I’ve become a big fan of late of premium refurbished gadgets. These aren’t quite the same as typical pre-loved or used equipment where basically anything goes: you can get stuff that are basically mint and barely used, stuff that’s in poor shape, and most risky – stuff that looks new but have suffered damage that isn’t visible outwardly and will only show up after extended use. Premium refurbished equipment are usually equipment that has been bought by consumers but returned to manufacturer for whatever reasons, e.g. change of mind. The manufacturer will then put the returned equipment through rigorous testing, cleaning etc. and possibly even replacement of key components of the gadget, before listing it again out for sale at the manufacturer’s refurbished equipment store, and normally at significant discounts too.
Apple for instance has a refurbished equipment store, and there are decent bargains to be had – though stock for their most popular items get snapped out very fast! I’ve been keeping an eye on this very store to see when I can get a good bargain for the iPad Mini 5, and can never get to one before they disappear off the availability lists. Similarly, the HP Pro x2 612 G2 I bought last year was from a local store – PC Dreams – who sells a lot of refurbished equipment – and the item was basically new, and I paid roughly half of what it’d normally cost at retail.
I’ve been eyeing a replacement for my coming to three year old Lenovo X1 Carbon 5th Gen. The notebook still works fine for normal office productivity, but internal wear and tear has been showing up. The battery – sadly – has lost 12% of its 57,000 mWh capacity and would have gone down even further in the last half year if I didn’t immediately install Lenovo’s battery management programme to fine-tune the battery charging thresholds to prevent further capacity degradation. The laptop is also OK for photo-editing in Lightroom but struggles when it comes to video editing – an area I’m really interested to learn and get into for 2020.
How about a replacement X1 Carbon? Well, the X1 Carbon series is considered Lenovo’s premium line of enterprise-grade laptops, but the most recent models – my requirements being 16GB RAM/512GB or more Nvme SSD/i7 – are dreadfully expensive, even with educational discounts. And my preference was to not go with yet another X1 Carbon, good as they are. And finally, the replacement needed to support USB-C charging. There are already three USB-C 60W+ charging adapters now situated at different parts of our home, any of which can drive the four USB-C power delivered laptops we use: the X1 Carbon, the HP Pro x2 G2, my work-issued HP Elite x2 G2, and also the wife’s work-issued Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga L380.
So, after a week of checking out new and refurbished stores and doing my usual table comparisons, I culled my list of about 24 laptop models into a short list of five models:
Asus Zenbook UX391UA: the Taiwan-based manufacturer pushes out a huge range of 13.3″ and 14″ ultrabooks in their Zenbook line. They frequently are pegged at attractive prices, and the models I looked at included the UX391UA, UX334FLC, UX433FA, and UX434FL. Unfortunately, most of the models I checked out in-person at the usual stores here – i.e. Challenger, Harvey Norman, Best Denki – invariably revealed the same quirks: screens that were somewhat dim brightness-wise, and lack of Thunderbolt support and USB-C charging, excepting the UX391UA model which supports the latter. And as lovely as the pearl blue exteriors on many of these models are, every demo model in that color had obvious and ugly fingerprint smudges.
Razer Blade Stealth: I found a refurbished Razer Blade Stealth on Amazon with fairly recent specs that was listing for roughly 60% of the price of a new one. The unit only had 256GB SSD, but swapping out this small SSD for a 1TB one would be easy enough. Form factor-wise, the Blade Stealth was my most preferred model of the lot, but the external case would also be a finger-print magnet!
Aftershock Lunar 14 Pro: a bumped up version to the original Lunar 14, with the Pro edition offering a monstrously large 73Wh battery, support for USB-C charging, and offering very recent specs at a good price. Unfortunately, information on this model was very scarce, and the form factor and dimensions was very similar to the X1 Carbon – something I was hoping to avoid this year.
Lenovo Thinkpad T495s. the only laptop in my shortlist with a AMD Ryzen CPU. A 16GB/1TB T495s configuration could be had for a good price after I applied the educational discount. Again though, the T495s is considered a less expensive version of the X1 Carbon, and form factor wise, it also looks too much alike the laptop it’s replacing. The AMD Ryzen version also is several hundred dollars cheaper than the i7 models, but would be performing at roughly the same performance bracket as my current X1 Carbon i.e. not really an improvement.
Dell XPS 13 (9380): the last horse in the race, literally – I found just one refurbished unit left at Dell’s own refurbished equipment store just this week. I owned the the Dell XPS Studio 16 from 2010 and then the first gen Dell XPS 13 9343 from 2015. The latter was superb – while it lasted that is! Right exactly after the two year warranty period ended, the XPS 13 9343 started experiencing systematic failures. Firstly, the battery unit failed and the laptop would only power-on on AC power. Then a couple of months after that, the XPS refused to even boot up altogether. I couldn’t find a Dell service center outlet in Singapore then, but there are two direct sales outlets now in Singapore which hopefully will offer drop-off locations for repair if it ever is needed.
The Dell XPS 13 9380 is a semi-recent model that was released around February 2019, and the XPS 13 line has been what industry considers among the most compact and powerful 13.3″ series of ultrabooks around. It’s not the lightest weight-wise of course – there’s the LG Gram 14 and Acer Swift 5, both of which weigh less than a kilogram at 990g or so. But neither the LG Gram or Acer Swift are particularly cheap, support USB-C charging, and honestly also feels just a tad flimsy too when I tried handling them at the stores. The Dell XPS 13 series has been very highly acclaimed for stellar build quality, very long battery life for the FHD models, and future proof with its inclusion of USB-C and Thunderbolt. The refurbished unit was listed at SGD1,499 for an i7-8565U/16GB RAM/256GB SSD/FHD configuration – a pretty good bargain as a new unit, if I can find it today, should be roughly around SGD2K or thereabouts. So, after a night of reading-up on the unit’s reviews, I linked up with a Dell sales rep and processed an order for this through online chat.
The unit is scheduled for delivery in a fortnight, and hopefully sooner since no assembly is required. More to come soon!
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