honestly if battery life and long-term reliability matter and you’re not gaming much, just get a MacBook Air. you’ll get like 15–20 hrs real use, no fan, no random performance drops, and it stays fast for years. macOS handles school, office stuff, zoom, and light coding effortlessly. for most students, it just works. but — if you’re doing certain types of programming, especially stuff like machine learning, CUDA, or algorithm-heavy courses that require Windows-specific tools or GPU acceleration, then yeah, a Windows laptop might make more sense. depends on what you’re studying and whether your coursework leans heavily on Windows-only dev environments. edit: the IdeaPad 3 you’re looking at uses integrated graphics (Radeon Vega 8), so no dedicated GPU. it’s fine for light gaming or basic rendering, but it’s not gonna handle anything GPU-heavy. also unlike something like an M4 or M3 Mac, which has dedicated media/GPU cores optimized for ML tasks, this is just CPU + iGPU. as for reliability — IdeaPad 3’s are budget-tier machines. they work, but don’t expect amazing build quality. plastic chassis, average screens, and thermals can get loud under load. it’ll probably get you through 4 years if you take care of it, but it’s not something you’ll want to hold onto long after that. More on reddit.com

Yes for the price. More on reddit.com

You can get a much better laptop for like $100 more More on reddit.com