what I can say about the lenovo's I have owned is they are cheap, reliable, plasticky and not brilliantly made but they haven't let me down and they get used to this day.
Dell again likely operates in a similar way, you get the business laptops (like the one I have for work) which is built like a tank and could probably take a direct hit from a 500lb bomb versus the ones a consumer would buy in currys which is probably made of blue tack and safety pins.
but the actual bit that matters the components inside are generally all the same. Same processors from intel. Same memory and storage drives from micron.
The display pannels are all made by a small hand full of companies. Sharp, Samsung, Sony etc... the only real difference from one laptop to another is the case they put it in.
In years gone by companies got a bad reputation because of what is dubbed the "capacitor plague" where for a period of years capacitors made cheaply in china did not last and would leave products from all manner of companies fit for the scrap heap. But these days even the smallest components, resistors, capacitors etc are made by a small number of very large companies to a very high level which in consumer electronics at least will never cause you an issue.
if all you are doing is browsing the internet, maybe you write the odd letter once in blue moon, you probably don't need it.
If you do a lot of creative stuff then it does have a lot of uses, stream lining work flow etc, I have just spent the last 8 months seeing/trying to find ways I can incorporate its use into health care. This is going to be a big part of health care in the future.
in most instances if you pick something that is in the middle of the range for whatever that range is at the time, then you won't go to far wrong.
Never buy cheap because the cheapest will become obsolete the quickest, they often use older generations of processor for example, or the most basic stripped down version of the current/newest technology.
Historically someone like intel would make a die of semicondutors to use in processors. They also have some variability in quality due to the complexity of their manufacture, and so the worst ones of the batch get used in the cheapest processors and the best get used in the top end model. Its likely a lot more complex these days with all the multi core, processors with so many of one type of core and so many of another, but the basic principle likely still exists to some degree. If it works just not very well, ship it out as the "low spec" version.
Rarely does anyone need the top end model, so the middle of the range is usually the best place to aim for.
You would probably keel over if you saw the number of hard drives and terabytes of information i have just in the computer I am writing this on I have 6 hard drives of which 3 are full or very near too it.
then on top of that I have microsoft 365 which gives me 1TB of storages which to be fair is very useful as if I am working on something on my desktop I can get up, walk into the bedroom or down to the living room, pick up my laptop and carry on working exactly where I was as all those files get shared across all my devices.
I also have an iPhone with about 12million photos so I pay for storage online with that as well, this means if I ever lose my phone at least I can enter my apple ID in any new phone and my old phone and all my information settings etc is there and ready to go (after 6 weeks of downloading it all from the cloud)
With printers I have always hated how they try to lock you into using "their" ink. Its a bit like the dealer and having to have your car serviced at the dealer. There is no real reason you have to use "their" ink its just they make it as difficult as possible for you to use anything else. The subscription methods is just the latest version of that. If that works for you then that's fine but I am tempted by some of the newer printers which just allow you to top them up with liquid ink from a bottle.
I am sure I read some time back that the amount of ink in a cartridge is really only a few ml and the cartridges on some are as much as £50 making printer ink as much as £10,000 a litre for some printers/cartridge combos.
Anyway, back to the topic
@Pugglt Auld Jock happy to give any guidance I can on anything that takes your fancy.
