Laptop Budgets

Posted by Air-and-valves@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 55 comments

Sounds like we will be needing to cut our equipment costs down for the end of the year and into 2026... That's probably not all that uncommon right now, but I don't know how much cheaper we can go before we sacrifice quality and usability. I just wanted to see what you guys are spending on your devices so I can get an idea of what's "normal". For context, we used to be a Dell house but swapped over to Lenovo a few years back. We initially ordered some X1 Carbons but had to find a more cost-effective device to deploy to our standard workers and landed on the T14 and P14s models which have worked really well for us so far. All devices need to have Intel vPro/AMD Pro and 32GB of ram at a minimum because of our company's standard software. We're spending roughly $1200 on average for these devices that are fully loaded with touchscreens and the works. Getting quotes through our vendors/Lenovo for stripped-down versions or cheaper models (E14/L14) don't seem to be any less expensive than our current devices. Sometimes it's even more expensive to remove the fancy stuff lol. Are we doing good on price? I just cannot imagine paying that much less for what we're currently getting.

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55 Comments

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SpotlessCheetah@reddit

$1200 for a T14 is pretty reasonable w/ your specs. I would not downgrade to a E series, they are horrible, heavy and garbage laptops w/ bad quality mics and webcams. We had so many from 2 generations have continuous bad motherboard issues too. L series is OK but it's heavier than an X series. It's like the nice plastic version of an X series, where the X series uses aluminum/mag. You might see some flex in the L series when picking it up and it's open.

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i_am_art_65@reddit

With the price of memory, SATA SSD’s, and NVMe SSD’s going up - in some cases going up a LOT - you should decide and purchase ASAP. $1,200 sounds cheap.

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pdp10@reddit

Too late. Flash, DDR4, and DDR5 are all way up from what they were 12-24 months ago.

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iama_bad_person@reddit

So glad I got a 4TB 990 Pro and 64GB DDR5 last year.

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Vengeful111@reddit

2 TB MP700 and 64GB DDR5 here, and very happy

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i_am_art_65@reddit

Yes, and they are expected to go up even more - some products significantly more - in the next quarter.

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

Yeah, we've been purchasing in large batches for a while now, the previous orders have all been in that range. I'd rather keep ordering than to change and have prices go up on us.

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Consistent-Baby5904@reddit

don't try L series, they're shit. lots of low quality parts and bad chip drivers.

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

Noted! Lenovo really didn’t have much to say about that line up when I had some one on ones with them lol.

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Consistent-Baby5904@reddit

like most tire shops, they'll never talk you out of a sale. they'll upsell and recommend and try to influence based on some personality, but they'd rather make money than you walk away. so they try to fill you with as much "YES" answers as possible. do you like your computers at this budget and size? do you prefer 14 or 15 inch laptops, or larger? which warranty would work for you? they are specifically trained to make sure you say YES more, and will try to never ask you YES OR NO questions. just open ended questions to request your inner wallet to allocate to their inventory. when you start asking questions about upgrading to more advanced technology, then you get a different sales agent that is ready to get your CapEx ventures into large scale operation needs (T, P and X series products) i've been on the receiving ends of both sides, and it's dirty business, but enterprise is about money, not about being nice to customers ignorance.

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Warrangota@reddit

Agreed. I have a L13 Gen4 as a work machine, totally crappy plastic thing. It works, and it survived a fall down half a stairway, but that's about it with the positive things. Other than that it's trash quality with thin case walls and way too much flex even when screwed down tightly. My personal E480 I bought for studies was cheaper (with trash connectivity, don't buy anything without thunderbolt!) but feels much sturdier despite being the same plastic junk. Now I own a X1 2-in-1 Gen10, and even though it was wayyy more expensive than anything I've used before I would absolutely do it again. Like a solid block of metal, no creaking panels, no squeaky mouse buttons, like the difference between a nice fountain pen and a marketing goodie ballpoint pen. Both are usable but the experience is on a whole different level.

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Sasataf12@reddit

What's really killing you on price is the high spec requirements. A piece of standard software that requires vPro/AMD Pro and 32GB mem sounds extremely inefficient. What industy are you in?

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

We're in the financial industry, but we require a lot of security software for what we specifically do.

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Sasataf12@reddit

If that's the case, then there's not much you can do. $1200 for those specs is an extremely good deal. My recommendation would be to drop X1's, since the only real value I see in them is the weight.

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Hotdog453@reddit

Why do you want vPro? Are you truly using EMA + OOB management? How big are you? I assume small, like under 500 devices? If so, you have no real leverage probably, so... yeah :( Did you get a price lock for 3 years or anything with your current OEM, during the RFP process?

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

Unfortunately, we do need to keep vPro/AMD Pro as we do leverage them to a degree. We're sizeable, just do things a little differently. Would be nice to get a break on paying for those processors though lol. The company went through an RFP process long before I got there with our current vendor, but that was with Dell equipment. Their prices kept going up, but our vendor supports all the big 3 so it wasn't much of a sweat to make the switch.

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a60v@reddit

Pedantic grammar pet peeve: you don't "leverage" something. You "lever" it.

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Hotdog453@reddit

How do you leverage vPro? Are you actually using OOB, or just using EMA for in band? Your RFP most likely had price locks in it for your standard model; have you spoken to your asset management team on what the contract is? I speak from a Fortune 20 perspective, where we're paying \~700 for an EliteBook 6 level machine. All of the pricing is fairly transparent at this level, with locks and such in place. I assume the vendor in this instance is a VAR; they have very little to do with your pricing. Do you have a contract with Lenovo/HP/Dell in this case, or just 'a contract' with the VAR?

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Current_Anybody8325@reddit

To answer your question directly: we currently deploy the Lenovo E16 with a Ryzen5, 16GB ram, and 512GB storage for our "standard users."

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highlord_fox@reddit

Our needs are lower (14" screen, normal Intel CPU, 16GB RAM), and that comes out to about $1200 on average, including the cost of the dock & kb/m, so it seems about right for the higher trim models. We also use Dell instead of Lenovo, fwiw.

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thewunderbar@reddit

What is your typical lifecycle on machines right now? Can you extend that for a a year, just extending warranty? That's a great way to lower overall costs.

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

We typically have like to have them in the field for 3-5 years, but we’re already stretching that a bit on some of our older models that aren’t upgradeable and need to be replaced. Used to buy 8/16GB devices with only soldered ram.

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Smith6612@reddit

Ah, yeah. The soldered RAM alone is going to create a lot of problems. That used to frustrate me when I worked at a Mac shop. We'd have to swap entire systems (at the cost of $2,600 + bench time + logistics per instance) and eat depreciation on the "undesirable" systems if they didn't go to a contract employee, whenever someone would come to the help desk showing signs that they need more RAM.

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

Ouch. We run a handful of Mac's now, but their use case in our environment is pretty limited. always feels bad to see them start collecting dust after spending that much on them.

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Smith6612@reddit

Agreed. They usually get re-cycled if they sit for too long to a place which resells the hardware to give it another home. So they aren't going fully to waste, but the depreciation and aging of the hardware/battery is sad to see on such a machine. If the RAM were replaceable or if Apple worked with Dell to make CAMM the standard for Macs going forward, that would've saved so much expense for everyone. Not sure if they'd achieve the same memory performance but, I'd take that tradeoff over the current situation. Especially since the Apple Silicon Macs are much thicker than the Intel Macs - There's room to play with inside.

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SquizzOC@reddit

$1200 for a machine that you have described is it, there's no cutting the cost down. You have a stellar price and frankly the cost of a laptop is the least of your concerns from a budget perspective as its one of the lowest costs of entry for an employee. If you have the part number for the Lenovo, I can take a look at share what I'm seeing others buy it for at our company, just post it here and I'll get the cost for you.

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C0mput3rMan@reddit

That pricing seems amazing actually. I deal a ton with managing pricing for our Lenovo fleet and we even have a partnership with them. Gonna dm you lol

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Putrid_Proof5704@reddit

I am interested in this also. We currently utilize Lenovo for our organization.

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segagamer@reddit

We spend around £700 per laptop. We focus on CPU (Ryzen 5 or 7) and RAM (32GB). Would like to try switching to ARM at some point but ARM laptops with 32GB RAM are seemingly non-existent.

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Visible_Spare2251@reddit

What models are you getting at that price? We are Lenovo T14 and are always over a grand now.

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segagamer@reddit

We haven't bought any for a couple years now as we haven't needed them, but we last purchased Dell Inspiron 5415 and upgraded the RAM to 32GB. They're due to be replaced next year so I'm going to start looking into this again soon.

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busychild909@reddit

I’d honestly be expecting higher right now due to the cost of the tariffs any product coming out of China. Landed items seem to have “adjusted” pricing

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i_am_art_65@reddit

When shipping to the US, Lenovo manufactures motherboards in Guadalajara and does assembly in Monterrey, so Chinese tariffs don’t apply.

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

That's honestly what I was expecting. Somehow though, after a month of that or so, the units have only got cheaper. No idea how that works out lol.

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Serafnet@reddit

You can see about a model without touchscreen, unless that's actually a requirement. I saw a few hundred dollar difference with and without on HP units, imagine it would be similar with Lenovo.

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pdp10@reddit

OEMs *really* want to sell touchscreens. Intel decided years ago that touchscreens were going to be a competitive advantage over Mac, so I think they incentivize them to the OEMs.

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SevaraB@reddit

I miss my last laptop with a touchscreen. A $5 capacitive stylus, and I was able to use whiteboards in meetings naturally and do ad-hoc highlighting. Now I have to do screwy things with Bluetooth or plug in my ancient Wacom tablet.

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way__north@reddit

We've also used T14's for the last 3-4 years, and been happy with them. Around $1000, but lower specs. But last order, it was decided to go for HP elitebooks, close to $200 cheaper per unit - hope we won't regret that...

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

I've heard really decent things about their business class stuff. I Know a few people who swear by HP. Unfortunately for us, their stuff is about the same price or more for the same specs.

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ReputationNo8889@reddit

I never seen a user actually be happy with the Dell/HP business class offering

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Koala19042022@reddit

Pricing seems a bit high, though I buy in big bulk. We are getting similar for just over 1k.

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OrganizationHot731@reddit

What about leasing? Lenovo I believe has leasing options....

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stufforstuff@reddit

And saving pocket change on laptop costs is going to make or break your company? If true, they are in waaaaaaaaay more trouble then laptop costs.

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

Not going to make or break anything, just want to do my due diligence because it's being asked of me.

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gameboy00@reddit

your pricing for specs is really good. I built a T14s a couple months ago with 32gb ram, core 7 cpu and thought it was closer to $2k

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j2thebees@reddit

In just about every client case I buy motherboards 3-4 years old, 32-64GB, usually 1TB (prefer NVMe, but will take new ssd). P14s can have thermal/fan issues (a fairly important one is down now awaiting new fan). After many years, generally shopping refurbs, I’ve figured out who sends me crap and who sends me shiny well-built boxes. I’d say new ones with 32GB at $1200 isn’t a bad price. Bought a refurb last week at around 850 shipped/taxed (64GB but settled for 1TB SSD). I generally find Lenovos at around 150USD higher than the same spec HP. It’s funny, I despite HP’s print biz practices, but buy and use them in laptops. Utterly despite dealing with Dell directly when buying servers, but frequently buy Dell desktops. 😂 Again, new under-warranty boxes at 1200 isn’t bad. In our case(s), I buy them cheap enough that they’re almost disposable. It’s also a lot easier to push up the chain (in some industries) if it has a lower unit price. For longevity, I don’t have a refresh schedule at any client’s location. But I’m also not buying a fleet at once. 😂 I generally expect 4 years, very happy with 5-6.

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theoriginalharbinger@reddit

> We're spending roughly $1200 on average for these devices that are fully loaded with touchscreens and the works. Why touchscreens? What's your TCO? Hardware, accessories, warranty? What's your failure rate by year (IE, Year1 - 5%, Year2, 10%, Year3, 15%). If you run the math, you might find it easier to just run the machines an additional year without the vendor support and just eat the cost of a new machine in month 40 (talking of 3 year warranties here) rather than having it get warranted out. You might find it cheaper to get accessories and peripherals from a trusted third party (Logitech or whomever) than the vendor. If you mandate new machine issuance to new employees, you might find it cheaper to re-issue employee turned-in machines than to issue new devices. Likewise, if you're turning over 2% of your workforce every month (not all that uncommon), you might find it cheaper to just find a better way to re-image laptops rather than having 2-4% of your fleet sitting idle at any given time. Lots of places to squeeze margin that won't impact end-user experience.

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

Only reason we get the touchscreens is because it's somehow cheaper to order them as-is with them than get a CTO through our vendor and have them removed. There actually ended up only being a $4 difference between the fully loaded model vs one with no touch screen, no IR win hello camera, and smaller battery. Been like this for a while with them across multiple models for some reason.

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Stonewalled9999@reddit

We pay about that to CDW for lower spec machines

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Air-and-valves@reddit (OP)

We will typically go back and forth between our provider and CDW. Our rep there tries to match our normal vendor as much as possible, so they are always our backup if we're seeing backorders. Really good shipping though.

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pdp10@reddit

> We're spending roughly $1200 on average It's not going to be easy to do better than this for business-grade machines with 32GiB soldered. The obvious course of action is to stretch the amount of time that the machines are in service. If feasible, repair more machines to return them to service. But primarily, just slow down the refreshes. Increase the interval between refreshes by 20% or one year, and see if that makes the difference in the numbers that your leadership needs to see. If not, I'd look at where else you're spending money: licenses, cloud services, telecom that hasn't been renegotiated in a decade.

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