Looking for a new laptop but what has happened?

Krakkkers

So my 2017 laptop is on its last legs, battery gave up years ago, fans are dying one by one and becoming noisy, and 2 BSOD yesterday.

Looked online today expecting the technology to have progressed in leaps and bounds but apparently not.

My current laptop has a 2TB SSD drive and most laptops i am seeing have similar or less, what happened in 9 years?

la531983

Cloud storage?

Krakkkers

When you have stuff on your laptop like i have you don't want it in the cloud (Joke) but seriously why is local storage not advancing, i can pay way more for about 4TB

la531983

It will be as I said, they will have done research and worked out more people now use cloud storage and other external hard drive storage these days than in 2017, and laptops are built to suit.

booneruk

Prices are currently insane due to the AI/Datacentre 'gold rush'. 4TB SSDs are going to be disgustingly expensive at the moment. Also, 4TB would generally be way more than the average user would need so I'm not surprised they're not standard in laptops right now.

It sounds like you could be a use case for external drives. A 6TB external drive using a hard drive might be the economical choice if you have a need for mass storage.

Otherwise cloud storage as the previous poster mentioned.

Lorian

NVME drives (faster than your SSD) and DDR RAM are all in constraint and elevated prices due to AI driven demand.

Exodi

Laptops have progressed leaps and bounds over that timeframe. CPU's are orders of magnitude more powerful, similar with GPU's, RAM, etc. My previous laptops could be considered doorstops compared to my current one.

What you are referring to in particular is memory, which is currently under significant pressure starting from around the end of last year due to memory makers directing manufacturing to more profitable components for AI data centres. This has caused an incredible surge in the price of RAM, SSD's, HDD's, etc.

For example:

Storage Drives (2TB SSD's have doubled over the past year)
Memory (DDR5-5600 2x16GB have more than quadrupled over the past year)

Unfortunately for you, before this even cheap laptops were coming with 16/32GB of RAM and 1/2TB SSD's as standard but that all stopped pretty much from the start of 2026, since then prices have surged higher and higher.

Consumers are now faced with a choice, either pay much much more to receive the same as last year OR to accept lower specs.

I'm heavily invested in this sort of thing, so in anticipation of the rapid increases I replaced my previous laptop earlier than I might have otherwise. The new laptop cost me £1,750 from Lenovo in Nov-25, today the same laptop costs £3,400.99 - so almost double.

So in summary, it's not that 'technology has not progressed in leaps and bounds' it's that AI has reduced the supply of consumer memory meaning the improved technology is now significantly more expensive.

Unfortunately this thread wouldn't have existed if you were looking for a laptop last year.

Krakkkers

Ok thanks, all those answers were useful, but since my laptop is about to expire i guess i am just going to have to pay up.

On-the-coast

if you haven’t ever cleaned out your laptop then a compressed air “duster” through the fans and heat sinks would probably stave of the inevitable for a while.
otherwise - yes, memory (ram and storage is highly expensive right now)

flaneurs_lobster

You could (probably) extract the 2TB drive from your old laptop (assuming you have it backed-up somewhere) and put it into a USB caddy.

Krakkkers

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82142860#Comment_82142860

That's a good idea. I am a bit of a hoarder with a current 45tb of external hard drives