Comment by _fat_santa

I would say even newer Thinkpads are a great deal. I recently bought a P15 Gen 1 from 2020 for ~$700 and it's been an absolute monster. Core i9, RTX 5000, and 128GB or ram. Through research I learned that brand new this machine would have cost around ~$5,800 but even five years later it's better than most new laptops around the ~$700 price point.

The "hard" thing about thinkpads is you have to find them. I must have searched eBay listing for close to a month before the right thinkpad popped up. Especially with the workstation grade laptops, they were so configurable brand new that there are something like 48 possible variants you can find, and finding one with the exact specs you want can be incredibly difficult.