 So this is kind of how I imagine this whole thing went down. Some execs at Best Buy were sitting around going, how can we help students get geared up with the hashtag best college, yes in my imagination executives speak in hashtags, laptops this year. And some bold soul stood up and said, let's have Linus give them the lowdown. Yay! And that's what they did. Welcome to my top four laptops for back to school showdown. Drop a like on the video if you're one of the 30,000 or so people who have been asking me to do one of these roundups for so long that you've actually graduated with your post-secondary degree already. Ha! Now I'm going to start by explaining a little something something. I don't really do the traditional top five or in this case top four thing where you rank a bunch of products from worst to best. When it comes to stuff that I'm suggesting that you buy, the only thing that you should buy is the best thing for your needs. Let's see how many people can guess where you can get all this stuff I'm talking about, hey. So why list four things to buy that aren't the best? No. Instead I'll be tackling four different use cases and choosing one model that I personally picked out as a great choice. Let's start with number four for the ultimate bang for the buck shopper. I'm calling this category super basic. This is actually my first time hands-on with an HP stream device and I gotta say while the 1366 by 768 TN screen takes me back to my college days and it doesn't feature the you know finest craftsmanship with the Egyptian cotton keycap covers or whatever, the build quality is certainly not as bad as some laptops that I've seen for twice the price and for 280 bucks you are getting a surprising amount of computer. The one I picked out has a 13.3 inch display, a Celeron N2840 processor, two gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of onboard solid state storage and yeah those aren't amazing specs or anything but for 280 bucks you also get a free year of office 365, a hundred dollar value. So instead of spending twice as much on a machine that doesn't have the office bonus and hoping it'll last you effectively three times as long for the price, you could just buy new ones every year taking advantage of the rapid pace at which modern technology evolves and then passing the hand-me-downs to a sibling friend or fellow student. Which isn't to say that buying something a little nicer won't yield some extra creature comforts if you don't mind keeping your devices for a little longer. Number three weighing in at a very reasonable 900 dollars is the Lenovo Yoga 3. Build quality gets a very significant upgrade with that sick 360 degree hinge design that is the calling card of Lenovo's premium yoga lineup and there are some very healthy spec upgrades as well. A 5th gen Core i5 processor means more performance without sacrificing battery life. 8 gigs of RAM means more than three chrome tabs at a time, so more like six haha. Storage increases to 256 gigs of solid state storage. That's eight times the capacity of our bang for the buck machine, not to mention that it's a lot faster and the display gets a nice upgrade to a 1080p IPS panel which is way better for content consumption, especially if you want to sit next to a friend while watching a movie thanks to its more vibrant colors and better viewing angles. For screen size, I stuck with 14 inch because from my experience as someone who legitimately carries a laptop in a backpack every day, I find 13 to 14 inches is the sweet spot for carryability if you don't really need the larger display. Which I guess leads us really nicely into number two, the first of our more premium options, MSI's GE62 Apache Pro. While there are a lot of gaming laptops out there for folks who want to do more than just study, few of them strike the balance between size, weight, horsepower, and cost that the GE62 has found. It's big enough to handle cooling, the Core i7 quad core inside, but not so large that it's horrible to carry like MSI's bulkier GT72. It's got 16 gigs of RAM for great multitasking performance and it uses a dedicated 128 gigabyte SSD for the operating system with one terabyte of hard drive space for bulky files and games. A less convenient but higher performance approach to hybrid storage. Now to be clear, there are gaming laptops out there that are less expensive and also feature quad core processors. This ASUS model would be a great one to check out if you want a powerful CPU in a reasonable size machine that could pull double duty as a portable workstation. But for me to truly consider something to be a gaming laptop, I need to see a GTX 970M. So that's why I went with a $1,500 option for the all-rounder gaming box. Which, speaking of expensive, I guess leads us pretty well into number one. A product whose inclusion in this list will definitely leave some of you scratching your heads after how much I rained on its parade in my launch review, the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. I picked out a fourth gen Core i5 dual core equipped model with 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of solid-state storage that sent me back a touch over $1,200. Although, account for a bit extra because you're going to want to use a type cover accessory since it's not too useful for typing without that. And the reason for it is that while the Surface Pro 3 doesn't do much for my personal daily workload, thanks to its easy to use stylus, responsive, high resolution touchscreen, and flexible form factor that allows it to really be used as either a notebook or a notepad, thanks to the included OneNote software that lets you take notes, mark up existing documents or pictures that you take with the rear camera, and sync everything to the cloud as you work. And there's more good news. If you don't want to pony up that much for the Pro model, unlike early step-down models like the Surface RT, the third generation non-Pro Surface uses an Intel processor now for a similar, if not as powerful, Windows 10 experience that the Pro has. So you get that outstanding app compatibility. Which I guess wraps up our list here. So all that's left is to give a big shout out to Best Buy, thanking them not just for sending us the laptops that we asked to check out for this roundup, but also for being really cool about it and not trying to, you know, guide us to the laptops that they wanted to sell, leaving us instead to pick whatever we wanted off their site based on what we thought was right for our viewers. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or even consider supporting us directly by buying a cool t-shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our forum. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little button in the top right corner to check out this video where we took a GTX 480 to see how its performance has evolved in the five years since it launched with Nvidia's regular driver updates. So I'll see you there, and then I'll see you next time.