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Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

I’m looking for a laptop. I can’t find any good laptop with 16-32GB RAM at a non-Apple price. Also they all have windows preinstalled.

Defeats the purpose. That’s how it is.

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Where I am, it's much much cheaper to get a laptop with the least possible amount of RAM preinstalled but -- importantly! -- with two RAM slots.

Then just buy two stick of fast RAM and install them yourself. It often doesn't void your warranty (but make sure to check the warranty of your specific laptop, obviously).

Same applies to SSD, actually.

Got a Thinkpad during one of their sales last year for $1300 that had a generation old i7 and 48gb of RAM. Had the Dolby HDR 4K screen and a bunch of other odds and ends as well.

Didn’t look if there was an option without Windows preinstalled since it was for my wife.

Added bonus: lots of ports, onboard HDMI, onboard ethernet

If you need something now probably not a huge help, but if you’re not in a rush might be worth keeping an eye on.

There's Tuxedo computers and System76.

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en

https://system76.com/

Refurbished Lenovo Thinkpads on eBay or Amazon is what I've gone with for my past two machines. Not disappointed at all. Quality builds for quality prices.

I like my Dell XPS15. It came with Windows and runs Fedora flawlessly. I maxed out RAM, extra SSD, and GPU because I do a lot of ML consulting (AWS works well too, but its nice to have my own hardware).

Much cheaper than Apple. I use an Apple 2015 MBP for a client's requirements. It screws up my muscle memory. The OS is ok I suppose but it's no Linux.

There are Lenovo Thinkpad Linux configurations up to 16GB but they'll be in the same price range as MacBooks.

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