Best Laptops for Data Analysis

with 15 years of analytics experience I've hit the limits of many laptops luckily there have been Swift and massive improvements in the last 15 years in the technology and the pricing of these laptops to make them much better suited for analytics and data science than what they have been in the past find out what to look for when you need a laptop for data science and now also recommended my top 4 laptops for data analysis hi I'm Jen I help people build analytic skills and careers with new videos every week let's start out with the requirements for a laptop and then we'll get into the recommendations the first requirement any laptop for data analysis should have at least 8 gigabytes of RAM though I recommend getting at least 16 if that's something you can afford the second criteria is GPU data scientists can't do their job without a strong graphics card always look for machines that have a newer more advanced graphic cards especially if you're going to be doing any machine learning my recommendation is an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card as the baseline they really are working with the latest technology though if you're watching this video in a few months something may have changed their competitors may have caught up more because the good graphics card is important for data science especially machine learning laptops that are great for gaming also are often good for data science and data analysis because they're used to processing a fair bit of information and having graphics that are high quality and quick when it comes to processors or CPUs I'd suggest at least a core i7 seventh generation or newer processor these tend to be much more powerful and can easily handle some pretty large tasks laptops with Core i5 also have good performance but it's not quite as good as the i7 and if you're buying a laptop that you want to last for several years which most of us do you're going to want to go with an i7 or even an i-9 that being said if the core i5 is all you can afford at this point there's really nothing wrong with it you may just find that you either can't do some really massive computing or that you're much slower in being able to execute it storage story is just an important factor when you're looking for a data analytics laptop if you're working for a company that has everything stored remotely on servers which in many many cases you will then storage becomes much less important however if you're doing any work on your own or you're doing a lot of work locally then storage becomes critical here you have some choices you can go with an HDD or an SSD so HDD is more of the standard hard drive that we think of and an SSD is a solid-state drive HD DS tends to be much cheaper but the solid-state drives though they're more expensive tend to be better performers I personally prefer a solid-state drive if you're going with an HDD I would recommend one terabyte of storage space and if you're going with an SSD I would recommend at least 256 gigabytes though again if you can spring for more it's a great place to have more storage when it comes to operating systems it's all about personal preference if you're a Mac fan and have always had their products or want to purchase their products they're a great option and if you prefer Windows then that's perfectly fine too or many people also choose to run Linux regardless of which you choose almost all the applications and programming languages that you'll be using are going to work on any of these systems so compatibility really isn't an issue here just go with whatever your preference is screen size and portability at this point we're solidly into preferences territory usually the trade-off for a reduced size lightness and portability in a laptop is that you sacrifice processing power or they become much more expensive to be small my personal preference is to have a smaller portable laptop that's easy to take with me wherever I often work from home or a coffee shop or on a client location so I want something that's easy to pick up and go and for most data scientists or data analysts you're going to find that you'll have a secondary monitor most of the time again that's preference but I personally have a secondary monitor that I use so while my computer has a thirteen and a half inch screen and is very portable I also have a secondary monitor that's much larger so I can easily work off of either one you'll have to decide whether portability is an important factor for you and how much you care about also things like build quality because all of these can drastically affect the price point of the laptop that you're going to end up with if your budget doesn't allow for you to meet all of the criteria that I've outlined the easiest one to sacrifice on is probably storage because it's really simple to add on or upgrade later and again if you're accessing remote servers for most of your work you're really not going to need that much storage locally anyway with those factors in mind let's go through four different great options that I recommend I'll link all of these in the description so you can go straight to them and see even more detail about each one my first recommendation is the Dell XPS 13 or 15 I personally use an XPS 13 it's about two years old right now and it's worked perfectly for me since I bought it two years ago I actually have the core i5 eighth generation processor in it but it hasn't been any problem if I was buying a new laptop today or if I buy one in the future I would opt for at least the core i7 because it's newer and I expect over time that the core i5 will become a problem the latest versions of the XPS 13 and 15 both have the core i7 as an option so it's really easy to get that configuration in this laptop where I've had issues with this laptop though is on storage I quickly ran out of storage space just because of the way that I happen to analyze data and the fact that I do a lot more freelance work which sometimes involves connecting to clients servers but sometimes involves having all of the data that I need a process on my own machine I easily solve this though by getting an additional solid-state drive that was about one terabyte or was one terabyte and that has completely eliminated any issues I had that being said the newer versions of the laptop also have much larger storage options so again if I was buying it today I would probably buy just the new version of the same laptop and that would have all of the upgrades that I would want in it the second option is for Mac sans the MacBook Pro is a great option that needs little introduction while known for their incredible quality Apple products don't come cheap they are known to last a long time though and if you're a Mac fan the MacBook Pro is a perfect option for data science and data analysis the third laptop option for data analysis is a hawawa mate book X Pro this is often seen as a more budget-friendly option than a MacBook with similar build quality though you'll find that it still doesn't exactly come cheap these laptops carry many of the same specs as the MacBook and have beautiful graphics and fantastic construction they also tend to have a battery life that's 9 or 10 hours long great for those that are working remotely or on the go we're plugging in might not always be an option for my fourth recommendation I wanted to include a budget option this option is one that compromises in almost every area but if you don't have thirteen fifteen hundred even twenty-five or three thousand dollars to spend on the laptop it's still a great starting point though you'll likely need to upgrade sooner and for that my recommendation is the Acer Aspire five at around six hundred and fifty dollars currently it's much less expensive than any of the other options on the list though as I mentioned you'll likely want to upgrade sooner and you certainly sacrifice build quality to reach this lower price point while it does compromise in pretty much every area it's still a great option for getting started and one that I'd recommend if your budget is lower I mentioned earlier that I often find myself using a secondary monitor and that this is something that's really common for people to do I'll leave a link down below in the description and put a card right here in the video so that you can see my work from home set up for data analytics and all of the other equipment that I use in addition to my laptop I hope you found this information helpful and the recommendations useful again check out everything in the description below thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time you

Channel: The Career Force

Views: 26,587

Rating: 4.8722687 out of 5

Keywords: data analytics laptop, data science laptop, laptop review, laptop for data analysis, best laptop for data analysis, data analytics, data science, the car

Id: Gkl6kGnNhhg

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020