Is there a particular reason you want a laptop? If you
must have a laptop, I
highly recommend buying refurbished from Amazon or a manufacturer. Laptops are pretty much obsolete within a few months of purchase.
If you don't absolutely need a laptop, I highly recommend buying a tower/desktop for a few different reasons:
- You can upgrade a desktop fairly easily. A laptop can only really be upgraded by adding memory, and that's really limited. With a desktop, you can upgrade components as you see fit; add more storage space and memory than you can with a laptop (within limits); customize said storage space; and you can even upgrade the cooling systems, extending the life of your investment. (I use a liquid-cooling system; they're a low-cost upgrade and are easy to install and really extend the life of yer CPU, especially if your overclock it.)
- You get a lot more bang for your buck: with a laptop, a lot of your hard-earned dollar goes towards miniaturization as opposed to power, storage, speed, etc.
- You can DIY repair a desktop much more easily and cheaply because not only are they meant to be repaired (so parts are much more widely available and interchangeable), they aren't entirely self-contained. So when your bass player spills his beer on your keyboard, your whole system isn't kaput. When your video output on your motherboard stops working, your entire system isn't useless because you can easily just add a new video card to one of the slots in the tower.
- You can isolate the tower from your recording/mixing area, eliminating fan noise and such. However, with the right PC build, many will run nearly silently.
There are tons of options for plug n' go desktops out there, even really small ones you could still
easily take with you, although you'd hafta lug your keyboard and mouse and monitor around with you. I mean, you
could take a tower to a session, but NUC models like the ThinkCentre pretty much fit in the palm of your hand. The only real drawback is they are basically a laptop without a monitor or keyboard, and their connections are pretty limited.
If you are comfortable assembling basic electronics and can follow YouTube tutorials, I highly recommend sourcing the components yourself and assembling it all yourself. You'll save even more money and get exactly what you want. There's a ton of info available on YouTube and online in general to help guide you in your build. I've been building PCs since the mid/late '80's but I still utilize the tutorials; the tech changes so fast nowadays it's hard to keep up, especially when I'm only building a new PC every six or seven years now.
Check out
this video for a really straight-forward, seven-minute look into building a recording/audio PC. The only thing I disagree with is his statement that you should always go with a barebones video card; this is inaccurate because it all depends on what DAW you use. Some DAWs are extremely graphic intensive; he uses Reaper, which doesn't tax a video card much at all, so in that case, a separate video card wouldn't even be necessary: the motherboard video processor could handle it. But notice during the time-lapse build how he never solders anything and barely uses a screwdriver, if at all, and he only puts in six or seven fairly good-sized components before he's done. [
DISCLAIMER: video is by this crazy Canadian metalhead who runs a studio just across the river in Windsor; if you're not into metal, it might get a little annoying as all the background and intro music is metal, but all the info is rock-solid. His recording technique videos are excellent, in my book, and if yer in the mood to laugh, watch any of his "Annoying Texts from Musicians" videos or any of the other videos in which he gets pissed and rants. It's fantastic.]
.