Current times are indeed very strange, what with the RAMpocalypse where AI companies are hoovering up all RAM manufacturers capacity, leaving very little for the consumer or SMB, and now expanding into HDD availability too. Only 12 short months ago, I bought 2 reconditioned 10TB spinning rust drives for around £80 each for use in my home NAS. Now those same units are double that price, if you can find them.
I was recently in the market for a new/second hand smallish laptop for use when I go on holiday. My main setup is also a laptop but it comes with a beefier Intel CPU and a Nvidia 3070 GPU and so battery life has never been stellar. This main laptop serves as a kind of docking station as it gets plugged into a mechanical keyboard, mouse and 32″ monitor and so it’s portability is not hugely important, but it does allow me at the end of a business day to unplug three cables and store it safely away.
The new/second hand laptop needs to do all the work related things that I do on the main laptop but I wanted it to have a smaller footprint, have better battery longevity, ideally convert to a tablet and of course it needs to run Linux of some flavour, hopefully many flavours. My ageing Samsung NC10 netbook although very cute, was really not going to cut it. I managed to get a i386 version of Linux installed but productivity was going to really suffer and have you seen what screen bezels look like from 2008!
Buying new was also going to be too expensive and really not something I wanted to entertain as my budget was sub £300. You can buy new laptops (including Chromebooks) for under £300 but they won’t feel premium and will likely feel out of date in a couple of years at best.
Enter the Lenovo X13 Yoga Gen 2! A 2021 13″ foldable laptop with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD rocking a Intel Core i5-1135G7 CPU. It has a 360 degree hinge allowing you to use it as a tablet as it also comes with a pressure sensitive stylus that is neatly stowed in the case. The keyboard buttons have nice travel, the trackpad and its real buttons are a joy to use and the entire structure feels quite robust with very little flex.
Battery live is ok, considering its a few years old now with the battery being around 80% efficient. That equates to around 6-7 hours of screen time without a charger with a typical web browsing, email, coding workload.
The webcam works and has a physical privacy slider and there’s a SIM slot and presumably a modem of some kind too, but I’ve not tried that yet, perhaps next week?
It also runs Linux very well and all its hardware seems to be recognised and working when running Ubuntu 24.04LTS. Even screen rotation works when converting it.
If I have any gripes, I’d say that the supplied stylus is more of a small stick than a nice feeling pen as it’s a little short and also quite thin, reminiscent of a Nintendo DS stylus but at least it is pressure sensitive allowing some form of artistic expression. It also came with some software pre-installed called Windows 11 which I’ve been told is some kind of advert delivery platform?
It also has a fingerprint reader that actually works under Linux too so all in all I’m stoked with my purchase which was well under my £300 budget at £230. All in all a great second hand purchase from Ebay and hopefully one that will last me a good number of years.