The Best Desktop Computers of 2018 Packing more power and flexibility than laptops, and spiffier designs than ever, desktops (whether hulking towers or space-saving all-in-ones) still have loads.

Receive a discount on a new Mac or iPad for your studies with Apple Education Pricing. Available for students, teachers and staff. The good news is Apple just refreshed the MacBook Air lineup with a new $1,200 13-inch Retina model, which we now consider the leading candidate for a first-time Mac buyer. Choosing the best Mac for a student can be difficult: should you buy a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, MacBook, Mac mini or new iMac? Here we explore the various Mac options and give our buying advice. The macOS is the new name for the operating system previously known as OS X. This Macintosh operating system runs only on Apple-branded computers, so you may have to hunt for this system.

The Right PCs to Power Your Business

Everyone needs a PC, especially at work. Email, Twitter, chat apps, the web: All of these technologies keep today's businesses humming. It might be tempting to buy a simple consumer PC from a big-box store like Best Buy or Walmart for your startup, but you'll be doing yourself and your customers a disservice if you do. Specialized business PCs have extra features that make them better suited to the office than the $300 sales-circular special.

For one, business desktops are built to last longer, and are easier to service than consumer PCs. After all, the longer a business PC is down, the more money it costs you in lost earning time. Business PC makers may have specialized tech-support lines to help you troubleshoot your hardware meltdown or your QuickBooks problem. At the very least, you can add a service contract to your business PC so that onsite support calls are handled by techs who respond in hours rather than in the days or weeks most consumer tech-support turnaround takes.

Go Core, Ryzen, or Xeon? Assessing CPUs

Dual- and quad-core processors, particularly in the Intel Core i3 and Core i5 lines, are the norm in business PCs. Celeron and Pentium dual-core CPUs are found in lower-priced desktop PCs, and use technology trickled down from the higher-end Intel Core processor line, but we'd look to the higher-spec Core chips instead of these.

Consider buying a slightly more powerful processor if you're concerned about keeping your system for a lengthy useful life. Faster CPUs are a must for today's attention-challenged, multitasking PC users. Core i5, Core i7, Core i9, or Xeon CPUs are prime options for users like graphic artists, hard-core number crunchers, and other gearheads who stress over the speed of their PCs. Much less common among business machines, but also viable options, are desktops based on AMD's Ryzen and Ryzen Pro CPUs.

As for memory, look for absolutely no less than 4GB of RAM, though 8GB is really the sweet spot nowadays that most users should insist on as a minimum. In general, the more memory you can get the better, especially for people who work in graphic design and Web development—they will need no less than 16GB. More memory allows you to do two things: open up more programs and windows at once, and perform multimedia processes (like editing photos) faster. Less than 8GB is really suitable only for an occasional-use desktop that won't be tasked with running more than one program at a time, and a nondemanding program at that.

Storage: Go Solid, Wherever Possible

You'll always see exceptions, but business PCs often require less storage than consumer PCs, since you're less likely to use them to sync your iPhone or to house your personal video collection. What's the best antivirus protection. Unless you're a pro content creator, many of the key day-to-day files you or your users access will tend to be housed on common servers, and business folks may well spend much of their time in cloud services for key operations. Even so, since storage is so inexpensive these days, a hard drive with 500GB of space strikes a good balance between economy and space. Frankly, 60GB of available storage could be enough for just about all the PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents you use on a day-to-day basis, especially if your office uses a network to house (and thus back up) files.

Compared with traditional hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs) fetch you less capacity per dollar. But an SSD-only system will boot and launch programs almost as quickly as your smartphone. A 256GB SSD should be sufficient for office workers' needs, today and for the near future, but it may cost you more than a machine with a traditional hard drive. Larger SSDs, 512GB or 1TB in capacity, are speedy options for power users, but these upgrades will boost your per-unit purchase price. (Apple SSD-capacity upgrades tend to be particularly dear in cost.) That said, a small-capacity SSD is far preferable to a large, slower hard drive whose capacity your office users will never fill.

Optical drives are less critical for consumer PCs these days, but a DVD burner is still a useful addition to a small-business PC. You may need it to burn copies of projects for your clients, or to read the occasional CD or DVD that's either sent to you by a supplier or customer or that contains important records or files from several years ago.

Graphics: The Basics Usually Suffice

Most business PCs come with an integrated graphics processor (IGP)—that is, video capabilities that are built into the central processor. Most of the time, integrated graphics will be just fine, since you won't be playing games on your work desktop. You can spot an IGP solution in an Intel-based system by the names 'Intel HD Graphics' or 'Intel UHD Graphics.'

Most workers who require a PC with 'discrete' graphics (that is, a separate graphics chip oir card) need it for specialized tasks, such as GPU acceleration in a content creation applicationor 3D graphics visualization for architectural drawings, or for displaying to more than two or three monitors. Computers that use ultra-small or ultra-slim form factors will likely have only integrated graphics and no card slots. These systems are best suited to general PC tasks (a category into which most business tasks fall).

Desktop graphics fall into two main categories: consumer/mainstream (Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon) versus workstation (Nvidia Quadro or AMD Fire Pro/Radeon Pro). Check out our deep dive on the best graphics cards for much more on assessing discrete graphics.

Room to Grow: Slots and Bays

Most minitower and some small-form-factor (SFF) budget desktops will have a measure of expansion. You'll find space for at least one extra internal hard drive, a PCI Express (PCIe) x16 video card slot, a selection of PCIe x1 expansion slots, perhaps a legacy PCI slot or two, and maybe space for a second optical drive or other 'big bay' device (seldom needed nowadays). You may also find extra DIMM slots, which will let you upgrade your memory later.

More and more, desktop PCs have on-motherboard slots for what are called M.2 drives, small sticklike SSDs (or sometimes, Wi-Fi cards) that let you mount an SSD straight onto the board. (See our guide to the best M.2 SSDs.)

Eventual upgrades in a business PC are likely to be modest, however, by tendency and necessity. Why the latter? The 125- to 350-watt power supply in these PCs won't be able to power more than a low-end graphics card. Memory or storage upgrades will have only a trivial effect on power consumption, so this is not a concern if you're adding those kinds of hardware.

All-in-One PCs: Space Savers

Don't need multiple hard drives and/or multiple graphics cards for your users? Consider deploying all-in-ones instead of tower PCs. All-in-one desktops have the benefit of a built-in screen without the theft and travel breakage risks that business laptops face every day. While many come with high-end performance processors (such as Intel Core i5 or Core i7) for your demanding users, there are also models that are available with energy-saving processors for everyone else. Intel's power-saving U-series processors are built for ultraportable laptops, but you'll also find them in some all-in-one PCs.

If you choose an all-in-one PC with DisplayPort or HDMI inputs, the screen will continue to be usable even after the internal CPU and storage becom

Best Mac Computers For Teachers