After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments. Users in Brazil will be the first to be able to send and receive money through the messaging app, using Facebook Pay.
WhatsApp says that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use, but comes with a 3.99% processing fee for businesses receiving payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.
A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today.
Three TechCrunch writers address one of the big questions about the future: Will tech continue to centralize in hubs like San Francisco and New York City, or will remote work and all the other second-order effects lead to a more decentralized startup ecosystem? (Extra Crunch membership required.)
The company first launched a vehicle in 2017, but the launch didn’t go exactly as planned and failed to reach space. In 2019, its MOMO-3 sounding rocket did break the Karman line, though just barely, and unfortunately its MOMO-5 sounding rocket launched over the weekend did not make space, as planned.
The Exchange is Alex Wilhelm’s regular dive into the financial side of the startup world, and how the public markets exert gravity (or lift) on private companies. These themes might sound familiar to Daily Crunch readers, since we’ve linked to plenty of Alex’s pieces, but now it’s an official column with an official name.
Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
SlideCasts let you combine YouTube videos and Google Sides / PowerPoint presentations in a single-player. The speaker video and the slides appear side-by-side and, as the video progresses, the slides auto-change in sync with the video.
You can try a live demo of SlideCasts here. Just hit the play button on the YouTube video and you’ll notice that the slides will change at the 10s, 25s and 30s mark (configurable).
SlideCasts can be really useful for educators involved in remote teaching. The teacher’s “talking head” video can be uploaded to YouTube and the lecture slides can be hosted on Google Slides.
If your course slides are available as a PowerPoint presentation that will work as well since you can directly upload your PPT and PPTX files to Google Slides.
Go to the Addons menu inside Slides, choose Creator Studio and then select Create Slidecasts. Here specify the URL of the YouTube video and your Google Slides deck (both should be public).
Next, specify the timestamps in mm:ss format (minute seconds) when the slides should change in sync with the video.
For instance, if you want the second slide to show at the 15s point in the video, the 3rd slide at the 45s mark and the 4th slide at 1 minute, 20 second mark, your markers would be written as:
0, 15, 45, 1:20
That’s pretty much it. Click the Generate button and copy-paste the HTML code into your website.
The SlideCast player is responsive so the video and slides will auto-resize based on the size of the visitor’s screen.
It takes 2 easy steps to embed any Google Slides deck in your website. Open Google Slides, go to the File Menu and choose Publish to web. Your presentation becomes public and you are presented with an IFRAME HTML tag that you can copy-paste in any web page.
The embedded Google Slides player can be easily customized by modifying the src attribute of the IFRAME tag.
Auto Start the Embedded Slideshow
Append start=true to the URL and the slideshow will auto-play as soon as someone opens your webpage. Or set start=false and the slideshow will only play when the visitor click the play icon in the slides player.
Change the duration of slides
With start set to true, you can add delayms=1000 to the URL to specify the time (in milliseconds) for which each slide should display before auto-advancing to the next one. For instance, start=true&delayms=6000, the slideshow will autoplay and the slides will auto-advance every 6 seconds (6000 ms).
Play the slideshow in Loop
Add restart=true to the slideshow URL and it will play in a loop, meaning it will auto-advance to the first slide after the last one.
Start from a Specific Slide
Your embedded Google Slides presentation will always start from the first slide in the deck. You can however customize the URL to start the slideshow from a specific slide by adding slide=id.p# to the URL, where # is the slide number.
For instance, if you wish to embed a slideshow with 8 seconds gap and starting from the 4th slide, your URL would be:
The Google Slides player displays the controls and Google branding in the bottom bar. However, if you wish to play the slideshow in kiosk mode without any player controls or Google Branding, just adding rm=minimal to the IFRAME link (rm = Render Mode)
Make the Google Slides player Responsive
The embed code provided by Google Slides has a fixed height and width and will thus display at the same size on both desktops and mobile screens. You can however make the player responsive with a little bit of CSS as detailed below.
Remove the height, width and other parameters from the IFRAME tag:
Add this CSS to your HTML page. The padding-bottom is set to 56.25% for 16x9 ratio (9/16*100) so the height of the player would be 56.25% of the player’s width. Set the value to 75% for a 4:3 ratio.
After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments. Users in Brazil will be the first to be able to send and receive money through the messaging app, using Facebook Pay.
WhatsApp says that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use, but comes with a 3.99% processing fee for businesses receiving payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.
A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today.
Three TechCrunch writers address one of the big questions about the future: Will tech continue to centralize in hubs like San Francisco and New York City, or will remote work and all the other second-order effects lead to a more decentralized startup ecosystem? (Extra Crunch membership required.)
The company first launched a vehicle in 2017, but the launch didn’t go exactly as planned and failed to reach space. In 2019, its MOMO-3 sounding rocket did break the Karman line, though just barely, and unfortunately its MOMO-5 sounding rocket launched over the weekend did not make space, as planned.
The Exchange is Alex Wilhelm’s regular dive into the financial side of the startup world, and how the public markets exert gravity (or lift) on private companies. These themes might sound familiar to Daily Crunch readers, since we’ve linked to plenty of Alex’s pieces, but now it’s an official column with an official name.
Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
If you are participating in CVPR this year, please visit our virtual booth to learn about what Google is actively pursuing for the next generation of intelligent systems that utilize the latest machine learning techniques applied to various areas of machine perception.
You can also learn more about our research being presented at CVPR 2020 in the list below (Google affiliations are bolded).
Organizing Committee General Chairs: Terry Boult, Gerard Medioni, Ramin Zabih
Program Chairs: Ce Liu, Greg Mori, Kate Saenko, Silvio Savarese
Workshop Chairs: Tal Hassner, Tali Dekel
Website Chairs: Tianfan Xue, Tian Lan
Technical Chair: Daniel Vlasic
Area Chairs include: Alexander Toshev, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Boqing Gong, Caroline Pantofaru, Chen Sun, Deqing Sun, Dilip Krishnan, Feng Yang, Liang-Chieh Chen, Michael Rubinstein, Rodrigo Benenson, Timnit Gebru, Thomas Funkhouser, Varun Jampani, Vittorio Ferrari, William Freeman
Deep Implicit Volume Compression Saurabh Singh, Danhang Tang, Cem Keskin, Philip Chou, Christian Haene, Mingsong Dou, Sean Fanello, Jonathan Taylor, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Philip Davidson, Yinda Zhang, Onur Guleryuz, Shahram Izadi, Sofien Bouaziz
Sinch said on Monday it has agreed to buy Indian firm ACL Mobile for £56 million (roughly $70 million) in what is the fourth acquisition deal the Swedish mobile voice and messaging firm has entered into at the height of a global pandemic.
The Swedish firm said acquiring ACL Mobile will enable it to leverage the Indian firm’s connections with local mobile operators in the world’s second largest internet market, as well as in Malaysia and UAE, to expand its end-to-end connectivity without working with a third-party firm.
Twenty-year-old ACL Mobile, which has headquarters in Delhi, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, enables businesses to interact with their customers through SMS, email, WhatsApp and other channels. In a press statement, the Indian firm said it serves more than 500 enterprise customers, including Flipkart, OLX, MakeMyTrip, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.
“With ACL we gain critical scale in the world’s second-largest mobile market. We gain customers, expertise and technology and we further strengthen our global messaging product for discerning businesses with global needs,” said Sinch chief executive Oscar Werner.
The Indian firm, which employs 288 people, reported gross profits of $14.2 million on sales of about $65 million in the financial year that ended in March. During the same period, ACL Mobile claims it delivered 47 billion messages on behalf of its enterprise customers.
“Although the long-term growth outlook is favorable, lower commercial activity in India due to the COVID-19 pandemic means that the near-term growth outlook is less predictable,” Sinch said of ACL Mobile’s future outlook.
ACL Mobile is the fourth acquisition Sinch has unveiled since March this year. Last month the company said it was buying SAP’s Digital Interconnect for $250 million. In March, it announced deals to buy Wavy and Chatlayer.
Sinch, founded in 2008, employs more than 700 people in over 40 locations worldwide and is increasingly expanding to more markets. Last month it said acquiring SAP’s Digital Interconnect will help it expand in the U.S. market. The company says it is profitable.
“Together with Sinch we are scaling up to become one of the leading global players in our industry. I’m excited about this next chapter and the many new opportunities that we can pursue together,” said Sanjay K Goyal, founder and chief executive of ACL Mobile.
Everyone experiences loss, but how do you cope with the tough moments that follow? Resilience researcher Lucy Hone shares three hard-won strategies for developing the capacity to brave adversity, overcome struggle and face whatever may come head-on with fortitude and grace.
Many people love to hunt for treasure. Some meet their needs through the practice of geocaching, while others like to visit abandoned buildings; there’s something poignant about remembering the things that have been lost to time and neglect.
However, some of us can’t visit these locations in person. This is either due to the fact that these locations are too far away, or because we just don’t know where to look. Fortunately, there’s a whole online subculture devoted to documenting derelict areas. Here’s a list of great websites on how to find abandoned places, wherever you might be.
First, let’s start off with a really old website that’s been documenting abandoned places for ages. When we say this website is old, we mean ancient. It hasn’t been updated since the early 2010s, so if you’re looking for a digital trip down memory lane, check out abandoned-places.com.
While the Abandoned Places website is old and not exactly user-friendly, it’s pretty simple to use once you figure out the main navigation wheel. Essentially, the whole website was designed to look like a mechanical contraption. You can click on different gears within the central wheel in order to learn about a new building.
The website also features locations from around the world, with each post including historical information and photos for those locations when possible. One area, called The Graffiti Place, includes a description on the size of the ghost town, along with its location along the river Scheldt. The photographs documenting it are detailed and definitely worth a look.
Looking for a more modern website with a distinct focus? Then you need to check out Abandoned America, a website put together by documentarian Matthew Christopher.
Over the years, Christopher has made it his mission to record the American dream in decay. On his about page, he states that he’s been fascinated with abandoned places since he was a child.
Additionally, he wants to share the stories behind these abandoned places, and bring light to the lives that were upended through historical atrocities. One such atrocity was America’s use of insane asylums in the 20th century, with ruins now scattered across the country from coast to coast.
The website also makes it very clear that some location information has been withheld, due to the fact that these abandoned buildings are on private property.
Even with that factor in play, however, this website is still one of the most comprehensive resources on this list. The attention to detail can help you satisfy that urge to “find abandoned places near me,” without having to go there in person.
Looking for a website that combines the topic of urban exploring with the history of abandoned buildings? Then you need to check out Urbex Playground.
With twin sections devoted to urban and rural exploring, Urbex and Rurex, this website aims to document abandoned buildings in both high and low-density areas.
For each place that this website explores, the team photographs and records the history behind those buildings. They also talk about how these buildings have come to be abandoned in the present day. As such, this website is an excellent source of inspiration and knowledge for writers working on a variety of different topics.
Although Urbex admits that its documentation process sometimes involves trespassing (an activity we do not recommend), its meticulous documentation practices and its attention to detail have to be commended.
Looking for a website that is a little more “daring” with the ways that it photographs abandoned places? Then you need to check out Freaktography, a website run by an urban explorer.
Starting in the early 2010s, Freaktography began to record abandoned buildings and old ghost towns, and post those pictures online. The explorer who runs this website has amassed a giant collection of images on the subject.
Like the other sites on this list, Freaktography strongly urges readers to not follow the photographer’s example. If you plan to document any abandoned places or retrace the photographer’s steps either through a website or an abandoned places app, then you need to avoid trespassing on private property.
Other Abandoned Places to Check Out
While we’ve been going over websites that you can use to learn about abandoned places, there are also a variety of individual blog posts that cover the topic, too. We’ve rounded up a list of the most relevant.
On English Russia, you can read a picture-heavy post called Abandoned Trains of the Soviet Era. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to research old objects that are not buildings.
Kathmandu & Beyond has a roundup of abandoned places that they’ve explored.
Urban75 also a section with lots of old photos detailing old trains and train stations.
Once again, all these links are really interesting to check out.
Find Abandoned Places From Your Own Home
Now that you know about this collection of websites devoted to the subject of exploring abandoned places, you can start to check out some of these websites yourself. Maybe you can even use the idea of urban exploration as a jumping point for a new project that you plan to research.
If you want to explore other places around the world, abandoned or not, then we recommend our list of Google Earth virtual torus that you’ll want to check out. It’ll allow you to venture into areas you’ve never even heard of, all from the comfort of your own home.
Everyone has a camera at their fingertips thanks to smartphones. You might also have a webcam that you use to video chat with people. Have you ever considered how to make money using your webcam? It will require some real effort, but it’s definitely possible.
That said, it’s very difficult to make a true living with a webcam job, so consider the approach of “making money with your webcam” as a source of bonus income.
Without further ado, here are some great ways that you can use to earn money with your webcam or smartphone camera.
1. Tutorial Videos
If you’re an expert in a field, creating tutorials and how-to videos can be a great way to build an audience. These can be in different formats, like lengthy lectures that take a deep dive on educational subjects, or more casual and fun videos for hobbies like card tricks and origami.
The best subject for these types of videos is a field that’s visual in nature—like pottery, fashion, instruments—so viewers don’t get bored. If you want to talk at them, you’ll need to have a captivating voice or personality.
How to make money: You can always upload to YouTube and hope to achieve a large enough following to make money with the YouTube Partner Program. If you’re feeling entrepreneurial, you could set up a website and sell your videos yourself. Or combine the two ideas: set up a website with ads and keep the videos free.
2. Review Videos
If you have access to a steady source of new products, you could try your hand at product reviews. Video reviews are great for prospective buyers because they can see much more compared to reading reviews or seeing static images. These reviews can be serious, humorous, or some blend of the two.
Before you go ahead with this idea, you need to know what you’re talking about. You need to be critical and analyze what makes a product good or bad and different from its competitors. Be thorough; missing key aspects of a product can destroy your credibility and enrage viewers. Finally, be engaging, because there’s nothing worse than a boring reviewer.
How to make money: If you gather a large enough audience, the YouTube Partner program is always a choice. Setting up a review website (start with our Best Web Hosting Services page) that supplements your videos with text reviews can turn into a hit, but make sure you avoid saturated markets (like most electronics). Reviews are a wonderful platform for jump-starting an affiliate marketing campaign, too.
3. Personality Videos
Since we’ve been talking about the YouTube Partner Program, we should consider one of the most popular video types that you’ll see on YouTube: the personality video. These are video series that revolve around the personality rather than the content.
For these videos, you can give advice, provide a running commentary, do comedy, news for a community, or any number of other ideas. Content is important here, but personality is just as important. Your audience will be coming back time and time again to hear what you’ve created.
How to make money: By this point, the YouTube Partner Program should be a no-brainer. However, there are alternative video sites that will pay you for successful content, like Dailymotion and Vimeo. Once you’ve built up a large community, you can create a website and make more money with ad revenue and merchandise sales.
4. Live Online Tutoring
Live tutoring is similar in concept to making tutorial videos, except instead of recording a video and uploading it to YouTube, you connect directly to one or more students and teach them in real-time. There are sites that facilitate all of this for you using their in-house software (typically a web-based platform) like Tutor.com, Chegg, and Club Z. You can also try finding your own students using Craigslist or something similar.
In order to do well with tutoring, you need to be intelligent, articulate, and knowledgeable on whichever subjects you teach. Basically, if you’d make a good offline tutor and you have a decent webcam and microphone, online tutoring could be worth it. If you’re doing this on your own, a program like Skype or an alternative could be helpful.
How to make money: If you’re employed by an online tutoring service, they’ll typically pay hourly. If you run it as a private venture, you can set your own rates.
5. Live Stream Games
If you have a propensity towards video games, one of the many ways you could make money playing video games is to stream yourself playing those games. There are free screen streaming programs and many of them include webcam picture-in-picture functionality, which is useful for connecting with your audience and talking with them. If video games aren’t your thing and you’d prefer live Dungeons and Dragons or board game sessions, that’s a possibility too.
One thing to note is that video streaming can be intensive on your computer, particularly the CPU. If you don’t have a powerful computer, you’ll need to sacrifice frames-per-second or video quality or both, which can result in a video stream that no one wants to watch.
How to make money: If you can build up a sizeable audience, Twitch has a Partner program where you can earn some ad revenue on your stream and you can enable a subscription feature for your fans. In addition, there’s always the option of putting up a donation link and having your fans donate, which can prove quite lucrative for engaging streamers with large audiences.
Make Money With Surveys Too
Don’t expect to become rich overnight. There’s very little barrier to entry, so lots of people are trying to make their mark alongside you. Consider these methods as a hobby and be passionate about them, or you will lose steam.
When your friend or family member is celebrating a holiday or special event, circumstances can sometimes prevent you from celebrating with them. No matter how far you are away from your loved ones, you should still let them know you care. Fortunately, sending gift cards or money online is easier than ever.
You probably know how to send money as a gift through wire transfers, but what if you want to get a little more creative? These thoughtful money-gifting methods will put a guaranteed smile on your recipient’s face.
1. Send a Prepaid Visa Gift Card
If you don’t know what exactly a person wants as a gift, you can never go wrong with a prepaid credit card. On the Vanilla Gift section of Visa’s site, you can easily purchase a gift card in the $10-$500 range.
Thanks to Visa’s wide array of prepaid card designs, you can find a card for just about any occasion—birthdays, baby showers, weddings, and graduations are just some of the milestones that the cards are designed for. Plus, Visa gives you the option of writing a custom message on the card at no extra charge.
Once you pick out a design, simply choose the amount of money to put on it, enter the recipient’s email address, and check out. Visa activates the card as soon as you buy it, so your recipient can start spending as soon as possible. The only downside to these cards is that they’re only usable for merchants located within The United States.
2. Give the Gift of an Amazon eGift Card
Perhaps you don’t just want to send money, you want to send a gift that’s a little bit more personal. Maybe the person that you’re sending the gift to is a bookworm, a fashion lover, or an avid techie. Thankfully, Amazon has something for just about everyone. From video games to home goods, pet supplies, and clothes, your recipient is bound to find something they’ve been looking for.
Amazon has a large selection of gift card designs, making it one of the best ways to send money for Christmas, birthdays, weddings, graduations, and many more occasions. Better yet, some of the card designs are animated, and you can even upload your own pictures to certain cards.
You have the option of sending an eCard with money over text message, or by email. Amazon also lets you set a date for delivery. That means you can buy the card now and have Amazon send it on the date of your choice.
3. Buy a Gift Card for Local Restaurants
Maybe your gift recipient isn’t really a shopper but loves to dine at local restaurants. In that case, the obvious choice is to buy a gift card through OpenTable.
Not only is OpenTable is a great restaurant picker app and website, but you can also use the site to buy and send digital gift cards for nearby eateries. It’s a great way to support local businesses, while also showing your recipient that you care.
When you type in a specific location, you’ll see a list of partnered restaurants. Click Buy gift card for any restaurant, and you’ll get redirected to a purchase page where you can customize and send your gift.
4. Send Money Through PayPal
If you have a PayPal account, you can send an eCard with money through PayPal. The only catch is that your gift recipients need to have a PayPal account as well, but creating an account is free, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
To send money as a gift, simply follow the above link and sign in to your PayPal account. You can then enter your recipient’s email or mobile number, as well as the amount of money you want to send.
As for card designs, PayPal only gives you six to choose from, so you might not find the theme for the specific occasion you’re looking for. Despite this, it’s still one of the best ways to send graduation money or cash for a birthday gift.
5. Buy Gift Cards on GiftCards.com
GiftCards.com has a huge library of digital gift cards. It’s packed with gift cards for major clothing stores, restaurants, airlines, department stores, online shops, and much more.
If you aren’t sure what type of gift card to send to your friend or family member, Giftcards.com is where you should start your search. As you browse, you’ll see small icons below each gift card option—the smartphone icon means the card is available as a digital gift.
You can opt to email your gift right away, or set the delivery date in the future. In addition to letting you customize a message, Giftcards.com also lets you choose a celebratory video to go along with your eCard.
6. Gift Home-Cooked Meals With Blue Apron
You probably know Blue Apron as one of the best ways to get fresh and healthy food delivered to your home. Upon signing up, Blue Apron will send you all the ingredients you need to create a healthy and delicious meal. Anyone who enjoys cooking, or wants to learn how to cook better can benefit from a Blue Apron subscription.
On Blue Apron’s site, you can buy a digital gift card for $60, $120, $240, or a custom amount. The $60 card covers a one-week meal plan, while the $120 amount covers two weeks, and the $240 value covers four weeks.
When you purchase a Blue Apron gift card, you can send it directly to the recipient’s email. Blue Apron might not give you any fancy card design options, but at least you can still write a custom message in the email.
Learn How to Send Money as a Gift Creatively
One of the most stressful parts about holidays and special events is gift-giving. Although money isn’t the most personal gift, when you prepare it with a kind message on a digital card, it becomes a lot more meaningful.
It’s no secret that going to college is expensive. Student loans aside, housing costs and everyday expenses require a lot of financial planning. On top of that, it’s expected that you own essential items like computers, smartphones, and laptops.
As more of our higher education moves online, getting the best computer for college becomes ever more critical. However, balancing cost and features is a fine art.
Here are some of the best computers for college students today if you’re looking for a place to start.
The Acer Chromebook 14 Bundle is one of the best computers for college students. Chromebooks are generally inexpensive as they run Google’s Chrome OS operating system, based on the Google Chrome web browser. This bundle includes the Chromebook 14, a wireless mouse, and a protective sleeve. If you don’t need specific software and do most of your work online in a browser, then a Chromebook makes an ideal choice.
They also have low maintenance requirements; updates are installed automatically when you restart, and you won’t need additional security software. Chrome OS also supports Android apps so that you can install and use your favorite smartphone apps on your laptop. The Chromebook 14 has a 14-inch HD display, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of onboard storage and an additional 100GB of Google Drive cloud storage.
Importantly this Chromebook can last up to 12 hours on a single charge. Initial setup is a breeze, too; all you need to do is sign into your Google account, and your existing bookmarks, extensions, and saved passwords are automatically synced to your new Chromebook. Chrome OS also has wellbeing features like Night Light and Do Not Disturb that’ll help you wind down at the end of the day and step away from your college work for the night.
If you don’t need something portable like a laptop, but enjoy the lightweight Chrome OS experience, consider the Asus Chromebox 3 instead. This mini desktop computer has slightly higher hardware specifications for the same price. However, this is because it doesn’t come with a monitor or any peripherals, so you’ll have to provide them separately.
However, if you already have this equipment and are looking for an upgrade, this is a great choice. The Chromebox 3 has 4GB of RAM, 32GB of onboard storage, and can support a dual-monitor setup. The Chromebox 3 also comes with access to the Google Play Store so that you can install your much-loved smartphone apps.
The mini PC comes equipped with an Ethernet port, three USB A ports, an HDMI slot, and a USB-C connection. The USB-C support means you can take full advantage of the cable’s data-transfer and power delivery features. As a result, you can charge your compatible devices at full speed using this connection.
In most colleges, space is at a premium, so your dorm may not have much space to spare. In which case, you won’t want a large desktop computer tower in the middle of your room. That said, there are still desktop options available to you like the HP All-In-One Computer. This Windows 10 desktop PC combines a monitor and the computer into one space-saving unit.
The computer is equipped with 4GB of RAM, an AMD A4 processor, and a 1TB hard drive. If you have an extensive collection of DVDs, CDs, or other disc-based media, you’ll be pleased to see that the HP All-In-One Computer comes with a DVD-Writer drive. The computer has an integrated webcam, which could be a concern for some. However, the HP HD Privacy Camera has a switch that’ll cover the camera and disable video when not in use.
You won’t need to worry about peripherals either as the computer comes with a wired keyboard and mouse. That said, most people prefer wireless options, so you may want to switch these out for alternatives. Still, their inclusion means that you could easily purchase the HP All-In-One Computer, set it up on your desk, and get going with little effort.
The Microsoft Surface Pro 7 is easily the best Windows laptop for college students. Importantly, it is also one of the most versatile devices on this list. The Surface 7 Pro is a two-in-one device that can operate in laptop or tablet mode. Unlike some two-in-one devices, the keyboard is detachable, so you get the productivity gains of a laptop, but the portability and convenience of a tablet.
The laptop comes with Windows 10 Home preinstalled and is available in a range of hardware configurations. This model features 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and an Intel Core i5 processor. The Surface Pro 7 is light, weighing in at just 1.7 pounds. Despite this, the laptop can achieve up to 10.5 hours of battery life on a single charge. The Surface’s fast recharge capability can get your device from empty to 80 percent in just over an hour.
Importantly for college students, the Surface Pro 7 also has a Studio mode, where the tablet is laid at a very slight 15-degree angle from the desktop. This makes it easier to use stylus accessories for design work, art and drawing, and, crucially, taking handwritten notes. Although the initial cost is higher than some Windows laptops, the device is easy to use, and you can get direct support from Microsoft when things go wrong.
An alternative to the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 is the Lenovo Yoga C740. This laptop is another two-in-one device that you can use as both a laptop and a tablet. The main difference here is that the display folds back against the keyboard, rather than detaching from it. Although most people wouldn’t carry the C740 around as they would, say, an iPad, it is still a great laptop for college students.
The 14-inch touchscreen is ideal for taking handwritten notes and quickly interacting with apps from the Microsoft Store. The device comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The laptop has Windows 10 Home preinstalled and is equipped with a built-in HD webcam and a fingerprint reader for convenient security; ideal if your computer is briefly left unattended in lecture halls or the campus library.
The Lenovo Yoga C740 should last up to 13 hours on a single charge, so it may see you through a whole day of classes before needing a top-up. Interestingly, the laptop comes with Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa preinstalled. If you already use Amazon’s service, this makes the C740 a useful option. For those times you need to listen to audio, the device uses a Dolby Atmos speaker system. It also includes far-field mics for high-quality recordings.
Apple’s computers have long been associated with creative industries. Writers, video producers, and content creators are often seen with the Apple logo embossed on their devices. However, the Apple MacBook Pro makes an ideal choice for all college students, too. This is especially true if you already use an iPhone or other Apple device.
The latest edition of the MacBook Pro features a 16-inch Retina display, 512GB of storage, and an Intel Core i7 processor. The Touch Bar gives you easy access to apps and other shortcuts, while Touch ID means can log into your computer with your fingerprint. It comes equipped with six speakers and has a 11-hour battery life. There are also four Thunderbolt 3 ports which accept Thunderbolt and USB-C connections.
Aside from the hardware, macOS is an easy to use, low maintenance operating system. Software updates are handled automatically, you are at lower risk of malware and viruses than Windows users, and software can be easily installed via the App Store. If you’ve previously used a Windows 10 PC, you’ll be pleased to know that most of your favorite software is cross-platform, and can be installed on a Mac computer.
Linux is an excellent alternative to Windows 10, macOS, and even Chrome OS. The open-source software is free to download and install and is often more secure and customizable than its well-known counterparts. Additionally, the flexibility of Linux lends itself well to Computer Science and Programming majors.
The Dell New XPS 13 Developer Edition is one of the best Linux computers for college students. The laptop comes with Ubuntu 18.04 preinstalled, 256GB of storage, and 8GB of DDR4 RAM. The device is powered by a 10th-generation Intel Core i5 processor and uses a 13.4-inch FHD+ InfinityEdge display. Given these specifications, it may not come as a surprise that this is an expensive laptop.
However, investing in the New XPS 13 Developer Edition should see you through college without further upgrades. The laptop supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.1, and can last up to 19 hours on a single charge. The hardware supports Windows 10 installations, so you could also consider dual-booting the laptop with Microsoft’s operating system.
The Best Computers for College Students
Educational expenses can be challenging to keep under control, but there are computers for college students that don’t have to break the bank. That said, we’ve covered a variety of the best computers for college here, so there should be something to suit every budget and requirement.
Before you head off to campus, you might want to upgrade your other gadgets, too. If a new phone is on the cards, consider one of the best budget smartphones.
