Have you been shopping lately? For $250, you can get something from almost everyone. It's likely to have an Atom processor, or something anemic from AMD, probably only 4GB ram, but most will have a (small) SSD these days. It may or may not come with preinstalled garbage, but you can usually uninstall that lately. Or just live with it. If these computers fit your needs, the junkware isn't going to impact you that much anyway. Some models even are upgradable at these prices, but soldered parts do save costs, and you have to accept cost savings if you're buying at the bottom of the market.

Sure, there's some correlation between price and quality, but if you're worried about longevity, 3-4 laptops of questionable quality are likely to last longer than a $1000 laptop anyway. And, screen aside, the 3rd and 4th cheap laptop might end up with better specs than the single quality laptop. If screens are important to you, then that's not going to work, and that's valid; but a lot of people get a fancy hires screen only to run it in 2x mode and push 4x the pixels for a small difference in experience; it's certainly worthwhile for some people, but it doesn't make a big difference to me and many others. In an ideal world, you could pick between screens on a laptop; there's a huge spectrum of screens that meet different needs and wants, but most manufacturers aren't giving options beyond glossy (eww) or matte in a normalish resolution, and on higher priced machines maybe one higher res option with no choice in finish. Sometimes, business oriented laptops will have a couple adjacent sizes available with the same bottom half of the chassis, but that doesn't happen for consumer laptops.

> I still remember the standard advice of buying a Windows consumer laptop was to reinstall the OS after buying it. In what world should that be acceptable? In my accounting, that time and effort spent installing an OS gets added to the price.

A lot of people say a lot of things. Windows works fine out of the box, most of the time. If you want something that values your time, Chrome OS devices are better: works out of the box; cold boots in a couple seconds; no junk (other than google login, but you can run in guest mode if you don't need persistence); updates are done in the background, reboot whenever, none of those long waits at startup to finish stuff like MacOS and Windows. Plus, they start at even lower prices: usually something for $100, something with a mainstream x86 processor around $200.