Question Need some recommendations for a laptop - Snapdragon vs Lunar Lake

[Trelidon555]

Hi there! I'm in the market for a new laptop.

I also have a reasonably powerful desktop (several years old but still far from not being able to meet the specs for anything); so this would be a secondary device. Budget is max around the £1.5k mark.

• Primarily needs to be portable, don't think anything over 16'' would work
• I primarily spend my time writing, so a good keyboard is non-negotiable
• I don't have much need for specialty software; for work I occasionally need InDesign, Adobe Pro and Oxygen (an XML editor), but beyond that it's largely browser-based work
• I don't game much, and almost certainly not while out and about; however, there is the odd exception when I visit family (who live in another county) and want to play the odd thing for old time's sake with my brother (nothing demanding) - this is perhaps a couple of times a year (so not sure that's really worthy of consideration...)

So with that in mind, I'm leaning very heavily towards either one of the Snapdragon or Lunar Lake models.

• advantage of Lunar Lake is of course no issues with software compatibility whatsoever, but as noted above, it's not a very large worry. Therefore the pricing generally seems to be a bit higher at the moment. It will run whatever games I throw at it better and the few bits of specialty software I mentioned above will run better and natively rather than via emulation (and not sure Oxygen works at all on Snapdragon)
• advantage of Snapdragon is the price and slightly better battery life; it generally feels like a more portable device. I was almost 100% sold on this until I saw some posts/YouTubers etc. basically saying the Snapdragon is dead - i.e. the worry is it won't be very future-proof; but part of me wants to resist this since a lot of people can be very particular about their favourite/least favourite pieces of tech...

Anyway, with that in mind, brand-wise I'm leaning either towards Samsung or Lenovo - not because I'm partial to these companies but because my company has great deals with these which lets us get a solid discount on both (ca. 20%!). So with that in mind:

• Galaxy has the advantage that I am somewhat in the Samsung ecosystem (phone, watch, buds, TV), but the disadvantage that their laptops don't usually score all that well in terms of reviews, and they're also quite a bit pricier than the Lenovo equivalents (so for Galaxy that's the Galaxy Book4 Edge for the Snapdragon, and for the Lunar Lake it's the Book5 Pro 360, I believe. Also their keyboards, while okay, don't usually strike people as some of the best on the market
• Lenovo is famous for their keyboards, but of course I lose ecosystem integration. They're also vastly cheaper (I think with the discount I could get one for just under 1k with my discount). I'm leaning more in this direction at the moment; the Snapdragon variant is the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9, for the Lunar Lake it's the Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition.

I know I've written a lot and narrowed it down already - but it would be great to hear your guys' thoughts, and of course I'm also very happy to hear any suggestions for alternative laptop brands and/or processors that would hit the mark of what I'm looking for. Thanks a lot!

 

[rgd1101]

for snapdragon you need to make sure the program you use will run. they are not all compatible