Disclaimer: Please be gentle as I haven’t bought a laptop myself for years and I have done 0 research recently. Also this is outside of US region and i’m considering to get brand new one.
I found what seems like a good deal on an Acer Aspire 3 AMD Ryzen™ 5 7520U, 16GB around $500. Not sure if it’s worth going for or just save a bit and go for the apple m1 macbook air 2020 which is around $770. My mind is telling me m1. What confusing me is the ram here, it’s 16GB with aspire 3 which i think is a good deal however I haven’t bought a laptop myself for years and I have done 0 research recently.
Use case: Daily use of a developer with running containers or Kubernetes clusters, few terminal windows and lots of browser windows 😎. Maybe running a linux vm.
Macbook more premium. The Ryzen 5 cpu is good. So, you are getting a decent budget laptop with nice speed from Acer, but I think the apple speakers and screen will be better for sure.
One nice Windows machine is HP Pavilion with Ryzen 7730u and 16gb ram at HP.com.
The 7520U is a REALLY poorly marketed CPU. It really should be marketed as a Ryzen 3, not a Ryzen 5. It’s a very low end CPU, Zen2++ cores, and only 4 of them. 2 RDNA cores for graphics. So extremely low end. The only advantage it would have in as much of an apples to apples comparison as you can get is that it has 16GB ram vs. 8GB. But in all other ways, it has inferior hardware to the m1 air.