Laptops

Unless you have particular reasons to buy a desktop computer, we recommend buying a laptop to enable mobility and flexibility.

Introduction

The choice of laptop models is enormous. For example, the online shop Digitec lists many thousand laptops, ranging from under 100 CHF to almost 8,000 CHF. Selecting a laptop is a challenge 😁

Here are three options depending on how much time and patience you have:

  1. if you want to move quickly, read section Our laptop recommendation
  2. if you want to know more, read section What to look for when choosing a laptop
  3. if you would like some help, please get in touch with me

Our laptop recommendation

The laptop I have been recommending for entry-level users for a while now is the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 2-in-1:

  • it is powerful enough for productive and enjoyable work
  • it has a good build quality
  • among comparable laptops, it has a very good price
  • it can function as a tablet, which can be quite useful

Five MakeFest participants are currently using it happily.

Note that there are various configurations of this laptop to choose from. Here is the one I recommend at the moment (Feb 2026):

  • 16 inch model (because it offers a full-sized keyboard and the larger display is better for our work)
  • 16 GB of memory
  • 512 GB of SSD storage (1 TB would of course be ok as well, it's just not necessary for MakeFest)
  • AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor (the alternative, less powerful and slightly cheaper AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 processor would also be sufficient)

In Switzerland, you can compare prices for this model on toppreise.ch.

Online shops I can recommend include Digitec and Brack.

The manufacturer also sells the model on their website at very good prices.

Accessories

As explained here, I recommend setting up a workspace with an external display, keyboard and mouse.

If that's not an option for you, the one accessory I strongly recommend is a headset.

What to look for when choosing a laptop

My goal here is to provide some guidance for choosing a laptop that does two things for MakeFest participants:

  1. it meets the minimum technical requirements
  2. it is powerful enough and has relevant features for productive and enjoyable work

Keep the following in mind:

  • there is no single laptop that is optimal for everyone
  • this page is not enough to help you pick the perfect laptop for you
  • there are more criteria to a good laptop than just the technical specification typically used in marketing; for example, build-quality and serviceability can have a huge impact on productivity and joy-of-use but they are much harder to determine
  • what I recommend you do is absorb the information offered on this page, perhaps do a bit of research of your own and then get in touch with me to discuss your particular situation

Operating system

All three major operating systems, Windows, MacOS and Linux, are suitable for MakeFest courses. Currently, all MakeFest participants use Windows and the courses provide more detailed guidance for Windows, so I focus on Windows computers here. But if you are interested in using MacOS or Linux, I can provide similar guidance.

CPU and GPU

Computers need a GPU to render the images they display. The GPU can either be integrated with the CPU, or it can be a dedicated card. As one might expect, a dedicated card is more powerful but also more expensive. There are integrated GPUs that are pretty good and there are integrated GPUs that are all but unusable for any task that is a little more demanding.

For the MakeFest courses, a good CPU is important because it reduces wait times during development considerably. On the other hand, a decent integrated GPU is enough for the courses. In principle, I would recommend a dedicated graphics card because it allows doing computationally heavy work like artificial intelligence and virtual reality. But in the interest of keeping the price down, I'll focus on CPUs with decent integrated GPUs here. For Windows computers, I currently recommend CPUs from AMD. That's because they offer better integrated graphics than Intel CPUs.

Of course, if you decide for a computer with a dedicated graphics card, it is no longer of any or much less importance if the CPU has an integrated GPU or whether that GPU is any good.

As a compromise between good CPU and GPU performance and relatively modest price, the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor is a good choice.

USB C

The laptop should have USB C so that it can be connected to an external display for both data and charging.

Display size

The display must be at least 14 inches to be productively usable for the course work. Generally speaking, the bigger the screen, the better the productivity, but also the heavier, larger and more expensive the device. In my experience, more than 16 inches are inconvenient.

I strongly recommend a setup with an external display, keyboard and mouse. If you have such a setup, a laptop with a smaller display might be ok. But a 16 inch laptop is still a good choice for flexibility.

As an alternative to an external monitor, you could put the laptop on a stand to use with an external keyboard and mouse, in which case a laptop with a 16 inch display would definitely be preferable. Obviously, it all depends on how you will be using the device, your willingness to buy equipment and your priorities.

Memory

The laptop should have at least 16 GB of memory.

But memory is were we have to start paying closer attention. Because there are slower and much faster kinds of memory. Currently, we should be looking for DDR5 SDRAM memory modules with a high frequency. And for laptops we should generally look for the low-power variant called LPDDR. Moreover, the memory should ideally be configured with two modules of half the total size, so in our case two 8 GB modules. This is because performance is much better when using two smaller modules instead of a single larger module.

Storage

The laptop should have 512 GB or 1 TB of SSD storage. Ideally this is in the form of an NVMe SSD because these are much faster than standard SSDs. Unfortunately, the kind and speed of the SSD is often not published by vendors.

Choosing among the options

When restricting the search on digitec to the above criteria, we currently end up with a few dozen options.

Looking through these options, they are still quite different:

  • prices range from 750 to 2010 CHF
  • some have OLED displays, most have LCD displays
  • some have touch screens, most don't
  • some have built-in webcams, most don't

The Lenovo IdeaPad, I recommended here is at the lower price and performance end of this range.

The models with dedicated graphics cards are obviously more expensive.

Making a choice among these options is a matter of your budget and priorities.

If you have the budget, I would recommend investing in the workspace accessories before you consider buying a more expensive laptop.

Where to buy

There are of course many places other than digitec and brack.ch to buy laptops. And offers can make other models interesting as well.

A good place to look for the best offers in Switzerland is toppreise.ch.

But in searching for better prices, you must be very careful to actually compare the same models. So you would need to be able to judge whether the differences you find are relevant for you or not.