Credit:
Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
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Credit:
Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
Reviewed's mission is to help you buy the best stuff and get the most out of what you already own. Our team of product experts thoroughly vet every product we recommend to help you cut through the clutter and find what you need.
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Lenovo's IdeaPad Flex 5i wrings plenty of performance out of its Intel Core i5-1335U—and its responsive touchscreen makes it a great "budget" 2-in-1. Read More
The Acer Swift 3 is perfect for portable productivity but is plagued by bloatware and too few ports. Read More
The Acer Nitro 5 may be a budget PC, but it gets the details right on the hardware and the design. Read More
The new MacBook Air looks like business as usual, but its unbelievable battery life and powerful new M1 processor blew us away. Read More
The Acer Chromebook 516 GE is a gaming-focused device that has more to offer than a standard Chromebook, like a high refresh rate display. Read More
The best budget laptops often come with minimal drive space, memory, and slow processors. You won’t be able to use them to run graphically-intensive games—but for giving your kids access to the web, sending a teen off to college, or for you to stay up to date with your family, a budget laptop could be an ideal purchase.
We’re always testing a mix of Windows laptops, MacBooks, and Chromebooks to find you the best options that will stretch your budget the furthest. Our top pick currently is the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i, (available at Lenovo) an incredibly well-rounded, 2-in-1 laptop for its hardware specs and feature set.
The Acer Chromebook is secure, fast, up-to-date, versatile, and simple. With thousands of apps, built-in virus protection and cloud backups.
Sturdy, stylish chassis
Good performance
Good battery life
Mediocre display
Bloatware
Sturdy and functional design
Great battery life
Competitive pricing
Mediocre performance
Only two Thunderbolt ports
Webcam and microphone don’t impress
Stylish chassis
Great performance
Useful features
Dull, muddy screen
Loud when gaming
Poor webcam
Stunning display
Snappy performance
Exceptional interfaces
Gets toasty
RAM constrained for heavy multitasking
Excellent 120Hz display
Snappy processor
Lots of useful ports
Middling graphics performance
Limited native game compatibility
We use a standardized set of tests to assess each laptop we lay our hands on.
We test the overall usability of the laptop: screen quality, performance, the keyboard and trackpad, battery life, storage read and write speeds and other factors.
Because the laptops in this guide are mostly designed for running web applications like Google Docs, we utilize the web-based benchmarks Basemark and Speedometer in Google Chrome. We also test with Geekbench 6 and 3DMark to compare processing and graphics power to other productivity laptops.
We run our display tests with a colorimeter like the SpyderX or X-Rite i1Display Studio—small, plug-and-play USB devices that measure luminance and color accuracy. We measure max brightness, the white levels, and black levels at max brightness and then again at 50% brightness.
We test the battery life of each laptop to see how long you can use them between charges. With their displays adjusted to a brightness of 200 nits, we set them to continuously cycle through popular websites, simulating the way you would use the laptop when idly browsing the web.
A little bit of knowledge can help you make a better laptop buying decision.
Cheap laptops are usually equipped with low-end processors, memory, storage, displays, and keyboards—all in the name of providing consumers with the lowest-priced laptop possible. Laptops that sell in the price range covered by this guide are still more than adequate for completing many tasks.
Their processors are fast enough to provide a smooth web browsing experience. Using Google Docs or creating simple documents in Microsoft Word or Excel are reasonable asks of laptops under $500 and even laptops under $1,000. But if you have a bit more space in your budget, many of the laptops on this list have mid-range or higher-end models if you need something with faster performance.
As you compare Windows and Mac laptops to Chromebooks, you’ll notice that the budget laptops running ChromeOS are snappier than their full operating system counterparts. This is because ChromeOS was built from a lightweight framework that takes a minuscule amount of processing power to run in comparison to Windows or macOS.
ChromeOS’s seamless integration with the Google Cloud services allows it to take advantage of Google’s powerful suite of productivity tools and platforms, such as Docs, Sheets, YouTube, Stadia, and the Play Store. There is very little you can’t accomplish without a simple web browser these days.
What Windows and macOS offer over ChromeOS is compatibility with many legacy apps. You can download Microsoft Office on ChromeOS these days, but if you want to use something like Scrivener, you’d have to have Windows or macOS.
For budget laptops, the most important hardware is the central processor (CPU), the working memory (RAM), and the storage (SSD) capacity.
Intel’s Pentium line or AMD’s A6 chips are adequately powerful, although you’ll get the snappiest performance out of entry-level mainline processors, like the Intel Core i3 and Core i5 chips or the AMD Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 chips.
8GB is the sweet spot for RAM since this gives the computer enough memory to run more than one program at once. 4GB can work on ChromeOS laptops but don’t expect that small amount to handle a lot of multitasking at once.
You’ll want at least 128GB of storage space on a Chromebook and 256GB of storage space on a Windows laptop for optimal performance, but you can usually expand your storage space with microSD cards and external storage drives.
Adrien is a staff writer for Reviewed, mainly focused on reviewing laptops and other consumer tech. During his free time, he's usually wandering around Hyrule.
Joanna specializes in anything and everything gaming-related and loves nerding out over graphics cards, processors, and chip architecture. Previously she was a staff writer for Gizmodo, PC Gamer, and Maximum PC.
Our team is here for one purpose: to help you buy the best stuff and love what you own. Our writers, editors, and lab technicians obsess over the products we cover to make sure you're confident and satisfied. Have a different opinion about something we recommend? Email us and we'll compare notes.
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