A guy on Reddit just hit the IT jackpot: buying 9 Lenovo laptops from his company for a flat $180. Is it the ultimate side hustle or a MDM-bricked nightmare?
You know what $180 gets you in tech nowadays? A half-decent mechanical keyboard, maybe a fancy ergonomic mouse, or half a monitor. But sometimes, the corporate gods smile upon you and drop an absolute banger of a deal right on your desk. Recently, a lucky bastard on r/homelab shared a story that had the entire tech community green with envy.
So here’s the scoop: OP’s company management is getting shiny new laptops, and the IT department asked if OP had any interest in the old ones. The inventory? Nine Lenovo L14 1st Gen laptops (8 AMD, 1 Intel).
The price? IT told him they’d take a flat $180 for all 9.
Do the math—that’s 20 bucks a pop! At first glance, you might think these are potato-tier machines with Celeron chips and 4GB of RAM. Nope. OP later dropped a bombshell in the comments: Every single one of them has 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 256GB SSD. Absolute stonks.
OP's plan? Buy them all, give one to his mom, keep a couple for homelab projects, and flip the rest to pay for his college tuition.
Naturally, the comments section turned into a mix of congratulations and pure jealousy. The discussion basically split into a few camps:
1. The "Shut Up and Take My Money" Crowd With 16GB of RAM at $20, it's a no-brainer. User elatllat summed up the entire thread's feelings with a single word: "> 16gb. Sold."
2. The "Family Tech Support" Curse Another user pointed out a pragmatic approach: keep them in the closet and hand them out to friends and family over the next 3 years.
If you’re the designated "IT Guy" in your family, you know the pain. Instead of wasting breath trying to recommend laptops to your tech-illiterate aunt while dodging Best Buy's upselling tactics, just hand her one of these. Problem solved, and you look like a hero.
3. The MDM Booby Trap Warning User Rinzlerx came in with the most crucial piece of advice: Make sure the company removes these devices from their Microsoft/Intune directory. If they don't, OP just bought 9 expensive paperweights. A bricked corporate laptop locked to an MDM is a nightmare to bypass.
Thankfully, OP was already on it. The IT director promised to wipe them from the directory over the weekend. OP is also planning to wipe Windows entirely and experiment with Ubuntu and Arch Linux anyway (because, of course, by the way, he uses Arch).
Looking at my current company-issued laptop that sounds like a jet engine when I open three Chrome tabs, I can only sigh. But honestly, this is a brilliant move by OP. He mentioned planning to sell 6 of them at market value ($170-$200 each with a charger).
From a $180 investment, this guy is about to net over $1,000 to fund his college education, while still keeping 3 solid machines for his family and personal projects.
What’s the takeaway here? Be nice to your IT department, folks. Bring them donuts, chat them up. You never know when they’ll dump enterprise-grade hardware on you for pennies. With machines like this, instead of renting a vps every month, you could cluster them together, build a wicked local Kubernetes environment, and homelab to your heart's content.
10/10 hustle.
Source: Reddit r/homelab
