What distinguishes a business laptop from a consumer laptop?

Strict separation is actually only available in marketing, especially in the low-end sector.At the same price, however, business laptops tend to place more emphasis on reliability, and consumer laptops on performance — especially those that look good on the data sheet.

A few features that are more common in business laptops than in retail models:

• High-quality keyboards. Consumer laptops often have spongy keyboards, where the rate of typos ultimately increases and longer writing more burdened the fingers.
• Matte displays. Consumer laptops often have glossy displays because they offer better image display when it’s not too much mirroring.

Matte displays diffuse the light so that reflections are less distracting from the content, but can greatly reduce the effective contrast ratio of the image — if it is correspondingly bright. Especially in office environments with fluorescent tubes, the latter is usually clearly preferable.

Ports for docking stations are also found almost only in business models. Nowadays, laptops in the “thin and light” category blur this criterion, as there is no space for the ports, and often the Ethernet port (“LAN cable”) requires an adapter. With DVI, business laptops used to often have support for much higher resolutions than HDMI (often limited to Full HD) — but with HDMI, the upper limit was always device-specific and not documented in the data sheet.

SSDs have tended to replace shock-dampened hard drives.
There are special “rugged” series with extended liquid, dust and mechanical protection, but they are more suitable for special applications such as construction site laptops or military personnel.When Thinkpads were still produced by IBM, such features were common there, but laptops were even rarer.

If you value pure performance for gaming and multimedia, you are more likely to be well advised with appropriately equipped consumer models. If the devices only have the integrated graphics of the processor, there is little difference here.
In between, there are “prosumer”series, such as the Thinkpad Edge series, which combine more powerful multimedia/gaming graphics cards with business features and target users who want to combine professional use and leisure on a device, or to have to.

However, this is highly dependent on providers. Sometimes it leads to better phone support, because sending a technician is much more expensive than saying “send it in” on the phone. I don’t have any personal experience of how well it really works.

The low-end range (<500€) is usually completely omitted from business series.

There is less difference on topics such as

• Display quality. Expensive devices usually have better displays, but I often see business devices with grotesque contrast, or low maximum brightness.

Resolutions above FHD are often not available or only at an extra cost. This is not significantly different from consumer devices.
However, particularly low resolutions (everything under FHD) can be found almost only in the price range, where there are no business devices.