It’s that time of the year again when schools re-open their doors for this years teaching to proceed, making kids smarter every day. In recent news, schools are going to start teaching children the basics of computer programming. This is where you’ll need one of the best laptop’s for the 2014 academic year.
As the government is pushing their “Year Of Code” since the beginning of the year, schools are set to update their curriculum to include programming within the basic package along side maths and english, but for programming you don’t need to have a top of the range laptop to fulfil most programming languages, but such specialised programming such as iOS programming, which is creating apps for Apple iPhones and iMac’s will require the use of Xcode (Available only on a Mac PC).
You can find a fairly extensive list of great programming PC’s over on the Top Laptop Review website, but here is my recommendations for the best laptops for this school year.
1. Apple Macbook Air – Best Laptop For The 2014 School Year
Yes this has to be one of the top list laptops for any teenager to
2. Dell Inspiron 15 7000
Taking the same look as Apple in design, but not the same high end price (around £630), the Dell Inspiron 15inch 7000 series provides you with a great platform to do any type of work. Dell has provided this laptop with a nice smooth aluminium finish (much like Apple), with a calculator styled keyboard (again much like the Apple), and provides a whack of power for even watching those HD movies. But unlike the Apple, this is one of the heaviest laptops we have featured on this article, so make sure you have a strong back if you are lugging this around for a long time.
3. Dell Precision M3800
The second Dell in this line up (they are certainly doing something right). The Dell Precision M3800 has to be one of the best laptops if you are steering your learning towards the video editing and creative side of computing. This laptop will set you back around the same price as the Macbook Pro series, at a cost of around £1760. But don’t let the price put you off, as this features one of the greatest laptop graphics cards of 2014 with the Nvidia Quadro graphics card, running a mental resolution of 3200×1800 on a 15inch screen! Again the look and feel of this laptop comes from the same styling as the Apple Mac (notice a patten here?)
4. Toshiba Chromebook
Finally, a laptop for those students on a budget (well what student has a budget – I know I didn’t, possibly why I never had any spare cash at the end of each month). The Toshiba Chromebook is their entry level laptop coming in at an excellent price of around £200, which makes it one of the best laptops with a 13.5 inch screen for the price. But with the cheapest price comes with some set backs, with little apps currently available for this laptop, and with not the best performance of the above laptops, this will allow a great platform for internet browsing and general word processing and light weight programming (HTML and PHP
Conclusion
As you can probably tell from just looking at all the current laptops on the market, they all seem to take their styling directly from the most successful laptop currently on the market – the Apple Macbook series. But saying that, a good laptop that will serve you for years to come, I would extremely recommend the Apple Macbook Air, with its extended battery life, stylish looks, and very popular with the kids, the Apple Macbook will give you years of trouble free computing, and an excellent platform to do any programming with.