I just consolidated all of my 2023 award stuff onto a $500 Amazon gift card and I want to buy a laptop.
Reliability is my top priority and I've had excellent luck with Dells over the years but they've all been company provided and I've heard that their consumer grade offerings aren't as good (I have no idea if that's true).
I'll be attaching it to a big monitor when stationary so screen size isn't very important.
I really just want to be reasonably future proofed on storage capacity and processing speed and not be hassled with a learning curve (I'll be 60 in June - get off my lawn) 
Are there any stand out deals on Amazon right now?
Thank you very much in advance for any guidance.
Business grade laptops are waaay better than the consumer grade stuff. It's always been worth it to me to pay the extra for the pro quality. Better longevity and user experience.
Lenovos are good for hardware quality and reliability. For ordinary office work storage capacity should never be an issue these days, do you work with very large files? Today's processing power is generally also excessive, when a computer "feels slow" it's usually storage speed rather than processing power at fault. I'd say being futureproof on RAM is most important as future software will devour more of it the soonest, 16GB is plenty right now and 32GB will be extra futureproof.
A laptop is a sorry excuse for a desktop computer. I wouldn't expect anything under $1500 to be worth a darn, but your pain tolerance may be higher than mine.
The advantages of a desktop are they're much easier and generally cheaper to repair/upgrade, and here's the big one, can hold a cooling system that will allow the PC to run hard for more than a couple minutes at a time (important for gaming and other CPU/GPU-heavy workloads but not for everyday office/web stuff).
I once saw a custom-built gaming laptop that could perform on par with a gaming desktop, due to the cooling system required it was over 3" thick...
GameboyRMH said:
do you work with very large files?
Nope, it'll just be a "prepare for and transition into retirement" computer.
I have a one tarabyte external hard drive and my whole life only needs 20% of its capacity.
Yeah 500GB (~0.5TB) storage should be enough then, and I think that's the smallest you'll find in anything available now. Also make sure it has an NVMe SSD just in case you run across something with a SATA SSD, the SATA interface is a major bottleneck for storage speed now.
In reply to RX Reven' :
Some GRM laptop chatter from just before this Christmas past that might still be helpful
Hive,
I really appreciate your guidance...as always, thank you so much.
I'm terrible about redeeming gift card type things so just getting electrons converted into anything physical that I actually need is a rare win.
John,
I'm sorry I wasn't aware of the previous laptop chatter...I thought I was pretty on top of our discussions but obviously not.
RX Reven' said:
John,
I'm sorry I wasn't aware of the previous laptop chatter...I thought I was pretty on top of our discussions but obviously not.
No apology needed. I just remembered that I had written on similar recently and rather than rewrite I just directed you there.
I'm still recommending the refurbished Lenovo ThinkPads. Great machines. Tiny price.
1988RedT2 said:
A laptop is a sorry excuse for a desktop computer. I wouldn't expect anything under $1500 to be worth a darn, but your pain tolerance may be higher than mine.
Even my work laptop didn't cost that much last year. Although I suspect we get a hefty discount with the amount that our company buys from Dell.
I like a big screen on my laptop, and I haven't sat at my desktop in 5-6 years now.....that said, wife just bought me a new 17" HP with backlit keys, SS hard drive, 512gig of on board storage and so on. It's extremely fast and I mostly use it for online stuff - I don't game with it - for that matter I don't game - except for the occasional game of Freecell! 
cost was $508 delivered.
I'm an IT manager at my day gig, and I'm responsible for purchasing the company's equipment. Over the years, I've found that Dell and Lenovo business class stuff is the best, and I've tried them all. Very litte bloatware, much more rugged than the regular stuff, better design, better cooling... I could go on and on.
With the Dells, you'll want to look at the Vostro, Latitude, Precision, and XPS, in that order. Vostro is the cheapest, while the XPS units are sleek and fast. Our bread and butter machines are the Vostros; they do the job well for 95% of people. Only issues we've had are the fact that they ship with McAfee garbageware that needs to be uninstalled, and that they sometimes have audio/camera issues that are almost always fixed by driver updates.
That said, I prefer Lenovo Thinkpad products over the Dells. They are more rugged and can take more of a beating. I am especially a fan of the P and X1 Carbon series of laptops; they are powerful and reliable. The X1's are super lightweight and have great battery life. I did have a run of bad E and T-Series machines over the years. The T-Series units had a propensity to make squealing noises after about 6-12 months of use, which was supposedly from bad motherboard chipsets. This seems to have been addressed now; those were all 8th Gen Intel processors, so it was a while back.
If you can score a refurbished machine, that's the most cost-effective way to get into a business-class unit.
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
That's not remotely close to true anymore.
In reply to grover :
Yep. My current machine is a Latitude 7420, I think it was $1150 through our corporate site.
grover said:
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
That's not remotely close to true anymore.
Well, to each his own. I suppose many of the most glaring faults can be remedied by adding a real keyboard and mouse. For me, it's the human interface aspect of a laptop that simply does not work. The hardware is by necessity more compact, and therefore more prone to failure and harder to service than a desktop of similar capabilities. I understand that some people need their computer to be portable, but if you remove that requirement, a desktop is always going to be a better machine, dollar for dollar.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I learned to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter, so cramped up flat little keyboards just don't work for me. Now, please. Get off my lawn.
Tony Sestito said:
...
That said, I prefer Lenovo Thinkpad products over the Dells. They are more rugged and can take more of a beating. I am especially a fan of the P and X1 Carbon series of laptops; they are powerful and reliable. The X1's are super lightweight and have great battery life. I did have a run of bad E and T-Series machines over the years. The T-Series units had a propensity to make squealing noises after about 6-12 months of use, which was supposedly from bad motherboard chipsets. This seems to have been addressed now; those were all 8th Gen Intel processors, so it was a while back.
If you can score a refurbished machine, that's the most cost-effective way to get into a business-class unit.
My laptop is a Thinkpad T480. It came with the I7-8550U processor, 24 GB of installed RAM, a 500 GB drive, and Windows 10 Pro. It's very fast for what I do, slim, has outstanding battery life, and has been flawless since I bought it.
Refurbished from Amazon cost $379.
1988RedT2 said:
grover said:
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
That's not remotely close to true anymore.
Well, to each his own. I suppose many of the most glaring faults can be remedied by adding a real keyboard and mouse. For me, it's the human interface aspect of a laptop that simply does not work. The hardware is by necessity more compact, and therefore more prone to failure and harder to service than a desktop of similar capabilities. I understand that some people need their computer to be portable, but if you remove that requirement, a desktop is always going to be a better machine, dollar for dollar.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I learned to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter, so cramped up flat little keyboards just don't work for me. Now, please. Get off my lawn.
The unit will spend 95% of its time docked with a full sized keyboard, detached mouse, and big monitor.
I have room for a desktop so I won't rule that out but the 5 corporate provided Dells I've had over the last 19 years have been flawless...the one I'm using to post right now flew around the planet 5.5 times in 2019 alone serving as a footrest on flights; solid piece if kit.
I'll give up some capability in exchange for the 5% of the time I want to travel with it so long as it's reliable.
1988RedT2 said:
grover said:
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
That's not remotely close to true anymore.
Well, to each his own. I suppose many of the most glaring faults can be remedied by adding a real keyboard and mouse. For me, it's the human interface aspect of a laptop that simply does not work. The hardware is by necessity more compact, and therefore more prone to failure and harder to service than a desktop of similar capabilities. I understand that some people need their computer to be portable, but if you remove that requirement, a desktop is always going to be a better machine, dollar for dollar.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I learned to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter, so cramped up flat little keyboards just don't work for me. Now, please. Get off my lawn.
I don't think that's the question, it was more a response to the "I wouldn't expect anything under $1500 to be worth a darn."
I got one of these about a year ago to use as a away from the office check email and document editor. It also can do YouTube well. Where it fails is if I need to do any work that requires a GPU with any power. But as a basic get stuff done appliance that is extremely portable it has been great. it is thinner than most tablets when closed.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B09D5SDCBX?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
In reply to Toyman! :
I somehow forgot that I actually have one of those, sorta!
It's a T490, 8th Gen i7, 16GB RAM. I use it as my "tuning laptop". Great little unit. The T-Series I had trouble with were either 15" T580's or 590's.
Tony Sestito said:
In reply to Toyman! :
The center of my index finger hurts just looking at that.
You people can argue all you like. For me, using a sub-$1500 laptop is like primitive camping, right down to the part where you're pooping in a hole in the ground. How's that for an analogy?
Beer Baron said:
Business grade laptops are waaay better than the consumer grade stuff. It's always been worth it to me to pay the extra for the pro quality. Better longevity and user experience.
I love HP Probooks for this reason. They are tough and have nice features like USB ports everywhere, every kind of connectivity you could imagine, and rapid access buttons above the keyboard for things like network and volume control.
Since I am not concerned about running the latest and greatest, I can usually pick up a refurb at Micro Center for like $200. The last two I bought (2022 and, uh, 2018) were $150 open box units. The 2018 replaced my desktop and is still in use at home. The 2022 is my work computer and in theory my new tuning laptop. It's way overbuilt for running the same eight or nine Firefox tabs 
