In context to education do you really think they're going to use anything other than the OOB configuration?

Oh and the Lenovo T400 I bought last week (Core 2, 2.4, 8Gb RAM, Radeon HD, 128Gb Samsung 840 pro) lasts 8 hours only cost $25 more and doesn't break if you cough near it.

I don't get the value proposition.

Where can you get a bunch of outdated Thinkpads with custom hardware installed (in my experience, the T400 released four years ago doesn't come with a 128GB Samsung SSD) for that price? How would a school district go about buying a thousand of these off-market, custom-modified laptops?

UK IT brokers have hundreds of them if not thousands floating around. Mine wasn't even used. SSD costs more than the unit. It doesn't take a genius to source that quantity.

HOwever, the school district should buy a pile of shit dell desktops and bolt them to the desks like they probably did before rather than succumb to a low priced promotional Trojan.

Someone probably gets a promotion for saving the cash but do they realise how inflexible the machine is and how tied onto the vendors' platform it is.

Selling out is the only description.

It's also a machine the kids can't screw up and takes next to no IT resources to administer. Unlike a shit Dell bolted to a desk.