Every laptop I’ve ever owned has been at the 500USD or less price point, and every laptop I’ve ever owned has had some kind of catastrophic structural failure in the chassis that causes the entire thing to gradually disintegrate after about two years, like clockwork.
Like, that must absolutely be something they do as an explicit design goal that forces you to buy a new disposable laptop just after the standard warranty expires, right? It’s not just me being bad at computer or something?
I just got a refurbished T14s thinkpad and it’s the most pleasant laptop experience I’ve ever had. Worked with every Linux distro I’ve tried out of the box. Good build quality, great matte IPS screen, charges by USB-C. It even has a little built-in sliding webcam cover. Not great for gaming but fantastic for travel.
Yeah for gaming you’d need a thinkpad with a descrete GPU and there are a variety but sadly they’re value goes down on the secondhand market much slower. For instance I recently splurged on a previous gen refurbished P16 that came with an nvidia gpu and it does acceptable gaming but nothing crazy like what you’d see from a desktop setup