Forum: 'A €1,000 laptop is worth €200 a year later'

Laptops: paying €1,000 and selling it off for €200

A user reports that a laptop bought for €1,000 can end up worth just €200 on the second-hand market barely a year later, even when the fault that killed it — a motherboard — costs €130. That gap between what the whole machine is worth and what its parts are worth is the starting point of a discussion on the forum: does the way computers are bought, used and thrown away today make any sense at all?

The specific case that started it all is the one told by the thread's author. A mid-to-high-end laptop, bought a couple of years ago for a little over €1,000, fails due to a motherboard that sells for around €130 on the open market. The owner goes to sell it and discovers nobody will offer him even €200. You have a €1,000 machine that's suddenly worth €200, he points out. And yet, when he's the one who needs to buy that same part, he's quoted far more than the whole machine would cost. For him, the paradox is no isolated case.

Why a laptop depreciates faster than a car

The comparison with cars comes up early, and it's no coincidence. A car loses value, yes, but it keeps a market, a valuation system and a logic. A laptop, by contrast, enters an obsolescence spiral that doesn't depend only on use: it depends on a new generation coming out every year with 10% more power, according to one of the calculations circulating in the conversation, and on second-hand buyers preferring to pay €400 for a new low-end machine rather than €600 for a used high-end one.

Some argue the problem isn't the market, but the buyer. The most repeated thesis is that spending €1,000 on a laptop is a waste of money unless you need real graphics power for design or editing. For office work, browsing, watching video and little else, a €400 or €500 machine is more than enough. And if it breaks after five years, you buy another: two €500 laptops cover ten or twelve years for the same money as one €1,000 machine that will also last five or six.

The other, more technical camp points to heat as the real cause of death. An i7 dissipates more heat than an i5, and a poorly ventilated laptop ends up cooking its own components. That's why many high-end machines die before cheap ones: not because of factory defects, but because they carry more watts inside than their chassis can expel.

The desktop wins the argument again

Against the laptop, the tower regains arguments that seemed buried. A €600 desktop performs like a €1,000 laptop, can be upgraded part by part — memory, drive, graphics card — and survives on updates for more than a decade. Some boast of a hard drive with eleven years of service and a 2013 machine to which they've only had to add RAM to keep it running in absolute silence, with no fans howling.

The counterargument is mobility. Anyone who works both away from home and at home can't afford two machines: they need one that does both. And there the laptop wins hands down, even if it's a 3-kilo machine nobody would call a true laptop. The discussion then shifts to size: ultrabooks and convertibles do the job for the average user, while ATX towers remain huge and heavy, more so than twenty years ago.

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What you can do to avoid losing money

The remedies repeated are few and specific. Buy without an operating system and save on the licence. Add RAM and swap the drive for an SSD, a simple operation on most models if the memory isn't soldered. Clean the heatsink and fan every few months. And above all, don't pay for power you won't use: the difference between a €700 and a €1,000 laptop usually lies in the processor and graphics card, not in the quality of the screen or keyboard.

The full calculation, with prices for each component and amortisation periods, leads to an uncomfortable conclusion nobody quite accepts: buying cheap and replacing often works out cheaper than buying expensive and stretching it. But that clashes with the intuition that good things last longer. And with the fact that, piece by piece, a laptop can never be built: the board, chassis and cooling come soldered from the factory.

Is it worth buying the latest model, then? The answer that prevails in the conversation is no, with very few exceptions. What remains unclear is why the second-hand market still asks €600 or €1,000 for machines worth half that.