I Bought a New Old Laptop

A 2016 Dell Latitude 7370 with a 13.3″ 3200×1800 display, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, and a two core Intel Core m7-6Y57 CPU with hyper-threading clocked at 1.2 to 3.1 GHz. It’s from the low-power CPU range they sold in different iterations from 2015 to 2018, and the reason I bought it.

I wanted to have a modern laptop, which is not the fastest, but has high-quality components to potentially be used as the main device. The point is to be more mindful of resource usage when building websites and applications. And a very high pixel-per-inch display in a fanless design is a huge step closer to a MacBook-like computing experience. It runs Linux with Wayland.

The laptop is fanless, because the CPU has a TDP of only 5 W. Most people hated this CPU, because it had only 80 % of the performance of the former entry-level Core CPU and perceived it as an expensive downgrade. This was a fallacy, because it achieved the performance with 5 W CPU power consumption instead of 15 W.

Thin, light, and silent laptops with high PPI are hard to find, especially at a lower price, which is mandatory for an auxiliary device. This weighs 1.3 kg.

Apart from a great keyboard, it also has a built-in LTE-A modem with 300 Mbit/s download and 50 Mbit/s upload capability. It works in Fedora Silverblue 40 beta out-of-the-box. Maybe, some day in the future, I will be able to get rid of my landline Internet. One can dream…

The laptop is in good shape and has 70 % battery capacity left, which results in 4 ½ to 5 hours of Wi-Fi web browsing. I paid 190 € including shipping on a well-known Internet auction site, which seems to be a rather good price.

I’m very happy with it, and I plan to use it for five to ten years.