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What are the best laptops for casual use with a 4K display?

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4 Options Considered

4 Options ConsideredPriceWeightRAM
Dell XPS 15
2kg (4.44 lbs)8 / 16 / 32GB DDR4 at 2400MHz
Apple MacBook Pro
3.02lbs8/16GB
Razer Blade Pro
7.8 lbs / 3.5kg32GB
HP Spectre x360 15t
2.89 lb 8GB
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Dell XPS 15

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Thomas Singer
Top Pro

RAM and SSD are replaceable by the user

•••
Endi Sukaj
Beenthere
Top Pro

Great 4K display

•••
No comparison to Apple, and Lenovo. XPS 15 has the best 4K display .
Thomas Singer
Top Con

Battery not easily replaceable

•••
Thomas Singer
Top Con

No 2.5" SATA possible

•••
See 2 more Pros & ConsSee 2 more Pros & Cons

Apple MacBook Pro

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Alex
Endi Sukaj
Alexander Sheremet
Top Pro

Lightweight

•••
The latest MacBook Pro has a trimmed down design compared to predecessors. It's 0.61 inches (15.5 mm) thick and weighs 4.02 pounds. It's even thinner than MacBook Air.
Piyush Sonani
Top Pro

Smooth display quality

•••
Alex
Alexander Sheremet
Top Pro

Long battery life

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Battery lasts up to 9 hours.
Endi Sukaj
Alexander Sheremet
Top Pro

Has tools for many activities pre-installed

•••
Video and audio editing, photo collections, music playing, rich text editor, calendar and mail - all preinstalled apps are of good quality
Alex
Top Pro

Great performance

•••
The MacBook Pro offers great performance both for day-to-day stuff and more niche graphic-related activities. The latest model also has had an update in hardware specs where both the CPU and GPU have been upgraded to their respective latest generations. The 16GB to 32GB help with performance as we...
Alex
Top Pro

Amazing build quality

•••
The MacBook Pro has an all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard with speakers on each side of the keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Alex
Top Pro

Good customer support

•••
Apple offers support over the phone worldwide, provides support in Apple retail stores and authorized resellers and has community forums where users can help users.
Alex
Top Pro

Fantastic display

•••
The MacBook Pro has a sharp, color accurate 2560 x 1600 IPS display. It's bright at 500 nits, has great viewing angles (viewable at up to 178 degrees) and capable of displaying 87.3% of sRGB color gamut.
Alex
Top Pro

The default macOS is relatively developer friendly since it's a Unix

•••
OSX is based on XNU (Darwin) kernel, it's certified Unix and arguably a lot more developer friendly than Windows. Development for Unix is native on OS X. There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful termin...
Alex
Top Pro

Can run up to 3 external monitors and output 4K

•••
With 2 Thunderbolt (DisplayPort) plugs and 1 HDMI, MBP can run up to 3 external monitors and output 4K over HDMI.
Alex
Top Pro

Both the hardware and software are designed in-house

•••
Both the operating system and the hardware are designed by Apple and are made to be as compatible as possible from the get-go. Any drawback that the hardware might have compared to competitors, is made up by the great compatibility between the hardware and OS. Furthermore, because Apple controls t...
Alex
Top Pro

One of the best trackpads around

•••
The Macbooks are renowned for having the best trackpad out of any laptop. It has full gesture support, you can configure in the software how much pressure you want before it physically clicks and the finger tracking is perfect.
Alex
Top Pro

Plenty of RAM for multitasking

•••
The MacBook Pro has up to 16 GB of RAM. That much RAM is perfect for running IDEs, emulators, and virtual machines.
Alex
Top Pro

One of the best SSDs that can be found on a laptop

•••
With read speeds at 3.1Gbps and write speeds at around 4.7Gbps, the SSD used in the MacBook Pro is the best in the market by far. This doesn't just mean opening/saving files is quicker, but it also has a pretty huge impact on general application performance.
Alex
Top Pro

The OS is exceptionally easy to use

•••
Macbooks are famous for working out of the box. The default operating system (macOS) is also exceptionally easy to use even for people who have never used it before. Most people will not need to customize or change anything since all the apps work perfectly as it is. The people who like to customi...
Alex
Top Pro

Great keyboard

•••
The 2017 MacBook uses the second generation of the "butterfly" keyboards first introduced in 2015. They feel different to use than most laptop keyboards as they are very shallow, but most people report really enjoying the keyboard after getting used to it.
Alex
Alexander Sheremet
Top Con

It's hard to switch if you're a PC user

•••
Macs have different keyboard layout, shortcuts, and hotkeys than PC.
Alex
Top Con

It's expensive

•••
Compared to other ultrabooks such as the Dell XPS 13, the MacBook Pro is very expensive. For the latest (as of July 2017) MacBook Pro and Dell XPS 13 with dual-core i5 Processor, 8GB RAM, 256 SSD, the prices are $1.1k for the Dell XPS 13 and $1.5k for the MacBook Pro.
Alex
Top Con

Glossy screen

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Apple has deleted the matte-screen option from its lineup, an unfortunate decision that reduces the usability of the computers and means you get less work done. You won't realize how much time you spend moving your head around to get reflections off whatever you're trying to see until you s...
Alex
Top Con

No Ethernet or FireWire ports

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An adapter is required to transfer data over FireWire or connect to the Internet using an Ethernet cable.
Alex
Top Con

The keyboard has a unique feel and some people may need some time to get used to it

•••
The keyboard on the MacBook is unique and some people may not like the way the keys feel to press or not having physical function keys.
Alex
Top Con

Hard to repair or upgrade the hardware

•••
The battery and other components are glued in, and the battery blocks access to other parts. The battery will wear out eventually, and the fact that it's glued in means that you cannot easily repair or upgrade a MacBook Pro.
See 20 more Pros & ConsSee 20 more Pros & Cons

Razer Blade Pro

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Alex
Top Pro

Great gaming performance

•••
Razer has equipped this laptop with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and one of the fastest mobile processors you can buy today. It can run almost any modern game in 4K resolution in high or maximum settings at upwards of 30 FPS.
Alex
Top Pro

Highly portable

•••
At 22mm thin, this is the thinnest laptop that has the NVIDIA GeForce 1080 and one of the thinnest gaming laptops overall.
Alex
Top Pro

Customizable RGB keyboard backlight

•••
The keyboard’s RGB backlight can display 16.8 million colors on each key and the touchpad border. The included Synapse software lets you program the lights with different patterns and color profiles and is shareable to other Razer devices.
Alex
Top Con

You may need some time to getting used to the position of the touchpad

•••
The touchpad is located on the right side of the keyboard, and can take some time to get used to.
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HP Spectre x360 15t

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Alex
Top Pro

Long battery life

•••
For simple activities such as web browsing and editing files, the HP Spectre clocks in at around 11 hours of autonomous battery life.
Alex
Top Pro

Great design

•••
The HP Spectre x360 has an all-aluminum body that gives it a very premium feel. The edges are all smooth and polished which provide a great highlight accent to the laptop.
Alex
Top Con

Can easily trap heat and overheat

•••
The extremely thin chassis is a drawback as far as heat management goes. Even a relatively simple activity like streaming HD videos will overheat the laptop and put the internal heat at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit which is 10 degrees higher than the 95 degrees "comfortable" threshold.
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33 Community Recommendations

Onze
Alexander Sheremet
Emma
Georgia
Mleri
BethLM
Alex
Callixtus
Monika
Chipester
Lysander
+8
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