Laptop suggestions

[Obiron]

My brother is looking for a laptop to replace his dinosaur of a desktop. His needs are pretty basic, so I'm looking for recommendations that are cheap, but reliable. He has mostly Apple products so he was looking at macbooks, but the price is driving him to Windows. He has an iPhone, iPad, AppleTV that he will want it to work with. Aside from that, it's mostly internet, music, and working with video from his GoPro.

There's an HP Pavilion going on sale at Costco ($150 off, but I'm not sure what the actual price is yet). He lives in Hawaii, so he likes the idea of not dealing with shipping. The thing that seems weird to me is that it claims to have 12GB RAM. I haven't seen 12GB configurations since the triple channel i7-920 era. Is that normal for a laptop? Here's the Costco Ad.

Any comments regarding buying a laptop like this from Costco, or other good, cheap alternatives? I did recommend that he look for something with an SSD for better speed, but I need to figure out what his usage looks like to make sure that he gets enough space for his videos.

[orinthia]

Ram is pretty cheap these days. Even my 3 year old laptop was 8gb. This is also a little bit marketing since bigger numbers help "crap" sell, but since we know very little about that machine itself, we don't know if that $150 off still makes it reasonably priced. A 4th gen i5 is good though, but we know little else unless you want to look on hp's site and browse Touchsmarts. If he really wants a macbook though, see if there's used ones near him. Though being in Hawaii, that may also wind up with little...

If he's doing video work, the big drive will be handy, but I can't imagine he'd only want to stick with a laptop's hdd for storage. If he had a NAS or some big external hdds for video/editing storage, what's on the laptop won't matter as much, and an SSD will speed things up.

Though at this point, if his old machine is really that old, almost anything with an intel i3/i5 or amd A8/A10 will suit his needs and thensome, but be mindful of the pricing. You may also want to check out the outlet sites (hp, dell, lenovo, etc outlets online) as they usually carry loads of refurbished business laptops at fair discounts. Business laptops, like dell latitudes, hp probooks, etc, are pretty damn solid work machines, and something to also consider. Stock changes constantly since the things you see on the outlet sites are what's available at that moment.

[Obiron]

Thanks, I forgot about the outlets. I'll check them out.

Yeah, I know bigger numbers are better marketing, but 12 just seems an off number. 8 is plenty, and 12 doesn't make much sense if you don't have 3 sticks. I googled a bit from my phone trying to find that laptop with no luck, I'll have to spend some time checking on my PC when I'm home.

I'll take a look at external drives too and maybe suggest that to him. A Passport would be pretty cheap and would let him get an SSD.

[xerodok]

First bit of advice from me is: try to stay away from HP laptops. Secondly, I have found over the past few years that Best Buy has the best spontaneous prices on laptops and other electronics. I'm not sure about your local Best Buy, but there is an entire section at my store with returned and opened merchandise at a huge price cut. Obviously you can check out what you are buying before you leave the store but I've seen great deals on stuff that people have just returned because they've wanted something else or they just needed their money back. Newegg also has a similar section but if I'm going to buy something that is opened or not brand new, I want to see it first.

Costco generally has pretty good deals on laptops too but there is a kicker. Most of the time it's old products that haven't sold over the past few years, or they made too many of them. So you end up getting a good deal, but, junk or dated guts.

[The Stig]

I do not think anything short of an i5 would have fun working with videos; however, if the machine is that old and he's happy with such performance then I'd imagine this won't be much of an issue for him.

I wouldn't worry about the RAM configurations (and in extreme scenarios, from my minimal knowledge I believe all sticks should have the same amount for maximum performance? But how valid these days that fact is I'm unsure). Ram is cheap these days and an extra 4gb in the secondary slot probablys costs nothing to a big company.

Aside the price on the Macbooks, i believe all of them now come with SSD by default (the current line ups). Only exception is the old MacBook Pro (no retina, just 500gb). But I do highly believe (and I don't know why but this is based on observation) a low/cheap range Macbook will perform better than a normal laptop with Windows on it...

(I watched some student edit a video on his Macbook (Air?) on the train; it seemed retardedly smooth; it's not even that smooth on my i7 3770 desktop and I tweak mine to the max -- I swear it's the software/OS combination)

Just my thoughts. I'm not favouring apple or anything here.

Otherwise, feel free to link me to some laptops and we'll give some advice on your choices suited to your price range.