Whats something that is only worth getting the expensive version of?
I grew up with $20 walmart blenders, and hated anything that required a blender.
Recently bought a ninja and there is no going back. I'll never use a crappy blender again.
Anything else like that?
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Laptops. Cheap and midrange ones defined how people perceive laptops in general: slow, hot and awful to use. Expensive ones are usually amazing, but you still have to do your research before purchasing it.
Also, cigars. Nothing comes close to proper Cuban ones.
I've found a refurbished Thinkpad one generation out of date to be a great midrange option.
It does take careful research though since there are thousands of possible configurations and often subtle options that make a huge difference. One such option that made my recent purchase of a P14S III challenging was that there are two non-touch 1920x1200 displays, one of which has a crappy color gammut and less brightness.
Just as long as you're not searching for a "gaming laptop". IMO those do not exist to any degree of satisfaction. They are all a "choose two" among performance, size/weight, battery life, and noise.
Unless you are so mobile that you are never ever at home, and the prosect of only scraping mid graphical settings at best while being permanently anchored to a wall outlet any time you play is worth it to you, I'd suggest taking that money and instead putting it toward a combo of a desktop rig and a cheap netbook. You won't be gaming on the go, but you'll have a better experience for the price. And if there's a more mundane task that the little netbook can't handle, you can, provided you have an Internet connection, always remote in to the desktop workstation at home and delegate expensive tasks to it.
If all you need though is something that runs well with a dozen browser tabs open, doesn't struggle playing back high definition video, and can handle playing a less demanding game every now and again, you can definitely find laptops that can do that while still being relatively slim, quiet, and cool. Just temper your expectations on how far you can push it.
I'm a repair tech and can't agree more. Gaming laptops suck, so so bad. They are only good for performance but besides that are awful for everything else. Shit speakers, shit screen, shit battery, shit keyboard, shit trackpad, and awful build quality. These things drop like flies and break down often. On top of that they are expensive to repair because parts are expensive and it's almost guaranteed that they will be a nightmare to work in, so high labour $.
If you want a laptop to game on, get a used HP 8770w workstation laptop, upgrade the CPU, upgrade the ram (4 slots!), and upgrade the GPU with a GTX 980m, put in an SSD and HDD (2x 2.5" bays). You will need to do a lot of modifying and If you aren't comfortable you can probably pay someone to do it.
Other than that, absolutely the best solution for a laptop with high performance, excellent build quality (these things are TANKS) and price (around 600-700$ with laptop and parts). Plus it has a secondary battery attachment and a docking station with extra ports and I/O. Utterly insane value.
I'm extremely skeptical of your advice, as HP in my mind has always been the posterchild of abysmally bad hardware. Garbage printers, garbage laptops, garbage workstations, even garbage rack servers. You're honestly the first one I've seen with a credibe-looking opinion that has anything positive to say about something they've made.
No company has bad "everything", and while HP has a lot of shit doesn't mean that everything they make is terrible. The 8770w is one of those laptops, very well built and extremely upgradable.
HPs consumer laptops are genuinely god awful. They have the rigidity of wet newspaper and break all the time. The guts are just a plastic sheet with the keyboard and trackpad and the rest of the guts screwed onto it. Because there are no reinforcements to this thin plastic, the hinges break constantly, even while brand new they will flex and creak during use.
The same goes for their gaming laptops too, the OMEN brand. HP desktop workstations tend to be pretty solid and I don't have anything to say about their consumer desktops. Printers definitely suck and the ink is criminally expensive.
I personally wouldn't buy anything new from them, just cherry pick what good products they have made, like that 10 year old 8770w.
You can carefully buy a midrange laptop. Lenovo Legion has some pretty decent gear for a good price, 'specially if you're getting a model that's on it's way out. Plus, at that point you have tons of reviews.
Buy used refurbished laptops, it's insane how cheap they are. You can buy a laptop with quadruple the ram (32gb) and quadruple the storage (512gb SSD) for a quarter the price (250$) than the cheapest new MacBook (1000$). I like PC Server and Parts, good customer service, good warranty and quality refurbishment. Buy from their website instead of eBay store, you'll get cheaper prices.
Prices on used hardware are comically cheap, so use it.