High School Student Needs Help!

[unifenser]

Hi! I am a high school student who has around 1000$ to spend on a machine to last me the next 3 years of high school. I know this is a forum that favors PCs heavily, so I ask that you keep an open mind and remain unbiased. I take a lot of classes that involve filmmaking and music, as well as standard classes that require typing papers. I have four options for myself:
iPad Pro 128GB w/ Logitech keyboard and Microsoft Office Suite

Refurbished 13" Macbook Pro with Retina Display 2015 mode

Gaming laptop with at least an i5 and a GTX 960m

I want to be able to bring it into school and take notes with it. I also watch a lot of YouTube and Netflix. I am heavily invested in the iOS ecosystem, so I am leaning partially towards the iPad Pro but I hear it won't replace a laptop. I know it will do what I want though, because my school gives us computers to use for heavy editing and rendering. Tell me what I should use, thanks.

 

[Gallarian]

The new Dell Inspiron 7559 might well just be the thing youre looking for...

Here's Linus giving you a good look at it, as well as some of his thoughts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJPQfWCuxAo

 

[unifenser]

I watched that video and that's the laptop that made me even think of something outside of the apple universe.

 

[thor220]

Hi! I am a high school student who has around 1000$ to spend on a machine to last me the next 3 years of high school. I know this is a forum that favors PCs heavily, so I ask that you keep an open mind and remain unbiased. I take a lot of classes that involve filmmaking and music, as well as standard classes that require typing papers. I have four options for myself:
iPad Pro 128GB w/ Logitech keyboard and Microsoft Office Suite

Refurbished 13" Macbook Pro with Retina Display 2015 mode

Gaming laptop with at least an i5 and a GTX 960m

I want to be able to bring it into school and take notes with it. I also watch a lot of YouTube and Netflix. I am heavily invested in the iOS ecosystem, so I am leaning partially towards the iPad Pro but I hear it won't replace a laptop. I know it will do what I want though, because my school gives us computers to use for heavy editing and rendering. Tell me what I should use, thanks.

The iPad Pro doesn't have editing apps anywhere near as good as that of MacOS or windows. You'd mostly be paying for the tablet form factor.

The 13" 2015 Macbook is also a very poor choice as well. It's performance is really poor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSQjfXtiICo

Unless you want a very unpleasant experience, windows is your only real choice here if you want to stick with a laptop.

 

[unifenser]

Hi! I am a high school student who has around 1000$ to spend on a machine to last me the next 3 years of high school. I know this is a forum that favors PCs heavily, so I ask that you keep an open mind and remain unbiased. I take a lot of classes that involve filmmaking and music, as well as standard classes that require typing papers. I have four options for myself:
iPad Pro 128GB w/ Logitech keyboard and Microsoft Office Suite

Refurbished 13" Macbook Pro with Retina Display 2015 mode

Gaming laptop with at least an i5 and a GTX 960m

I want to be able to bring it into school and take notes with it. I also watch a lot of YouTube and Netflix. I am heavily invested in the iOS ecosystem, so I am leaning partially towards the iPad Pro but I hear it won't replace a laptop. I know it will do what I want though, because my school gives us computers to use for heavy editing and rendering. Tell me what I should use, thanks.

The iPad Pro doesn't have editing apps anywhere near as good as that of MacOS or windows. You'd mostly be paying for the tablet form factor.

The 13" 2015 Macbook is also a very poor choice as well. It's performance is really poor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSQjfXtiICo

Unless you want a very unpleasant experience, windows is your only real choice here if you want to stick with a laptop.

I know it won't do editing, but the school provides powerful pcs for that. Itll be mostly for writing papers, YouTube, etc

 

[thor220]

If you're only going to be writing papers and doing light stuff, you could really be happy with anything on the market and $1000 is overkill. You could get the iPad pro but to be honest most of the features are just going to be wasted on YouTube / writting.

You could easily get a dell business notebook and that would give you a nice large screen, good performance, an amazing keyboard to type on, and they are always at good prices.

The MacBook 2015 I could almost equally recommend but it wouldn't come with as much power and the keyboard isn't fun to type on at all. Lack of ports is also a concern and printer support could be a pain.

 

[Solandri]

I prefer PCs myself, but if you're into making video, processing photos, or doing graphics arts, I usually recommend people stick with the Macbook Pros. Apple calibrates their screens to cover 100% sRGB color space (range of color saturation). Most PC laptops only hit about 80% sRGB, and the Macbook Airs absolutely suck at around 60% sRGB. There are several PC laptops which can hit 90%-100% sRGB (including that Dell Inspiron posted above), but you have to really dig for reviews to find them. The two sites I've found which consistently measure color gamut are mobiletechreview.com, and notebookcheck.net. You have to be a bit careful with the latter as some of their % sRGB ratings are in Lab color space, while others are in CiE. The percentages are not comparable - Lab emphasizes granularity of intermediate tones more than range of color saturation.

Also understand that high-PPI displays like Retina are more important on Macs than on PCs. PCs use something called subpixel rendering to make things like fonts appear sharper on the screen.
https://www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm

Since the Macs are widely used by graphics and layout professionals, Apple opted not to use subpixel rendering. It makes things sharper on a lower-PPI screen, but does so at the cost of forcing fonts to align with the subpixels. That's not acceptable for a layout professional, where you want the font to appear exactly where it's supposed to even if that makes it blurrier. Consequently, if you hook up a Mac and PC to the same 1080p monitor, the PC's fonts will appear sharp while the Mac's fonts will look like crap. The only way to improve sharpness on the Macs is with a higher-PPI screen. (Tablets suffer from the same problem because subpixel rendering does not work in both portrait and landscape mode, unless the screen is Pentile.)

On the gaming front, the Macbooks simply aren't very good for it. Apple dropped the dedicated GPU from MBP 13 and uses the Intel Iris 6100 instead. It's slower than a nvidia 920m. Even their flagship MBP 15 uses a run-of-the-mill 950m or low-end (for gaming) 960m. These are older GPU cores and are basically overclocked 850m and 860m. If you want decent gaming, you pretty much have to go with a PC.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphics-Cards.13849.0.html?type=&sort=&deskornote=0&or=0&search=&month=&benchmark_values=&gpubenchmarks=0&professional=0&archive=1&dx=0&multiplegpus=0&showClassDescription=0&itemselect_5965=5965&itemselect_6157=6157&itemselect_6158=6158&itemselect_6159=6159&itemselect_6220=6220&itemselect_5945=5945&condensed=0&showCount=0&showBars=0&showPercent=0&gameselect%5B%5D=368&gameselect%5B%5D=366&gameselect%5B%5D=361&gameselect%5B%5D=359&gameselect%5B%5D=355&gameselect%5B%5D=353&gameselect%5B%5D=351&gameselect%5B%5D=346&gameselect%5B%5D=344&gameselect%5B%5D=342&gameselect%5B%5D=340&gameselect%5B%5D=336&gameselect%5B%5D=332&gameselect%5B%5D=334&gameselect%5B%5D=329&gameselect%5B%5D=324&gameselect%5B%5D=316&gameselect%5B%5D=308&gameselect%5B%5D=297&gameselect%5B%5D=293&gameselect%5B%5D=263&gameselect%5B%5D=249&gameselect%5B%5D=217&gameselect%5B%5D=214&gameselect%5B%5D=208&gameselect%5B%5D=204&gpu_fullname=1&codename=0&architecture=0&pixelshaders=0&vertexshaders=0&corespeed=0&shaderspeed=0&boostspeed=0&memoryspeed=0&memorybus=0&memorytype=0&directx=0&opengl=0&technology=0&daysold=0

So you're going to have to compromise somewhere. Either give up gaming, or spend a lot of time finding a PC laptop with a decent screen, or give up size and go with a larger gaming laptop like the Inspiron posted above. If you want something Macbook Air/Macbook Pro 13 sized with gaming capability, look at the Asus UX303LB. I think it's out of production now but can still be found on sale. It's basically MBA/MBP sized with a great IPS screen (100% sRGB) and nvidia 940m. I included the 940m in the above comparison link.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-UX303LB-940M-Subnotebook-Short-Review.146312.0.html

If you want something like that without gaming, look at the Asus UX305LA. MBA-sized with an IPS screen, not the crappy TN panels Apple puts on the MBAs, and only $750.