My team is looking into getting a new drive station laptop as our old one has broken. We know we need a laptop with an ethernet port and ~16 GB of RAM for some head room. I have spent about ~15 hrs of my life looking for a good laptop at a reasonable price, and at this point, my head is firmly through my desk. I would appreciate any and all recommendations.
What’s your budget for a “reasonable price”? We use a Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 4 AMD (15") - in general Lenovo has sales pretty often and ThinkPads are quite durable, and some models come with the ethernet port.
If someone on your team (a parent) is willing to lend their Costco membership you can also go there/shop online from them - they have a handful of MSI laptops with a LAN port from what I can see online.
We have older laptops (Thinkpads) with built-in Ethernet ports.
I also got several new-to-us, 3-4 year old laptops with USB-C and will be looking into testing USB-C based converged hubs [with power delivery in and Ethernet out over that one connection]. It’s TBD which direction we’ll end up going, but I suspect if we go USB-C, we’ll bring spare hubs and have the old Thinkpad tank in the pit or the bus just in case.