There are some decent looking ones on woot. I might get one. They have the same models regularly so some consistency of supply.
I've bought tons of used laptops over the years and done fine. Mostly thinkpads.
Also there are some very good black Friday deals for new laptops. Try best buy (today only) and Costco) through December). This intrigues me:
Black Friday price is $550 for those reading later.
$10/m redpocket.com, US. 1gb/m 5g data plus some big amount of voice+sms. This is way more than I need. They have smaller plans too.
You don't want it to be ridiculously easy to back up, since that is an attack route. Anyway I'm happy with FreeOTP which is on f-droid.
Post thoughtfully not quickly.
Don't care at all about dynamic lock screens. Actively want to keep AI out of my phone, maybe excepting specific apps. Battery tech by itself is nice but you know that stronger batteries will just result in even power hungrier phones, so no real good will come of it. Hinged phones break more and cost more.
NTN (satellite text messaging for when you have no cell coverage) is the main interesting phone tech to appear recently IMHO. Everything else is just little tweaks or outright regressions. I prefer more repairability and openness to more features by now.
My main suggestion is "don't.". Use a regular pen and paper notebook. Transcribing and expanding your notes into a computer later can help you retain the material.
SSDs for backup? Being rich must be nice. More srsly if you have the upstream pipe for it, remote backups are preferable in case something happens at home.
I'd never heard of this before. What are the upsides? And just make them user replaceable and standardized, and we'll worry much less about cycle life.
Tools:preferences, about:config, file downloads, form prefills, remember password, etc. yes you can try to lock everything but it's too easy to miss something. And then there are outright RCEs. There's just too much attack surface.
There's no way to srsly prevent a full-bloat browser from messing with its environment. Make a static VM image and reboot it at the beginning of every session.
I wonder if you can use the cards on woot.