Why I chose an i3 laptop.

What?  I purposely got an i3 laptop?  Not the expected i7, or even an i5?

Yes.  Yes I did.  Here's why:

Most of what I do on a PC (browsing, IDEs) rarely taxes the CPU.  When I went shopping for a new laptop, I wanted to emphasize creature comforts (decent display, usable keyboard & trackpad) over performance (storage, memory and CPU).

When Fry's had a sale on the Asus Transformer Book Flip (TP500L) I snapped it up, despite it only having an i3-4030U with 4GB DRAM and a slow 500GB disk.

Having a touchscreen combined with the keyboard able to flip to make a stand or all the way backwards to make a huge tablet was a plus, since I will often use the system as the interface for various USB instruments (o'scope, logic analyzer, signal generator, device programmers, etc.), and being able to get the keyboard out of the way saves lab bench space.

Even more important is that I can stand it up sideways (profile display) to view documentation at the workbench, scrolling with the touch of a finger, using the on-screen keyboard for the occasional text search. Think about all the paper that will save, especially since my PDF viewer (Foxit) supports annotation.

Finally, a modern i3 provides maximum battery life and minimum overheating concerns.  But, not surprisingly, the system was dead-dog slow out of the box.  No surprise there, but I had plans.

Today Fry's had a 240GB SSD on sale, which I installed with about 20 minutes of mechanical work and an hour of copying time using EaseUS Todo Backup Free, which also handles partition resizing.

My total investment so far is still less than even a low-end i5 system without the flip screen capability.  And the performance with the SSD makes it feel like it's punching way above its i3 weight-class.

Now it cold-boots in about 4 seconds, and programs load much faster.  Browsing is also quicker due to the rapid disk cache updates.  Software installs are also swifter.

But best of all is the quick swap speed, which will postpone a DRAM upgrade until I need to install truly massive tools, such as the Xilinx FPGA development toolchain.

The moral of the story?  If you have an unlimited budget, get an unlimited laptop.  Otherwise, subtract the cost of an SSD from your budget, then get the best laptop you can with what's left.