The Best Notebooks for Teenagers and University Students

The Swift 3 SF314 is a 14-inch notebook in a good-looking slim case featuring a matte display, decent battery life, a backlit keyboard, quiet operation, and low temperature emissions. Its main drawbacks include the dim display and the low amount of RAM. It comes preloaded with Windows 10 Home and is ex facto limited to running applications from the Windows Store only. Fortunately, this limitation can be lifted for free by installing an update.

So affordable and already a high-quality convertible! The Microsoft Surface Go already starts for less than 500 Euros, but this version is shipped without physical keyboard. You can either use a Bluetooth keyboard or the optional Type Cover, which will increase the price noticeably. The storage is also limited on the base model at just 64 GB, and Microsoft charges a hefty premium for the 128 GB option. You can at least use the microSD reader to store more data.

The quality of the magnesium case is excellent, the Surface lasts long on battery, and you get a bright as well as high-contrast screen. The performance is not that bad, either. You notice that the Surface Go is no real notebook when you look at the ports, because one USB-C port will have to suffice.

If you are looking for a simple 14-inch notebook for less than 300 Euros, the Medion Akoya E4253 may be the rigt device for you. It offers decent battery life, a matte IPS display, and a fairly effective passive cooler. Clearly, you should not expect top-notch performance in this class but at least storage is upgradeable, and some SKUs feature more RAM, should this be required.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 is a 11.6-inch convertible starting at around 300 Euros. It is silent and offers decent battery life, which sounds like a great combination for not a lot of money. Unfortunately, it also performed very slowly and required regular waiting times when working on normal tasks and applications.

The AMD Ryzen 5-powered Acer Aspire 5  starts at less than 500 Euros. While this sounds fairly promising given the Ryzen’s multimedia reputation the CPU is incapable living up to its fame in the Aspire 5. Due to a undersized cooling solution the CPU is forced to thermal throttle quite dramatically. Nevertheless, for a notebook as affordable as this performance is more than adequate, and the robust case with its high-quality input devices and its straightforward and relatively simple maintainability basically seal the deal.

AMD hardware in a slim case: meet the MateBook D 14. Thanks to its affordable AMD processors the laptop is affordable enough to be considered for this top 5, and it performed very well indeed. Long battery life, high-quality input devices, a good-looking robust case, and most importantly its great price-performance ratio are its main selling points.

If you don’t mind a large notebook the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 15 might be worth a closer look. Its bright high-contrast matte 15.6-inch display offers plenty of screen real estate. Thanks to its comparatively high GPU performance even gaming was possible in low settings, and it was powerful enough for demanding graphics applications.

The E490’s predecessor, the ThinkPad E480, sat atop this particular list for the longest time, and the ThinkPad E490 follows in its footsteps. Lenovo’s entry-level ThinkPad is not as constricted as its low price might suggest. Battery life and input devices are excellent, the case is robust and sturdy, and apart from its poor color representation we really liked the matte display. To top things off the laptop is fairly quiet and comes with fast SSD storage.

The HP Envy x360 13 is a fairly affordable and compact convertible with stylus support offering a fair amount of benefits thanks to its close proximity with HP’s more premium Spectre devices, such as for example its excellent case or its powerful AMD Ryzen 5 processor.

The ThinkPad T14 carries Lenovo’s new name for what is arguably its best-selling ThinkPad series. It is the successor to last year’s ThinkPad T490 and scored a decent 88 %, just like its predecessor. Changes are far and few between compared to last year’s model as the design remained unchanged. The major update is the inclusion of Intel’s Comet Lake CPUs that are not necessarily more powerful but generate a lot more heat than previous generations.

Apple’s iPad Pro 11 2020 requires a keyboard cover or Bluetooth input devices to become a full-fledged laptop alternative, all of which can be purchase either directly from Apple or at lower prices from third-party OEMs. Thanks to the latest iPad OS updates mouse support is now fully integrated into the system, and the iPad Pro 2020 is even slightly cheaper than its predecessor.

The HP ProBook x360 11 G4 is a device targeted specifically at the education market. It is fast and supports stylus input. We particularly liked its great input devices, its robust and sturdy case, and its very low noise emissions. In return, it lacks a keyboard backlight and the display was too dim overall. Considering its small display, the low resolution is not as bad as it might seem at first glance.

So affordable and already a high-quality convertible! The Microsoft Surface Go already starts for less than 500 Euros, but this version is shipped without physical keyboard. You can either use a Bluetooth keyboard or the optional Type Cover, which will increase the price noticeably. The storage is also limited on the base model at just 64 GB, and Microsoft charges a hefty premium for the 128 GB option. You can at least use the microSD reader to store more data.

Huawei’s MateBook 13 is a subnotebook with a limited port selection. In return, it comes with a docking station that even offers a VGA port by default as well as a sleek high-quality case. At the time of writing Europe was limited to the iGPU SKU without dedicated graphics. Battery life is acceptable, and the device managed to last 7 hours in our real-world Wi-Fi battery test. That said other notebooks lasted a lot longer.

The Acer TravelMate Spin B1 is a device targeted specifically at the education market. The small and sturdy convertible supports stylus input, and it offers a colorful FHD display as well as fanless and thus completely silent operation.