There are plenty of models under $1,000 on the market at any given time, and most of those are under $500. As long as you manage your expectations in terms of options and specifications, you can still get a little out of a budget laptop model, including good battery life and a reasonably lightweight laptop body. (If you’re replacing an old Windows laptop that can no longer run Windows, consider replacing it with a Chromebook.)
Price
If the figures being thrown around by Intel and PC manufacturers are correct, you’ll be stuck with this laptop for at least three years so don’t give up if you can’t stretch your budget a bit for better specs.
Better yet, consider a laptop with a replaceable battery (if you can’t find one), upgradeable memory (although memory is often sold on the motherboard), a graphics card and storage space, or all of the above. When you do, draw on user reviews and comments to get people’s experience on improving a particular model. Sometimes they require proprietary components or require access to hard-to-reach areas of the system.
Of course cheap gaming laptopyou’ll still have to break the $500 ceiling to support multiple games. Inexpensive budget laptops suitable for a solid gaming experience — those with discrete graphics processors with limited power — will run you closer to $700. Here are our recommendations if you’re looking for the best gaming laptop under $1,000. If you like to stay on the bleeding edge, cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate’s Cloud Gaming will let you play games on laptops with specifications that come under the $500 mark.
A bright spot you don’t have to let go of a clamshell laptop with a fixed display and keyboard. You can also find a convertible laptop (also known as a two-in-one), which has a flip-up screen to turn the screen into a tablet, standing it up for comfortable streaming or giving a presentation.
You can also try to make your laptop last longer. If you need something to last you a few months, dig into places where you might buy refurbished equipment and check for non-profit or educational discounts if you qualify.
Windows, Mac or Chromebook
You won’t find cheaper prices for a MacBook laptop or any other Apple laptop. At best you can get the current entry-level MacBook Air model for $999. If it’s on sale, you might be able to get it for less than that but it will never reach true “budget” territory. Even an iPad will run more than $500 once you buy the optional keyboard (though it may run less if you look at sales for a tablet or keyboard), which is well beyond our budget here. A base model iPad with a cheap Bluetooth keyboard and a cheap iPad stand may be enough.
It’s easier to find cheaper Chromebooks than cheaper Windows laptops, making them some of the most popular budget laptops on the market, although we see more Chromebooks in the $500-to-$1,000 range and more Windows laptops in the $500 range. Those Windows systems are often recycled Chromebooks that can’t run Windows properly.
Google’s ChromeOS isn’t nearly as power-hungry as Windows, so you can live with a lower-end processor, slower storage and less screen resolution or RAM; several components that make a laptop expensive. The flip side is Chrome and Google apps are more of a memory hog than you’d expect, and if you go too low on the processor or skip the memory, the system will still feel slow.
While Chromebooks can run ChromeOS and Android-specific apps, some people need the full Windows OS to run heavy-duty apps, such as video editing suites. With that comes the need for a faster processor with more cores, more memory — 8GB RAM is the minimum, though 16GB is preferred — and more storage for apps and the operating system itself.
ChromeOS is also a very different experience than Windows; make sure the apps you need have a Chrome app, an Android app or a Linux app before making the change. Since Chromebooks are cloud-first devices, you don’t need a lot of built-in storage.
That also means that if you spend most of your time surfing the web, writing, streaming video or playing Android games, it’s a good fit. If you hope to play Android games, make sure you get a touchscreen Chromebook.
The size
Keep in mind whether having a light, thin laptop or a touchscreen laptop with good battery life will be important to you in the future. The size is determined by the screen, which also changes the size of the battery, the thickness of the computer and the weight.
Portable laptops, usually 13 inches or smaller, are rarely under $700. Turns out, smaller doesn’t always equal cheaper. Generally, you will find budget laptops in 14-, 15.6- and 17.3-inch sizes. Also, because of their low prices, 11.6-inch Chromebooks are attractive. We do not recommend that size for any but very young readers.
In the budget price range, you should be careful with screen names when it comes to text: An “HD” screen may not necessarily be a high-definition screen. HD, with a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels, is called “Full HD” so advertisers may refer to displays with a lower resolution (1,280×720 pixels) as HD. For Chromebooks, HD usually means a screen with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. On the other hand, the boom in 14-inch laptops comes down to this price range, allowing more FHD options in that size.
A common complaint we see is about “washed out” displays with poor viewing angles. Unfortunately, that’s another trade-off: Most of these use TN (twisted nematic) screen technology, which is cheap but meh. Look for IPS (in-plane switching) LCDs for better viewing angles, brightness and color.
Processor, memory and storage
Most Windows laptops on this list use AMD Athlon and A series or Intel Celeron and Pentium processors to hit the low prices. We don’t recommend going with an Athlon instead of a Ryzen or a Celeron/Pentium instead of a Core: Windows is too heavy for them, and with the 4GB of memory most have, you might find them too slow.
SSDs can make a huge difference in how fast Windows runs compared to a spinning hard disk, although thankfully older hard disks are becoming increasingly rare. Not all SSDs are equally fast and cheap laptops often have slower drives. If you need to go with a smaller drive — they usually come out at 256GB in this price range — you can always add an external drive or two (or five, for some of us) at some point down the road or use cloud storage to back up the smaller internal drive.
For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB is the absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data of the currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly (for example, right now Chrome is taking up 7GB of my memory). After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slow. Most laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which combined with a slow disk makes for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, most laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Many manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, it is sold and cannot be upgraded. Some PC makers will open up the memory and leave an empty internal slot for adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or get the full specifications of the laptop to confirm.
