Prices for laptops and desktops are way down. Best Buy is selling a core i5, 256 SSD, 8 GB ram Dell laptop for $399 as of this writing. That's plenty of power for most used.
Where prices continue to be high is for business laptops, where people will pay a lot more money for a little bit more performance (and better build quality, lighter weight).
I remember a time when a half decent laptop was $1500.
The funny thing is that this would be the least expensive laptop I've ever bought to date. My first laptop cost $5000, as did the following 3. My very powerful dell was around $3000.
Well... the cheapest notebook from Dell is actually much closer to $400. It has exactly 512MB of RAM. And it does not run Windows, it runs Ubuntu.
They better care about that.
Hell, even if it wasn't, $1,000 is mid-range in the laptop world (e.g. a bottom end Dell XPS 13 or Envy clocks in around that price point), and anything below that starts to get pretty hit-and-miss.
Pricey? Maybe in comparison to a budget laptop but as you're comparing it to a Macbook, it's not even close to the price of a similar configuration there. My local Costco has Dell XPS 13s and Lenovo X1s for ~$1400.
I usually tell family members that if they’re dead set on buying a new laptop (as opposed to used), then don’t buy anything under $1000 since it’s going to be a piece of shit.
The only exception to that rule is Dell. Don’t buy Dell at all, since it’s always going to be a piece of shit.
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