Think pads get ordered by companies in bulk. After a few years, they get swapped out for a newer model. The old ones often get resold to a refurbishing company, and they test them and sell them refurbished for way less money. This happens a lot, so because they are refurbished and there’s so many of them, prices are extremely low. I got like 6 of them for 200€ each. It’s insane. So that explains the extremely cheap ones.
I could hypothesize that the price jump is because there’s a gap between new and refurbished models, but tbh I don’t really know and I also don’t see that much of a jump. But that’s kind of my theory. Hope that helps.
I bought a used T480 on refurbed.de for 430€ a while back and installed Debian Forky. I only realised it had a touchscreen when I touched the screen. I am very happy with it. I firmly believe the Wikipedia and FSF stickers make it run faster.
I cant stop buying them either. Have a cluster of self hosted machines and that’s 11th Gen cpu and 32gb ram - some serious compute. You put it on nixos with auto backups and you can easily extend your swarm and replace any duds. Put claude code at the helm to orchestrate it and it’s really fun. You can vibe code something and it’ll deploy itself and keep going. Crazy times.
Think pads get ordered by companies in bulk. After a few years, they get swapped out for a newer model. The old ones often get resold to a refurbishing company, and they test them and sell them refurbished for way less money. This happens a lot, so because they are refurbished and there’s so many of them, prices are extremely low. I got like 6 of them for 200€ each. It’s insane. So that explains the extremely cheap ones.
I could hypothesize that the price jump is because there’s a gap between new and refurbished models, but tbh I don’t really know and I also don’t see that much of a jump. But that’s kind of my theory. Hope that helps.
Or they get auctioned off in bulk and some local guy resells them on facebook marketplace piecemeal making a quick buck.
I bought a used T480 on refurbed.de for 430€ a while back and installed Debian Forky. I only realised it had a touchscreen when I touched the screen. I am very happy with it. I firmly believe the Wikipedia and FSF stickers make it run faster.
I cant stop buying them either. Have a cluster of self hosted machines and that’s 11th Gen cpu and 32gb ram - some serious compute. You put it on nixos with auto backups and you can easily extend your swarm and replace any duds. Put claude code at the helm to orchestrate it and it’s really fun. You can vibe code something and it’ll deploy itself and keep going. Crazy times.
If I max out the ram and ssd space as much as is possible would that be as powerful or more than a Macbook pro of similar or lesser stats?
Is the think pad arm?
Im not sure yet, will be choosing a few canfidates on Saturday, I’ll see them when my chores are thru—I dont know how long ill be-eee