[agentultra]

I use one of those too and made the switch rather recently from a MBPr. I used Linux Mint on it.

It's speedy, video calling works fine, can compile lots of code quickly, and it's refurbished and saved from the dumpster.

I hope to never buy a new computer again instead relying on refurbishing old ones as we go along. I keep all of my configurations and projects synced up so that booting up a new computer into my dev environment is straight forward. If I lose the device or it gets totaled it's a couple hundred bucks instead of $4k going out the door to get a new one in a few hours.

[organsnyder]

Two-year-old ThinkPads (the real ones like the T and X series) are great deals. I did buy my T480 new (I wanted features like the best screen that are hard to find used), but my wife and mom are both using T470 units that we bought off of eBay. My mom's unit turned out to have a charging issue, but we discovered that it was still under a three-year extended warranty, which is tied to the machine rather than the purchaser; Lenovo replaced the motherboard on it with little fuss.

[ajford]

This is exactly what I've done for the last 5 years or so. I'm currently running a T460 I picked up almost two years ago for under $500 and is now running Xubuntu 18.04. My wife's running an X1 Yoga gen 2 that I picked up for around $400.

I've come to the same conclusion that it's generally not worth the premium cost to buy a new laptop when good hardware is so readily available in my neck of the woods.

[zhte415]

ThinkPads last forever. I'm still on a T420 and X220 (travel), upgraded SSD and new batteries, and have no desire to change.