WEBVTT

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If you go on Amazon and search for a laptop, then sort by price, lowest to

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highest, the cheapest option is $146.

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Then if you go, that's not low enough,

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and you fire up AliExpress, it's about $127.

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But what if I told you that you can get a fully functional laptop for just $99?

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You might say to me, "Gee, Lidus, surely

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there's some kind of catch." And you'd be one smart shopper because while this

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thing is truly a fully functional laptop

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for $99, it's got one heck of a gotcha.

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Let's take a look at it, shall we?

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So this is the Pine Book. It comes from

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the single board computer company Pine 64. And on first glance looks like

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basically every other uh you know

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MacBook design ripoff from 2008. It

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comes in a couple of flavors. So ours is the 11.6 in version that comes with an

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IPS display. And then there's a separate 14-in version that's got a TN panel

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instead. What's nice about the 14-in version is that it does have a bigger

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trackpad, thinner bezels, and pretty much a full size 10 keyless keyboard,

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while this one is actually quite squished. So, it's got a short backspace

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button. It's got these pinner little arrow keys. You'd probably get used to

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that. What you won't get used to is the shifts. Now, this one, I think this

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short left shift is actually standard somewhere. I will never move to that

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country. Sorry. Uh, but this one, how

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are you supposed to get used to that? Um, overall the the feel of the keyboard

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is actually surprisingly good. Like, I've seen laptops that cost three, four,

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five times this much that have more flex to their keyboard overall. So, I'm there

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is some to be clear, but it's really not that bad. The thing weighs about a

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kilogram and then it's got a.3 megapixel camera up here at the top. IO is

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actually pretty reasonable for 2019

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standards. Micro SD expansion, headphone microphone combo, 3 and 12 mm jack, USB

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type A, which is nice to have. Another one of those uh DC input, so no USB

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type-C. Come on, guys. And then due to the low

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profile of the machine, we're stuck with a mini HDMI, which in fairness gives us

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HDMI output, which is good, but um is

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very likely to break. Uh this is really not a very robust connector. Uh in terms

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of the internal specs, should we should we open this thing up? Let's have a look

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at it. Let's do that. And there it is.

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1.2 2 GHz quad core ARM Cortex A53 64bit

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processor, 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 16 gigs

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of eMMC memory. I'm just kind of pointing vaguely at this small board

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because it's it's it's all on here. And then we've got wireless uh N with

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Bluetooth 4.0. And you can see your antennas are hooked up over here. Also

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of note is our spectacular stereo speakers. And oh yeah, look at this. You

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can kind of see everything in here. So here's our magnet for the uh for the top

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cover to keep it closed. There's your microphones. Does have dual microphones,

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so like an array microphone. Enough foreplay, though.

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Let's find out just how much laptop you get for 99 bucks.

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Give her a sec. Now that we're booted, we're looking at

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a KDE Neon Linux desktop. Uh we see that

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there's actually no uh 5 GHz Wi-Fi support. So just 2.4 GHz.

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That's kind of to be expected on something this low spec.

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Pause for a second. Yep. This uh OS. Can we turn the brightness

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up? We can't. You want to come in a little closer? Yeah.

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Okay. The Ooh, webpage loading time is

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not spectacular. It's hard to say how much of the slow experience we're having

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right now is software and how much is hardware though because the Pine 64 guys

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acknowledge that this build of KDE Neon

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is quite out ofdate. Like it's got tons

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of issues like the fact that it takes forever to move the cursor across the

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screen. Uh you can't adjust the display brightness. But then on the other hand,

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the CPU in this thing has a MIP score of about around 11,000, which puts it

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somewhere in the neighborhood of Sony's PlayStation 3 in terms of performance

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with the GPU. It's actually a Mali 400

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MP2, which gives it about the performance of the original Xbox. So,

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I'm not even Were you expecting this, James? I'm not even able to load

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YouTube.com. Fortunately, our journey doesn't end here, though, because the

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good folks at Mangaro have a specific build of their OS that you can load up

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using Etcher on a micro SD card and boot

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to that instead, which I think we should probably do right about now. It's still

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slow, but it's brighter, right? Yes.

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Yes, it is. So, now that we're in, let's see if our brightness adjustment works

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now. Hey. All right. So, this is already

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a better experience, but with the better trackpad and the brighter display. Let's

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see if YouTube even manages to load at all.

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Okay, this is a lot better. But I think

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the question that we need to answer now is, okay, let's say that I'm willing to

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learn to use Linux. Is this usable? So, I'm going to get

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logged into my Gmail. Um, maybe get some

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Libra Office on here. Um, try and watch

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some YouTube videos. Let's see.

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Volume at 100%.

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I can't hear it at all. Okay, so this is weird. After some dinking around in the

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audio settings, we found that we can change our maximum volume to 150%. So,

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why don't we try that first?

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Nothing. Oh, maybe we can change Hey.

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similar. Wow, that's really quiet.

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3D space. Okay, so a couple problems. Um, the fact

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that it was configured to use the wrong audio device out of the box. Not the end

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of the world. That's the kind of thing that you can fix pretty quickly. But

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it's got some other issues. So, it does technically have stereo speakers, but it

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figures this is the front right speaker

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and this is the front left speaker. You can actually hear it coming out of this one when I press

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right. Issue number two is that at 100% volume

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in both the application and the device,

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it's way too quiet. And if we crank it to 150%, well, it sounds like this.

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Now, I want to talk about the size. So, in fairness to it, though, if I was

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using headphones, the YouTube playback is actually pretty

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reasonable. Although we aren't at HD yet, so let's try 720p. We are dropping

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a lot of frames here.

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Okay, let's go back to 480p. Even 480p

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in full screen mode chugs.

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If your objective is purely just to watch YouTube videos and absorb the

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information, you can do it. Let's uh fire up email or

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something then. I'm not going to lie, guys. This is not a great experience. uh

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even just performing a search in Gmail. So, I just clicked an email. Let's give

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her a hot second here.

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So, this is like a cached page. Let's go

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back.

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Really? It's still loading. So, at this point, I

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think it's pretty clear that the hardware in here is not really

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daily driver ready. Um, and by the way,

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if you were thinking, "Oh, well, maybe I could just play like ancient games on it

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or something," unfortunately, because it's got a Mali GPU and the Mali drivers

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are not open source. Well, 3D acceleration's pretty much not available

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on any archbased images like Mangaro,

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uh, the Lima drivers are like a reverse engineered driver, but they're not

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complete. So you could install them on the Pine Book, but you'd have to

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recompile the kernel first, and it frankly would not be a good experience

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at all. Anyway, it's not something that we'd recommend. Our final project for

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this is to actually try to install Windows. Now, as we mentioned before,

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this is an ARMbased CPU, but Microsoft has been working on ARM versions of

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Windows for over half a decade now. Remember the Surface RT? That was a long

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time ago. So, we're going to give it a shot.

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Maybe see if Windows can save this

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experience.

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So to do this, and this is our first attempt at this actually. This is the

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one thing we didn't prep before the video. Uh we used a tool called the

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Windows on ARM deployer and an image

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that's actually intended for use with the Raspberry Pi, which is also

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ARMbased, but isn't a pine book. So, uh,

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we're really not sure if this is going to work. Only

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one way to find out. So, what we're trying to do right now is figure out how

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to get it to boot to this because when we threw mangaro on a micro SD, it just

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automatically booted to it. But now it's

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not doing that. I tried F2. I tried F8. I tried F10. Actually, F11. F11 makes an

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appearance once in a while. Let's try delete. Come on, baby. Try F1. I need

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help.

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Uh, something's happening.

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Oh god. Given how utterly unsuitable this is for

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daily driver use and the fact that our

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initial attempts to install a Raspberry Pi build of Windows didn't work, um, we

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decided to abandon it because the reality of it is Pine 64 flat out says

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what this is not for. This is not a device to use as your current work or

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school laptop. And if that's what you're after, you probably need to look

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elsewhere. What it's really intended for is as a lowcost all-in-one solution for

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ARM Linux and BSD developers that are looking to mainline the SOC or are

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interested in some part of it like the

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GPU for example. One example is the Lima project. So, that's not to say that

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there's no potential for something like this to achieve lowcost daily driver

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status in the future. In fact, the upcoming Pinebook Pro could be a better

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daily driver. It's going to be 200 rather than $100. It's based on the RK

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3399. So, it's a hexaore SOC, six cores

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with two A72s at 2 GHz, 4 gigs of RAM

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instead of two. Uh, 14-in IPS panel,

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magnesium alloy body instead of the plastic one, USBC. So, in summary, this

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thing isn't what we hoped it was, and that shouldn't be a surprise because

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they told us that it wasn't what we hoped it was. But if you clicked into

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this and you're disappointed now cuz you were like, "Oh, I was really kind of hoping for a $100 laptop option." We did

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manage to find a couple other things that look a bit more compelling. So,

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this cheap Windows machine over on Walmart is just 140 bucks. It's got a

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touchcreen. It's a convertible and it's only got 32 gigs of storage. So, it's

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likely that Windows Update will eventually be the death of it. But, it

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does look fairly usable for the price. And this Chromebook over on Newegg is a

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bit more expensive. if it's over $200 and it's a Chromebook, so you're going

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to have software limitations. Finally, the third option, as we always love to

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bring up anytime someone's on a budget, is picking up something used. A lot of

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the time, you can get a used laptop somewhere like eBay or Craigslist or

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Kijiji, LetGo, wherever, for much

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cheaper than you could get something new. Especially if you're looking at Windows machines or Chromebooks as

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opposed to a MacBook or something. Those things hold their value incredibly well.

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So, thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that

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button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we

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this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.