Workplace issue laptop selection.

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Scott3

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#318921 5-Mar-2025 00:19

What is the current prudent procurement for nicer work laptops (Small scale office).

Workplace is looking to replace a small fleet of Asus Zenbook's (Intel 1260p, 16GB of ram). Largely because the users are running into performance and heat issues with them.

Use case for these, is largely office suite, google earth pro and lots of web based tool's (heavy GIS based ones).

A few questions:

Is it nuts to go for a consumer grade laptop for this application.
- Something like a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura (14" Gen 10), comes out more than $1000 cheaper than a similar specked Thinkpad X9-14 (Intel 258V, 1TB SSD, 3 years onsite support). -Wife has an older version of the Yoga Slim 7i for home use and it has been completely fine.
Everybody seems to be raving about Lunar Lake CPU's, but the but there are still fairly few business style laptops with them. Is it generally seen as worth the reduced selection to get the latest.
Brands? Out IT supplier is quoting us Lenovo, but said 80%+ of their clients are running HP. (My work laptop is an Lenovo Thinkpad, so we are not opposed to Lenovo)
Are those 2 in 1 / 360 laptops generally seen as useful?
Thoughts on going Microsoft surface
Thoughts about going Apple? (I am the only one who uses specialist software at the moment, and am sticking with my Lenovo)

Handle9

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#3350252 5-Mar-2025 00:47

The big difference with work machines, aside from build quality, is support. When a machine craps itself under warranty you'll have a technician onsite the next day and be back productive.

There is also a real difference in build quality, work machines are built to be abused. They also generally have been built to fit with enterprise docks etc but this really isn't a thing anymore. They often have ports which are no longer supported for home machines, like having a dedicated HDMI or displayport.

I'd be considering HP, Lenovo or Dell at an absolute pinch.

Surface machines are cool but not the most reliable. Macs are also great but is it worth the F around factor of migrating users from Windows to Mac OS? I daily drive a mac at home so like them a lot but there is a learning curve which you won't have when migrating to new windows laptops.

Dynamic

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#3350255 5-Mar-2025 06:48

I echo Handel9's very well-written sentiments and would encourage you to re-read his post more than once to pick up the detail.

For business use as your daily driver, the HP Elite / EliteBook series is the way to go in my professional opinion. 90% of the laptops we sell are from this range. I picked up an EliteBook x360 with the fold back hinge 2 years ago as my client meeting / travel computer as it was on a clearance deal. The only thing I use the touch screen for is pinching to zoom a document or image. I never fold the screen all the way back to use it as a tablet. (Before this I was using an ASUS laptop that a client insisted on buying through us and then rejected when it had reliability issues. It got sent away for 1-2 weeks twice for repair before the situation improved.)

Laptops with the Snapdragon processor like some recent Microsoft Surface devices had amazing battery life but there was some compatibility sacrificed. We saw this with clients not being able to use corporate-standard antivirus software and corporate-standard remote access. Microsoft have dipped their toes in the water with ARM processors before and abandoned them, and I suspect this time around a good number of software developers that need driver-level access like antivirus and VPN were adopting a wait-and-see approach before committing significant resources to support the ARM architecture Snapdragon is based upon. Clients see a new slim computer with amazing battery life. They don't see challenges 'under the hood'.

Lunar Lake is Intel's answer to Snapdragon. I've not got my hands on a machine with one of these processors yet, but my reading suggests the battery life of a Lunar Lake machine rivals that of Snapdragon but the processor performance (when on battery power) is notably less than that of Snapdragon. How noticeable this will be, I don't know. The performance is on par when plugged in, and most laptop users have their machines plugged in most of the time.

Whatever you choose, I'd suggest buying one and giving it a try for a month or two before committing to replacing your whole fleet.

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tehgerbil

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#3350288 5-Mar-2025 09:00

Echoing Dynamic and Handle9, and adding my 2c.

Avoid snapdragon imo, the architecture's too new for 100% reliability, we're trialing it and have come across several bugs with Office products.

Speaking of consumer grade machines are designed to run for 1-3 hours a day, roughly 2 to 5 days a week at a minimum of 5-15% utilisation.

This is NOT the same as a enterprise grade machine designed for running 8-9 hours a day for 5 days a week at 60-80% constant utilisation. Enterprise grade machine also have additional upgrades like metal plates over the USB-C port to provide additional rigidity to support the frequent use of docks.

This is most notable with Surfaces, their cooling solution quickly gets overwhelmed if you run it for 2-3 hours at 90% capacity a day causing excess heat which damages the battery and causes the thermal paste to dry out and decreases efficiency.

Macs are good for battery life, longevity but you'll also likely need to look at Parallels and Windows licenses as plan B for Windows only software, or even the same software which is significantly better on Windows (Looking at you Excel). But frankly their operating system is not designed for multi monitors and as a power user forcing myself to run MacOS for a year now, I struggle every single day with basic things like alt-tab not bringing up the window, finding windows software and just general multitasking.

plas

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#3350338 5-Mar-2025 09:22

I deploy the Lenovo T14 with 3 years of premium support, this is used globally in all our offices in some variant. We did supply Yogas but they were overpriced, under powered and unreliable.

insane

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#3350346 5-Mar-2025 09:46

For the sake of your employees, make sure not to skimp on screen resolution and graphics card. The ability to Connect to a dock that drives two additional 4K monitors should be a given in my opinion.

Using a ThinkPad 14s gen 5 and it's really good and ticks pretty much all the recommendations above.(Which are all well thought out)

Scott3

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#3350399 5-Mar-2025 12:18

Handle9:

The big difference with work machines, aside from build quality, is support. When a machine craps itself under warranty you'll have a technician onsite the next day and be back productive.

There is also a real difference in build quality, work machines are built to be abused. They also generally have been built to fit with enterprise docks etc but this really isn't a thing anymore. They often have ports which are no longer supported for home machines, like having a dedicated HDMI or displayport.

I'd be considering HP, Lenovo or Dell at an absolute pinch.

Surface machines are cool but not the most reliable. Macs are also great but is it worth the F around factor of migrating users from Windows to Mac OS? I daily drive a mac at home so like them a lot but there is a learning curve which you won't have when migrating to new windows laptops.

With Lenovo, 1 year Onsite support is standard I think, and it is a reasonably priced upgrade to go to 3 years (For the yoga is was then free to upgrade from regular onsite support to premium on site support). I have used Lenovo on site support before, and it was a good experience.

Quality is more of a concern. Dealing with hardware issue's is seriously expensive if it means lost productive time. But there is the possibility that the ~$1000 saving could be fed back into a more frequent hardware replacement schedule.

On ports, the old Norm's seem to be broken. At my prior employer I was issued a dell workstation (ISV graphics card, 64gb ram etc), but it only had 4 ports. 3x USB-C + Headphone jack... Contrast with my decade old personal dell workstation laptop which is brisling with ports...

Seems to be a heap of variance between models on ports Thinkpad X9 has just 4 ports (2x USB-C, HDMI & Headphone). 14" & 15" Yoga Slim 7i Aura gets that plus a USB-A, 14" yoga slim 9i gets just 2 ports (both USB-C)

Noted on Surface & Mac.

Scott3

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#3350402 5-Mar-2025 12:27

tehgerbil:

Echoing Dynamic and Handle9, and adding my 2c.

Avoid snapdragon imo, the architecture's too new for 100% reliability, we're trialing it and have come across several bugs with Office products.

Speaking of consumer grade machines are designed to run for 1-3 hours a day, roughly 2 to 5 days a week at a minimum of 5-15% utilisation.

This is NOT the same as a enterprise grade machine designed for running 8-9 hours a day for 5 days a week at 60-80% constant utilisation. Enterprise grade machine also have additional upgrades like metal plates over the USB-C port to provide additional rigidity to support the frequent use of docks.

This is most notable with Surfaces, their cooling solution quickly gets overwhelmed if you run it for 2-3 hours at 90% capacity a day causing excess heat which damages the battery and causes the thermal paste to dry out and decreases efficiency.

Macs are good for battery life, longevity but you'll also likely need to look at Parallels and Windows licenses as plan B for Windows only software, or even the same software which is significantly better on Windows (Looking at you Excel). But frankly their operating system is not designed for multi monitors and as a power user forcing myself to run MacOS for a year now, I struggle every single day with basic things like alt-tab not bringing up the window, finding windows software and just general multitasking.

Thanks for your comments.

It's basically only office and web based tools that these users will need, but good to know that Excel on mac differs from excel on windows

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Scott3

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#3350404 5-Mar-2025 12:40

insane:

For the sake of your employees, make sure not to skimp on screen resolution and graphics card. The ability to Connect to a dock that drives two additional 4K monitors should be a given in my opinion.

Using a ThinkPad 14s gen 5 and it's really good and ticks pretty much all the recommendations above.(Which are all well thought out)

On screen resolution, the users are coming from 14" laptop's with glorious OLED 2880 x 1800 screen's. I'm thinking anything more than FHD on a 14" laptop is overkill, but might be wrong here.

Nothing we are looking at has dedicated graphics, but If we go Lunar Lake I understand the integrated graphics is quite good. I have a dedicated workstation graphics card on my laptop, and unless I am using AutoCAD or something needing video encoding it is Off anyway (had it forced on for a while and it would cut my battery life down from about 6 hours to ~1:20...

Everything we are looking at seems to have Thunderbolt 4 ports, which should be fine to drive twin external 4k monotors fine

SpartanVXL

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#3350462 5-Mar-2025 13:41

For business you want the support service, if you have a problem you call or make a ticket and get the vendor to deal with it in a day or so.

This might be my hardware overclocking background talking, but the main components are much the same. There isn’t really a distinction between enterprise/consumer laptops, if it’s got a Intel CPU then it should perform identical to another with the same one. The performance problems come from how the device handles thermal/power constraints, and unfortunately the majority do not handle them well.
Most common complaint from users about slowness usually stems from policy enforced AV scans which happen while the device is still in use. Hammers CPU and causes thermal throttling and slows everything down even on modern laptops.

Scott3

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#3350484 5-Mar-2025 15:20

Yoga's do have a historic reputation of breaking hinges. hopefully that issue has been resolved.

On cooling, the Lenovo Thinkpad X9 (below photos are of the 14") which is one of the first business grade lunar lake laptops seems to abandon the conventional laptop configuration of heat pipes and a copper grill, in favor of a large metallic plate and twin fans:

I am a bit suppressed to see this. I know Lunar lake is efficient, but the 258V still boosts up to 37W. Guess Lenovo know what they are doing....

CDN media

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https://www.pcmag.com/news/ces-2025-hands-on-lenovos-thinkpad-x9-aura-edition-swipes-at-macbook-air

cddt

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#3350497 5-Mar-2025 16:17

Unfortunately the 1260p is relatively new and I don't think you'll see a decent performance uplift from switching it out.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4707vs6364vs6303vs6281/Intel-i7-1260P-vs-Intel-Ultra-5-228V-vs-Intel-Ultra-5-226V-vs-Intel-Ultra-7-258V

If you're using web based tools they are unlikely to be optimised, probably full of crap single-threaded javascript.

Must they be laptops?

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Handle9

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#3350501 5-Mar-2025 16:35

Scott3:

Quality is more of a concern. Dealing with hardware issue's is seriously expensive if it means lost productive time. But there is the possibility that the ~$1000 saving could be fed back into a more frequent hardware replacement schedule.

it sounds like your work fleet is currently consumer machines that can’t hack being used as work machines. I’m really not sure why you’d be looking to repeat the experience.

CamH

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#3350504 5-Mar-2025 17:20

Always go with proper business grade laptops. Support, ease of management, ease of repair and reliability.

About 20% of our client base run consumer grade laptops. The rest run HP Elitebooks, Zbooks or Probooks - depending on their needs.

We see more hardware failures and performance issues with the 20% of clients with consumer grade over the 80% of clients with business grade.

Also - have you ever tried to open a lot of these consumer grade laptops? That's a maze in itself, and then trying to obtain replacement components is an incredible nightmare.

If you value reliability, simply buy the stuff that's made for business.

KevlarCoated

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#3350591 6-Mar-2025 07:22

Are the Elitebooks worth the price premium over a Thinkpad X9? Im doing contract work and a new windows PC, I had been looking at the X9 with 32gb of ram and the Ultra 7 comes to about $3400 (or 3100 with out going with the OLED display) where as the Elitebook 840 G11 come in around $4300+. Are they actually much better built or justify the higher price tag?