How to Convince Your Dad that a Black Friday Laptop is Not Worth the Time Anymore

My dad started out in this country as a software engineer, working on various projects from large contractor companies that essentially brought in tons of immigrants to fill contract needs in the 70s and 80s. He now works as a Project Manager in the development/software sector, but has always been familiar with computing and best practices. Come black friday season, he's usually interested in picking up a new laptop to manage his personal work. I usually see him go through these every 2-3 years, and this past year he asked me what laptop I think he should get. I bet him that I could spent less on a custom built PC that is more powerful and capable than a laptop, and would far outlive the life of the laptop as well as the period of time it takes for a machine to "feel slow". What ensued over the next three days was a debate of the ages, similar to those of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. He showed off tempting deals--mobile platforms with Ryzen 7 CPUs, high fidelity displays, long battery life, warranties. I returned by pointing out benchmarks of those CPUs, the lower clock speed of the memory modules, the ineffective cooling capability of the chassis. Finally, our great debate resulted in a close with a wager. That I could successfully build a complete machine with peripherals for under 500 USD that would outmatch the laptops he was interested in, even in ranges of 600-700 in price.

Ultimately, we're both quite happy with the resulting build. He primarily uses the computer for office and productivity related work. He was using a Dell Inspiron 22 3263 that was an AIO desktop solution. He had been struggling with load times, processing times, and the ability to print 50+ page documents (as he also side hustles as a notary) without the computer crashing. Looking back, perhaps I could have gone with a lower memory package, but for the cost and the spec it was a great deal! If it was an intensive gaming build, I definitely would have sprung for a silver or gold standard PSU, but with the given warranty and the use case, I thought this was fine. With additional savings, I would have installed an NVME SSD to act as a boot drive, then added in some HDD TB drives for storage, but we had plenty of old drives lying around to recycle into this build, so there was no need.

I also learned that I love building in mATX cases! My own build uses a full size ATX case, and I feel that the cable management gets messy as it is with that much room. In this case, I just left the rats nest of cables as is because there's not that much space anyways, so who cares!