This past year I’ve been checking local listings for used cheap laptops because it’d be neat to have a small portable Linux machine.
It’s just surprisingly difficult to confirm what specs a given model has or to find reviews for it. The sellers don’t always do the best job listing the components and googling the model numbers may not give you too many results either. Some manufacturers keep reusing the same model name year after year so you have similarly named computers with wildly different guts, or often a specific model number will only give you very local and very limited results which makes me think some SKUs are only sold in a few countries for a short period of time
Buying phones is much more simple in this regard
Its a holdover from their desktop pc origins, its a way to grift/ripoff and the last a lot of times the sellers themselves don’t know what’s up they just know sell laptop get $. Reverse image can help somewhat,
I focus on cpu, ram and if its upgradable, storage and then reviews on those when I look. People are offloading after their semester/for holiday money so now isn’t a bad time to hit up ebay/FB Marketplace if you want second hand. Lenovos tend to be very customizable, easy to repair and built like tanks.
Not really, these aren’t product photos but ones snapped by the seller themselves
Can help narrow the model down sometimes, have to do this at work when people return items without tags, sometimes Google/Yandex recognizes what it is, sometimes not.