Intel Evo branded laptops have to provide 9 hours of battery at full workload.

There are a lot on sale rn for the holidays

business laptops are just overall a better option than consumer laptops, except higher end ones like Dell XPS and HP Spectre

Here’s the question: what kinds of laptops do you think professional IT experts in Fortune 500 companies use?

Hint: not consumer hardware.

They use HP Elitebooks, Dell Latitudes, Lenovo Thinkpads, or Apple Macbook Pro. Possibly the occasional Toshiba.

Take a look at Framework AMD (not Intel) options. Battery life is pretty good. Bonus - Its easy to upgrade when new processors are released, you need more RAM, or need more storage. Just as easy to replace anything that wears out - All the parts are available on Framework Marketplace with install directions and videos… Working with a Framework requires no more than a T5 torx driver and a spludger, included in the box with every laptop.

I also do dev work - Mostly network management and other internal tooling… C/C++, NodeJS, PHP, etc. At the moment I have a Framework 16 on order. As a Linux user I wanted hardware with solid Linux support… Dell’s hardware hasn’t been all that great, Lenovo’s pricing is a mess to figure out. System76’s rebranded Clevo laptops are overpriced junk (I currently have an Oryx Pro oryp6, unfortunately). Beware if you want to do any virtualization AMD is the better way to go - Intel’s E/P cores cause trouble… Not to mention Intel processors run hot and are less than power efficient nowadays.

so you gonna exclude mac?

I personally feel that mac would be a better choice for us staring at a screen for 10 hours a day trying to write out better bugs

I’m not a mac person but as a senior frontend dev that also does a lot of backend stuff these days I love my work issued macbook pro 16’. It’s not the cheapest option tho if you do really intensive work, like mine was around 4k ‘even tho for what I do it’s pretty light work’ but my backup that I purchased on my own was only about $800 open box from bestbuy

In general: yes.

Business laptops are for example the Lenovo T series which have traditionally offered maximum performance, usability and reliability over gimmicks like design and entertainment components (f.ex. speakers or RGB keyboards). This will also go for available support. This is another market for the manufacturers. Here they want to please the business owner / the IT support department, as they are the ones picking the vendor. The actual user has no say about which machine they get. So glitter and gold on the casing and useless components will have no purpose.

On consumer laptops, manufacturers are appealing to average Janes and Joes most of whom won’t know the difference between a CPU and a GPU and perhaps believe that more MHz on a processor is always a better processor. Such consumers usually make their decisions completely differently and I won’t even try to guess how. But I’m sure that aesthetics, gimmicks, cool stickers and catchy parameters will play a bigger role (i.e. all the DoubleBoost, Xtra, Ultra, 2-in-1, Super catchnames).

That’s not to say that you cannot get good value with a consumer laptop but it’s more of a lottery.

I can only speak for Dell laptops: higher quality screens for working in direct sunlight (higher NIT and anti-reflective coatings) and the business level support is miles above standard customer support. We normally got them with a standard three year full coverage warranty that had a tech out within a day or two with parts if anything broke.

While it costs more, Dell business grade is worth it in zero headache support if you have issues.