https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u01AbiCn_Nw mental outlaw video:
hi everyone, i was planning on getting a new laptop cheaply for about 500ish but then i stumbled upon this near-totally modular laptop rhat starts out at above 1000 bucks. do you think the cheaper laptop in the long run is just a false economy and i should go for the framework or what? if you want to ask questions go ahead but im mainly concerned about the longterm financials (and how well it will keep up over time)
i was planning on getting a new laptop cheaply for about 500ish
What are you hoping to do with it? I got a used Thinkpad T480 that was like new for €180 and added a couple of upgrades to it (1TB NVMe, 64GB RAM, Intel AX200 Wi-Fi card) that cost me €137, meaning a total of €317, and I’m very happy with the laptop right now, it’s very responsive with Arch Linux and an i3 desktop and I think this baby will be good for many years.
I third that motion. Doing similar with a T440p. I’ve spent $400 total between upgrading the CPU to a 4712 and putting 16g of RAM. Running WoW happily every night on Debian. Second hand Thinkpads are the way to go.
Seconding a used Thinkpad. They are plenty modular/repairable compared to other laptops. I’ve got an X270 and it’s a great little machine.
I’ve bought about a dozen from friends and family.
Search on eBay.
Find a seller with many of the same model. These are tech contractors offloading the laptops they just replaced under some contract - you’ll get a laptop that’s been sitting in some managers drawer for the last 3 years.
Next go to the contractors own website, not ebay. See what stuff they have.
I usually email them and just try to express interest in buying 2 or more laptops, ask what peripherals they have - get a dock or something. Ask about RAM or SSD upgrades, things like that.
You’re helping them offload their second hand stuff, avoid ebay fees, not being a dick.
There are various ebay sellers who carry certified refurbished laptops with warranty included. You can also buy some directly from Lenovo.
Got mine on Ebay, and you usually have to be careful like with any purchase of a used item: ask for detailed photos if you can’t judge the state of the item from the photos that are there, ask questions about things that were left out in the description, look for sellers with very good ratings and look at their reviews, see if you can return etc…
Amazon also sells refurbished ones, but so far I’ve seen the best deals on Ebay.
EDIT: important, make sure the BIOS is unlocked.
I’ve got a X270 and it’s a great little machine.
Same. X380 here. Cost ~$200 refurb a yearish ago. Love it so much I steered my mom onto one a couple months back, and she’s been loving it too. Manjaro on mine and Win10 on hers, both great little performers. They fall short on tasks you expect to need some grunt for, but are great for everything else. I recommend it for anyone who will listen.
Having said that, I really am eyeballing the framework to be in the running the next time I’m in the market. Whenever I reach that point I’ll need to do some comparisons. I could theoretically be convinced to spend a bit more to enable ongoing piecemeal upgrades, desktop-style.
due to the nature of arch and its rolling releases, it tends to get bleeding edge updates/features rather than having to wait for a major update to iron itself out then get rolled out. If you’re a gamer for example, if Valve fixes a bug in the gpu driver, then Arch would probably get it asap (especially given that Steam OS is arch based)
You have the freedom to customize it how you want. The downside is that you have to customize and install everything yourself. A happy compromise is to get an arch based distro which handles a lot of the main stuff, my current favorite is endevour os.
What’s good about it is that if you know what you’re doing you can install only what you need and keep your system small and tidy. Also, since it’s a rolling distro, updates become available really quick and sometimes some of the updates introduce optimizations (meaning more performance) or better power consumption. And finally of course Arch has also an amazing wiki, they have hands down the best Linux documentation along with Gentoo, and they even have a page about Thinkpads: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo
there will always be a Thinkpad nerd to do the shilling in a laptops thread, just doing my job 😎
That’s amazing, but not reasonably indicative of the specs we’ll normally find for that price.
The specs that I have now are due to the upgrades I’ve listed: the NVMe is a WD_BLUE SN570 1TB, and the RAM sticks are Patriot Memory DDR4 3200Mhz, both bought new on Amazon, and then there’s the AX200 Wi-Fi card that I bought used (you could also spend €5 more and buy it new but I didn’t see the point in doing that).
The base laptop (the one I bought for €180) has an 8th gen i5 and came with 8GB of RAM (single stick), and you can find these specs below €200 on Ebay (very good chance if you also participate in the many auctions that are there, as an example here’s one if you’re in the US: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266452790554).
This is the answer OP. Or similarly, I lined up a T14S Gen 1 for $299 with a 2 year warranty included on eBay. 10th gen i5, 16GB RAM, 512GN NVMe.
Here’s a random one I found. Touchscreen too if you like that, but slightly over $300.
