Slickdeals Frontpage. I like Dell 15 laptops. Walmart brand EVOO is supposed to great bang for the buck. Slickdeals: Searching for "laptop 15"
That has not been my experience, nor the experience of the people I spoke to. I bought an ASUS laptop for travel (super light, ZenBook), and 2 portable screens (ZenScreen), and they all fit perfectly in a small Osprey backpack. I have had them for about a year, and ZERO issues. I was big into Dell, because that's all I used since 1998. I am pretty satisfied with the switch, and if it gets lost/stolen, easy to replace. Not a tragedy... The point is that there are plenty of solid competitors out there. I got stuck with the brand Dell, because that's all I ever knew since the 1990s. Ironically, my previous laptop was a Dell Latitude, which was not cheap. Within 3 years, the touchpad started peeling off, and bending. To top it off, bubbles emerged on the left side of the touchpad. I pierced one of them with a knife, AND FIRE CAME OUT. I threw it away...
Dell seems to be popular in America, never understood why. They are mediocre at best. Had an Asus phone here, within 2 years started shutting itself down randomly. A laptop that would do the same that was less than a year old. Turned out to be a chipset issue, if the warranty was out, would have been a throwaway. Higher end Thinkpads have issues too but almost all can be fixed relatively cheaply and components are usually high quality.
Hey I'm familiar with your type of setup and workload. For laptop (15 inch under $1600) I recommend a Surface Book 2. It is the previous year model, and they often go on sale. The 16GB RAM version is more than enough to handle your complete array of charts, scanners, and trade ideas. For trading on the go, a very popular recommendation is to trade over a server. Check out our 6x AMD Threadripper, 16GB RAM remote servers. They are only $119 per month, and can also smoothly run your entire workload. Especially since you are going to be on the road, trading from an always connected remote server is very attractive because you can take your entire workspace with you everywhere you go and connect to it using any old device, even a mobile phone. For example if the Wifi becomes spotty at the co-working space, you can connect to your server using mobile data through your phone to manage live trading positions. Your workspace on the server always has 1,000mb/s internet connection, regardless of your own personal connection. For comparison, Intel i7-10700 has a CPU benchmark score of 17,328 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-10700+@+2.90GHz&id=3747 Our AMD 3900x has a CPU benchmark of 32,898 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+3900X&id=3493 Our subscriptions are month to month so you can test it to see if it works for you, before committing to a $1600 purchase. A server dedicated to trading also runs much faster than a similarly spec'ed home PC because it doesn't have the bloatware of Windows 10.
It could be marketing, at the school, university level, etc., in America (basically indoctrination!). It was ALL Dell, and you got used to them at an early age. Now, there are so many competitors offering good value, and Dell just got lazy. Prices have also gone down dramatically, across the board. So the OP's budget is actually very doable in this day, and age. Not so much, let's say 5+ years ago...
Lenovo has an eBay store. I have often found better deals on their eBay listings than their official web site...
Dells are pretty horrible. I bought a top tier business model from them. Keys started coming off after 6 months to a year. Had to keep them taped to the surrounding keys ever since. So, I got mad and went Fujitsu instead. Fujitsu had an American branch that sold laptops made in Japan. This was before Lenovo bought out their PC department.
My Old Dell laptop's are just fine. Trooping on and on and on. What did tech support say about replacement for keyboard?