ok the main conclusion i have reached after much research is that all laptops suck ass in one way or another totally unrelated to the headline specs

too heavy? fan too loud? speakers bad? runs too hot? pick one, or maybe two, or three

also most retailers filtering options are shit and useless. sometimes they don't work at all. often they filter out products that actually do match your criteria but the specs weren't entered properly.
and sometimes you get stuff like this. how in the hell is 8"-15.6" a useful category for anything

i am fully open to recommendations at this point before i lose my mind. i'm looking for something 15-16 inches that weighs less than 2kg and has decent enough specs, good screen and good sound

i doubt i'll do much gaming on it so it doesnt need a banger gpu but i want it to be good for everything else & be reasonably future proof

@Rairii I mean yeah it's not gonna be anything that's impossible to get rid of. it just gives me bad vibes lol

@lion i generally hear a lot of praise for thinkpads but haven’t personally looked at them in years

i absolutely concur on this btw. in 2015 i was trying to buy a laptop and just ended up getting a macbook because all the other options on the market were awful

there were exactly two machines i could find in gibraltar with more than 8GB RAM at the time, one was a hulking gaming behemoth and one was the MBP

@Ninji @lion it is absolutely bananas that the only real choices for powerful laptops that aren't gamertastic now are thinkpads (kinda questionable, they fell off a lot in the '10s), macbooks and frameworks

@lion here is my strategy from previous laptop shopping: prioritize the most popular item from two seasons ago with the refurb discount. Check reviews and followups to see if some glitch or flaw has been discovered.

Most people are searching for "it's good enough" on all of those things, so following the crowd works. And if it's completely new you won't know about hidden flaws, but the catastrophic stuff is usually sorted within six months, so getting the refurbished version of last year's hit is a calculated risk

@Triplefox tbh i'm avoiding refurbished this time based on past experiences, my last couple of laptops were refurbished and while i did end up with some decent bargains, each time the first unit they sent me had some fault and i had to send it back. with the second one it happened twice! so i haven't had a very good hit rate with refurbs really, would rather avoid the hassle

@lion I can't recommend any laptops, they're all just awful these days.