Description
Laptops are not labelled by year and year is not a good indication of performance or ability, except in the crudest sense. You can't buy a laptop from the early 2000s and expect it to perform as well as one being sold new today but a top-of-the-line system sold five years ago, may very well outperform an entry level system sold new today. Laptop prices range considerably and a low price generally means a lesser system, will run slower and will not last as long. Cheap is cheap in any industry and you get what you pay for.
What really counts is what's inside of your laptop. How is it built? Built to last? What is the processor type/generation? Is it SSD or HDD? How much RAM is installed? What GPU is installed? These are the things that really matter. But here lies the problem, many people do not know what these things are, so they resort to "the year" as a measure of performance, which can be very misleading and is not a good indication of performance or ability.
Instead of focusing on the year, I recommend focusing on needs. If you just want a laptop for checking your email, an older, slower, less expensive system, will do you just fine and if you want a laptop for games or video editing, you need something completely different. So think about what you want the laptop for and then when you are shopping, tell the person who you are dealing with, what you want the laptop for and ask, what do they recommend. If you don't feel the person you are dealing with knows what they are talking about or you don't trust them, move on. Nobody wants returns or unhappy customers so its not too much to ask for and get an honest opinion.
One further point to consider, just like you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge a laptop by its exterior design. Many Lenovo laptops kept the same cosmetic design and casing for close to a decade, but they upgraded the internal components quite a lot. Business class systems have a tendency to be plainer in design because the focus is on a quality build and not on a flashy outside.
