Latitude 7490

T14 is newer and I'd go that direction if you can afford it. The T480 is on the inner edge of 9 years old and T490 is barely any better at the inner edge of 8 years old. (Although as mentioned they're arguably probably fine for office usage and light video work. my primary personal computer is a Lat

My current main personal computer is a Dell Latitude 7490. It's been the best computer I've ever had. At ~6-7ish years old it still gets ~3-4ish hours of battery life, it can run off a DC barrel jack or USB-C power, and it meets the requirements for Windows 11. There's hundreds of them on eBay with

What kind of specs and/or overall vibes/priorities are you looking at? Not all ThinkPads are fully internally flexible. Some T14S machines and many X-series machines have soldered RAM, which isn't necessarily bad if you're aware and plan up front. I usually recommend Intel 8th gen for the quad-cores

8665U will probably do those things vine. The heaviest of webtech apps (Canva, most conferencing/communication apps these days) could struggle a little bit compared to something newer but stuff should basically run fine. The machine is basically 8 years old and the battery might nto be great. This i

Basic desktop usage is gonna be "fine" on anything with four cores, 16gb of ram or better, SSD or better, intel 8th gen and AMD ryzen 2nd or newer and with supported graphics. That line applies to both windows 11 (close to those are the official requirements) and linux. All "T14" models are newer th

There was a really good write-up recently on "ThinkPad as a cultural phenomenon" here: The Myth of the ThinkPad – Innovintage TL:DR business computers in general are almost always a good deal used because they're good, well-built machines that get sold off before they are actually done. In the case

Typically your first couple years in higher ed are fairly easy computationally, and further there's almost always remote resources available. The main reason a T480 isn't recommendable today isn't that it's too slow, I get by with 8th gen just fine, it's that T480 costs 2-4x what a similarly equippe

Where's home? If you're living/buying from the USA, cross-shop Dell and HP, they're usually cheaper for similar/better build quality and often newer generations of hardware incl. better batteries. (And further: Because ThinkPads are an influencer meme many models simply cost up to 2x more than equiv

My guess is you'll outgrow the CPU in either of these machines before you outgrow any other part of it. The T480 is nearly a decade old and the P52 is... also nearly a decade old, but it's datasheet was updated more recently. As has already been mentioned these are wildly different machines. The oth

The W530 will run linux. People regularly say it's good at it. It's also fifteen years old. So, the question is basically whether or not you think you'll do anything heavy and/or how much patience you have. If you're in the US you can get much newer machines for not an awful lot of money. Most peopl