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
Buying phones is simple because they’re all just Qualcomm Snapdragon systems-on-a-chip and they’re super proprietary. Do phone specs list the model of the RAM or storage? I guess finding some info is easier because you can just look up the SoC and find what sub-components it has. I agree it’s insane that you can’t even see the list of part models in laptops on the website even though they’re written right on the parts themselves if you open the computer up. Even when a part is listed, it’s probably made up of a more specific integrated circuit that you would still have to track down. Even though that’s important info that determines how reliable that part is, and sometimes even what features it supports.