Hello there
My friend is looking for a new laptop. It will be basic usage and a lot of video editing in 4K. She doesn't know Mac and requested a PC but I know nothing about PCs.
Should I push her to switch to Mac or are there good, decent alternatives for PCs?
What models, brands and specs would you recommend?
Well if you wants to edit 4K on a PC, getting a gaming laptop PC would be her best bet. For 4K video, she would need to make sure the internal graphics card must have 4Gb of video ram. Pretty much all newer PC laptops would have one. 16Gb of RAM is a good start. All gaming laptops come with M.2 blade internal SSD drive which are really fast. I don't recommend editing on the internal ssd drive, so provision some cash for an external USB 3 SSD drive. Samsung T3/T5/T7 are good choices. Whether it's an i5 or i7 depends upon the footage being used. If she's working with 10bit RAW 4k, then get an i7 because the CPU is used for decoding/encoding h.264/h.265.hevc footages. If she's using the PC to edit iPhone/Android 4K stuff, then an i5 9th or 10th gen CPU is adequate. I use an i5 9th Gen desktop with the Nvidia GTX 1650 myself to edit 4k with no issues whatsoever from my Lumix 4/3 20MP camera. The best price performance mobile CPU right now is the GTX-1660Ti or the RTX-2060 both come with 6Gb of video ram which is more than enough for 4K editing.
Now, the reason why you may want to push a mac to her is with Davinci Resolve. With the free version, the PC version does not provide hardware acceleration for final rendering. You need Resolve Studio for that. With the free Mac version, hardware acceleration is available for final rendering and it also supports for the Apple T2 chip for really fast h.265/hevc encoding. Faster than the fastest PC CPU. So there's a plus there for video content creation. I use Davinci Resolve myself as it is quite powerful and supports multi-GPUs.
Now comes to choosing which laptop to get. I would say either the MSI, Asus ROG Strix, Dell XPS and Lenovo. These are designed with better thermal cooling than other cheaper solutions. Better thermal cooling is important since video editing is like playing games. Too much heat on the GPU will lessen its lifespan.