The Top Laptop as of September 25, 2021

Surface Laptop 4-AMD Ryzen 7 13" with 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD, only available on the business Microsoft store. 8 cores of power in a small 13" form factor. Not available on the consumer website. Comes with Windows 10 Professional. $1799

Criteria: Plan for minimum 10 years of use. Previous laptop was the 2012 Macbook Pro, which I am still using, and was able to upgrade memory to 16GB, 1TB SSD, and easily replaceable components and cables for easy repairability. The Surface Laptop 4 has a removable SSD, which is the main component that can fail. In general RAM and CPU do not fail within 10 years.

All other laptops besides the Framework have the risk of failing SSD because they are soldered onto the PCB board requiring one to buy another whole laptop. The disadvantage of the Framework laptop is that they are currently only available with Intel CPUs and would be a top pick with an AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU. Until then, the Surface Laptop 4 with 16GB RAM AMD Ryzen 7 13" is the best laptop for longterm and reliable use. The 16GB would be required for future-proofing because RAM is soldered, hence 8GB has a risk of being too little with no option to upgrade.

Apple makes a good product, and their recent philosophy to solder all components have caused many to leave them including myself. If Apple ever changes their business model they might get the self-upgrade people back, but for now we have other quality options. Thanks to Apple's stubbornness it has allowed competition and many to leave them, so it is not a bad thing.

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