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Comment by Mashimo | Hacker News Reader

A used notebook was also better in price to performance 10 years ago, no?

Yeash, but not as good as an alternative to a PI back then, since 8 year old notebooks 10 years ago (so 18 year old notebooks today) were too bulky and power hungry to be a real alternative. Power bricks were all 90W and CPU TDW was 35-45W. But notebooks from the 2018 era (intel 8th gen) have quite low power chips that make a good PI alternatives nowadays.

The mobile and embedded X86 chips have closed the gap a lot in power consumption since the PI first launched.

Now you can even get laptops with broken screens for free, and just use their motherboard as a home server alternative to a PI. Power consumption will be a bit higher, but not enough to offset the money you just saved anytime soon.

Laptops are still pretty bulky and power hungry in comparison if you're looking for very SFF and passive cooling.

Pop open a cheap Celeron N laptop, and often, the motherboard inside is essentially a passively cooled SBC.

https://www.insidemylaptop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Le...

The big pain with using something like this would mostly be the IO and odd form factor.

You can passively cool a laptop CPU too if that's your jam. Plus, latest RPI 5 cases now feature fans to not thermal throttle :))

You can get a 5-year-old laptop with a perfectly working screen for free if you're on good terms with the owner of a company who has a stack of them sitting in a storage closet waiting for disposal. :)

Which is basically just cutting out the middlemen in a transaction that might cost $100 on eBay.

Used corporate laptops are particularly cost-effective if you're interested in running Windows, as unlike Intel NUCs and most SBC products, they typically include hardware-locked Windows 10 Pro licenses which can be upgraded to Windows 11 Pro for free.

5-year old laptops for free aren't really a thing in most of Europe unless maybe you're in Norway or some super rich country where 100$ is pocket change. In most large places I worked in Europe, laptops are leased from a service provider, not owned by the company. When they're obsolete they get sold in bulk locally or abroad. But never for free.

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