Why off-lease enterprise ThinkPads ruin the £200 consumer laptop market
Just wrapped up testing an off-lease ThinkPad X13 Yoga Gen 2 vs modern sub-£200 Chromebooks. It’s wild how much plastic e-waste retail stores sell at that price point when off-lease enterprise gear running Linux blows them out of the water.
Anyone else running off-lease ThinkPads for lightweight mobile setups? (Dropped a quick 2-min video spec comparison if anyone's looking at cheap refurb gear right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Pw2cBKpfs)
3 replies
I have had that thought years ago and it's still a reality. You either buy a cheap laptop brand (Acer, hp, etc.) and you regret it for the rest of your life, or an expensive laptop brand like a Framework, an expensive Dell model, or a Mac (Neo which is the cheapest, etc.). And there is always a refurbished ThinkPad somewhere.
I was given a very old ThinkPad, I installed the latest Linux Mint, and it's still faster and better than most laptops out there. Same for the servers/NAS: I'm still undecided between buying something like a Synology (eww) or a Terra Master, but the ThinkPad is still there with the desktop version "ThinkCentre." A refurbished ThinkCentre can be bought for $200 and will have all the features I need with good reliability.
My cheap and old ThinkPad is not lightweight. The GPU may suck, but it's great for most work.
Used enterprise hardware is the computer hobbyist's playground. I have a ThinkPad, multiple Poweredge servers and one Supermicro, a bunch of used SAS drives, and several mini PC workstations, all from eBay or local recyclers.
Yep, I have an X1 Tablet Gen 2 that I scored for around $75 after shipping, a T480 I picked up for $83, and before prices went up and they started stripping them for parts, I picked up five ThinkCentre m75q-1 Tiny for $50 each. That was the real score. Each had 32 gigs of RAM, a 256 gig NVME, and the power adapter. I added a 1TB SSD to each and gifted all but one to family members with Aurora on them. Man it was good when stuff was cheap.