Laptop Best Buy Guide – Introduction
Preview
A large number of these new laptops are game laptops. Xiaomi the Chinese giant who officially still does not deliver in Europe, for example, releases his first game laptop and Gigabyte is about to release the Aero 15 and Aero 15X laptops, witness his teaser . Acer and Asus also seem to be about to release game laptops . Several webshops put a new model of the Asus Zephyrus online and a Polish website mentions the Acer Helios 500. The most striking thing about these game laptops are the mentioned processors: the Core i7-8750H and Core i9-8950HK. These are probably the first hexacore processors of Intel’s new Coffee Lake generation. At the end of last year already leaked a list with the new processor names, the number of cores, cache and tdp. Incidentally, data on the next 10nm generation Intel processors with codename Ice Lake also appeared. They probably get a much faster gpu than Intel’s current ulv processors .
Apart from Intel, various rumors about Apple laptops have recently been dealt with, the first of which involved a patent application for a haptic virtual keyboard. Should that actually be built, then it would be a keyboard without moving keys. A more concrete rumor is about a new entry-level MacBook. That laptop would get a 13.3 “screen with a screen resolution of 2560×1600 pixels which would be the successor of the MacBook Air and given the resolution of 1440×900 pixels with the current Air is not a superfluous
Concrete laptop announcements have not been around much in the past two months, manufacturers are saving their announcements for one of the biggest electronics fairs of the year, the CES, which is taking place at the beginning of January, making February and March quiet months. Microsoft announced that, for the time being only in the US, is making cheaper versions of the Surface Book 2 and Surface Laptop, and Lenovo announced two new convertibles at the Mobile World Congress. convertibles that follow Yoga 520 and 720 in June, and faster, thinner and lighter than their predecessors .
Changes in LBBG
The LBBG appears to attract a large number of readers every two months, and yet we are still seeing if we can improve it. For the past two years, we have been testing the best buys ourselves so that we can give a well-informed opinion about the laptops.
But there was still room for improvement at the LBBG and many comments we have received, concern the complexity of the categories, the number of which has grown considerably since 2009. The most used categories returned once every four months and were the budget laptop to four hundred euros and the mainstream laptop to nine hundred euros, alternating with the basic laptop to six hundred euros and the multimedia laptop to twelve hundred euros. Then there was a third category, which could vary from Chrome or netbook to gamelaptop or mobile workstation.
All these different categories made it more clear for readers, but also for us. Moreover, in the worst case, you had to wait two months for a LBBG that was relevant, because your category was not up to you. We have therefore considerably reduced the number of categories from this Best Buy Guide to four, and at the same time, using historic data from the Pricewatch, looked at the maximum price per category. This showed that amounts of five hundred, seven hundred and one thousand euros fit better with the categories in which our users search laptops.
| Category | Frequency | Budget (max.) |
| Budget laptop | Every LBBG | € 500, – |
| Basic laptop | Every LBBG | € 700, – |
| Thin & light | Interchanged with mainstream laptop | € 1000, – |
| Mainstream laptop | Interchanged with thin & light | € 1000, – |
The budget and basic laptop have therefore both received a hundred euro higher budget and will now appear in every LBBG. We have chosen a higher frequency because we see that cheaper laptop models are quickly followed by new versions and that Best Buy advice is rarely held for four months until we release the next LBBG. That is different with the more expensive laptops, from a euro or a thousand. These models are generally delivered longer and that is why we exchange the thin & light and the mainstream category per edition of the Best Buy Guide. Reducing the number of categories makes the Best Buy Guide not only more transparent for our visitors, it also means that we as editors no longer need to keep track of fifteen but only four categories, so that we can test more specifically laptops and thus improve to give advice.
What happens to the much-loved categories like business notebook, high-end workstation and multimedia laptop, are you wondering? We will unfortunately not see them in the new Best Buy Guide in this new setup. That does not mean that they disappear completely from the site, because we will continue to review such laptops separately or in round-ups.