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Ask HN: Best laptop in 2023 with a $500 budget?

3 points by qup ↗ HN
General purpose, non-gaming use for a student / young person.

I get asked this a lot and I'm honestly a bit out of touch with that budget level; as a developer I spend up on my machines. Has anyone done the research already?

Thanks!

8 comments

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dougmwne
Find any M series MacBook even if you have to raise your budget a little.

The price to performance ratio, the durability of the hardware, the portability, the ease of use, they are all unmatched. It’s the best deal in laptops.

If you get your average $500 windows laptop, you will be buying another one before the MacBook shows any sign of age.

legitster
YMMV - The hardware/price is indeed quite good. But I don't actually think the form factor is a selling point anymore. My Macbook Pro is big and heavy and requires a bag full of dongles whenever I travel.

I also think they are quite delicate - the aluminum and glass construction makes them very susceptible to spills and drops. And repairability is garbage.

After a couple of "incidents" having to deal with repairs from commonplace accidents I instead travel with a Thinkpad and leave my Macbook Pro permanently parked on my desk.

legitster
I love to buy up old corporate laptops. Your money goes really far. In most urban areas, you should be able to find "a guy" on Facebook or Craigslist who specializes in refurbing and dumping corporate machines that come off of the lease.

My personal favorites are the Thinkpad T series which are super practical and still built like tanks. But any old corporate Ultrabook should do you pretty well.

dieselgate
I am a Mac user but believe the best “budget” laptops are commonly said to be running Linux on a Lenovo/thinkpad machine.

Hopefully folks can chime in on specifics of models etc. but for this price point my first assumption is used hardware may be relevant.

I’ll post relevant links if I can find then

shams93
Right now with an oversupply of PCs and a shortage of macs I'd say you have a lot of options whether its windows 11 or chromeos.
amrb
Ex-lease Thinkpad t480
coder4life
A Dell Precision 7510, with a 6th gen i7 / 32gb of DDR4 ram, 500GB m.2 SATA SSD, and dedicated graphics now runs $380.

I paid $700 for mine, used, about 18 months ago. Upgraded the ram to 64gb ($90), added another 1TB SSD, and got a dock ($30?)