Laptop Direction in 2019

Longer battery life, more storage space or lower price?

Laptops are heading in two directions in 2019: Any laptop that wants to deliver performance and design should be able to find a common trend - price concessions. Most laptop shoppers who want mainstream mainstreams will see improved performance, and the low-to-medium price is around $500.

Always Connected PC

In 2018, one of the most anticipated events in the laptop world was the launch of the Always Connected PC.

These laptops feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor originally designed for smartphones, with a battery life of more than 20 hours and a seamless 4G LTE wireless connection. Lenovo's Yoga C630 is the Always Connected PC launched in November. It uses the higher performance Snapdragon chip and outperforms HP and Asus in CR testing, but it is still much slower than the Intel Core processor. Looking forward to 2019, Qualcomm requires notebook companies to once again serve Always Connected PCs. Last December, it showed off a new processor, Snapdragon 8cx, which provides better performance for Always Connected PCs. If this is true, these laptops may become attractive products - at least for some consumers.

Medium-sized laptops have more choices

If you want to buy a laptop for $500 in 2019, it would be good news: there are more to choose from in these laptops, many will have all the performance needed to watch a movie, use a spreadsheet, and Do other daily work.

In 2019, these laptops typically use Intel Core processors and offer 4GB to 8GB of memory. For storage, they will include larger hard drives or smaller solid state drives for storage.

According to Richard Fisco, electronic test manager for Consumer Reports, most consumers should have at least 256GB of storage to accommodate applications and large files such as videos and photos.

In 2018, quite a few SSD-equipped laptops offer only 128GB of storage. However, the price of the drive dropped before the end of the year, and in 2019, consumers may see more laptops offering 256GB SSDs, and the price has not increased significantly. Due to competition in the chip market, notebook prices may even fall.

Intel dominates the computer chip manufacturing industry, but its competitor AMD made significant advances in the desktop space with its Ryzen chip in 2018. Like Intel Core processors, Ryzens is a multi-core processor that delivers fast performance in many applications - but with one big difference. Some desktops that use Ryzens are $200 less expensive than comparable Intel computers.

Only a limited number of Ryzen laptop processors are available in 2018, but this may change in 2019. In 2019, Intel did not talk about price cuts, but talked about performance improvements. The company told analysts in December that its next-generation processor will debut in 2019 and will bring key performance improvements, including in-car graphics. This means that the gaming performance of thin and light notebooks is better.

High-end notebook style still exists

Last year, some notebooks with unusual designs were released, and this trend is likely to continue in 2019 - at least in high-end laptops. For example, in November, Lenovo released a two-in-one convertible called the Yoga Book C930, which has an E-Ink display - the one you found on the Amazon Kindle - not a physical keyboard. This helps keep the notebook less than 0.4 inches thick. Then there was HP, which released the Spectre Folio in October, a two-in-one product that is completely covered in leather. Leather has no effect on performance, but it is not the point.

Companies including LG continue to push the limits of lightness and light weight - the 2.1-pound LG Gram has done a very good job in terms of ratings in 2018, while the relatively new PC Huawei has performed very well with its Matebook X Pro - The webcam is hidden on the keyboard and the user presses a button to make it pop up. There is also Apple, which was known for its design innovation and is known for its highly loyal customers. The Mac laptop is one of our most watched laptops, and given that the redesigned MacBook Air was released only a few weeks ago, we are unlikely to see any major hardware changes in 2019. Instead, Apple users can look forward to continuing to tweak macOS to bring some simple iOS to their laptops.

More notebook new technology breakthroughs are worthy of our expectation in 2019. In the first few months, new models released from major brands have already seen the trend and look forward to a better experience.