Price to performance
Unless you know what to look for modern day budget laptops are absolute minefields with some having acceptable performance and others being outright scams and not everyone has a PC guy to ask. Even my oldest and cheapest laptops match if not exceed the performance of a modern day budget laptop with an Intel Celeron. Most modern budget laptops have vastly varying amounts of ram and usually come with a meager amount of EMMC storage (like whats in a micro SD card, slow and small) all laptops I sell come with a minimum of 8gb of ram and a proper SATA ssd.
Features
Modern laptops in general do not come with many ports or features, the dvd drive is more or less extinct and you can usually expect 2 USB ports and MAYBE an hdmi port, i almost always stock older business line laptops that are known for having many USB ports, hdmi, headphone and mic ports, some have dvd drives and display ports and almost all have SD card slots. For many people convenience is what drives them to purchase a laptop so why not get one that has the ports you need and not carry around a dongle?
Reliability
This one may seem backwards since wouldn't a used laptop have more "wear" than a new laptop? And you would be correct a used laptop does have some amount of wear, but most modern laptops are very cheaply built usually just a pcb sandwiched in-between 2 pieces of plastic and that's it. The older laptops i sell almost always have more structural integrity, the older Thinkpads have magnesium inner chassis to safeguard the pcb's the dell latitudes have a sort of plastic "roll cage" to add to the laptops rigidity, and any laptop i sell that has a dvd drive is just thicker in general. This helps a lot for when the laptop is dropped because the number one way for a board to die is for it to be flexed to the point where solder joints break and lose contact, having a thicker chassis or support makes the laptop MUCH more durable!
Repairability
Laptops I sell tend to be from their respective company's business line which means parts are plentiful and cheap. Repair guides are also common and well documented with drivers being provided online from the manufacturers website. Older laptops also tend to be easier to work with, and rely less on plastic tabs to hold the laptop together making disassembly much easier.Â