I bought this a month ago to replace my laptop that I bought in 2012. I did so much research when buying this laptop, going over reviews, researching every little piece of the machine that I didn't know about and understanding how everything worked.
I was a little hesitant when purchasing this laptop because I was not too familiar with the AMD ryzen processors. After doing more research and finding that the AMD ryzen 7 4000 series was actually benchmarking at almost double the ability of the Intel i7 processor did I make up my mind.
Some of the features on the laptop like the full touchscreen display that is also adjustable 360 degrees, the two sticks of 8GB Ram, 512 pcie nvme SSD memory, and again the ryzen 7 4000 series processor is only a handful of the things I enjoy about this laptop. To be honest the manual cutoff for the camera is very convenient and reassuring, the fingerprint reader makes accessing and logging in a Flash, the full-sized backlit keyboard with a 10-key is one of the bigger things I wanted, and one of the most important things is I got the Entire Computer in Nightfall black which was critical because if I don't like the way it looks every time I go to use it I will always have that little bit of regret wishing I could have gotten the computer the way I wanted it to look which I did.
In conclusion, I quite thoroughly enjoy the laptop that I was able to fully customized in so many different ways on this wonderful website. I enjoy every time I use my laptop now and I know that it will last me a very long time tell I need another one.
I was pleasantly surprised with how great this laptop turned out to be! I've found myself using the tablet mode more than I thought I would, and I've even managed to play some rather intense games on it as well. The Ryzen 5 is a great chip, so you have plenty of processing power, and the Radeon Vega is a top notch mobile video card. I've been able to play older games like Counter Strike, Portal, and Minecraft with reasonably good settings without much issue. Larger render distances on Minecraft give it some trouble, but frankly it's much, much better than I expected for the price!
This is an excellent choice for really anyone looking for a new laptop. The touchscreen also supports a stylus, and is really responsive, so it would be great for a work/school purchase as well.
As far as the refurbished condition, mine appeared to be brand new. Everything is flawless, and so far everything has worked as expected. Not even a scratch.
The only downsides to this laptop that I can think of would be weight and sound quality. It's thin but a bit heavy, not excessively so, but if this is for someone young with little hands, or your grandma whose grip isn't so good, that might be an issue. And the speakers are about as expected for laptop speakers - high quality for sure, but lacking depth for bass. Just use some bluetooth headphones or external speakers if you need high quality audio.
Got this last week and it is just what I needed to replace my old HP. Loved being able to customize the laptop to meet my specifications. Quick service, arrived on the date they had estimated to ship it. Loved that!