I currently don’t have any need to buy a new laptop but I was seeing how so many sites here was selling this HP EliteBook 845 G8 Business UltraBook Laptop for $499. That’s a great deal for the specs as it seems to be a 2021 model and is ideal for people who want to use it for basic work. What got me thinking was how I heard some people were actually thinking of buying it as a backup for that price in case their laptop suddenly malfunctions.
That would definitely be wiser and probably cheaper than scrambling to buy one at the last minute if such an incident occurred. I’m thinking though, for this kind of item the tech evolves so fast where one year is enough for the value to drop like a rock as the latest and greatest could easily be two times better. That would mean price drops for everything else as well. You could then have a situation where for the same price here you could have a laptop that is much better.
I tend to think for that reason things like a computer is better to hold off until you actually do need it. For backups in these cases I tend to use my previous hardware as the backup. Even though it is slower, getting rid of a lot of things to make it a barebone work computer is usually good enough for emergency situations in order to provide enough time to buy something new. I find that to be a better solution where instead of automatically throwing away your old hardware, keeping your last generation for the backup and repeating the cycle once you get another new item is the way to go.
It would only make sense to do that with things like your phone too right? Assuming you didn’t sell your old one to get the new one, I would find it odd to buy a smartphone just as a backup for the same reasons above.