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

Note that I keep repeating the phrase business-grade laptops. Think Lenovo ThinkPads, Dell Latitudes or HP EliteBooks.2

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.

Used laptops are cheap

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.

For 195 EUR, I can get a ThinkPad X395, sporting an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U quad-core CPU, 16 GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD, sold by a store that specializes in selling used hardware. You even get a 6-month warranty! That’s crazy good value.

New business-grade laptops cost somewhere around 1000-2000+ EUR. They are generally faster and provide more memory and storage, but in the best case scenario that performance difference will be 2-3x at best, while the price is 5-10+ times higher. The math does not check out.

The price depreciation curve is also quite harsh on new laptops. You can pay 2000 EUR for a new laptop and only be able to sell it for 1000 EUR a year from now. Two years later? 500-700 EUR. The prices eventually settle at around the 5 year mark, which also happens to align with the extended warranties expiring.

Used laptops reduce stress

With used laptops, you don’t have to worry about the wear-and-tear that much.

You accidentally drop your laptop on the floor? It might still be fine!

Your child picked off all the keycaps on the keyboard? No worries, replacements are easy to find!

Your lunch for the day ended up leaking all over the laptop, killing it completely? No problem, you can get a new one and still end up paying less compared to a new laptop!

Buying used is no excuse to mistreat your hardware, but I personally love the lack of stress associated with trying to keep a new and expensive object in pristine condition. The laptop already has some cosmetic damage on it, so why worry?

Used laptops are surprisingly reliable

Reliability is often one of the top reasons why some people avoid buying used laptops. I attribute this to the experiences people have with used cars. You pay less, until you pay a lot more to get that hunk of junk fixed once it breaks down on you.

I’ve had the complete opposite experience with used business-grade laptops. The ones that make it to the used market have gone through years of reliability testing, and those that don’t make it were defective anyway. The only areas to pay attention to is basic maintenance (remove dust, apply new thermal paste) and a potential battery replacement, which are quite simple to do on modern business-grade laptops. It’s so easy that even children and teenagers can do it with a little bit of guidance and supervision!

The reliability doesn’t stop with the hardware. Buying used often means that you’ll be buying a laptop that has received all the software and firmware fixes to all sorts of issues. Linux users will also have a much better time with used laptops since by that time most of the issues associated with new hardware will have been fixed in the kernel.

You should avoid buying new and used consumer-grade laptops. I’ve seen so many of those with missing pieces of plastic and the hinges breaking open the laptop case, but rarely with business-grade laptops.

Used business-grade laptops are so reliable that some companies are even willing to rent and support those machines for a really low price.

Exceptions to the rule

There will always be a place for new laptops.

Sometimes you do need the latest and greatest hardware for CAD work, complex video editing or high-end gaming.

Some people find that a 30-second build of their software project taking 20 seconds is worth the productivity gain, regardless of the higher price or increased environmental impact of buying new.

Some simply want to play around with the latest and greatest, for fun.

There will always be people who find the idea of used laptops off-putting, and companies do prefer to buy pallet-loads of new laptops every few years.

On the bright side, this does mean that there will always be a supply of cheap used laptops available for the rest of us.

Conclusion

If you ever need a laptop and your needs are not extremely specific, then give a used business-grade laptop a try. It will be fine, I promise.

  1. no hard feelings to my mom, we both didn’t know any better. ↩︎

  2. note that there are certain models that are a ThinkPad in name only, under the hood it’s still the same crappy components you see in consumer-grade laptops. Thanks, Lenovo. ↩︎