Best cheap laptops of 2024, tested by Mashable staff
When it comes to shopping for the best cheap laptops, you can do a lot with $ 1,000. (Heck, even $ 500 cuts some mustard nowadays.) But you’ll probably have to make some compromises along the way to stay below that price point.
That doesn’t mean you have to settle for a total clunker that doesn’t tick any of the boxes on your must-have specs list. It just means you have to shop a little smarter than someone with unlimited funds.
That’s where we come in. The Mashable team is constantly reviewing new laptops, and we can recommend several affordable machines for different budgets, operating system loyalties, and use cases based on our hands-on testing.
What is the best cheap laptop?
As of mid-2024, we believe the best cheap MacBook is the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air powered by the previous-generation M2 chip. It’s speedy enough for most people, it’s got a great keyboard, and it starts at $ 999 (though it’s often on sale for less than $ 900). Among Windows PCs, the Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 (Gen 9) is currently the best laptop under $ 1,000 that we’ve tried. It has a newer processor and a good battery life, it doubles as a tablet, and it comes in at a starting price of $ 899.99. We’ve gone deeper on these picks and some other solid options below.
As a final note, we’ve removed the Acer Chromebook 516 GE as a pick because it’s no longer available for purchase anywhere. (It used to be our favorite cheap cloud gaming laptop.) However, Acer recently replaced it with the newer Chromebook Plus 516 GE, which is effectively the same laptop with a newer processor, a darker finish, and some new Gemini AI tools. We can’t fully recommend it just yet because we haven’t finished testing it, but it looks great on paper. We’ll update this story as soon as we publish our full review.
FYI: We’ve listed the pricing and specs of our testing units, which may not apply to each laptop’s base model.
