Why is that new laptop on such a big discount? | John’s Tips 2024W5

Does that laptop offer look too good to be true? Here is what you should know when buying a laptop and how you can decipher the “Real” reason a laptop might be on sale

I’m the “Techy” for my family and friend groups, which usually leads to me being asked advice on what laptop they should buy. For anyone looking for a day to day laptop in the last 5 to 10 years, the checklist I usually would send to them has been the following:

- At least 8GB RAM*
- 250GB+ of Solid State Hard drive (SSD) 
- At least 8 or 9 hours battery life

Up until 2 or 3 years ago, this worked well, and my relatives and friends were happy with their well functioning laptops. In the past few years though, the RAM & battery increases has levelled out a bit on personal laptops and as a result of this, another variable has been added to my advice.

This is a question I got last week — “This one hits all your criteria, why is it reduced from €600 to €400?”

In most cases (including this one), It is due to the actual age of the laptop components. Yes, the laptop is new, but it is either built and sitting unopened in a warehouse for a number years, or it is newly built but the parts were released a number of years ago, and more modern versions exist.

If you want to check this out yourself, an easy way to do so is to just drop the processor’s code into google. You can see what code I’m talking about on the screenshot below. The first result for searching 7520U gives back this link: https://lnkd.in/g9cebDGT

On there, you can see that the processor was released in September 2022 — which means the parts were likely designed almost 2 years ago. A lot can happen in chip manufacturing in 2 years, but you’ll be able to use this information to choose if the laptop is not too old for you, and cheap enough for you to want to take the risk.

*I’m leaning towards recommending 16GB to most now if they can afford it, and they want the laptop to last a few years.

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