What is the best laptop brand?

[apple]

No Apple please… Too expensive for my economy…

What you just asked is, basically “What is the best laptop brand? Don’t tell me what the best laptop brand is.” If you wanted to know what the second-best laptop brand is, you should have asked that instead!

And if you think Apple is too expensive, take a good hard look at the stats on the low-end MacBook and price out a comparable Dell, or HP, or Lenovo, or Toshiba laptop. You’ll probably find that they’re very close in cost for what you get.

@cwilbur – He specified “no Apple” in the question…

I would say for a PC, lenovo is definitely the best laptop brand. It’s still on the expensive side, but since laptops do wear (and break) over time, i’d say it’s worth the extra money. After that, I might look at Dell just because you can find some very low prices.

I like Sony Vaio laptops as well, I have both a MacBook and a Vaio. My second choice is the Vaio :)

@ben: When people pay me for my technical opinions, I tell them when they’re asking the wrong question, or when the basis for the question is wrong; I see no reason not to do the same when they’re getting my technical opinion for free.

Back in the day I had great luck with Toshiba…now I use “the ones we cannot mention here”

IBM/ Lenova ThinkPads are in my opinion the best brand of reliable laptops. My friend dropped his thinkpad twice and and nothing has happened to the laptop at all. Plus i remember seeing a news story about how a thinkpad from a burnt house was still working (even though the monitor display was blotched)

Get an EEE PC, cheapskate. ( or a MacBook )

Another vote for IBM/Lenovo machines. Panasonic “Toughbooks” are also extremely durable and excellent (and are used by emergency services for this reason), but are more expensive than MacBooks.

If money is preventing you from Switching, consider buying a refurbished MacBook directly from Apple. You get a full year warranty, the machines are fully tested before shipping, and the price is reduced quite significantly. Lenovo’s least expensive machine, the R61i, isn’t significantly cheaper than a refurbished MacBook.

If you’re still more comfortable with a PC laptop: the latest and greatest is always reduced by hundreds of dollars within a year, so shop sales; and avoid Vista like the awkward, clumsy, resource-hungry monster it is, paying extra for XP Pro if you have to.

I think you’ll find a refurbished Macbook is the same price as a higher end PC, but of higher quality, especially in the software, which is where it really counts.

There nothing to be afraid of about a Mac. Its just a computer.

Do you want the best laptop brand, or the best for value? Seen you’re “not an apple – too expensive” point, you want best value for money, in which case you should give a limit how much you’d want to spend. Because there’s a test result out there showing that the 17” Apple is eg the fastest MS Windows laptop, making it presumably one of the better laptops as well.
(If you need to run MS Windows on a Mac, it won’t be equivalently priced though, despite it’s the same price when comparing hardware specs: you’ll still have to buy MS Windows for a few 100$.)
All in all: you might want to define ‘best’ better. User experience? Durability? Cheapness? From the various suggestions above, it already shows there’s no simple ‘best’ laptop brand…

OK ppl… I didn’t say “don’t include Apple” because I hate Apple, in fact I’d really like to have an Apple laptop/desktop computer. The thing that stops me from buying it is that there is no Apple computers shop or distributor in Serbia (maybe there’s one in Belgrade, but I’m not living there), and the second reason for is price (even the refurbished Macbook would be very expensive for an average Serbian citizen). Buying it online is impossible, because most (all) of the online shops don’t accept credit cards from Serbian banks.

Because I want a laptop, and I can’t buy a Macbook, I will just have to buy some other branded laptop, and since those other branded laptops are coming in variety of prices (from the cheap 300€ ones, to the most expensive ones), i can can afford one. :)

“Best” is subjective, but the highest quality products always come at a premium, MedivhX, and the highest quality PC laptops are usually equally or more expensive than comparable MacBooks. Now that we better understand your query, some additional details would be handy:

How much are you willing to pay for a new laptop?

What do you plan to use it for? (Basic word processing? Graphic design? Games?)

How do you plan to travel with your new laptop? (Will it mostly serve as a desktop, or are you something of a road warrior?)

stay away from dell. dreadful customer support.