That ThinkyPad that is selling for over 7000$ and it doesn't even have a GPU makes it really hard for anyone to see that price as justified. Do some of these sellers just have a goal to sell one or two of these for the entirety of the products life cycle and that would be a win in their book? Or is this just then trying to pad the market pri ces to make the less expensive products look more appeealing?
Most expensive laptops
91–100 of 111 posts
Re: Most expensive laptops
#92Expensive is relative. I'm the CTO of a small startup and we're leasing our laptops from Apple. We don't have huge budgets. I got my 16" M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB model a few months ago. Costs us 105 euro/month. That includes 3 years of extended warranty. After the lease is over (3 years), we have the option to buy the laptops at a discount typically. The new value of this thing is around 4500 euro, I think. We could have go…
> 105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't…
3000 * 5K = 15M per month in salaries. We can argue if 90K is worth it or not. Depends how good the people are. But it's not a lot of money relatively speaking. And 5K is not a lot of salary. We're probably talking 2-3x the amount.
And you are also spending on buildings and infrastructure, software licenses for things like Office, Slack, etc.
Not saying every company should blindly buy big laptops for any software developer. But I am saying that penny pinching on their laptops might not be the smartest thing. Save 90K vs. destroy flow state for 3000 people on a daily basis. One of those things could really cost you; it's probably not the 90K. Big companies can be short sighted like that. Big companies incentivize mindless penny pinching like that. Nobody even questions it when it happens.
If I work for myself, I do question these things. IMHO if you are a freelancer or a consultant, having proper equipment to do the job is not optional.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#93Re: Most expensive laptops
#94Last year I purchased a Lenovo P15 Gen 1 used, originally it came with a sticker price of $5700 but I managed to get it used for ~$500. All these hyper expensive laptops fall into one of two buckets, either they are top end gaming rigs or they are like my Lenovo and designed for large engineering companies that will just lease them and not give a crap how much they cost. For the average consumer though I highly recom…
Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine - had that with a Lenovo too. Ended up buying a brand new Asus that was so heavily discounted it cost the same as the 2nd hand Lenovo I returned.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#95I didn't realize Amazon was offering payment plans for laptops. I'd only ever seen that for cars and houses. Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?
Where do you live? Here in the UK, a company called Klarna has managed to wriggle their way into almost every single online storefront and offers plans for sub-£5 purchases.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) This is why data driven purchasing is key. Running some tests and having some data to show how much time will be saved by a laptop upgrade makes the decision process much easier. The companies that only decide based on prices and budgets set by someone making blanket decisions for the company a…
> This is why data driven purchasing is key. Many years ago I failed to convince my employer how buying their programmers less expensive computers with 5400rpm hard drives was an overall loss compared to 7200rpm disk drives. My argument was that any programming necessarily entailed reading and writing dozens to hundreds files all the time, especially during compile cycles. Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual tim…
> Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual time lost waiting?
This is exactly what works.
Adding analytics that reports duration of test runs to a central server makes it easy. Some developers panic at the thought of this because it feels like spying, but the data is immensely helpful.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you pay MSRP for a thinkpad you're doing it very, very wrong
Where do you get them instead? eBay?
Lenovo sells refurbished Thinkpads on eBay, yeah. I bought one at the start of the year for about 30% of MSRP and I couldn't tell it wasn't brand new
If you're intent on getting a new one they still offer regular deals on their store
Re: Most expensive laptops
#98Last year I purchased a Lenovo P15 Gen 1 used, originally it came with a sticker price of $5700 but I managed to get it used for ~$500. All these hyper expensive laptops fall into one of two buckets, either they are top end gaming rigs or they are like my Lenovo and designed for large engineering companies that will just lease them and not give a crap how much they cost. For the average consumer though I highly recom…
Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine - had that with a Lenovo too. Ended up buying a brand new Asus that was so heavily discounted it cost the same as the 2nd hand Lenovo I returned.
why not just re-install the OS?
or did you mean spyware at hardware/firmware/BIOS level?
Re: Most expensive laptops
#99Last year I purchased a Lenovo P15 Gen 1 used, originally it came with a sticker price of $5700 but I managed to get it used for ~$500. All these hyper expensive laptops fall into one of two buckets, either they are top end gaming rigs or they are like my Lenovo and designed for large engineering companies that will just lease them and not give a crap how much they cost. For the average consumer though I highly recom…
Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine - had that with a Lenovo too. Ended up buying a brand new Asus that was so heavily discounted it cost the same as the 2nd hand Lenovo I returned.
> Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine
At least in my case it came without a hard drive so there was no vector for attack there. Sure they might have installed spyware at the BIOS level though the practical chance of that happening from a seller that does any sort of volume is more unlikely than winning the lottery IMHO.
Sellers (especially volume sellers) just want to ship you your stuff and make a buck off the margin.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can the average person lease a laptop or just businesses?
I don't think they officially support leasing to individuals directly, but it's very easy to setup a leasing/biz account with them as a business. I think any Apple store has a POC there that can help / see: https://www.apple.com/shop/finance/business-financing You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the…
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