HP were known for carrying Intel's Itanium business, for which few tech people have nostalgia for (the second hand market prices have always been eye-watering too), compared to the older PA-RISC line.
I'll agree their consumer/business laptops were always been perfectly usable and long lasting. I dumpster dived an excellent condition pentium 3 laptop from a HP Office that was probably thrown out because of a password locked BIOS (which was not resettable by battery removal, only by getting access to someone who had the bios password serial->keygen tool). It was a great daily driver with Debian, and wifi worked fine with ndiswrapper.
Despite originally saying it was a perk of graduation, mine ended cutting access after 10 years by citing cost saving (I imagine Google Workspace bills add up quickly, compared to self-hosting email). I wouldn't be surprised if this is the trend now.