My Laptop DIED - Time to Pick a New One!

well it finally happens guys I am in the market for a new laptop because my previous one my blade stealth 2018 decided to off itself quite literally I was sitting in a job interview I was interviewing I'm not quitting don't worry I was sitting in a job interview and they just boot up no that's fine the issue isn't actually that it won't turn on the issue is that I can't charge it just to clarify that statement a little bit i plug in my charging cable and it goes something shorting something's wrong with it it is time for a replacement so we have assembled a flop heard fried murder whatever it is a bunch of laptops to determine which will be my new daily driver and there's going to be quite a few considerations screens gonna be a major factor I type fast and I type a lot battery form-factor and of course I would love to have I oh that I can actually use although it should be noted that I do always carry a dongle because I have just embraced that dongle life and my dongles not on me because I'm actually using it for a review that I was working on but trust me I almost always carry a dongle so in front of me are the five candidates let's find out which one gets the cheap and expired chocolate rose 2016 this thing goes best before speaking if that's before my segue thing has gotten pretty stale now hasn't it but I'm gonna keep doing it anyway this video is brought to you by Ridge wallet bridge wallet is the sleek way to keep your wallet bulged down with its compact frame and RFID blocking inner plates use offer code ltte July to get 10% off and free worldwide shipping [Music] I think this is gonna be a lot of fun and I'm actually really looking forward to it so of the five ultrabooks in front of me some of them we paid for but some of them were submitted by the manufacturers thing is I don't know which was which so if I pick one that we paid for then I'm gonna go with that and ultimately I'll be buying a notebook for the first time in a while and if I pick something the manufacturer provided we'll send the other ones back for refund but we did it this way to ensure that I wouldn't be able to have any bias as I'm making a selection another thing that this was actually the idea of one of our new writers was evaluating without actually knowing which device I'm using so this is my first time standing here in front of this and I guess apparently they snuck a MacBook in there so this is a MacBook of some sort like what's what's the challenge do I just sit down and start trying to type something wow those are not very pronounced home row nipples oh wait there they are okay I really like this keyboard I did struggle with the backspace but I think part of it might have been the do routine on my hands so I'm not gonna hold that against it too hard I'm gonna give this keyboard an eight and a half nine out of ten I really like it this is already a different style of keycaps that I do not necessarily prefer accuracy on this one is not bad but it feels a little bit slower it's got those kind of borderless square key caps this one's like a seven and a half for me I think I already know what I think of this one but okay I had the same feedback that I had about this before I feel like it's really easy to fire off quick bursts but as soon as I try to take the longer sentence I really struggle to keep up limit for some reason those short keystrokes really don't work well for me these have kind of a it's a long travel but kind of an empty feeling travel the really long keystrokes make double characters a little bit tougher on this one and my weaker finger my ring in my pinky fingers struggle a little bit it's okay seven it's probably the worst play minutes so far I like this one too I think it's between this is an eight and a half for sure and then which one was the hoops well I kind of saw which one that was whoops so keyboard test is pretty clear to me this one in this one stand above the crowd this one is shortly behind this is shortly behind that and this is honestly probably somewhere in this territory as well for me because I do do a lot of sort of short bursty typing as I'm thinking you know go go go go go go go go now our content consumption test might end up telling me even more that I need to know about these things because at this point in time I would have a hard time switching to something without a touchscreen so this one has one that's good to know I would describe the speakers as okay it's not nearly as oversaturated as contestants 2 and especially for our but it doesn't look as good as the MacBook so the ones on the end I'd say are the closest to the MacBook with these two trailing behind that you can see there's a lot of green in the water here oh right it's a netbook their speakers are sort of samey across the board so far touchscreen good good this is the worst offender as far as the oversaturation goes honestly this one speakers sound like they're doing a bit of weird tuning it's a little harsh sounding as far as content consumption goes it's clearly the ones at the end or the MacBook I mean you can calibrate the display but I want the one that is as neutral and accurate as possible out of the box I know for a fact Brandon wouldn't shoot anything that looks like that so with that out of the way the next part of the challenge is apparently for me to find out exactly what all of the notebooks are and identify them so that's definitely a MacBook Air oh shoot okay well I saw that one so I'm gonna guess the one with the good display but subpar keyboard is an HP Spectre I don't know who to blame for this poorly calibrated display over here you know what I'm gonna throw LG under the bus and I'm gonna guess that that's a razor blade stealth and I don't think there's a surface laptop to here let's find out what's actually back here though wow that was a surface laptop to wolf I gotta say I don't think its keyboard is as God Tyr as Alex does this was an LG Graham whoo-hoo-hoo hell gee I was hoping I was wrong about you and that's a blade stealth so actually the thing I didn't have was the spectre x360 I did get the rest of them right though so the next step is to go through and sort of talk build quality how they feel what the IO is like you know it totally makes sense that I would have liked the keyboard on the blade stealth as much as Alex might hate this keyboard I personally really liked it so this one's only got two USB Taipei's but that is enough for a keyboard and a thumb drive which is sort of my typical maximum when I'm traveling it does have Thunderbolt 3 as well which means you can either use just a standard type C dongle like I already have or something like an external Thunderbolt GPU it's got a quad-core processor Razer switched over to Intel networking from killer networking and I'm personally a fan of that move overall the only thing I didn't really like about this from the original review was kind of the the boxy shape but I kind of feel now like I might have been a little bit unfair to it because it really doesn't feel that bad in the hand at all and the touchpad being nice and big like that I'm a huge fan of that the RGB backlit keyboard is obviously a nice touch actually wait a minute this doesn't have dual Thunderbolt does it oh dang oh that's really nice now the Grahams main selling point is the massive 72 watt hour battery and I've daily driven one of these before and it is really nice basically charging every two or three or maybe four days depending on how heavily you use it something to note about this one even though we do have the barrel adapter plugged in is that it does charge over the thunderbolt type C port so that's a huge plus or a more than I really thought about before I this because it means I can carry a single type-c power adapter for my switch my laptop and my phone while I'm traveling but only a single Thunderbolt port native HDMI out though full size that is pretty nice to see but they're still using an M SATA SSD there's no discrete graphics like this one and unlike most of the other contestants it's using only a 1080p display which strikes me as a little bit ironic given that LG is the only company here that actually manufactures LCD panels on the subject of things that it has to make up ground for the build quality is just not up there with the razor blade stealth on the subject of build quality Apple still does it like few others do this thing is hyper thin super rigid I mean even the screen it's almost like they have a bunch of experience building tablets you know like super thin tablets super thin phones you know that bent once before and they learn their lesson from [Music] the thing that's really hard for me to get over here is the IO not having even a single type a USB is the kind of thing that can end up really inconvenient for me because maybe I do go out and buy a type C you know USB thumb drive or something like that there's still things where I might have to like a two-factor authentication key or now I have to go get that and I have to go get a dongle and I'm usually using something like that at a time when it's really an opportunity to be slowed down the other thing that kind of kills the MacBook Air for me is the dual-core processor if they refresh this thing with a quad-core CPU now they got my attention again because the keyboard is not my favorite but the trackpad is hands-down the best out of anything in front of me so it does have touch ID built in both power buttons something I really liked when I spent time with the last MacBook that I reviewed but some of the Windows machines here including the blade stealth and our next one have Windows hello with facial ID and I definitely prefer that I'd also have to get used to Mac OS again but I mean it wouldn't be the end of the world it's just not my preference unless this really blew me away I wasn't gonna go with it moving on to the surface laptop to to Microsoft's credit magnetic power cords are pretty cool and like a 2008 chic kind of way but unlike the meg safe connector this one you can actually pull the laptop a fair distance with it before it disengages depending on the angle you're using so you could actually conceivably pull pull it off the tape actually coming off biometric authentication it's three by two which is really nice for productivity that aspect ratio makes a huge difference it was far from the worst display and it feels really good in the hand but it's not as stiff as the others although I get it because they've got this you know soft touch surface here and it's just it's really expensive I just don't think it's really a candidate for me now this one was kind of surprising to me when I saw the pricing so the Dell XPS 13 as equipped has 16 gigs of ram 512 mb me storage it's a similar spec CPU to everything else we're looking at here so if I was going to you know do some light photo editing or very very light video editing or plays a casual steam game or something on the road it would perform similarly to anything but the blade stealth 4k which is going to outperform it by about doubling games if 3dmark is anything to go by a single Thunderbolt port no dual Thunderbolt again with another type C on the other side microSD and not a single type a man it already had one Rose but the pricing the pricing the pricing for this guy is really reasonable and when you consider the build quality which is you know what I seem to remember it being better it's okay it's not up there with Apple or Razer in terms of the actual flexibility of it I really like the keyboard and I really like the screen and I really like the price and I really like the look it's been a long time since I've used to dell I actually don't remember the last time I daily drove at Dell yes I do Wow my old XPS 12 two and one that thing was a tank though I mean I've yet to have a razor laptop lasts me more than two years and that thing got rained on I took it apart dried it out put it back together and it is still working to this day honestly when it comes to i/o and external build quality and looks there's really no question that has to be the razor blade stealth it doesn't have a full size HDMI which really bums me out a lot but that's becoming harder and harder to find so I guess I'm carrying my dongle around anyway but at least it has a couple Taipei's still has dual Thunderbolt and it is just plain built more rigidly than the other Windows machines anyway I wish I had a little bit more time to do this because I'm on my way out the door to go on a trip so whatever it is I'm gonna set it up for this trip I'm going away and that's it that's gonna live in my backpack but it's tough so the Dell config for a similar spec is about three hundred dollars less but when I say similar I mean similar because the razor blade stealth it has discrete graphics which means I'm not going to get as much life out of it but they don't have Windows hello facial recognition on this model is it sensitive power button that'll make a big difference to me it is it's a fingerprint sensor see that's pretty good but it's not quite and go you know what I've been gaming quite a bit more lately I'm giving Razer another chance don't let me down this time Razer big shout out to energy for sponsoring this video the energy 6dc is a small sixty watt power adapter that's able to charge smartphones iPad pros the Nintendo switch and even a MacBook it uses a USB type-c outlet and with a USB C to lightning adapter it can charge an iPhone 10 to up to 50% battery in just 30 minutes it's got over current over power over voltage overheating and even short-circuit protection it's got a foldable plug meaning it fits perfectly in your pocket or purse and it's great for travel and you can get yours today on Amazon at the link below use offer code 60c linus to get 10% off so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing oh this hard drive shirt is freaking awesome so it's a stealth hoodie for that matter and our community forum which you should totally join now I was going to eat this chocolate rose as a laugh until I opened it and realized just how fossilized it is these aren't like some kind of fancy white milk chocolate hybrid this is milk chocolate that's terrifying

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 5,566,261

Rating: 4.8609924 out of 5

Keywords: dell, apple, razer, lenovo, thinkpad, macbook, blade, laptop, finding, new, decision, showdown, performance, graphics, resolution, screen, display, gaming, workstation, keyboard, speakers

Id: 3i0XCn3HhNo

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/sboat77]

Have a 14" 2014 that's still going. Battery still lasts most of the day. I've used it in harsh climates/environments and ran plenty of intensive software. Only complaint I have is the fan noise and the only issue is the left click on the mouse below the track pad only works if you click on the edge of it.

I also have the late 2017/early 2018 stealth refresh that Linus used, (first available quad core in the stealth line up) and though I really only use it for light web browsing and word processing (school work) it's still looks/feels/performs like it's brand new.

Razer gets a bad rap but in my experience they've been nothing but great machines.

[u/Ricky_RZ]

Far from perfect but not a weak choice by any means. The keyboard is ass and the screen/spec options are idiotic but it is a very well built laptop with great thermals (which doesn't matter cause performance sucks but that's another talk) and a fantastic trackpad.

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Speakers are not bad by any means. But damn that battery life is so disappointing on the 4k model (the only worthwhile model as well, fuck your configuration options razer).

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IMO if he didn't have an unlimited budget, he probably wouldn't have gone with it

[u/adamgt86]

Enjoyed the video. I'm in the market for a new laptop and looking at the stealth. Linus said he never got more than 2 years out of a Razer laptop though. Is that the norm?

[u/SpiritenHasArrived]

Gets rmaed a week later