Buying Sub $500 Laptops in 2026 (Beware)

the struggle of explaining to family members why their $300 laptop is unusable is real

His uncle might be better off buying an used Thinkpad from tiny raccoon like fingers, one and only the Greatest Technician that's ever live...

Budget laptops have to make compromises somewhere. Personally I would not settle for the CPU and RAM configs that I’m seeing.

the intel n100 is great for a router, but putting it in a daily driver laptop is a hate crime

at this point buying a refurbished 5-year-old thinkpad is genuinely a smarter choice

just get a refurbished ThinkPad

Used business class laptops looking better than ever

The MacBook neo

128GB NVMEs? I put my 256GB Samsung drive in a portable enclosure and installed Medicat on it because I thought it was too small for anything else but a portable diagnostics suite.

MacBook Neo beats pretty much everything in this category. And a used MacBook Pro probably beats the MacBook Neo.

You know the laptop and pc markets look bad when macs look good

128GB SSD in 2026 means windows updates will literally take up 90% of your storage on day one

Hey Zach, The ThinkPad series are great honestly, some of their budget options are great especially in countries outside of the USA. Although the highest end ones are slightly over the budget compared to others they're pretty reasonable in today's market.

You let out a little spit mid sentence there 🫪

the struggle of explaining to family members why their $300 laptop is unusable is real ..

An Celeron and 4GB of ram with Windows 11 is the very popular option for budget laptops. And terrible.

Honestly your best bet is probably a macbook neo with the student discount

I got a Dell 14 pro Premium for like 500 bucks from my uncle who used to run a business and ordered many of those laptops in bulk directly from the suppliers amd btw the laptop i got is new and sealed in box and its the max config one with Intel core ultra 7 cpu and 32 ram, 512 gigs of storage but sadly not the oled one but the 2.5k ips version and this is a huge upgrade for me as i upgraded from 15 year old pc (did i win guys?)

Me over here just chillin with 8gigs In a "gaming laptop"

I’m sure everyone is screaming: NEO!!!!!!