If you’re going the iGPU route, you may want to look into out-of-date (from a year or two ago) enterprise/corporate fleet laptops. There are always a ton on the market because the C-level execs always demand the newest and best laptops, even if they’re just going to use them for emails; the CEO would be embarrassed if they found out they had a worse laptop than the programmers or 3D modelers, after all. So the company IT is always milling through enterprise laptops.

And when they go to list 20 identical laptops on eBay at the same time, (because they just upgraded an entire department,) they’re not concerned with how much money they’re actually getting for each resale. The person making the listing is just some lowly IT schmuck who will never see a dime from the sale, but is forced to list them because the bean counters in accounting want to recoup expenditures. If you try to buy used from a personal sale, that person is going to be focused on getting the most money possible; No gamer is selling their year-old GPU unless they really need the money. By sticking to laptops that are popular in corporate settings, you’re able to ensure that:

1. There are a lot of identical models on the market, driving prices for each one into the ground.
2. The seller doesn’t actually care about things like minimum sale amounts, because they’re just trying to get this stack of old laptops off of their desk.
3. It has probably only ever been used for email and PowerPoint.

You can often find two year old like-new $2000 laptops for like $250. Hell, just a quick google search of “Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2024 i7 1TB used” turned up multiple eBay listings for like $200. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon (current model is Gen 13) is a $2600 laptop, but the Gen 12 is only going for a few hundred.

Agreed. I got a framework 13 with the new AMD Hx370 and it has replaced my Steam deck completely.