> Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.

In September I picked up a laptop for $575.

Its specs are 15.6" 1080p IPS display, AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores, 16 threads) CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, Radeon 680M iGPU that can allocate 8 GB of GPU memory, 1 TB SSD with a backlight keyboard. Weighs about 3.5 pounds and has (5) USB ports plus HDMI port. It comes with a 2 year warranty as well.

Running Arch Linux on it with niri and it's really nice for what it is.

There are decent laptops out there at affordable prices.