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Comment by ChiefNotAClue | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that new, low-end laptops are in the $300-$400 range. Most people would be better served by a new laptop, instead of a decade old refurb. Sure, basic tasks might not need additional processing power, but things like better battery life, higher resolution screens, fast solid state drives, better webcams, and network adapters supporting newer wifi/bluetooth standards are things the average person would notice and benefit from.

I doubt the average person knows how to or is willing to manually install feature updates to continue to run Windows 11 on an unsupported laptop. Refurbishing is great, but I'm not sure how much more you can get out of a 10+ year old platform. I think the sweetspot is a 3-6 year old platform where a refurbished unit will be a decent bit cheaper, but still have a good bit of life left.

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I think the use case you imagine most of my customers have is not the one they have. Most of my customers need a laptop for a handful of "can't do it on the phone" things that they do occasionally - taxes, bookkeeping, a Zoom call here and there. They're not daily driving it like you or I would. Another large plurality need a Chromebook-like device for school (I often install ChromeOS Flex on the lower-end machines, if it's compatible, to achieve this, and sell them for $40-50 each).

The point that others have made about business laptops vs consumer laptops is also salient. Most of what I am refurbishing is business-grade and therefore has held up quite well in terms of build quality.

I do also do quite a bit of business in the ~4-6 year old machine world, but that's a different demographic of customer from my average.

For laptops specifically, the technical specs don't matter for most use cases, but the "quality-of-life" things absolutely do: screen resolution and brightness, keyboard and trackpad comfort, and battery life.

It's hard for me to recommend most ~$500 Windows laptops when they skimp out on those things to lean into specs, while older-model Apple Silicon MacBook Airs are just a bit pricier but absolutely deliver on quality-of-life.

Yep, Apple likely got a bunch of lifetime customers during the decade long period they spent not leaning into specs in favor of putting every dollar into quality of life.

Gamers and power users of course shunned them for so long saying, "you could get a better laptop for half the price!" but it's a testament to how good the build quality was that the full force of tech enthusiasts telling everyone not to buy it wasn't enough to sway people away.

Everywhere but the low end the point has become kind of moot these days for the most part, Apple has beefy specs now and mid-high range Dells and Thinkpads have good build quality and QoL. I think speaker quality is the most noticeable difference between Apple and Dell where Dell just doesn't value it as anything other than an afterthought.

Thinkpads had excellent build quality for most of their history.

> Gamers and power users of course shunned them for so long saying, "you could get a better laptop for half the price!" but it's a testament to how good the build quality was that the full force of tech enthusiasts telling everyone not to buy it wasn't enough to sway people away.

I've had two Intel MBP cook themselves to death within two years.

The best laptop I've ever used was an Thinkpad X1 Carbon and I'll die on that hill - I find that Apple's build quality for a lot of stuff is ridiculously overrated and on-par with PCs that cost similarly. The lack of cooling is awful and the extra survivability of MacBooks is helped a lot by their status as shiny prestigious toys for people who don't care that much about using their computers.

Obviously plenty of people get real work done on them, but I'm not sure that they're actually more reliable for the price.

I'd argue that there's no better value right now for a basic computer than the Mac Mini M4 standard for $500 (been on sale for this price 2-3 times at various places since release, and it's the standard Education price at Apple store).

> I'd argue that there's no better value right now for a basic computer than the Mac Mini M4 standard for $500

Doesn't that come with an anemic 256GB HD expected to hold both OS and user software?

In the meantime, you can buy cheap miniPCs with Celeron/i5/Ryzen5 with 16GB of RAM expandable to 32GB and 500GB HD with multiple SSD expansion slots for less than $300.

I was floored to see how miniPCs are bottom-barrel in pricing…interesting to see how this will trend with AI cpus in the next decade for overdriving automated tasks for persons…

Refurbished laptops can be superior in comparison to cheap Bestbuy laptops. These old laptops are often much more solid built, have better keyboards, may even have better screens (FYI brand new laptops with cheap TN 1366x768 screens are still manufactured).

Good refurb definitely should have an SSD and battery at least in good condition.

> Refurbished laptops can be superior in comparison to cheap Bestbuy laptops.

They can be, but there's an inflection point of age. For ~400 USD you can get an all-E-core i3-N305/512GB SSD/8GB RAM/1080p laptop - which is about on-par for performance with a midrange 4-core CPU from the final 14nm mobile chips (Comet Lake, 2019). With the N305 you get notably lower power draw under load.

My 10 years old laptop has FHD screen, half a TB of SSD. Battery life is not as great as today's laptop but that's a tradeoff my family is willing to take because they transport the laptop but rarely use it on battery.

Battery can be changed easily, memory can be replaced in case of failure or need to upgrade.

It doesn't support Windows 11, but it happily runs 10, browser and the entire Office software suite. It's built in an plastic/aluminum chassis so it's a bit sturdy but the keyboard is not soft as low-end plastic keyboards.

The value of such a laptop is lower (if not nearly $0) than a low-end laptop but much snappier.

The value of that laptop is definitely not $0. It's probably $50-150 depending on the specifics of the machine.

Battery life is one of the biggest issues there isn't a good way around. Replacement non-OEM batteries are extremely variable (and often pretty poor) in quality.

Also, it probably does support Windows 11, as long as you're OK with manual installation of the once-a-year feature updates.

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