I'm a passionate proponent of Right to Repair legislation. When you own a thing, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want with it–including fix or upgrade it yourself. But lately, I've been wondering: is there a point at which it's time to give up on the dead carcass of a piece of tech you love, in favor of picking up a new, used one off of eBay or Facebook Marketplace?
Hear me out.
I bought a used 7th Generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon late last year. Writing for a living doesn't require having the fastest or most recent hardware out there. You need a good keyboard. ThinkPads have got that going for them. I grabbed my X1 Carbon for a song, for a few reasons. First: it's a five-year-old computer. It's in great shape cosmetically. Good hinges, all of the ports work just fine. RAM is soldered to the board on this model. But I found one with 16GB of memory, so it's all good. And the keyboard still had lots of play in it. However, the keyboard that came with it was a French Canadian layout. No problem, sez I. I'll keep my eyes open for a new palmrest/keyboard with an American layout. A few weeks ago, I found what I was looking for. New, from a grey market OEM dealer on online. The part arrived at my front door suspiciously quickly. It took me a couple of hours to get it all sorted out, but my X1 Carbon now has a brand new keyboard (with an American English layout) that is an absolute pleasure to type on. The laptop cost me $200, Canadian. The palmrest: $170.
Having installed Ubuntu (Hackintoshes make me sad since Apple started making their own silicon), I started using the ThinkPad on a regular basis. Its battery? Not great. To Amazon! That's another 70 Canadian buckaroos. And, as I was under the hood, I figured I may as well upgrade my storage. I take lots of photos while I travel, and I like to carry all of my music and some movies with me to kill time while in transit. A 2TB M2 SSD set me back just shy of $250 (Canadian). Grab a second power adapter from an OEM. Another $24. By the time I was done sorting out my steal of a deal of a laptop, it was like the ship of Theseus. There's damn near more new parts than there are old. Is it still a used laptop if over 50% of it came out of bubble wrap and anti-static bags?
All together, my X1 Carbon has cost me $714. Did I potentially save a laptop from the landfill by buying used? Yep. Did I save any money on this laptop over buying something new, or at least something more whole than this computer? I honestly don't know. Even at five years old, it's a powerful machine. ThinkPads tend to hold their value. Lenovo sells its new ThinkPads for a stupid amount of money. They're currently on the 12th generation of the hardware. It's easy, if you buy directly from the company, to spend three or four thousand bucks on one. When sales come up, you can get one for maybe $2000. Compared to this year, I got a scorching deal. But, if I head back over to eBay, the computer with the same guts as those that I just finished refurbishing costs $380. It looks to be in good shape, comes with a Windows 11 Pro License and a free copy of Office 2021 (yucky). I hate Windows. But I also hate feeling like I've ripped myself off. I'm not certain if sunk cost fallacy plays a part in the laptop that I'm now using to write up this post. But I do know that I spent a lot more putting it together than I could have bought it for online.
The notion that you rebuilt a thing yourself, that you returned a piece of hardware from the dead? The feeling that comes with that is worth something. I'm just not sure that feeling is worth an additional $400 over the cost of just having what you want, new or used, sent to your front door.
Previously:
• Site lists cheap used mini PCs on eBay
• How to build a $240 gaming PC
