I presume you are referring to the SuperFish scandal in 2015.

First, you have to define “comparable”. These are Enterprise-grade laptops. Their class includes the Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook. It doesn’t include anything you will ever find at Best Buy. It might be tempting to do so, since your visible specs like CPU and RAM are the same. But they really aren’t the same.

Within their class, Lenovo has (for over a decade) been noticeably more expensive than their counterparts. Roughly $100-150 more per unit for the T4x0/T14 vs a Latitude 74x0 (now Dell Pro) or an Elitebook 840.

Current prices are: HP Elitebook 8 G1i 14 - Core Ultra 5 236v, 16GB/512GB, $1249

Dell Pro 14 - Core Ultra 5 236v, 16GB/512GB, $1659

Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 6 - Core Ultra 235u, 16GB/512GB, $1809.

All have integrated graphics.

I don’t think the detailed specs/pricing for Gen7 (what the article is about) has been announced yet. I would expect it to be in line with previous generations, since their 9/10 repairability score was.

Now is probably a good time to remember what a VPN can and cannot do. It can block your ISP from knowing which sites you’re going to. It can bypass ISP-level blocks, including geo-blocks.

It cannot stop the endpoints (WhatsApp, both the client and server) from harvesting whatever data they want from there.

Meta is clearly concerned about bans on WhatsApp. This is nothing more than their own self-interests.

This is highly dependent on what your needs are and how you plan to solve it. SATA-3 maxes at 6gbit, which SAS-2 had in 2009. Most cards are x8, and have at least 4 full speed SAS lanes (of whatever generation). That means 24 Gbit. PCIe x8 2.0 (from 2007) had 4 GB (32 Gbit). So if that meets your needs, you can run it on an ancient board.

However, if you need something more advanced, such as SAS-3, a SAS expander, or a card with more native lanes, then you would need to plan accordingly.

I’ve been running on an LSI 9211-4i4e, which is only a PCIe 2.0 card, for many years. I did notice my speeds dropped when I expanded the 4e to a 15-bay DAS (plus the 4 internal SATA drives), but it’s still enough to meet my needs.

If you can use SAS (you’ll need a SAS PCIe card, roughly $50 used), get SAS drives. They are enterprise-grade exclusively, there is a massive supply of used drives as servers get refreshed, and a very limited secondhand market because most people can’t use SAS drives.

You won’t get the latest or largest drives, but you’ll get something that works perfectly fine for home use.

I recommend against Go Hard Drives. They get drives that previously failed but currently test ok, then wipe the SMART data. I had a whopping 133% failure rate (all 3 original, plus 1 replacement) before I returned the whole thing.

If you insist on using them, do the most extensive burn-in testing you possibly can. I would use at least a full week, to make sure it’s actually (semi-) reliable.