Here are the best laptops for students we saw during CES 2021 and what we expect for the year ahead.
The last year has been an especially trying one for students around the world. While technology has played an increasingly larger and larger role in student experiences in the past few years, the novel coronavirus pandemic has taken these existing trends and supercharged them. The transition to online learning is not going to be permanent for the vast majority of students, but many of the features of our current situation are likely to persist long after everyone is vaccinated and schools reopen. Students’ reliance on computers for learning, already a major trend, are now taken for granted in the era of learning from home. Thanks to the continued proliferation of 2-in-1 hybrid laptops and the introduction of faster, more efficient processors, even more cost-conscious Chromebooks are powerful enough to become a student’s all-in-one educational platform. So which laptops do we expect to make a splash in 2021? With CES 2021 winding down, we’ve gotten a good sense of what laptops this year will be especially valuable for students during the remainder of the pandemic and beyond. With the introduction of new 11th-generation Intel processors,5G connectivity, and thinner, more portable form factors, the best student laptops this year are going to have a lot going for them. While students are mostly stuck at home for the time being thanks to the pandemic, that won’t be the case for long and a laptop is often a major investment for a family, so they’ll want to have some future proofing built in. Fortunately, a lot of the laptops we saw this year are hardly one-term ponies. We were really impressed with what we saw from the Acer Chromebook Spin 514. In the early days, Chromebooks were pretty niche devices, but they’ve matured quite a bit since then and they’ve become much more robust. In the case of the Chromebook Spin 514, that means a new AMD Ryzen 3000 C-series mobile processor with integrated Radeon graphics and 16GB RAM – specs that honestly make it almost too powerful for a Chromebook. Chrome OS is fairly light on system overhead, so this is easily one of the more powerful Chromebooks out there. With its affordable price point of $479 / £499 (about AU$675), it’s definitely the kind of investment that will pay some serious, long-term dividends and will be more than capable of handling the evolution of Chrome OS for year to come.
