I've been a bit of a AMD fanboy as of late thanks to their new Ryzen processors and was thinking if I was to replace my laptop the
Swift 3 laptop from Acer is the one I would go with. It has an IPS screen, 512gb ssd, 8gb ram and is on sale for $1300 (4300u has better performance than an i5). One of the usbs is 2.0 but the others are High speed usb 3 gen 2 one type a and one type c. It also advertises 11h battery life.
If you don't mind a much heavier laptop (2kg) the
Aspire 5 is $1200 from Harvey Norman. Its more powerful but less portable and worse battery.