Why I bought a 5 year old laptop.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve owned a laptop that was truly mine. Back in college I got by with cheap “off-lease” laptops from eBay and from used computer sellers, then once I graduated I started using the MacBooks my company issued as personal machines. The company I joined at the time was a startup and they didn’t have any sort of provisioning on their company laptops, you got the same laptop you would get if you just walked into the Apple store and got one yourself.

I used company machines as my personal laptop for a number of years but over time a few things have happened:

• My opinions on MacOS, especially more recent versions have soured.
• I joined other companies that had more locked down Mac’s
• I started to be acutely aware of the ramifications of using a company machine for personal work.

My initial solution was to dust off an old Intel NUC that I used as a workstation for a couple of years. The machine was quite old but came with a Core i7, 32GB or RAM and a half decent video card so for development it was fine. But as time went on I started to see the downsides of having a desktop machine, mainly that I was always tethered to my desk and anytime I went on a trip I had to take my company Macbook with me which was not ideal for the reasons I listed above.

So early this year I decided it was time for me to get myself my own laptop that would take over as my primary development machine for both work and personal projects. And so I started looking.

The Hellscape of Consumer Laptops.

I started off by doing a cursory search of current consumer laptops on the market and I was greeted with an absolute hellscape. Every semi-decent laptop these days costs $1000 or more and most have all their components soldered onto the board, not to mention most laptops that had the specs I needed were the “gaming” variety that came with a rainbow or RGB lights and price tags that were upwards of $2000.

I knew that buying a new laptop would not get me what I wanted at the price that I wanted so I started to look in the used market.

The Used Laptop Market.

The used laptop market is very different than the new laptop market and there are many more things that one has to look at to see if you’re getting a good deal. After some initial research I settled on the following requirements for a used machine:

• It must be a mobile workstation: Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Precision, HP Z-book, etc.
• It must be upgradeable: At the least the RAM and SSD must be upgradable and the more stuff that can be modified the better.
• The laptop had to be no more than 5 years old.

With those initial requirement in mind I started looking and quickly settled on getting a Thinkpad. While their build quality isn’t what it used to be in the 90’s and 2000’s, they are still solid machines. I must have spent 3 or 4 weeks comparing models before finally settling on getting a “P Series”, their mobile workstation line.

Down the Thinkpad Rabbit Hole.

While I had narrowed my search down to a specific series of laptops, there was still much more research to be done. I found many older P Series laptops like the P50, P51 and P52 but they were quite old (manufactured from ~2015 to ~2019). I looked at newer models like the P16 but while they had all the specs I wanted, even used models went for upwards of $1500 which was too much.

Eventually I settled on a “P15 Gen 1” which was released in late 2020. I found that overall they hit the sweet spot between price, specs and age and fit all my initial requirements.

However, even within that model, there was still a good amount of options to choose from. Because these are workstation laptops, customers could configure them in many different ways so there was a large variance between the cheaper models and the more expensive models. Eventually I found the “grail” version which was:

• An Intel i9 Processor
• Nvidia RTX 5000 video card
• 4k touchscreen display.

But as I learned, finding a 5 year old niche workstation laptop with those exact specs would prove quite elusive.

The (eBay) Hunt.

Most of the time I spent looking for my laptop was going to eBay every morning, refreshing my saved searches and seeing if anything came up. While I saw many P15’s for sale, most had the lesser specs and the few that came with the specs that I wanted were going for $1200.

So I updated my search and started looking for “mechanics specials”. These are laptops that are either in a non-working on semi-working state but come at a steep discount compared to their fully functioning counterparts. This part of the used laptop market can be quite a minefield because if you aren’t careful, you can easily purchase a very expensive paperweight.

I kept searching and after about a week I finally saw my “grail” popup with the exact specs that I mentioned earlier and at half the price of other’s with the same specs. This was exactly what I wanted but I quickly realized why the laptop was so cheap: it didn’t come with memory, an sdd (and hence an operating system), battery and charger.

I was excited but also had to temper my expectations as this could easily become too expensive once I bought all the missing parts. But after a quick search on eBay for the missing parts, I realized that even with all those parts the computer would be ~$400 cheaper than fully assembled models with the same specs. So I pulled the trigger, quickly buying the laptop and all the required parts.

Some Assembly Required

When the parts came in I got to work assembling the computer and crossing my fingers that everything would work. Assembly was straightforward and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to take apart the Lenovo, I had heard great things about their ease of repair but it was still nice to experience that first hand. Installing the battery, memory and NVME drive was pretty straightforward though I hit a small snag when I realized that the battery I bought didn’t come with any mounting screws. Thankfully my local Micro Center had generic screws that worked, though it’s missing one screw on the battery and one on the case.

After everything was put together I booted the laptop for the first time and breathed a sigh of relief when it was able to boot off my Ubuntu Live USB without issue.

From here the rest of the setup was pretty straightforward and before long I was surfing the web on my shiny new (to me) laptop. While I was initially hesitant to buy a laptop without an internal battery, I realized that it would probably the best move as a 5 year old battery in a laptop would likely be EOL.

Ubuntu needed a few tweaks but overall runs great, but that was too be expected since the laptop is certified to run it.

Conclusion

It’s now been about a month since I bought my new laptops and things have been great. I runs noticeably faster than my work Macbook which is several years newer and it’s really nice having a Linux laptop where everything works.

There have been a few software related hiccups though, early on I decided to install Nvidia drivers from their website instead of using the ones that shipped with Ubuntu. This wasn’t an issue until Ubuntu ran some background updates one night and I woke up to a computer that booted straight into a blank screen. Thankfully I had all my stuff already backed up so I opted to just re-install the OS instead of figuring out how to fix the graphics drivers.

Overall it’s been great and I got a smoking deal. The final cost of this laptop build tallied up to just a hair under $700 which is way better than similar laptops I saw for ~$1200 and wayyy better than the original sticker price of $5,800 that this machine went for when new.

Used laptops might seem like a terrible idea at first, but look hard enough and you are surely to find a diamond in the rough.