Refurbished laptops can be superior in comparison to cheap Bestbuy laptops. These old laptops are often much more solid built, have better keyboards, may even have better screens (FYI brand new laptops with cheap TN 1366x768 screens are still manufactured).
Good refurb definitely should have an SSD and battery at least in good condition.
> Refurbished laptops can be superior in comparison to cheap Bestbuy laptops.
They can be, but there's an inflection point of age. For ~400 USD you can get an all-E-core i3-N305/512GB SSD/8GB RAM/1080p laptop - which is about on-par for performance with a midrange 4-core CPU from the final 14nm mobile chips (Comet Lake, 2019). With the N305 you get notably lower power draw under load.
Marsymars|1 year ago
They can be, but there's an inflection point of age. For ~400 USD you can get an all-E-core i3-N305/512GB SSD/8GB RAM/1080p laptop - which is about on-par for performance with a midrange 4-core CPU from the final 14nm mobile chips (Comet Lake, 2019). With the N305 you get notably lower power draw under load.