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LAPTOP QUESTIONNAIRE

• Total budget (in local currency) and country of purchase. Please do not use USD unless purchasing in the US:
  I am flexible with budget if it is reasonable to spend more, I can push up to 2800€ (30-32k NOK), but if I would stay around 2000-2200€ (not more than 25k NOK) would be ideal.

• Are you open to refurbs/used?
  No.

• How would you prioritize form factor (ultrabook, 2-in-1, etc.), build quality, performance, and battery life?
  Form-factor not a priority (not 2-in-1), excellent performance, good battery life, rugged if possible (I will carry it around a lot)

• How important is weight and thinness to you?
  I value ruggedness more than weight, but my back would not mind to have a reasonable weighted laptop.

• Do you have a preferred screen size? If indifferent, put N/A.
  14'' or equivalent in size.

• Are you doing any CAD/video editing/photo editing/gaming? List which programs/games you desire to run.
  VSCode running R, Python, ML and NLP packages, spatial data packages (GDAL and friends), Stata, some gaming, occasionally vector graphics software and QGIS.

• If you're gaming, do you have certain games you want to play? At what settings and FPS do you want?
  I play mostly Civ VI and turn-based strategy games, MOBA more occasionally that I would play at some decent fps settings

• Any specific requirements such as good keyboard, reliable build quality, touch-screen, finger-print reader, optical drive or good input devices (keyboard/touchpad)?
  Good keyboard, nice screen, solid build quality

• Leave any finishing thoughts here that you may feel are necessary and beneficial to the discussion.
  I am looking for a replacement of my MacBook Pro 13'' with M1 due to probably Motherboard failure (sigh, delusional). I will use the laptop mostly for research but I would like to also do some gaming. My research is based on micro data and I often need to run machine learning or text analysis tools (if it is not too much demanding) locally. It is really important for me to have a non-Windows option, I am a long-time Linux user and I would not mind a dual-booting laptop with Windows just for some games, if not another MacBook. Reasonably speaking, I am aiming to 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD, and adjusting specs depending on whether it is worth the price or not.