high quality finish, 2 in 1 laptop for (remote) college work

Question

Heyo. Here's my situation: I'm looking for a laptop basically acting as a mobile workstation extension for my home computer. For what it matters, I'm doing mainly programming and college work as well as the occasional match of League of Legends with friends (fairly low requirements). Because of the programming part, I've went for a 4k display which has paid off for sure. I'm just so much more efficient with it than with a standard FullHD monitor.

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Enough about the past, here's what I want:

• working between and sometimes during classes in college on fairly basic tasks like completing homework and studying (pdf and browser)
• programming. Being able to quickly try something on the go after discussing it is important to me (which is why I'm looking for a laptop in the first place)
• concerning the finish, I'd much prefer something with an emphasis on usability, meaning not too heavy, not too fragile. I don't like having to worry about 1) whether to bring it because it's too heavy or 2) where to put it in order not to break it
• I like to think of myself as a creative person and I learn visually, so having a touch screen is something I think will be worth a lot to what I do and how I do it
• as I said, the occasional match of League of Legends, but no serious gaming and I quite frankly don't care whether it runs on medium or high settings
• 2 in 1. Because it's cool. Not because I necessarily need it :P
• I plan on doing most (programming) work remotely via some kind of screen forwarding

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Which leads me to what is probably most important (tl;dr), the requirement list in order of importance:

• 2 in 1
• full HD with on a screen size between 12"/13" and 15"
• goooood battery, >5h of realistic usage
• reliable and light case
• a usable network adapter
• i5+ is desirable, not a precondition though
• SSD or SSHD is a bonus
• 4GB of RAM (should be no problem anyways)

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Closing words. I'm asking here because I'm mainly concerned about usability and the overall quality of the thing, including battery for example. Those are things you can't just look up on a comparison website.

The budget is somewhere roughly between 700 and 1000 Euros, which should translate into about 800 to 1150 USD.

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Things on my (probably incomplete) list right now:

• Lenovo Yoga 2 13
• Lenovo Yoga 3 14
• Lenovo Yoga 700 14ISK
• Acer Aspire R5
• ASUS Transformer Book Flip

Those are (hopefully most of the) devices which meet the formal part requirements and are available at my budget range.

Answer 1

My wife is using Lenovo Yoga 3 - 14 (not pro screen below):

I bought it with this specs:

• Intel Core i7-5500U
• 8 GB (SO-DIMM DDR3, 1600 MHz)
• 256 GB SSD SATA III
• 14" FHD IPS Touch Screen
• Intel HD Graphics 5500 + NVIDIA GeForce 940M

What it is used for ?

Most demanding task which this notebook is performing is Diablo 3 it's working well but not at max detail settings. Mostly it is used for internet.

Touchscreen ?

It's really great I didn't think that it will be so easy to get used to using touchscreen instead of mouse but it's really nice feature to browse websites using touch...

...but we had problems with touchscreen at the beginning. When I firstly turned on this notebook touchscreen wasn't responsible it was working sometimes on half of the screen sometimes on 3/4 of the screen rest of the screen wasn't giving response. After few hours on forums I found solution. I had to delete all nVidia drivers and install older ones (newest drivers are working well) additionally I had to check what model of touchscreen I had and install drivers to it from manufacturer (not included with notebook). There was also some fix for Windows 10. And from this procedure touchscreen is working really well.

About touchscreen itself. If not a problem above I would talk about it only good things it's really responsive and precise. It's so easy to browse Internet with this of course to games like Diablo you need mouse but to all simple tasks touchscreen will be enough.

360° modes ?

When we are talking about other modes than laptop mode. It switches to it when you move screen more than 180° automatically (you can also turn it on manually). Weight of this device allows to use it as a tablet. The biggest downside of this modes is when you use it vertically www pages are not scaling well (tried in Chrome, FF and Edge) there is often need to scroll them horizontally.

Price:

I bought it for ~$1000. I didn't found exactly the same model on newegg.com or amazon but there are many models on amazon which allows you to choose a model which fits your preferences:

• i5 5200U / no additional GPU for $864 on Amazon

Of course you can look for other configuration which will fit you better.

Final thoughts:

The most important thing is that I was really disappointed with problems at the start with the touchscreen, maybe it was only my notebook but I found many threads about it. I could also return it to the shop but I resolved the problem myself...

...but if we won't look at the troubles at the beggining I would really recommend this notebook. The biggest pros of this notebook are touchscreen and quite good components for the paid price.

Answer 2

For my dev work, I use a Dell 7440 with 16GB of RAM on a 256GB SSD. Tried a touchscreen, and found the smaller screen with integrated touch capacity just isn't the best when it comes to smaller motions and specific points to click within code or a field. Also, the touch capacity reduces overall screen size due to additional internal hardware requirements.

I have a machine with another 500GB SSD, an XPS 14, and found it not a usable as the E7440. The keyboard and integrated mousepad/touchpad aren't nearly as user friendly.

My wife has a Folio 14 with 16 GB of ram, i7, 256gb ssd.

With many dev environments running online and online repo's, and the projection over the next few years to go that route, massive amounts of internal storage for dev isn't necessary.