Dell Latitudes are pretty great for mid-range and very affordable. You get tons of ports, a FHD screen in 14" variant, nvme ssd + tons of ram, plus you get serv

Dell Latitudes are pretty great for mid-range and very affordable. You get tons of ports, a FHD screen in 14" variant, nvme ssd + tons of ram, plus you get service manuals for the hardware. Dell has pretty good support in most countries. Also, the UEFI/BIOS is actually pretty great, it gives you tons of control over the hardware! If you keep it plugged in most of the time and switch off battery savings and so on, it is quite a beast. I tend to run mine in the middle mode where it doesn't use turboboost but also doesn't down clock it too much, thus the fans are silent and the machine still very fast. Very happy with mine. If you are forced to pick between Dell and Lenovo, take the Dell. Skip all the other brands/model variants (even from Dell) as they are more consumer oriented (better speakers but no gigabit lan port...). If you need something with a beefy gfx card, then rather buy an Asus gaming laptop, but they tend to be heavy and noisy but packs quite a punch. If you are going to use Linux on it and value your sanity, do not take one with an nvidia chip (intel/amd chips works out of the box). If you were solely going to use windows, prefer one with an nvidia chip. If you can get a Ryzen 5/7 -based laptop at a good price, take it instead of an i5/i7. Lastly, most manufacturers, including Dell, usually use very basic OEM ram and ssd's and wifi chips. So it is worthwhile to swap out your ram with faster and bigger ram sticks, make sure they run in dual channel (so rather buy 2x16gb instead of 1x32gb), and buy a proper nvme ssd (I typically go for one of the samsung ones with 5 year warranty).