Sure. The one area where this advice begins to break down, however, is with M.2 PCIe SSDs. I personally don't keep up with laptops, so unfortunately I can't off

Sure. The one area where this advice begins to break down, however, is with M.2 PCIe SSDs. I personally don't keep up with laptops, so unfortunately I can't offer any specific recommendations, but if you can find an otherwise solid laptop with an M.2 slot that's the way to go. They're about 2-3x faster than SATA-based SSDs. It's not the same order-of-magnitude jump in speed a SSD offers over a HDD, so I wouldn't necessarily call it a make-or-break feature, but it's something to keep in mind (for that, you'll definitely need the latest-generation "Skylake" platform) Also, to save yourself some time researching SSDs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds http://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds