> A whole laptop for less than 400 USD is a great thing for the other half.
I paid my "new" ThinkPad X13 Gen1 400 Euros + 29 euros for shipping, less than a month ago, from eBay. It comes with a 8c/16t ryzen cpu, a full-hd touch display and 32GB ram.
Even if it was 500 euros, it's an incredibly better value than a "Shenzhen Special" piece of trash.
I just buy second hand thinkpad for half of that if I want a good enough one.
Recently bought a Thinkpad x390 for my significant other for 170€ with a brand new battery. Works well enough, is small, light and quiet, has a decent keyboard and fullhd screen. Very little battery drain when suspended. Brand new laptops at twice that price offer a much crappier experience.
> I just buy second hand thinkpad for half of that if I want a good enough one.
happy that works for you, but for my data center environment, where I need a bunch of cheap, simple laptops in the colo -- and in some cases, burner laptops for dubious countries with data centers -- cheap and simple is the requirement.
2nd-hand and refurb create question marks as to security and reliability, and we already have enough holes and questions.
I worry about gpu driver support and the like. I have a 2014 Macbook pro that I run linux on, and it's generally great, if you ignore some minor thermal issues. But x265 decoding happens only on the cpu and the gpu support in wayland is lackluster.
It think a modern under 400 laptop would not have all of the above issues.
I disagree, sometimes all you need is some sort of screen, a keyboard, a wireless interface, and the cheapest x86 processor invented by man.
A whole laptop for less than 400 USD is a great thing for the other half.