Besides the old Acer Nitro, I also saw this Samsung Galaxy Book4. It’s not a bad laptop per se, but at $565, there are better options. There’s the Asus VivoBook 14 (or 16), which retails for $650 and sometimes drops to $550. It comes with an 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X, which gives it longer battery life than the Galaxy Book4. There’s also the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X, which has the same chip but comes in at an even cheaper $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 Chromebook recommendations, which I update frequently.
unknown brand
You always know it’s bad when the brand of the laptop is not mentioned in the product title. Oh, you’ve never heard of the well-known, trusted laptop manufacturer Jumper? Or Nemo? Yes, I haven’t either. Still, Amazon thinks it’s fair to recommend these as some of the best laptops.
Like the HP laptops above, these are extremely affordable Windows 11 laptops—all for under $300. The Jumper laptop also suffers from some of the same problems, like eMMC storage and Intel Celeron processors, even though the company at least manages to include a 1080p display. The large touchpad and edge-to-edge keyboard look good too. Still, I would never recommend a laptop that is not from a reputable manufacturer. It’s not that it’s impossible that these laptops could be good, but buying laptops that have no independent reviews is not a good idea.
You’ll also see the Nemo brand popping up specifically on the topic of gaming laptops. Marketing these as gaming laptops is very misleading, as they do not come with discrete graphics cards or any other notable gaming features. This Nemo laptop is no more a gaming device than any other $600 Windows laptop you can buy. You can’t really buy a worthwhile gaming laptop for this price, and these off-brand companies are taking advantage of that fact.
It’s not all bad
There were a few laptops that appeared on page one of the Amazon results that were promising. Amazon tops the 13-inch M4 Apple MacBook Air, which is also our top pick for the best laptop you can buy. Amazon also recommends the Dell 15 laptop, which is a budget device that looks solid. I haven’t tested it myself yet, but it’s a 2025 laptop for $530 that comes with nice features like a 120-Hz refresh rate, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. But that’s really it. The remaining results are filled with sponsored results of varying levels of quality.
Walmart, which has become another popular online laptop retailer, does even worse, appealing to the lowest common denominator. It falls into the same trap as Amazon, offering extremely cheap, old HP laptops priced under $300 and many unknown brands like “RNRUO” and “Coolbee”. The problem is even worse at Walmart; Of the 40 laptops presented on page one, 24 are from these mystery brands, and most of the rest are from HP. It’s a shame really, because Walmart and Amazon both have great deals on some of my favorite laptops, but unless you’re specifically searching or filtering for them, they’re often buried.
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