[nickjj]

> For many people outside of HN demographic $500 is a lot of money for "a computer"

It would be but it's also kind of overkill based on the specs you can get nowadays for general computer usage.

I recently picked up a $399 15.6" Lenovo laptop new on Amazon for a family member. It has all of the important stats for a regular user. A 1080p display, fairly light, 11th gen Intel CPU (i3), 8gb of memory and most importantly an SSD. It's lightning fast for browsing the web, working with Excel and playing browser games.

If you did care more about development they have a 20gb of memory version with a 512 GB SSD for $540 and a 36gb of memory version with a 1 TB SSD for $630.

[cywick]

With these cheap computers, the manufacturers typically cut corners on things that are not listed on the spec sheet, though, especially the quality of the trackpad.

We have a bunch of $400 Lenovos at work and their trackpads are absolutely atrocious. When someone is using one of those, they almost always use an external mouse with them, because otherwise, mouse cursor handling is just too frustrating.

[nickjj]

The webcam and sound are decent enough for casual usage. The keyboard was surprisingly good.

I can't speak for the trackpad. When setting up the laptop I found it to be ok but I only have 2 occasions of using it for 20 minutes (2 different laptops) which isn't enough time to really evaluate it since so many things can be hit or miss with trackpads. The people who use it do use an external mouse, mainly because using a trackpad is too foreign to them.

Both Lenovos are IdeaPads that were purchased a few years apart. The latest one wasn't to replace the first one, it was for someone else. The first one is still going strong. I had forgotten I even picked a Lenovo the first time around and ended up picking the same brand / model when researching "what is a really good budget'ish laptop for general computer use".