Best laptop under $500 for 2021 – CNET [CNET]

March 7, 2021 Thomas Giboney technology

Looking for the best laptop under $500 for Windows or Chrome OS (also known as a Chromebook)? The supply of cheap notebooks dried up when it hit parents that their kids weren’t going back to school anytime soon, and we’re past the hump since the height of the initial coronavirus-induced work-from-home rush, when PC and accessory sales spiked. But with the grim reality of unprecedented job losses, the demand for a budget laptop and other ultracheap hardware remains strong. Though it can also be a perfect time to find seasonal laptop deal bargains.

Here’s a list of laptops available for under $500 that should ship within at least 10 days. Keep in mind, though, that availability and shipping times may depend on where you live. I live in New York, so my recommendations may be based on a best-case scenario.

Think long-term

As a rule of thumb, resist buying out of desperation — don’t spend $500 on a laptop because there are no cheaper ones available, for example. Buying a need-it-now laptop can be like shopping for food while hungry. Even for a laptop, $500 can be a lot of money, and you’ll likely be holding onto it for at least three years, if the statistics Intel and PC manufacturers hurl at us are correct.

You can also try to make your current laptop last a little longer. If you just need something to tide you over for a few months, dig into possible places to buy refurbished machines, and explore nonprofit or educational discounts if you’re eligible. Also, if there’s something you really want in a laptop, like a touch screen, backlit keyboard or HDMI port, definitely look for something with that feature. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

If you suspect you’ll be holding onto your new laptop a while, see if you can stretch your budget to buy a slightly more expensive laptop to accommodate a little more memory or a processor with more cores than you were otherwise considering. If you haven’t thought about it, look at AMD Ryzen processors as alternatives to Intel Core.

Even better, if you’re comfortable with it, think about an affordable laptop with a replaceable battery, or upgradable memory, graphics card and storage, or all of the above. Furthermore, you won’t be stuck at home forever. Remember to consider whether having a lighter-weight laptop with good battery life will be important to you in the future.

You can always add an external drive or two (or five, if you’re me) at some point down the road. But if your internal storage is the type of slow-spinning hard drive that comes in a lot of cheap laptop models, even fast external storage is unlikely to help speed up loading Windows or applications. (You can frequently set a system to boot from an external solid-state drive if necessary.)

You may see references to “Intel Optane” in conjunction with slow (5,400rpm) spinning hard drives; Optane is fast solid-state memory that acts as a temporary storage space for frequently accessed files on the hard drive to speed things up. It helps, but not as much as an SSD drive.

And finally, if you’re replacing an old Windows laptop that’s just not up to running Windows anymore, consider turning it into a Chromebook.

Trade-offs

As long as you manage your expectations when it comes to options and specs, you can still get quite a bit from a budget laptop model, including good battery life and a reasonably lightweight laptop body.

A bright spot is you don’t have to settle for a traditional clamshell laptop with a fixed display and keyboard. You can also get a convertible laptop (otherwise known as a two-in-one), which has a screen that flips around to turn the screen into a tablet, to position it for comfortable streaming or to do a presentation. Keep in mind that all convertibles have a touch screen, which is a prerequisite for tablet operation, and many support styluses (aka “pens”) for handwritten and sketched input. Don’t assume a stylus is included with it, though.

One thing you won’t find at these prices: a MacBook or any other Apple laptop. Even an iPad Air tablet will run you more than $500 once you buy the optional keyboard (though if you look for sales on the tablet or keyboard it might work out to less), which is above our budget here. A base-model iPad with an inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard and cheap stand for the iPad might suffice, though.

You’ll see a lot of cheap laptops listed as coming with Windows 10 S, a stripped-down and locked-down version of the operating system intended for use by schools — it only allows you to install applications from the Windows Store, forces you to use Microsoft’s Edge browser and includes a subset of the administrative tools in Windows 10 Pro. You can upgrade to the full version for free, though.

It’s easier to find inexpensive Chromebooks than Windows laptops, making it one of the most popular categories of budget laptop on the market, though we’re also seeing a lot more Chromebooks in the $500-to-$1,000 range. That’s because Google’s Chrome OS isn’t nearly as power-hungry as Windows (check the specs), so you can get by with a lower-end processor, slower storage and less screen resolution or memory — just a few of the components that make a laptop expensive.

Read more: Best Chromebooks for 2021

But the flip side is that while Chrome OS isn’t as power-hungry as Windows, Chrome and Google apps are unfortunately more of a memory hog than you’d expect, and if you go too low with the processor or skimp on memory, the system will still feel slow. Chrome OS is also a much different experience than Windows; make sure the applications you need have a Chrome app before making the leap.

Lenovo’s Duet Chromebook is part laptop, part Android tablet

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Since they’re cloud-first devices, however, you don’t need a lot of storage built in. That also means if you spend most of your time roaming the web, writing, streaming video or playing Android games, they’re a good fit. If you hope to play Android games, make sure you get a touchscreen laptop model.

For a cheap gaming laptop, though, you’ll still have to break the $500 ceiling to support most games. The least expensive budget laptops suitable for a solid gaming performance experience — those with even moderately powerful discrete graphics processors — will run you closer to $700. Here are our recommendations if you’re looking for the best gaming laptop.

Although, if you like to live on the bleeding edge, cloud gaming services such as Google Stadia and Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will let you play games on laptops with specs that hit the under-$500 mark.

Specs to keep in mind

While Chromebooks can run Chrome OS-specific and Android apps, some people need the full Windows operating system to run heftier applications, such as video editing suites. With that comes a need for a faster processor with more cores, more memory — 8GB is the bare minimum — and more storage for applications and the operating system itself. A lot of these have 4GB or 6GB, which in conjunction with a spinning hard disk can make for a frustratingly slow Windows experience as well.

I’m seeing a lot of Windows laptops in this range use AMD Athlon and lower-end A series and Intel Celeron processors to hit the lower price. I don’t really recommend going with an Athlon instead of a Ryzen or a Celeron instead of a Core: Windows is just too heavy for them, and in conjunction with the 4GB memory a lot of them have, you may find them abysmally slow at best.
Because of their low prices, 11-inch Chromebooks are attractive. But we don’t recommend that size for any but the youngest students. And for remote learning, if you’re both going to be looking at the screen frequently, 11 inches can get really cramped.
SSDs can make a big difference in how fast Windows performance feels compared with a spinning hard disk, but they also push the price up. So if your budget can stretch a little and you want more storage, you may want to consider stepping up from base storage options to a 128GB SSD.
In the budget price range you have to watch out for screen terminology when it comes to specs: an “HD” screen may not always be a truly high-definition screen. HD, which has a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels, is sometimes called “Full HD” so marketers can refer to lesser-resolution displays (1,280×720 pixels) as HD. In Chromebooks, HD usually refers to a screen with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. Another frequent complaint I see is about “washed-out” looking displays with poor viewing angles. Unfortunately, that’s one of the trade-offs you’ve got to live with; a lot of these use TN (twisted nematic) screen technology, which is cheap but meh.
Pay attention to networking. Inexpensive models with older chipsets may only support Wi-Fi 3 (or 802.11b/g/n). Wi-Fi 3 is limited to 2.4GHz channels; those are slower than more recent chipsets with Wi-Fi 4 (aka 802.11ac) that add a 5GHz channel as well. The specifications aren’t always correct on the shopping sites, so if you see a model that doesn’t seem to have Wi-Fi 4, double-check on the manufacturer’s site before ruling it out. Remember, Chromebooks are designed to work predominantly over the internet, so Wi-Fi speed and stability are crucial.

Considering all specs and options — battery life, storage space, screen resolution, screen size, core processor performance and general machine and battery performance — these are a few of our top picks for 2021’s best Windows laptops and Chromebooks under the $500 budget, along with their pros and cons.