Beyond the outdated Acer Nitro, I also spotted this Samsung Galaxy Book4. This is not a terrible laptop on its own, but at $565, there are better options. There’s the Asus Vivobook 14 (or 16), which costs $650 and occasionally dips down to $550. It comes with the 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X, providing it with much more battery life than the Galaxy Book4. There’s also the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X, which has the same chip but comes in even cheaper at $584.
If you want great deals on laptops that are actually worth buying, check out our Best Budget Laptops, Best Budget Gaming Laptops, and Best Chromebooks recommendations, which I frequently update.
Unknown Brands
You always know it’s bad when the brand of the laptop isn’t mentioned in the title of the product. Oh, you’ve never heard of the well-known, reliable laptop manufacturer Jumper? Or Nimo? Yeah, I haven’t either. Yet, Amazon seems to think these are appropriate to recommend as some of the best laptops.
Like the HP laptops above, these are extremely cheap Windows 11 laptops—all under $300. The Jumper laptop suffers from some of the same problems, such as the eMMC storage and Intel Celeron processor, even if the company at least manages to include a 1080p display. The large touchpad and edge-to-edge keyboard look nice, too. Yet, I would never recommend a laptop that isn’t from a reputable manufacturer. It’s not that it’s impossible that these laptops could be decent, but buying some that have almost no independent reviews isn’t a good idea.
You’ll also see the brand Nimo pop up, specifically around the topic of gaming laptops. Marketing these as gaming laptops is very misleading, as they don’t come with a discrete graphics card—or any other notable gaming features. This Nimo laptop is no more a gaming device than any other $600 Windows laptop you can buy. You can’t actually buy a worthwhile gaming laptop for this much, and these off-brand companies are preying on that fact.
It’s Not All Bad
There are a couple of laptops that appeared on page one of the Amazon results that were promising. Amazon put the 13-inch M4 Apple MacBook Air high up, which is also our top pick for the best laptop you can buy. Amazon also recommended the Dell 15 Laptop, which is a budget device that looks solid. I haven’t tested it yet myself, but it’s a 2025 laptop for $530 that comes with decent specs, such as a 120-Hz refresh rate, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage. But that’s really it. The rest of the results are flooded with sponsored results of varying degrees of quality.
Walmart, which has become another popular online laptop retailer, does an even worse job, appealing to the lowest common denominator. It falls into the same traps as Amazon, surfacing ultra-cheap, outdated HP laptops under $300, and tons of unknown knock-off brands like “RNRUO” and “Coolby.” This problem is even worse at Walmart; 24 out of the 40 laptops offered on page one are from these mystery brands, and most of the rest are from HP. It’s really a shame, as Walmart and Amazon both have great deals on some of my favorite laptops, but they’re often buried unless you’re specifically searching or filtering for them.
Source: www.wired.com
