I didn't downvote you, but I'd imagine you're being downvoted for arguing in favor of that laptop being economical. At the risk of sounding like a dead meme, "

I didn't downvote you, but I'd imagine you're being downvoted for arguing in favor of that laptop being economical. At the risk of sounding like a dead meme, "a laptop going strong for over 9 years" is already the default for the kinds of folks who would opt for Linux and who would replace their laptops HDD with an SSD. My $800 laptop from 2015 has been 16GiB RAM and 512TB SSD and it still works perfectly (save for an Ethernet port which I regrettably damaged). It's running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is supported for three more years as of this comment. This is kind of a standard experience for people in Linux land. So by comparison, a $1600 laptop with 8GiB RAM and a 256GB HDD which is no longer receiving security updates does not sound like a good deal.