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A friend needed a new laptop and was about to buy some consumer-grade garbage for ~500-600€. Fortunately he asked me before committing to it, and we found a second-hand AMD-based Thinkpad T14 for 300€. It's stupidly powerful for what he does, has much better connectivity and a much sturdier case. It was in really good condition too.
Long story short, stay away from consumer laptops. There's second-hand business machines that are both better and cheaper.
I got burned by a laptop that didn't have a mechanical power switch. One hack bricked it. Well, it required me to open the case and pull the power cable, but the manufacturer had booby trapped that action. Without a bespoke tool, I shorted something vital to the machine. I even offered to pay a college kid who knew how to wrench on microelectronics to fix it, but he couldn't. I gave it to him to strip for parts.
A few pictures of this machine and a few more ways in which this is better than a consumer one:
* the keyboard is solid and comfortable
* you get a touchpad with 3 separate buttons and a trackpad
* the hinges are sturdy
* it's very easy to open up for servicing
* the cooling system is well done and doesn't blow hot air on the screen
* the bottom case is solid magnesium
* you get USB A & C, HDMI and Ethernet ports, an SD card reader and a headphone jack
* the camera has a lid to block it
@gabrielesvelto solid mg? won't the explode if it touches water? i did high school chemistry u can't trick me
@gabrielesvelto I have advocated for the purchase of last gen enterprise hardware for many, many years. Aside from the solid hardware that is far more durable and reliable, the base Windows install (if that's your thing) is bloat-free. And if that's not good enough a starting point, I then hook them up with Titus Tech's WinUtil to clean out all the other junk that you can't simply remove. For the less tech savvy, I suggest you just run it for them, but it's easy enough for most people after a bit of guidance. https://github.com/christitustech/Winutil
@gabrielesvelto I have a soft spot for the #thinkpad family 😉 I use them for anything outside work and they never le me down 😊
@gabrielesvelto My brother-in-law asked me for recommendations last month, and ended up with a used HP EliteBook with a good repairability index. Can’t really beat used laptops unless you have very very specific needs.
@gabrielesvelto I had one Thinkpad...must have gotten the lemon. Crashed and died five months after purchase and no one could revive it. I was sad. I liked it very much.
@Lizette603_23 second-hand gear always carries a risk, especially if it was treated poorly by a previous owner. A completely dead machine sounds like an issue with the motherboard power circuitry which is indeed one of the bits that's most likely to fail, especially if the previous owner had let it overheat.
Did you manage to return it and get a replacement?
@gabrielesvelto I chose not to get another one. I bought a whole other brand
Long story short, stay away from consumer laptops. There's second-hand business machines that are both better and cheaper.
Absolutely agree, also recommend Think Pads. Mine, a T120 has stood up to some massive abuse while traveling.
@gabrielesvelto@mas.to My sibling asked me for what laptop to buy ages ago. I recommended them to buy a used Thinkpad at the time. They still use it today and I think it's been like 8 years or so at this point. (They did put Linux on it day one with my help and out of their own motivation, so the hardware aged kinda well!)
Not saying that Thinkpads are the solution, but buying high quality, older hardware can last you a long time!
@gabrielesvelto My wife bought such a laptop and when I unboxed it, it instantly felt like garbage. All plastic, horrible keyboard and bad key travel, clunky trackpad and sub par screen. Holding it with one hand resulted in the screen flickering on and off.
@tokyo_0 well, if an iGPU is not enough there are business laptops with decent dGPUs. I don't know how much they cost second-hand though, nor if they're reliable given that both the thermal stress and the wear on the power circuitry will have been higher because of the presence of the dGPU.
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