacBook Air to be completely fanless, which is ideal for use in libraries or areas of silent study. In our tests it achieved well over a full day of use on a single charge so you can power through your day without anxiously making sure you're sitting near a power outlet, and it has enough ports to support most of the peripherals you'd need at college or school, such as a mouse and webcam. The MacBook Air (M1, 2020) is currently the most affordable laptop in the Apple family, and while its likely to be overtaken in performance by the recently-released M2-powered MacBook Air, the older MacBook Air is a much better buy for a student laptop, as it's cheaper than the latest model by quite a bit, while still being an excellent performer. For more information on how we evaluate laptops, see our how we test laptops page.
Most of the picks below are based on our own reviews and time spent with these laptops, as well as our own expertise. Similarly, students studying video editing or photography may need to prioritise a display with fantastic colour accuracy and high levels of brightness which are difficult - though not impossible – to find on a tight budget. That said, university and college students may need something more powerful, particularly if they're studying a creative field such as visual effects and 3D modelling so we've made every effort to include a decent selection of laptops equipped with seriously powerful graphics cards and plenty of RAM in their systems. Note that the vast majority of students won't need the power that comes with a flagship machine for their studies, especially at a younger age where most applications will run online within a browser, or are optimised to run on low-powered hardware that's typically found through schools. To make buying a new laptop for studying on as easy as possible, we've put together this list that collects a range of different devices that are ideal for a variety of students.