– Every year when back to
school time rolls around, all the major big box
retailers love to tell you about their brand new shiny laptop deals. But as with most deals in
life, they’re not real. Now, on average, a US
household spends somewhere between eight to $900 per
year on school supplies. Now, that’s obviously more
than just a laptop, right? You’re thinking about books,
you’re thinking about bags, all that kind of stuff. But for today’s purposes, I’m going to purchasing
a back to school laptop from Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon, as well as Target to see
which store is worth it and which of these laptops
are actually any good. Let’s start out with Walmart. Now, I’m gonna go into each store with a roughly six to $700 budget, but I’m also going to rely
on the store’s recommendation and their so-called
sales to drive the way. So the very first thing I see here is top of the class gadgets. So let’s shop some tech, shall we? So all kind of options here. The first thing I see is a MacBook Air. So this is a 2020 M1 MacBook Air that I will actually
say is a very good deal. So when I purchased mine a few months ago, it was about $700. Now, they’re actually
on sale for 650 bucks. All right, let’s lock it in for Walmart. We’re gonna go with an M1 MacBook Air. Next up, let’s try Best Buy. Now, Best Buy should be a great place to get a back-to-school laptop. All right, back-to-school essentials. Wait, an XPS 14 for $1,800? What? Boy, that’s a terrible
first recommendation. I will be not purchasing
that one for back to school unless you’re rich. You know what, Best Buy,
I will give you this. You have a lot of options. So I think I’m gonna go with
this Lenovo IdeaPad at $480. It is supposedly $320
off its normal price, which I think this actually
is a fairly decent deal. It’s got a slightly
older Ryzen 7 processor, but importantly, it
does have 16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD. This seems like a pretty reasonable choice for going back to school. Next, let’s go to target.com. Well, I see electronics, okay. Computers & Office, yep. Laptops and tablets, yep. Okay, I’m still clicking. I will tell you, there’s
nothing good, laptop-wise, on Target. And they’re listing me tablets
in the actual, like spot where laptops should be. Like, they’re pretending that this is like a reasonable choice. 350 bucks for the iPad, the 10th gen. Oh god, I’m gonna have to buy an iPad. Okay, all right. And how much do I have to pay
for the keyboard with this? The keyboard’s expensive, right? I know Ken did a video on this. – And it costs as much as 350
bucks for the 13-inch model. – It’s a $350 iPad with a $250 keyboard. No, no, don’t make me do it. So I guess I’m buying the
the iPad and the keyboard for the same price as a good laptop. Last but certainly not least, let’s take a look at what
Amazon has got for us. Surely, Amazon will save the day, right? Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
best laptops for students. Hit me up. A Vivobook Go. So for $260, this is a
HD screen, thankfully, a Ryzen 3 7320U, 8 gigs
of RAM and a 128 gig SSD. We’re gonna put that
in the maybe category. That actually feels totally reasonable. Wait, what about the gaming laptop? So this is the ASUS TUF A15. Now, a gaming laptop’s actually
a really interesting choice for back to school because while obviously gaming
laptops are going to be great for gaming, they are oftentimes really useful when it comes to doing heavier tasks. So if in your schooling, you need to do non-gaming tasks like, I don’t know, edit video,
do some 3D rendering, maybe even some light AI tasks. While eight gigs of RAM
is a little bit limiting, having that RTX 3050 on board
actually is like low key pretty important. I actually think this is my move. Now, mind you, it is the
most expensive laptop here, but it’s only just a little
bit more than the MacBook. Let’s do it. All right, my friends, with that, I am going to place four orders for back-to-school laptops to
see is it actually worth it to trust the fine
establishments known as Best Buy and Target and Walmart and… – [Joanna] The one you just bought from. – And Amazon. Thank you, I appreciate it. There you go, that’s the one. Welcome back. We have a wide selection of laptops that we have purchased
from our various retailers. So to determine which one is best, we have a patented criteria
of important metrics that we’re going to carefully measure. (clears throat) Carefully measure
scientifically with accuracy and journalistic scruples. That’s a word. I saw it in the dictionary. So just as a reminder, our laptops are the M1
MacBook Air from Walmart. We had the Lenovo IdeaPad 1 from Best Buy. We have the TUF Gaming A15 from Amazon, and we have the iPad 10th
gen and keyboard from Target. So we’re gonna begin by unplugging each and every one of these devices. Battery life is going
to be part of the way that we’re going to determine
how practical these are for back to school as they were recommended to
us for back-to-school use. And let’s actually start
out with the MacBook Air. So essentially, what you’ve
got here for $650 is a laptop that previously was about
1,000 bucks and it was new. Now, it’s easy, I think,
to kind of write this off. It’s a, you know, three,
almost 4-year-old laptop. But I will tell you that
that M1 inside is still very, very much usable in 2024. And among all the devices
we have on the table, this is still one of the more powerful. Obviously, something like
the gaming laptop has more like graphics performance, but don’t count out something like the M1. All right, let’s start out by doing a typing test on each laptop, starting with the MacBook. (keyboard clacking) Okay, 82 words per minute, 95% accuracy. Now, the advantage that
the MacBook has over all of the other devices here is
it is a solid aluminum chassis, which means that there’s no keyboard flex. And, of course, the
track pad is phenomenal. I will say having briefly used all these, the track pad on the MacBook,
hands down, the best. But, of course, you’re gonna do more than just type on your device. Let’s watch a YouTube video and see how well the screen
and the speakers hold up. Let’s watch PSP, shall we? Sony dominated the generation with PS2. So when they set their sights
on the portable market, the expectations were enormous. This is quite a nice
display, I will tell you. It might not be 120 Hertz
like someone with the TUF, but it’s a very high quality panel. And the speakers are
also really pretty good. So you do have front-firing speakers, which is not something you typically get at this kind of price point. I mean, obviously there’s
gonna be some advantages to this previously being $1,000 laptop, some of that sort of goodness
has sort of trickled down. Now, one of the key things I want to try is how laptop-able these devices are because, well, again, something like a MacBook
is really designed to be used on your lap. I’ll tell you that iPad is not. All of this stuff so far is
like absolute like MacBook. Like, this is like exactly what
this device is designed for. You know, it’s like lighter
tasks, typing, keyboard, track pad, screen. Like, all of the basic
fundamentals of a laptop, this MacBook absolutely nails. And it’s also going to go for
something like portability. So I am a small laptop boy. And so one of the things that I appreciate about a device like this, very small and thin and portable. It slots in absolutely no problem. It’s not super heavy. I mean, when you’re
talking about practicality, when you’re talking about sort
of everyday lighter tasks, I mean, the MacBook is
clearly the best laptop here for these kind of things, isn’t it? Now, let’s take a look
at our Lenovo IdeaPad 1. Now, I will say this is
the cheapest laptop here. So it’s worth looking
at it through that lens. This cost, was it 470 bucks,
480 bucks, something like that? – [Alex] It was 480. – $480, right? So screen is not amazing. It is also just 1080p, which is fine. Some other stuff here. It does have a good port selection. So unlike the MacBook, which
only has a couple of USB-C. We’ve got ourselves USB-A, USB-C, HDMI. You’ve also got a full-size
card reader, another USB-A. Like, port selection is pretty solid here. All right, give this a try, shall we? Even though it’s a little flexy, Lenovo know how to make a keyboard, man. 84 words per minute. Importantly, 100% accuracy
on my first go, yeah. Sony dominated the
generation with the PS2. Oh no, thank you. On the portable market, the
expectations were enormous. This sounds more like a phone speaker than a set of laptop speakers. That’s bad. Yes, the build quality feels a little bit on the cheapy side. I wish it wasn’t quite so flexible. Considering the fact that
we’ve got 16 gigs of RAM, we’ve got a still relatively
modern Ryzen processor. The keyboard’s phenomenal. The track pad’s pretty good. The biggest downsides here
are for media consumption. The screen is just okay, and
the speakers are actively bad. Now, as a larger laptop, I don’t know if this
is gonna fit in my bag. Now, I will say it’s light enough. That it’s fine. And it, oh, it does, nice. Oh, does it? Ooh, yeah, it does
barely fit, just barely. So I will say that even
though the downsides of it being plastic are certainly there, the upside is it’s actually
really lightweight. So I would say it’s still pretty practical for you to carry around
with you every day. So, all right, you know what? Feeling pretty good about the Lenovo. Next up, let’s take a look
at Target’s wonderful choice of a 10th gen iPad. Now, I will give them a
little bit of credit here. While most people should not
really buy an iPad for school, there are some merits on paper. Battery life is going to be quite decent. Portability is obviously great. It’s an 11-inch form factor. But boy, there are some challenges here. So there’s one port, which is a USB-C. So there’s no Thunderbolt,
there’s no headphone jack, there’s no SD card, no USB-A. And when it comes to a keyboard, obviously the keyboard
doesn’t come with the iPad. So this is a $350 iPad
with the $250 keyboard. Now, to be fair, if I was
gonna go outside of Target in their default recommendations, there are third party
keyboards you can purchase. I know Logitech make a few. That still, like plug
directly in and everything. They’re gonna be cheaper. They’re gonna be like
in the 100, $150 range. So it’s still expensive, but like significantly better than this. Let’s give this a try, shall we? Oh, oh, oh, I don’t like that. Yeah, it’s really small. Oh, it also doesn’t sound good. You can tell it’s like built into a cover and there’s nothing like behind it. Oh boy, this is, yeah,
this is gonna be slow. 64 words per minute. Yeah, I’m a lot slower. Probably the strongest
suit of the iPad is going to be media consumption because if that’s like
your number one thing that you do on your device,
the screen is quite nice. So I don’t know the resolution
off the top of my head, but it’s pretty high. It also gets fairly bright, and this does have nice stereo speakers. This, my friends, is the
story of every PSP ever made. Sony first ventured into the. Solid. Okay, so you know that thing I was saying about how if you just care
about media consumption, the iPad’s fine? Yeah, if you ever wanna use
this as a laptop, it’s real bad. So I’m, of course, using
the Smart Keyboard Folio. So it does have some adjustment,
not as much as I like, but the problem is it’s really uneven. So this is fine when you’re
like a normal surface. But if I’m trying to put
that on my knees, right, I wanna try to lean it back. First of all, it’s gonna
fall really quickly. ‘Cause if I want it to be like here, and that’s obviously not gonna stay. So I’m gonna have to like lean and put it like on the
very edge of my knees. It is, I will immediately
say really uncomfortable. That’s probably the number
one selling point of an iPad. It is so portable that you can
pretty much take it with you anywhere. And especially if you
don’t need the keyboard, you have the pencil or something, you could just take the iPad
by itself, toss the pencil on, walk around, throw in any kind of bag. That is a major advantage. But for most people, the typing experience on anything other than a nice flat level
surface makes it so hard to live with. Last but not least, we
have the Amazon special, the TUF A15 Gaming laptop. However, at the $680 price tag, there are a couple of
things we’re missing. The big downside here is that
we only have eight gigabytes of RAM You’re almost certainly gonna need to spend a few extra dollars to put in another eight gigs of RAM. Like, I just can’t, in good conscious, recommend to use a eight
gigabyte gaming laptop in 2024. Like, that’s just, that’s not it. So plastic, plastic,
plastic is first impression. Now, it does have this finish that makes it feel a little less cheapy although it’s definitely
soaking up my fingerprints pretty quickly. Now, you do have RGB on the keyboard, so it looks pretty decent. The screen is actually very similar to something like Lenovo, 15.6 inch, 1080p, color
and everything’s not great. The main advantage here is this
is a full 144 hertz display. So it will be better for gaming. But I’ll say for like regular tasks, immediately, you can just look at and go, “Oh, it looked kind of not great.” Port section is pretty solid. So we got a USB-A on one side. We also have two more USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, and a full-size ethernet, which is nice. One of the downsides
though, is power adapter. So all these other devices
charge either of the USB-C, you have a small power adapter. This is 180 watt brick, and you’re gonna wanna carry
this around with you all day, which means that not only
is this a much heavier, much more bulky device, but you also have to consider that you’re gonna have
a bunch of extra weight when it comes to the charger in your back. Practicality is gonna take a massive hit, but if the performance
is worth it, that’s fine. Mm, all right, let’s give this a try. (keyboard clacking) Hmm, keyboard’s actually not bad. 89 words per minute, 98% accuracy. Yeah, that keyboard actually
is better than I was afraid. The track pad, though, is
definitely on the small side. It’s honestly, basically
the same size as the iPad, which is not great. But the track pad itself
is also, like it’s fine. It’s totally fine, nothing special. This, my friends, is the
story of every PSP ever made. Sony first ventured. So speakers are okay, a
little better than the Lenovo, but still as good as either
of the Apple devices. What I’m noticing is the speakers kind of fire out the
sides, which is not great. ‘Cause first of all, there’s
not a lot of separation, but also, just, it sounds muffled. So when it comes to
using this as a laptop, certainly big, certainly a little bit on the bulky kind of side, but where this is not gonna
feel solid is in your bag. I mean, this is a big chunky laptop, and I don’t think it’s gonna fit. Oh, barely. Maybe. Ah, if I stretch this. Nah-uh. If I stretch the zipper, I think it. There we go. It fits. If you’re gonna put downsides
on a gaming laptop like this, portability is the absolutely one. ‘Cause keep in mind,
that’s just the laptop. I also have to carry on my
giant 180 watt power adapter. No self-respecting school laptop is not gonna spend a whole
bunch of time in video calls. So I’ve got all four of our
devices here set up on the table on a single Google Meet, and we’re gonna see
exactly how well they look and how well they sound, not just by recording locally, but actually what it looks like on the other end of a Google Meet call. This is gonna be fun. First of all, we have
ourselves the MacBook Air. Now, MacBooks, as you will
probably not be surprised to find, are pretty good
for this kind of thing. So it’s got a 1080p display. The M1 processor does a lot
of the actual processing on chips to make sure the
video looks all right. And theoretically, the audio
should also be pretty decent. Keeping in mind that all of
what you’re seeing right now is being compressed through Google Meet. So all the audio enhancements and video compression and blah blah, this is exactly what someone
would see on the other end of your video call. Next up, we have the Lenovo. It’s a little contrasty, I’ll say, but I assume that once we’ve
actually processed this video through Google Meet, on the other side, it’s gonna look fine. My bigger question is what
does the audio sound like on the Lenovo? And now, we’re on the 10th gen iPad. So this has the ultra wide camera, which in the browser,
just looks ultra wide. But if I was using the
actual Google Meet app, it would be panning and
sort of scanning around to make sure that I was always
centered up in the frame. Last but not the least, we have the TUF. So, again, like the Lenovo, this doesn’t look great on camera, but I think Google Meet’s doing
a little bit of processing, and this does advertise two
way AI noise cancellation. So you can be the judge
if this sounds wonderful or like poop. Next up, let’s try some gaming, shall we? And, of course, the best
gaming PC here is the MacBook. So let’s start out with
Resident Evil Village, a game that theoretically
would run on all of these except the iPad because it’s too old. But anyway, this is a game
I’ve actually played a fair little bit on the base MacBook Air. It’s really not bad. One of the things that Apple
low key does really well when it comes to gaming is they use their MetalFX upscaling, which is very similar
to something like DLSS, which means that, again, for
a thin and light $650 laptop, the game experience can be good, except for when you wanna play any game that’s not Death Stranding or Resident Evil or Assassin’s
Creed or Baldur’s Gate or Minecraft. I think I just named
90% of the games on Mac. Now, we are playing with the Lenovo, and my baby looks slightly more pixely. I’m very surprised to say that this looks and runs
worse than the MacBook. It’s honestly not great. But this is still a
much more usable laptop because, of course, it’s running Windows, which means that even though
I actually think the MacBook may be slightly more powerful
when it comes to the graphics, this is gonna have so many
more games to choose from. That’s probably not that
much of a competition. Okay, so some pros and cons
of gaming with the TUF. A pro would certainly be the performance. We’re actually now hitting
pretty close to 110, 120 FPS, running at 1080p. Obviously, this is a very
like not demanding scene, but I mean, it is dramatically
smoother than the MacBook or the Lenovo. However, I’m running
into different issues. Mostly, this screen is really dark, especially for a game like
this, it does not look good. I mean, yes, if I’m right on top of it, it’s all right, but the viewing angles
are not good at all here. Even though Resident
Evil does work on iPad, it needs an M1 processor,
which this does not have, which means that we’re
gonna have to play Genshin. Where is the impact? – We should head off. – Yes, let’s get going, great idea. Okay, so, ooh, wow, that
frame rate is a frame rate. So touch control’s not great, I will say. I could, of course, pair a controller, but, I mean, this is fine. I’d say kind of jittery though, like it’s not super smooth. Unless your gaming tastes are
incredibly narrowly limited to stuff that lands on the App Store, they’re just, that’s not it. It’s just, it’s not it. And so, my friends, it
is time to determine which of these laptops truly is best. Now, the risk of a little
bit of a cop out answer, I will say that there is an argument for any of these devices. You know, if you really
care about portability, the iPad obviously has an advantage. The performance of the TUF, the MacBook is more premium, the Lenovo is the cheapest. But my goal here is to determine a winner using these three criteria. So we’re gonna start out
by talking about value. Now, this one’s a little
bit more complicated than it should be. Now, starting with the MacBook. MacBook, 650 bucks, very
strong value proposition. You’re getting a quite premium build. You’re getting a lot of, I
would say, bang for your buck. Now, yes, it’s easy to
complain, only 8 gig of RAM, but performance, screen, like there’s not really a
whole lot of things wrong with the MacBook from a value perspective. By far, the worst when it
comes to value is the iPad. If the iPad had a keyboard that was not ludicrously expensive, I think it would do pretty well ’cause I think the iPad by
itself for 350 bucks is not bad, but another $250 with the keyboard? Hell no, brother. The Lenovo does well on value because the Lenovo, for less than $500, even though the build
quality isn’t amazing, you’re getting solid specs,
including 16 gigs of RAM, which I will argue is quite
important for the future. And the TUF is decent. The problem is, is that when you go into super
budget gaming laptops, there are major corners to be cut. The screen is just not good. It’s just very dim. That’s the biggest problem. And having only eight gigs of RAM means that you pretty much have to upgrade this. So if I’m gonna rank them top to bottom, bottom to top, iPad clearly on the bottom,
not even a question. I will actually put the
TUF as number three. And number two, I’m actually
gonna give to the MacBook, meaning that the Lenovo wins value. Even though the MacBook feels nicer, you’re saving $180 by
going with this Lenovo, which also has 16 gigs of RAM, which makes me feel a lot
better about the future. So value wise, feel pretty
good about this one. Next, we have performance. Now, the way I’m gonna categorize this is how well it performs as
a back-to-school laptop. Now, when it comes to the iPad, there’s a lot of things
that the iPad cannot do besides very, very basic kind of tasks. Now, the Lenovo does
pretty well on performance. So it does have that
Ryzen 7 16 gigs of RAM. The downsides though, is
that the webcam is not good. The audio is atrocious. So as a laptop that you’re
gonna be spending time with like video calls and stuff, well, it might be fine for you. People on the other end of the call will not appreciate your. (babbling) Sounds bad. The TUF has a lot of performance. So it’s going to score well here. But much like the Lenovo, the webcam and the audio is only so-so. You’re also dealing with a device that’s gonna be a lot louder. The MacBook, I think, is actually a pretty good sweet spot here. As a laptop that is actually
usable on a regular basis and something that actually
has the performance and the overall package, I have to give the MacBook
the win on performance. But this one’s actually not
even particularly close. Second place, though, is the TUF, I think the TUF delivers
a lot of performance, is probably one of its strongest suits. Lenovo is decent. And iPad definitely last place here. It’s almost like there’s
a little bit of a trend on the the bottom of
the chart here so far, which leads us to practicality. So before I decide on this,
I actually wanna check. So we’ve been running, how long has the time had been running since we unplugged all these devices? – [Alex] Literally like two
minutes before three hours. – So two hours and 58 minutes
ago, we unplugged them all. Now, please keep in mind,
this is not a scientific test, but we’ve, generally speaking,
done all the same things on these devices. So they’re all spent roughly
the same amount of time gaming. They were all on a video call
for like 30 minutes or so. We’ve obviously been web browsing. The screens have all been on, they’ve all been on for about three hours. So let’s see how much
battery life we’ve got. Because when we talk about practicality, battery, pretty important. All right, let’s start with the iPad. The iPad is at 74%, the MacBook is at 60, the Lenovo is at 36, and the TUF is at 32. So while clearly not a
scientific comparison, both the iPad and the
MacBook score really well on practicality. The TUF does not score
well on practicality. It’s big, it’s heavy. You need that huge power adapter. It also has, surprise, surprise, the worst battery life here. Yeah, you can probably try to come close to getting all day battery life on Lenovo, but you can 100% get all day
battery life on the MacBook, and the iPad is even better than that. TUF, very clearly on the bottom here, not even a competition. I’m putting the iPad in third. The iPad, even though
it’s its strongest suit, the problem with the iPad, iPad is still not all that
practical as your only system. And the fact that you have
to spend that much money on a keyboard that is nowhere near as good as having an actual real
keyboard, third place, which puts the Lenovo in second. And the MacBook, I know how to spell. (Alex laughing) The BA in first place. So if I’m doing my math right,
last place goes to the iPad, the third place goes to the TUF, second place, Lenovo, first place, MacBook Air. You know what? I feel good about that. Yes, the Lenovo is a perfectly reasonable. It’s a good second choice. But for me, this MacBook at 650 bucks not only is the best laptop here. It’s also the best MacBook, period. When you consider that a newer MacBook, if you wanna get like an M2 or an M3, it’s gonna cost you what? 1,000, $1,100 at least before you add any upgrades
or anything like that. Like, this laptop right here, thumbs up. Good job, Walmart. Thank you very much for
watching this video. Hopefully, you found it
a little bit insightful when it comes to learning
a little bit more about the back-to-school laptops, and importantly, how stores love to tell you
they got a brand new deal, when in fact, they’re
charging you full price. And in fact, there’s nothing unique or special about it at all.