Most Expensive Laptops

Isn't the GPU throttled anyways? Because it's going to be a mobile version?

It seems like a scam that gaming laptops are marketed with the headline, i.e: GeForce RTX 5090, then in the fine print, read: GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU.

The thinkpad is insane, 7k and NOT EVEN A GRAPHICS CARD

Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop. I like a laptop that can get the job done when I need to and easily be fixed if I need to when I am on the road. At the moment that is Framework, and previously thinkpad, and a while ago, Powerbooks.

I have learned as I became older that the device is a tool to getting the work done, not something to drool over. I am more proud of the output than the device I do it on.

Makes a $3500 Macbook Pro look like a steal of a deal.

It pulls data from Amazon and so is limited to availability there. For instance, the most expensive MacBook in there is $5839 while on the Apple Store you can max out at $7349 (hardware only). I suspact same goes for other manufacturers. So if you want to blow ungodly amount of money you’d need to do some extra research.

I'm wondering what would be the use case for a laptop with 24TB storage.

Most people look at computers as a commodity that needs to perfectly balance performance and price; most really expensive computers usually are acquired by professionals that do need the specs and within small time, it gets paid off quickly. I have a 16" Macbook Pro M2 with 96GB of RAM. Costs without VAT around €4k, but a client paid half of it as a one year retainer for my work, so the device ended up costing me €2k. You would say those specs are over the top, but it's been 2 years and I still have an amazing work machine and there's not enough things I can do to make it feel slow; it pays off, because I don't waste my time waiting for my device, it's the other way around. Would my dad buy such a machine for browsing? Absolutely not! Me as a professional? Makes no sense not to!

I didn't realize Amazon was offering payment plans for laptops. I'd only ever seen that for cars and houses.

Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?

Expensive is relative. I'm the CTO of a small startup and we're leasing our laptops from Apple. We don't have huge budgets. I got my 16" M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB model a few months ago. Costs us 105 euro/month. That includes 3 years of extended warranty. After the lease is over (3 years), we have the option to buy the laptops at a discount typically. The new value of this thing is around 4500 euro, I think. We could have gone cheap and gotten something for 70-80 or so Euro per month. It's not worth the savings. Over 3 years that adds up to about 900 euros saved. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.

I get a lot of value out of having a fast laptop. For example, our entire integration test suite (Spring Boot) can run in under 30 seconds making use of all the CPU this thing has and running against docker containers with DB, Valkey, and Elasticsearch. That's a build that takes a lot longer on crappy CI vms or one of my old laptops. Basically, it runs almost like a small unit test suite. I can just invoke that whenever and not be blocked by it. I do this a lot. It helps me catch things early and keeps my feedback cycles short. Which helps me maintain flow state when I'm working. That is priceless.

30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.

I used to freelance / consult and charge more per hour than this thing costs me per month. In retrospect, for me the lesson on updating here is to never ever allow myself to penny pinch on laptop cost again.

These HP Fury Laptops and many others on that list are such a joke.

A somewhat capable CPU, sometimes just an integrated GPU slapped in a cheap chassis with mediocre build quality. Sold at absurd prices. My employer is "getting scammed" by HP continuously by paying for this absolute crap. The workstations aren't any better.

Nowadays the "business laptops" you get cost the same as a MacBook, have a bad, barely usable, CPU and are made out of flimsy plastic. I do not get how companies like HP keep doing this, what a total embarrassment.

and yet not one of them has a monitor of 17" or more...

Last year I purchased a Lenovo P15 Gen 1 used, originally it came with a sticker price of $5700 but I managed to get it used for ~$500. All these hyper expensive laptops fall into one of two buckets, either they are top end gaming rigs or they are like my Lenovo and designed for large engineering companies that will just lease them and not give a crap how much they cost.

For the average consumer though I highly recommend going on Ebay and finding these hyper expensive laptops used from a few years ago. Mine came with an i9 processor, an RTX 5000 and can support up to 128GB of RAM and even 5 years on those are still wild numbers except that same computer can be found for maybe 10-15% of the original price.

Though I will say one downside of buying one of these is they are customizable to an insane degree so finding the "right" one might take you a while (took me around a month to find mine).

how much of those prices is due to having 8tb nvme drives?

Largest has 128G RAM and not clear if the GPU can access all of it.

So, looks like none of them can run an .5T LLM locally.

Pass.

Willing to bet these kind of notebooks get the worst update support possible.

The funny part the 5090 mobile is more like a 5080 desktop edition!

See the Alienware laptop flagged as 5090 while it's ‎"GeForce RTX 5090 24 GB GDDR7" as laptops can't sustain the TDP and RTX XX90 full power. For AI an external GPU is less costly option.

That ThinkyPad that is selling for over 7000$ and it doesn't even have a GPU makes it really hard for anyone to see that price as justified. Do some of these sellers just have a goal to sell one or two of these for the entirety of the products life cycle and that would be a win in their book? Or is this just then trying to pad the market pri ces to make the less expensive products look more appeealing?

$9k for 64 gigs of RAM...fyi a single 64gb DDR5 SO-DIMM stick is only $200

Typically I need to pick from the other end of the spectrum, but this is pretty cool to look through.

...these are kind of quaint, honestly.

The FZ-40GZ-0SBM is almost $8000. You get an Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, 32GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD space. Intel integrated GPU only.

The Getac X600 Server Laptop be decked out with a Xeon W-11865MRE, 128GB of RAM, and 6TB of storage space (no GPU again), but it'll run you a cool $17,000.

IIRC they weigh 7 to 10 lbs, so not terribly light either.

MSI is rubbish