Lenovo ThinkPad 14" T470 Black 2020

The ThinkPad T470 is a durable, comfortable business laptop with a great keyboard and a 1080p screen. Performance is dated, with a CPU in the 4th percentile and gaming basically off the table. At $302 it's a solid budget buy, but don't pay anywhere near $866.

The i5-6300U is a dual-core chip from 2015, and our database puts it in the 4th percentile for CPUs. That's rough. But for office work, it's fine. Word, Excel, Slack, and a pile of Chrome tabs won't bring it to its knees. The 256GB NVMe SSD helps a lot, though storage capacity lands in the 25th percentile, so you'll want to lean on cloud storage or an external drive. RAM is also in the 14th percentile at 8GB, which is the bare minimum for Windows 10 Pro in 2025. The Intel HD 620 graphics are in the 14th percentile too, so forget gaming entirely. The weakest area score we calculated is gaming at 9.3 out of 100. That's not a typo.

Against something like the Apple MacBook Pro Core i7 2.6GHz, the T470 gets smoked on raw performance. The MacBook's CPU and GPU are in a different league. The HP OmniBook X Flip and ASUS Zenbook UX3405CA also run circles around it in every benchmark that matters. But here's the thing: those machines cost way more. The T470 competes on price and durability, not speed. The MSI Prestige 16 Evo and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge are modern thin-and-lights with better screens, better battery life, and better everything, really. The T470 only wins if your budget is tight and you need a keyboard that feels great.

Pricing is all over the place. US listings run from $302 to $866, which is a massive spread for the same laptop. At the low end, this is a decent deal for a reliable workhorse. At the high end, you're getting fleeced. The CAD and GBP listings are not directly comparable, but they look steep for what you're getting. If you're in the US, hunt for the cheaper listing and don't pay more than $350 for this config. Anything above that and you're better off looking at newer refurbished options.

The ThinkPad T470 is a used business laptop that still knows how to show up for work. You get a 14-inch 1080p IPS display, a backlit keyboard, a fingerprint reader, and that classic ThinkPad build that feels like it could survive a fall down a flight of stairs. It's not flashy. It's a tool.

Under the hood, the Core i5-6300U and 8GB of RAM handle email, docs, spreadsheets, and way too many browser tabs without much drama. The 256GB NVMe SSD keeps boot times snappy. Just don't ask it to do anything creative or game related. This thing is built for spreadsheets, not shaders.

Skip this if you need to edit video, run modern games, or keep 50 browser tabs open while streaming. The dual-core CPU and 8GB RAM will frustrate you quickly. Also skip it if battery life matters, because 24Wh is not going to get you through a full workday away from an outlet.

Buy this if you need a cheap, dependable laptop for writing, email, spreadsheets, and light browsing. It's a great second machine or a first laptop for a student on a strict budget. The keyboard alone makes it worth considering if you type all day. Just know that you're buying old tech, and it won't age gracefully from here.