I did not have a lot of money during my college career, and nailing my main piece of tech was absolutely critical. If I bought the wrong thing, there was nothing in the budget for a redo. Thankfully, political science is not a tech heavy major (though it is becoming more so!), and I had a wide selection of options for my daily driver. A "daily driver" is the main piece of technology someone goes to for non-specific problems. Most people's phones fit into this category, but in this article we will talk about finding a daily driver for classwork, which will likely have to be a larger device. This article will also examine the different options and provide different use cases to help students identify what piece of hardware they should pick up as their own "daily driver."

Laptops

Laptops are the most popular option by far, and it makes sense why. They come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and price points. Because of this, it is often the easiest device to either overpay for or be underwhelmed by the performance, or even both, as sometimes some gimmicky feature will create an expensive device that still does not meet one's needs. For most students, I would look for something in the $500-$700 range for the best value. This is not a small purchase for many students, but a brief look at Amazon's laptop page left me concerned about the amount of cheap land mines out there. That $300 computer might feel like a sweet deal now, but it will load at about the speed of smell and run out of storage around winter break.

My ideal purchasing experience for students is going out early during the back-to-school tech sales and buying something after being able to see a sample in the store. Best Buy is mostly available nationally, though local versions of that type of store will likely have more competitive prices. Non-traditional tech stores can often have pretty good deals as well; I often find myself impressed with Nebraska Furniture Mart's prices on their technology. With laptop's especially, I really do think there is a huge benefit in being able to pick up and feel how heavy the demo model is, feel the clickity clackity of the keys, and wobble the mouse on the trackpad. Some people like touch screens on their laptops... I find the slight drop in performance, inevitable fingerprints on the screen, and price mark-up sufficiently annoying, but if you are into that kind of thing, test the touchscreen too. Laptops are the most versatile option here, and thus gains the most from being able to interact with it at the store before purchasing.

Desktops

The type of students who would benefit most from a dorm room desktop probably are not going to get a ton of utility from this article in the first place. These are tech-heads such as myself who likely built the system themselves for the purposes of online gaming or even just from enthusiasm. However, lack of portability is going to be a non-starter for a lot of students. The only students who may benefit from a desktop are students doing engineering, video editing, or other computer intensive projects, as desktops usually outperform their similarly priced laptop counterparts and are more likely to have the graphics cards and other hardware to handle those heavy-duty tasks.

Tablets/Chromebooks

My undergraduate daily driver ended up being a Samsung tablet with an attachable keyboard, and it worked excellently for me. If you are looking for something super portable for note taking, googling, and paper writing, a tablet can be a great option. Chromebooks are a bit of a middle ground between tablets and laptops and really depend on brand or model. Read reviews thoroughly. I currently have a Chromebook as my portable option for easy tasks, when I'm away from my home and campus desktops, and it works excellently. However, others do not have nearly the power one would hope, often even unable to handle the ever so popular zoom call. Tablets and Chromebook can be great options, just do the required research and make sure it will perform how it should.

Apple Products

I do not own an iPhone, though I appreciate how convenient it is to have an iPhone, iPad, Mac Book, and/or Apple TV all connected and working in harmony. Apple products do not play well with a lot of campus software. Every year, I have students inevitably turn in .pages documents, which is not able to be read by my grading software. Usually, they can just convert the file for me, but it is still an annoying problem. When I worked campus tech support, anytime an Apple product had a problem it was always a degree of magnitude more annoying than a standard windows computer issue. Apple products are reliable, but they tend to cost more than their windows counterparts for the same kind of performance. If a student really prefers a MacBook, I suppose that would be fine, but be aware there is a lot of extra hoops to jump through for that tech solution to work.