I paid $500 for each laptop my kids needed at beginning of pandemic in March 2020 (so $1000 in total). Each is a Ryzen 7, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD (one of them is

I paid $500 for each laptop my kids needed at beginning of pandemic in March 2020 (so $1000 in total). Each is a Ryzen 7, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD (one of them is actually NVMe). Both laptops are still performing greatly without hiccups and they saw 2 vacations on the other side of the country during the 2 summers. And one of them (the NVMe one) I used it to do my work during the 2 weeks vacation last summer (virtualization and virtual machines for all my projects, though I had to get an external USB SSD for the virtual machines to fit with me). All in all if you take care of them it can be used as work horse during vacations. Only thing I can't do on them is last generation gaming, for that I need my usual work horse which is a $2500 desktop gaming rig.