In 2011, I was finishing 9th grade. As a gift, I got to choose a laptop in the 400 EUR range. I ended up picking an ASUS Eee PC 1201PN. It was new and

The best laptop is the one somebody else had

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2024-11-01 12:00:03

In 2011, I was finishing 9th grade. As a gift, I got to choose a laptop in the 400 EUR range. I ended up picking an ASUS Eee PC 1201PN. It was new and the first computer in my life that was 100% mine, but awfully slow for a lot of tasks.

It was so slow that I ended up giving Linux a go as a result. Linux! I didn’t even know computing all that well around that time!

A few years later, I bought a ThinkPad T60 off of someone I knew for about 40 EUR. It was about 8 years old at that point, but it ran circles around the new laptop that I had in performance.

That’s when I learned about the absurdly good price-to-performance ratio of used business-grade laptops, and the crappiness of netbooks.1

That’s the core of this whole idea. Consumer-grade laptops are cheaper when bought new, but that is a result of a lot of compromises made in the build quality. Business-grade laptops are used for work and need to be reliable for years, which means that they will last for a long time.

I recently checked what the prices are for used laptops, mainly focusing on the 100-300 EUR range as I find that to be the sweet spot for bargains.