Best laptops and home theatre projector under 1000? The MacBook Air 2018 is a long-awaited refresh of Apple’s line of lightweight laptops, which, since 2015, had only seen tiny, iterative updates instead of big leaps forward. The 2018 line-up brings a 2560×1600 Retina Display screen, which boasts fantastic levels of colour accuracy and decent levels of brightness and contrast. There’s Touch ID, which lets you unlock the MacBook Air with a tap of your finger, and the T2 security chip, which encrypts your files on the go. The stereo speakers also offer sound quality that’s among the best of any laptop we’ve seen recently. For everyday use, the battery gave us 9-10 hours of power, too. Downsides include the fact that you get just two USB-C ports. They support the Thunderbolt 3 standard, so you’ll be able to charge and transfer files quickly and hook your Air up to all manner of monitors, drives, eGPUs and other accessories, but, when you’re working on the go, this will be very limiting.
The upgrade to AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors is the single biggest component difference between the Alpha 15 and the Bravo 15, and it’s a big difference maker, too. The six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 4600H (3GHz base, 4GHz boost) in the base model is plenty fast to take on Intel’s same-core-and-thread-count Core i7-10750H, but my test unit’s eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 4800H (2.9GHz base, 4.2GHz boost) hits far above it in overall performance. My test unit (model A4DDR-023) is the better value of the two United States-bound Bravo 15 models because of its stronger processor and extra memory (16GB versus 8GB). The storage for both is a single 512GB solid-state drive with Windows 10 Home, and they also share the 4GB Radeon RX 5500M graphics chip that was used in the Alpha 15. The laptop is backed with a one-year international warranty.
While the entire laptop category has gotten slimmer, there’s still a market for larger “classic” desktop-replacement laptops that blend premium design and function. Desktop replacements aren’t quite as easy to cart around as smaller ultraportables, but these 14- and 15-inch laptops offer everything you need in a day-to-day PC. They have bigger displays, as well as a broader selection of ports and features, and are one of the few categories that still offer optical drives. Screen resolutions run the gamut from 1,366 by 768 for budget systems to the more mainstream 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution, up to the 3,840-by-2,160-pixel resolution found on high-end multimedia laptops intended for graphics professionals. Read even more information at https://top3beasts.com/best-laptops-for-research-and-writing/.
The Google Pixel flagship phones have a lot going for them and easily make it on to our best smartphones list. Leading the way again, of course, is the camera: Google has added a second lens this time around, meaning even better shots (and even pictures of the stars). Elsewhere you’ve got a modest specs bump over last year and the pure stock Android experience that the Pixel phones are known for. Sometimes the strength of a phone lies in what it doesn’t have, rather than what it has. A couple of cool features worth mentioning are Face Unlock, which makes it easier than ever to get in your phone, and Motion Sense, which lets you control music playback, silence alarms and more with a wave of your hand.
If you’re a creative professional and want a Windows laptop that’s more powerful than an ultrabook, with a larger, higher-resolution screen and a faster graphics processor, you should get what we call a power notebook. These are ideal if you’re an audio, video, or photo editor, or if you do a lot of 3D modeling, but you still want something fairly light and portable.2 They’re pricey, though, so expect to pay upwards of $2,500. Laptops with color-accurate screens and enough power for creative professionals are expensive. Power notebooks also tend to have shorter battery life than ultrabooks, because of their larger, higher-resolution screens and power-hungrier processors. And because they’re thin and light enough to be reasonably portable, these laptops are often not as easy to upgrade as chunkier business or gaming laptops.
Exclusive to Apple devices (e.g. the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air), the Mac OS interface is very user-friendly. It is highly intuitive and works seamlessly with other Apple devices to deliver exceptional performance when transferring files, photos, apps, etc. Apple devices are incredibly popular for manipulating graphics and publishing. However, not all software is compatible with its operating system, and they aren’t great for gaming. Read even more info at https://top3beasts.com/.