I dunno .. maybe my son is a total idiot, or just plain unlucky .. or maybe he uses his tablet as a skateboard .. or or a seat .. or maybe just a plain old punching bag/item.
But I've never known any device to be so unbelievably unreliable! he's had to have the SSD drive replaced about 6 times over the course of the 10months of the school year!

it's one of those Dell something or other touch screen 11" things a model just prior to the latest model.

So .. a while back I used to have good things to say about Dell mobile PCs. I've had many folks have them, and they seem to work more than reliably.
Most of the laptops I've had to fix, have been Toshibas and Acers .. but even that .. they were old bangers which the owners just wanted to keep going just a bit longer before they upgraded them.

Now .. that same son(of mine) has an ASUS laptop for well over 3 years now. It's had a few bruises and scars .. nothing overly painful looking, but definitely hasn't been kept insulated in a hermetically sealed cloud and duck down environment.
Never a problem .. he's loaded so much garbage onto it with his incessant gaming needs .. which then brings me to it's usage pattern. Sounds impossible, but 25 hours per day usage when he's with me. He's truly incredible how much stamina he has for his gaming mania!

So on the one hand, his Dell tablet with SSD storage has needed 6 new drives in 10months .. yet his more heavily used laptop(for his gaming) with spinning drive has been rock solid and unwavering in it's performance.
While his laptop is an i7, it still doesn't feel as quick as my AMD powered dinosaur desktop .. but then again I have quite speedy drives on this desktop so could be the difference.
But his lappy has more than enough speed for most folks.

My daughter has been handed down an even older ASUS laptop of even older vintage(I think about 5 or 6 years old now) .. I had a quick tune up session with it the other day, and it felt slow now(but that's to be expected).
At $400 and with a mobile AMD CPU .. more than expected. But again .. it's still going strong(enough for her).

I don't know about others experiences .. but my first choice of laptop/mobile/tablet type device is now ASUS.

Lplates! .. you haven't really given any indication of price range.

i7 is good, but not always the advantage it appears to be. i5's are as good, cheaper and can use far less power ... hence longer battery life per charge. This may be important in some way if 'traveling'.
It's all about balance.

For me at the moment, I like the ASUS Transformer Book Flip TP500LN. Or the cheaper and slightly lighter LA version.
(only difference btw them is the LN has a graphics card, LA has integrated graphics chip)
I like bigger screens(14" minimum .. 15" better).
As the name suggests it also flips to work like a tablet if desired.
For a rough price guide .. Scorptech(not the cheapest PC retailer around) have the more expensive LN model with i7 for $1199.



FWIW: I'll slightly contradict Am about the USB3 ports.
I've found that 1 of them has always been enough. That is, I always use a mouse on a laptop when I use them(not often tho), as I hate those trackpad thingies.
and with other peripherals connected to the usually other 2 USB ports .. when I need to connect an external storage device, it's only ever been one item and this one goes to the USB3 port because of it's speed. The other peripherals(mouse/keyboard/headphones/Bt adapter .. whatever) don't really need speed the way an external storage device does.
But more importantly .. many of the off the shelf USB hard drives will usually only have very slow 5000RPM 'green' or eco-friendly drives.
That is, while it may be USB3 connection, it's speed is not usually at the blazing speed USB3 is capable of.
Some of those drives can only write at about 30(or so) Mb/s .. and while this is faster than USB2 can transfer .. it's not a lot faster. So the advantage of having the USB3 isn't fully realised.

As a comparison, I have a USB3 case, which I use a WD black 2T drive. This drive connected to USB3 can write at a sustained 80+Mb/s.
Compared to an off the shelf USB hdd, that's nearly 3x faster. That one hour transfer now only takes 20mins.

But my slowest drive .. a WD green I can connect either via USB3 or USB2. On USB3 it only gives me 30-ish Mb/s .. sometimes 35Mb/s sometimes only 25ish. the actual files make a difference .. but it's not all that much different in real terms.
On USB2 it may take one hour to do the transfer .. on USB3 it may take 50mins or so. The difference is not as marked as it is for the faster(physical) drive .. because the drive is not made for performance. It's cheaper .. and as it's an always on drive uses much less power(why I got it).