I'm an undergraduate student participating in a number of research projects and have an IT internship opportunity in the future. At the moment I'm schlepping a heavy and crappy Emachines E627. It's a huge pain to lug it around campus and on public transit. So now I'm looking at ultrabooks in the 1000 USD range and have considered taking the used/refurb route. I've looked at Pretty much every thin notebook on the market in that price range and have come up with some favorites. My main concern isn't the reliability of used/refurbs, it's the hardware performance. Naturally most used and refurb notebooks out there are old models with older generations of hardware. For instance, I could secure much more ssd capacity at the same price with an ivy bridge CPU than with a haswell, but how will that affect the longevity of the device? People treat haswell mobile CPUs as a pretty big deal for power and power draw. I don't want my ivy bridge notebook to be entirely obselete in a couple years. Is it too much of a step back to look at old generations of hardware (1-2 years, ivy/sandy bridge)? EDIT: Forgot to mention, the notebook will be getting a lot of use. I'll likely be dual booting Windows and Linux and running a couple VMs (not concurrently). A little bit of CAD as well, and probably a MOBA game or two. Less stressful tasks will include lots of ssh and some light software development and bash scripting.
I had the same dilemma 2 -3 years ago,when i started my IT school. Back then we had Sandy Bridge affordable,Ivy was new and a bit on expensive side. After all debating,i ended up with a Dell Inspiron 14z with a i5 2450 ,8 gb or RAM ,i upgraded to a 250 Samsung SSD and until now,notebook did what i asked for and never felt that it is slow or anything. Running up to 4 ,5 VMs ,some xml parsing in the background, running querries on some databases,modeling networks with Packet tracer,listen to music and browsing the web was the heaviest use for it. And notebook is around 2 kilograms. Why all the above story? Simple,i was tempted to buy more expensive hardware ,fearing that it be not enough for the tasks ahead. I ended up buying a cheaper hardware and managed to get my job done. For sure,getting my job done on a higher hardware platform is always better. But i was so suprised to see that a second hand Lenovo x200s upgraded to 8gb RAM and a SSD was able to do 70% of my IT tasks . Now,a refurbished Haswell notebook will give you plenty of computing power . Problem is that almost all notebooks are coming with crappy hard disk drives and an SSD can make a difference,and by a mile. Hardware will always become obsolete,hell my classmates were like: Dude,you are so poor ,what is that ugly ,ancient Lenovo ? Dude,be serious,can it run minesweeper? And even more amazed to see running fluid ,speedy KDE and VMs and bash scripting and all... Tl;DRr you are free to spend money to get what hardware suits you best,but Sandy,Ivy ,even first Arrandale can be used to get the job done. Look for refurbished Lenovo T,W,and X series...
If you buy a used laptop, you would want a good deal on it. It's sometimes hard to compare prices with laptops vs new laptops considering new models etc. Most people will tend to want 'a little more' for their used laptops then would probably be considered fair. A big consideration with used laptops is their use. Have they been bastardised? Have they been knocked around? Have they treated the battery properly? These are all important considerations. For best laptop battery use, when new you need to do a couple of complete charges and discharges, and ensure that at least once in a while you do a full drain on the battery, and a full charge from flat with the computer turned off. This will help battery life. Once the battery is knackered, drain it completely, put it in the coldest part of your freezer (ideally under the air outlet of a fan forced freezer) and leave it there for no less than 24 hours, but say, 36 hours is probably better for a battery of that size. Take out, make sure the air is reasonably dry to avoid condensation (run a refrigerated air conditioner if you have one, they dry out the air), put it back in the laptop when still cold, and do a full charge from flat with the lid down. Then do a complete drain, and then charge again. No joke, this works! A lot of people say bull, but they haven't tried. It works with any lithium battery, including mobile phone batteries and good shavers. This has worked with numerous laptops, mobile phones, and shavers of mine and other peoples that I have mentioned this to. Your freezer is safe for lithium batteries, and ideal, due to the temperature range (usually around -20 C). Just don't put it in an industrial freezer as these may get colder than -40 C (-40 F). The above is NOT the same as putting your batteries in the fridge/freezer to last longer. Now, for refurbished products it can be a bit of hit and miss. Unfortunately the cost of refurbished products may not represent a good enough saving over the same or properly equivalent brand new device. Remember it's probably refurbished because it has had something wrong with it in the past, and you don't know what that is. The best idea is to shop around, and look at expansion capability in terms of RAM an HDD. It may be more cost effective to get a cheaper computer and add that stuff than paying more money for other features you don't require just to get the bigger HDD and RAM from the start. At least you will be using a laptop for what it's designed for - portability. A large number of people buy laptops these days and leave them on the desk 24/7 plugged in to the power. They then may plug a proper keyboard and mouse into it for easier use. The one time they do decide to take it with them, because they knackered the battery through the way they used it, they get bugger all battery life!
I have been looking at ultrabooks with good upgradeability. One of my #1 contenders right now is a Latitude E7440. 14", very thin and light, has 2.5" drive bay as well as mSATA (probably the only ultrabook out there with both), 2 DIMMs with support up to I think 16GB (will probably never need anywhere near that much). And ofc removable battery and upgradeable wifi receiver. My only gripe with it is that since late 2013/early 2014 has been its first mdoel year, it's the priciest of the bunch even used/refurb. Similarly I've looked at the Lenovo T440s and it's high on my list but has only one DIMM (with 4gb soldered on to the mb), but finding an available one with 1920x1080 is more of a challenge. That's one spec that I really don't want to budge on because it's something I can't upgrade myself. I like to use tiling WMs when I work in Linux and 1366x768 was causing me annoyances and 1600x900 likely wouldn't be much better. And also the Ideapad Yoga 13 which has 1 DIMM and 2 mSATA slots but in a less common form factor. So other ultrabooks have been out for a while and are easier to find used/refurbished, but have less upgradeability. Dell XPS 13 has mSATA and swappable wifi and internal removable battery, the rest is locked down. Macbook Pro Retina, similar except they use a rarer PCIe SSD connector. Thinkpad X1 Carbon has used a variety of ssd connectors, mainly mSATA and some proprietary PCIe. The thing is you can get some pretty good deals on say, an early 2013 XPS 13 with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. I don't see 8GB of RAM being a bottleneck anytime soon, even with VMs, but I'd be stuck with Ivy Bridge or even Sandy Bridge. You could even find some pretty good deals on MBP Retinas because there's just so many people buying them and then selling them used, but then pretty much all the hardware is locked down. So in the end it all comes down to recent model refurbs vs older used or refurbs, and how those older models' hardware stack up against other models with upgradeable hardware. As in, do I ever really see myself upgrading past 8GB of RAM before the entire notebook is obsolete? And how do the differences in CPU power consumption affect the buying process?
Yes, unfortunately for you people now use tablets in the place of ultrabooks. Besides battery hours before recharge, how important is an ultrabook over a laptop for you? You might have to go the laptop route.
I'd really like under 4.5 lb (~2kg). If it's in the 3s, even better. I already carry books and a gym bag to school and walk the 4 square mile campus. And the internship will be something like 2.5 hours away and getting there and back will involve 2 buses and a train. The lighter the better while still being big enough to be productive. Which is why I've settled on the 13"-14" ultrabook range.
Ah ok, that makes your choice much more difficult and limited! But understandable . The main issue of concern is value for money, it's a hard metric to consider.
I've been pouring over Ivy Bridge vs Haswell mobile CPU benchmarks for the last few hours and their performance doesn't seem to dissimilar, the main difference appears to be in battery life and heat generation. So that helps close up the gap, at least a little. The difference between Intel's integrated graphics from Ivy to Haswell also seems negligible. As to battery life, I see that Ivy doesn't have the greatest battery life in the world, but hopefully I wouldn't be doing the more intensive tasks (virtualization, gaming, CAD) away from a power outlet. So I now feel there's no real major draw back to an Ivy Bridge ultrabook. That said, I can start looking at older models more intently. The Latitude E7440 is still pretty high on the list though just for that 2.5" drive bay. The only negative I've heard about it is that it's got some keyboard flex. Having a built in ethernet port puts it (and the T440s) in a special category. Much better than a USB 3 adapter. As to the non-business ultrabooks, it turns out Dell officially supports Linux on the XPS 13. That's a plus in its favor. Even Lenovo doesn't do that. Most sellers will also shave $50 or so off the price of the Ubuntu Edition because of the lack of a Windows license. EDIT: The more I look at the XPS 13 the more I like it. It's an impressively good deal. Can get a manufacturer refurb with i7 4650u and 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD for a little over $1200. And the SSD uses standard mSATA form factor, and is a Samsung EVO. It's also a damn small notebook. Wish it had a ethernet but an adapter is livable.
