> It blows all the “premium” work laptops out of the water.
I disagree. I loved my Thinkpad T450s so much I bought an identical used machine when I quit the job. Since then it's been stepped on, dropped onto concrete multiple times, had beer and wine spilled on the keyboard.
It cost me $250 + $100 for a battery replacement + $34 for a new keyboard (when the wine spilled on it, it still worked but the keys were sticky) + $150 to upgrade the RAM.
It's currently running Visual Studio Code, Photoshop, and prepping to run a pub trivia event later.
But this is all a digression - my larger point is that a $500 laptop bought today is going to have a lot more longevity than people will give it credit for.
One caveat wrt the more recent mil-spec Thinkpads is that they broke the ergonomics by making the front edge razor-sharp, so that it really cuts into your wrists. I tried to work on my T14-2 on a long train ride, and the pain in my wrists the following days kept we awake at night.
My daily Linux driver is a ThinkPad X220. $75 on eBay + another $120 for IPS LCD screen and an SSD. I use it when it really need Linux or when I’m on the go and don’t want to carry a 15” laptop. I wish they still had 1080p conversion kits for that one…
But my current Dell Precision from work is a spectacular nightmare POS.
I'm also a big fan of the 2012 macbook pros. I only upgraded to an M1 mac end of last year.
I love that the older macbooks can be opened up and fixed if needed. I had to replace the HD connector a couple times (and learnt to add some electrical tape to stop the issue), and I recently cleaned the old CPU adhesive off and added some new (old macbooks can start to smell like Body odour!).
With 16GB of RAM the macbook performance is still decent, able to run docker and run modern IDEs.
It's a great machine. The only downside is that you can no longer update to the most recent OS versions.
Kits and YT videos pretty much always means "beyond the average consumer", meaning either paying a repair shop hundreds of euros in labour/profits, or just replacing the device.
It blows all the “premium” work laptops out of the water.