Young people like the trendy things so the laptop presumably should be a good one

In that just mentioning some directions -> the best processor is the Intel i7 generation now, if the RAM is DDR4 then 8Gb RAM is enough for almost everything even in a gamer laptop, but there should be some graphics card in the laptop and better if that is NVidia. Plus there is a technology change currently in hard drives, that the HDD drives are going and SSD drives are coming, the SSD is much faster/less noise/less power consumption as having no moving parts, just still being expensive at this moment.

So a good machine is Intel i7 or can be also i5, but DDR4 8Gb RAM and graphics card Nvidia with around 4GB to keep it cheaper (Nvidia GTX 1080 is the top now), with SSD hard drive (or combo HDD and SSD to keep it cheaper).