Any laptop suggestions?

[Razzie.P]

My 9 yr old daughter seems determined that she want a laptop (probably macbook) for her birthday.   Any suggestions for a nice "somewhat modern" system for a few hundred bucks?    Nothing that'll need to play the latest, greatest games, of course, but something that'll run Roblox properly and good for editing photos and videos.

 

Thanks!

[Keatah]

I've noticed that kids and teens do better with Macs & Chromebooks. They all shy away from Windows

[Tanooki]

If you're trying to stay cheaper, have decent performance, and want maybe a little room to tinker on how it works out for you I'd look probably at a Dell or Lenovo, maybe Toshiba if they're still excellent (they were years ago.)  ASUS also had made some really excellent stuff about a decade back, but again, didn't keep up on them either but all 4 were affordable.

 

The last ASUS I got was maybe a decade ago now and the thing (dead battery aside) still works fantastic and keep it as a backup if my main laptop fails, it's an original i5 sandybridge with an intel hd3000 on it and it ran stuff far better than it had any right to in many cases and it was like $700 in the day and that's before laptop prices began to plummet due to chromebook style competition or dealing with mobile phones/tablets getting beefy.

 

I'd probably see what your roblox does for preferred game spces, figure out what would be twice as nice as a benchmark, then start customizing a few things using websites and see what shakes out.  I'm only saying go a bit over the top so it lasts longer.

 

You know I found this story from laptop under budget.com, Top 10 BEST laptops for $400 or less.

https://laptopunderbudget.com/best-laptops-under-400-dollars/

...and one for $300 too

https://laptopunderbudget.com/best-laptops-under-300-dollars/

 

Personally I'd cap your lower budget around $400 because the losses at the $300 mark are truly unacceptable.  You get some small eMMC storage, not a real hard drive, and given the RAM required to get online, run games, hell just run windows 10 and its services the $300 systems all have 4GB of ram which is crap, and the $400 tier have plenty at 8GB and real hard drives too for storage.

 

Coming up here on having my laptop now for the last 5 years and I went way overkill at the time to the point it still runs anything I throw at it fantastic and I've only had to toss the HDD and put a SSD in it (i7, nvidia 980m w/8GB ram, 16 of 32GB ram possible installed to give an idea) as it can run modern console games PC ports better than the consoles still.

[0078265317]

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-l340-15api-15-6-laptop-amd-ryzen-3-8gb-memory-1tb-hard-drive-platinum-gray/6350522.p?skuId=6350522

[Flojomojo]

This is a really good resource IMHO https://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/

 

For a 9yo I would lean towards whatever she's using in school. Mine 12yo has a Chromebook and I sometimes let her dabble on my personal Windows fun machines, but not on my work Macintoshes. She's getting into Photoshop and digital art though, so I might need to spend a little something to keep that interest alive. 

 

An older MacBook Air with an SSD would be a fine choice, if a little spendy for a kid machine. Ebay would be my first pick if you're handy with fixing stuff (restoring MacOS is easy these days), else the Apple Refurb Store is very nice. And you pay for it. 

[Flojomojo]

@malrak This would be a good starter Mac for a kid. Clicky