Yeah, when you buy it for your work without paying taxes on it, you also don't get the consumer benefits. At least that's how it works in NL: if you buy it as a work necessity, you don't pay BTW/VAT/GST on it, but then you indeed don't get the 14 day "I changed my mind" period and I don't know how it works with the standard 2-year warranty.

In general though...

> If the laptop is outright terrible, but not technically _broken_

Then it depends on whether it is as advertised or, if a certain feature was not specified, as one may reasonably expect. In an extreme example, a washing machine that turns out to play annoying music while running is not as one should expect; or if it was advertised that it would play music but it doesn't... Finally, it depends on whether you talked to the merchant. Anything they said can be seen as "as advertised", though of course anything not in writing would be hard to prove.

So it depends on what you mean by "terrible". It sounds to me like you mean something worse than some annoyances or that it's a good laptop but doesn't fit your purpose (assuming that that the merchant did not claim it would do well for your purpose, if you explained your use case to them). You might have a case there, if you tell them as soon as you become aware of the defect(s).

Of course, there are also merchants that are simply nice and will let you exchange it for a product of similar value. I had that with my most recent laptop: in hindsight, I should just not have let the 14 days expire and I should have returned it without strings attached. (It was good hardware and I told myself that, with enough time and customization, I'd be able to work on Windows again since the Linux drivers didn't work at all. But after 3.5 weeks I was absolutely done with Windows.) I asked the merchant and they let me exchange it, but their laptop selection was limited (as with any store), and while I now got something I'm not perfectly happy with, it's still a lot better than the thing I initially had.