the card itself does, but how do you value the time you spend on research and doing the replacement? I bought the windows version of that laptop when I was a student, and replaced the card myself. that made sense then, but if I bought it today to get work done, I'd gladly spend $200 extra to have it ready to go out of the box and not think about it. just my two cents, feel free to do whatever works for you.
To know that Intel is one of the best for Linux? I kinda have known this for years. To find online and buy one? Maybe 15 minutes. To replace? 10 minutes. I do such things without thinking. You can send me your laptops along with a 200 per laptop.
Exactly. I feel like the costs of swapping out such components for better ones likely wouldn't exceed $200.
Maybe pwg is right and the discounted price with Windows is due to the paid pre-installed software. But that still leaves the customer with complete freedom to install something else on it.
Depends how much you value your time, and how many laptops you’re buying.
Some people want their laptop to work out of the box, and will happily pay $200 to ensure they get a HW/SW combo that’s been validated to work together by the manufacturer.
If you’re a company buying 10+ laptops, paying an extra $200 per laptop is probably cheaper than the faff of separately finding and acquiring wifi cards, then finding the time to swap them all.