Do you Need to Upgrade to a Business Laptop?

Consumer laptops are inexpensive and plentiful, but a business laptop offers features that generally are not found in laptops meant for consumers.

 What you should know

When you started your business, chances are you bought a few consumer laptops or notebooks. After all, you were used to using them and they seemed just fine and great value. Right?

As your business grew, you have wondered whether your computers were quick, efficient and powerful enough for the job. Can they still handle the volume of work your team were trying to do? Were they impacting your teams productivity? Most importantly, was the money you saved by purchasing them really worth it considering what you gave up in features and functionality? The ages old question about price and cost of a product.

Some key differences

When comparing the two types of devices, business and consumer, there does not seem to be a great deal of difference when looking at specification. The differences are found after closer inspection, here is a list of things to be aware of 

• Hardware – A shortcut to cheaper production costs is to remove things such as biometrics security, which is becoming an ever increasing necessity in a business, using HDD over SSD for storage, poor quality or no webcams for video conferencing, no 3G capability and limited ports for connecting to external devices.
• Performance – Due to potential cheaper slower components you can find performance bottle necks on things which can feel like things are grinding to a halt when you attempt to open multiple applications.
• Durability – Often business laptops are built with more metal in the case compared with a consumer laptop’s, which use more plastic. As the disks used can be HDD this means there are more moving parts, which can mean more to go wrong if dropped. Business laptops are designed with the idea of being on the road and having to take the occasional bump.
• Software – Most consumer laptops will come pre loaded with lots of software called bloatware, demos, trials, games which you may never use but all take up resources of Storage, Network Bandwidth, CPU and Memory. These can be running in the background for the entire life time of a consumer laptop without you realising. In addition to the unneeded and unwanted software you don’t get business grade security software, one required in businesses today is encryption. Purchasing a business laptop means you will get Microsoft Professional which comes with BitLocker to help you secure the device, with no additional cost. Buying consumer means you have to source software to perform the same function and have a good understanding of technology and security to implement it correctly.
• Warranty – the vendor who hosts these platforms will ensuring its up to date at all times

Summary

If you are wondering if it’s time to upgrade your business laptops from consumer to a business model, here is our short answer: Consumer laptops are not built for constant abuse, but their business counterparts are – from a hardware, durability and longevity perspective.

Take a look at this video for the Top 10 Best Business Laptops for Ultimate Productivity

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