What is the big chasmic difference?

Are you talking about used ones? There are no new ones for less than a thousand.

Think pads get ordered by companies in bulk. After a few years, they get swapped out for a newer model. The old ones often get resold to a refurbishing company, and they test them and sell them refurbished for way less money. This happens a lot, so because they are refurbished and there's so many of them, prices are extremely low. I got like 6 of them for 200€ each. It's insane. So that explains the extremely cheap ones.

I could hypothesize that the price jump is because there's a gap between new and refurbished models, but tbh I don't really know and I also don't see that much of a jump. But that's kind of my theory. Hope that helps.

Or they get auctioned off in bulk and some local guy resells them on facebook marketplace piecemeal making a quick buck.

I'm too lazy to look up Lenovos current lineup of products. But atleast 10 years ago when i was somewhat knowledgable on that matter they already had tons of differing SKUs to water down the brand. The $2000 offerings were normally the T and X series. The business juggernauts. T's for the devs. X's for the departments who wanted a Macbook Air but werent allowed to have one from corporate for reasons(MS contract). I think there also was also the somewhat rare W-series with workstation GPUs for the engineers.

But Lenovo also branded the L and E series as thinkpads. Which were just shitty entry level laptops with the design cues of a "real" Thinkpad. Whats a "real" Thinkpad? Probably some IBM machine with a Pentium 3 processor if you ask an enthusiast.

Anyway, i made half of my post up.

If I max out the ram and ssd space as much as is possible would that be as powerful or more than a Macbook pro of similar or lesser stats?

Im not sure the distinction between new/used/refurbished altho thats a hell of a price drop if the 500 ones are basically reasonably souped up altbeit used/refurbished

They have the cheapo plastictastic ones they sell to consumers, the generally decent mid range ones that corpos buy in bulk for their office drones and the fancy ones for executives. Then of course there's the secondhand market where the corpo machines get flogged off for cheap after a few years of use.

I would prefer aluminum or magnesium

Basically a Linux Macbook Air but hopefully cheaper

If you post two examples I can probably break down the differences, but as other people said new carries a premium over used/refurbished and for old ones they’ve been around for decades so the specs could vary wildly.

You could just run Linux on a macbook air..

That said, I have used macbooks and thinkpads and the aluminium might feel sturdier it is not. Drop a macbook and your looking at an expensive repair especially if it is case related, basically easier to buy a new one. Thinkpad parts are very plentiful and easy to repair yourself. And the cases may scratch but are not easely damaged.

Edit: I'm talking about the mid to high end thinkpads, comparable in price with macbook.
The cheap ones are absolute shit.

Thanks, very generous of you to offer your time and attention like that to silly ol' me.

Could I be a pain and ask give me till Saturday, is that cool? I just need to wrap up some life-enhancing changes and housework I need to put to bed before I can devote my attention fully to this :) Ive been procrastinating on them leading to many of my posts lol

I will reply with my selects on Saturday, deal?

Refurbed business machines FTW, you can find them easily on e-bay and they usually come with extended warranties too.

Yeah no worries

Thats such a relief I'll have this guidance, its definitely on my bucket list

What keywords are relevant and help filter the sheer fuckton of machines floating around on internets?

Is the think pad arm?

Im not sure yet, will be choosing a few canfidates on Saturday, I'll see them when my chores are thru—I dont know how long ill be-eee

Go on eBay or whatever marketplace and search for any halfway recent X or T models. Specs obciously depend on what you need. I only use my laptop once or twice a week when I don't feel like writing/coding on my desk and would rather sit on the couch or go somwhere else so a Gen 1 X13 with an i5 10310U and 8GB RAM for 120€ was perfect for me.

Reminder: Lenovo got caught putting a rootkit in their BIOS so...you should probably not buy one at any price.

They come in all shapes and sizes

The specs.

You either get them refurbished on ebay or brand new. They don't sell for less than $2k new. Newish refurb thinkpads can be as high as $800

That rootkit didn't affect Linux installations at all, and was never loaded on ThinkPads.

Still a shitty move to protect their bloatware at BIOS level.

I bought a used T480 on refurbed.de for 430€ a while back and installed Debian Forky. I only realised it had a touchscreen when I touched the screen. I am very happy with it. I firmly believe the Wikipedia and FSF stickers make it run faster.

I got my T14 for less than $100

It works great for what I need it to with Mint

The computer store didn't have it for sale. I went and asked if they had any really cheap laptops out back, that still could do browsing and streaming

They had a whole stack of maybe 15 laptops that they were going to either ditch or strip

So I think the answer is, that they'd rather sell you a really expensive computer when they know that you're afraid to buy a really cheap one

I cant stop buying them either. Have a cluster of self hosted machines and that's 11th Gen cpu and 32gb ram - some serious compute. You put it on nixos with auto backups and you can easily extend your swarm and replace any duds. Put claude code at the helm to orchestrate it and it's really fun. You can vibe code something and it'll deploy itself and keep it going. Crazy times.

You just have to look for business class laptops: Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Latitude/Precision, HP Elitebook, and such.

I just go to e-bay and search for "refurbished lenovo thinkpad (model I want)" and look for sellers that have good ratings with the buy it now filter on because I don't have patience for bidding. If they have a warranty it should be fairly prominently featured on the page. Last time I got a 3rd gen touchscreen L14 for like $300 and it came with a 2 year warranty, runs Mint like a champ!

I would avoid Dell Precision, they're usually higher spec but they also seem to have problems much more frequently than Latitudes despite being "better".

My favorite for personal general use laptops has always been Thinkpad, but I am probably a little biased because of nostalgia and Linux friendliness.

Very interesting...

I assume the memory was expensive though because it's still ddr4 sticks.

I've had good luck with Thinkpad, Latitude, and Elitebook laptops. I've actually got a pair of Elitebook 8440p machines left over from an old IT job. One of them I maxed out with an i7-740QM, 8GB DDR3, SSD, 1440x900 display, Nvidia discrete graphics, and all the extra options (except the little nib in the middle of the keyboard, like the Thinkpad Trackpoint... I hate those things).

You can find 32gb refurbs with memory already. It's much rarer though.

Still, doesn't inspire much trust. Luckily GNU Boot supports a few ThinkPad models.

that still kind expensive.

Then the Framework Laptop 13 Pro might be for you, but it's quite expensive.
Though it's repairable nature and easy upgradeability (you can buy a new motherboard when you want to upgrade your CPU, while keeping the same chassis e.g.) might save you some money in the long run

Where? It seems eBay has dried up, and even surplus places online are gouging a bit

Huh?!

I love the nub. ThinkPads have been pretty solid for me. HP has been hit or miss, but their business line is definitely the way to go if you go with HP.

Fair, I'm not one to yuck someone else's yum. I just don't understand the obsession with it. But whatever, doesn't hurt me.

My daily driver laptop is actually a 15" HP Spectre x360, running LMDE7. Outside of the battery life (or a lack thereof), I love it.

Decent graphics or decent battery life: Can't have both in a laptop.

My gaming laptop is an Eluktronics Prometheus 17 and that's pretty pretty good (minus battery life, maaaybe 3 hours with light use, probably closer to 1 for gaming) but for regular use I stick to my L14 Thinkpad with Cinnamon Mint on default settings and it can do 4+ hours no problem.

I've got a Thinkpad T14 G1 stowed away, and that thing is pretty sweet... But being AMD powered, the best resolution it's capable of is just 1920x1080, which drives me absolutely insane on a small 14" screen. My Spectre runs a much nicer 4K OLED touch display (which I can't imagine helps with battery life).

I barely use the Spectre for gaming.

Edit: Honestly - after googling around a bit - if I can successfully install the missing SMD capacitors on the eDP connection, I will happily daily the Thinkpad.

1920x1080 seems pretty usable to me on a small screen but screen upgrades are fairly popular with old Thinkpads.

I vastly prefer 1440p at this point. The way I use my laptop, running at FHD just feels crowded.

That, and the fact that Lenovo artificially limited the display output of their AMD models to FHD is enough to make me mod it out of spite.

I just upgraded to 1440 on my desktop, that's probably a factor in my perception lol