Are Cheap Laptops Worth it?

Have you ever been browsing online at Amazon, spotted a cheap laptop, and wondered, "Is this thing even worth buying?" Well, we're here to answer that question for you. We bought the cheapest laptops from Walmart, Amazon, Aliexpress, and Target because we were genuinely interested in whether these laptops were even viable for basic use. They seem budget-friendly, but it doesn't matter if they can't even perform basic tasks like watching Netflix on them. Spoiler alert: it was a colossal disaster.

The Shopping Experience

After sorting every laptop by price from cheapest to most expensive, we immediately noticed the abundance of Chromebooks. However, we aimed to find full-fledged laptops, so we filtered these out. Right off the bat, we were left with many laptops that we knew would be useless based on their specs. The most common issue was too little memory or storage, making running any modern program almost impossible. For example, a Tocosy 10.1-inch laptop on Amazon only has 2GB of memory and 32GB of storage. Windows 11's minimum requirements are 4GB of memory and 64GB of storage, so you can't even use the most up-to-date operating system on it.

On top of that, many of the other laptops listed online are essentially the same underlying product with a different name slapped on it. Influencers selling courses on how to get rich on Amazon and other e-commerce platforms have heavily pushed this practice. Find a cheap product overseas, slap your branding on it, mark it up, and sell it locally. This practice of selling cheap garbage online powered by fake reviews and even sponsored search results now plagues many online stores. The Tocosy laptop we mentioned has a before-sale price of $199.99 and has an overall Amazon rating of 3.1, which is average. Despite this, most of the reviews say the laptop is completely unusable.

To ensure the laptops would actually boot, we set our search parameters to have at least 4GB of memory and 64GB of storage and include a full version of Windows for under $200.We also prioritized a screen with at least FHD resolution when possible. Once we narrowed our search, we ended up with four laptops:

• The Dell Latitude E6420 from Walmart, $159

• The Hyundai Hybook from Target, $139

• The A Dreamer Leobook 13 from AliExpress, $169

• The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 from Amazon, $169

We also planned to buy one from Best Buy, but the cheapest laptop there was the IdeaPad 1. We abandoned the purchase because we knew it would be worse than the IdeaPad 3.

Unboxing

Our Dell Latitude was the first to arrive, and upon opening it, we were instantly slapped in the face by the smell of cigarette smoke. The Latitude was a "refurbished" laptop rather than a new one, despite the Walmart seller's page implying it was new. Not only did this laptop smell terrible, it was filthy.

What increased the overall dodginess is that this laptop came with a piece of paper from the seller stating in capital letters, "DO NOT RETURN TO WALMART". It even came with a dedicated tech support phone number. On the back of the page, the seller informed us that they upgraded our laptop for no charge from our 10-year-old model to a minuscule, ever so slightly better 10-year-old model. But, of course, the seller made it sound like a big deal. To summarize, this laptop looks like an old brick with a DVD player and weighs about as much.

At least the rest of the laptops we received were new, but our fun didn't stop there. The Ideapad 3 didn't sit flush on the desk, and it was the only laptop to come with Windows 10 S mode, a simplified version of Windows that only lets you run applications from the Windows Store. However, you can change it to the full version, which we did.

The Hyundai Hybook had a horrific TN panel with dreadful viewing angles. You have to sit directly in front of it if you want to see anything. The Leobook didn't come with a US charger, even though we specifically selected the US version of the laptop. This laptop uses a barrel pin charger, so we couldn't just get a USB-C charger to replace it. To top it all off, none of these laptops even have a USB-C port.

Testing

The Dell Latitude was the fastest of the bunch, which is not saying much. It uses a 10-year-old Intel i5 processor with two cores and four threads. To give you a point of reference regarding how slow this laptop is, it delivered a Geekbench multi-core score of 1,879, far less than a modern low-powered processor would provide with just one single-core. Despite having a semi-decent processor, the laptop's reliance on a mechanical hard drive held back its performance. These hard drives are incredibly slower than modern SSDs for accessing data.

The other laptops have newer processors but are much slower as they are from Intel's Pentium and Celeron range, designed for very low-powered devices. Though not as old as the Latitude's processor, their processors are still 4-8 years old, and their performance is beyond woeful.

To sum up the overall performance, all of these laptops are atrocious. The Leobook took 30 minutes to complete a single run of Geekbench, a test that typically takes 3-5 minutes. It couldn't even play a YouTube video at 480p.

These laptops can only do basic word processing or simplistic website visiting. Any page with complexity is going to grind these laptops to a halt. If you try to do anything more, you are wasting time waiting for the site to respond. Time that, quite frankly, could be spent working to afford a better laptop.

While other aspects of these laptops were also lacking, the performance was the gating issue. The Leobook's screen was surprisingly decent, so it's a shame the performance couldn't deliver.

Conclusion

All four of these laptops are garbage. At this price point, these companies are making products that are nothing but e-waste that will end up in a landfill. Regarding our refurbished Latitude, it's three years past its expiration.

So, even if you or someone you know is shopping on the tightest budget, do not buy a new laptop for under $200. You are flushing your money down the toilet. Here are my recommendations for what you should do instead.

First, save up a little more money if you can. Laptops around the $400 price point are viable and entirely usable. To help you out, we've listed our favorite cheap laptops here.

The second and perhaps most viable option is to look for a secondhand laptop. You'll need to know what to look for in a used laptop to do this. For starters, make sure any secondhand listing includes the computer's specs. Plenty of listings don't detail the specs for several reasons:

• The seller doesn't know.
• The seller doesn't care.
• The specs aren't worth mentioning because they're so weak.

Avoid these outright. The next easiest thing to look for is memory, also known as RAM. If possible, you're looking for 8-16GB to give you the best experience. Next up, and probably most importantly, you must pick something with a reasonable CPU. What we recommend is finding something with an "i" number like "i5" or "i7". "I3" is passable, but you can do better if you keep your eyes peeled. You should also ensure it's 8th generation or newer; a quick Google search here will give you this info. Lastly, you'll want to look at hard drives. If possible, look for the term "SSD," but generally, you get what you get in this price range. Higher numbers are better in terms of storage space.

The third option is buying a tablet, like a cheap Android or a refurbished iPad. You can get a Bluetooth keyboard for the tablet to help you feel like you are using a laptop. For those simply browsing the web or working on office documents, tablets will provide a better overall experience than buying a laptop in this price range.

The fourth option is kind of cool. If you have a Samsung phone, you could buy a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and run Samsung DeX. This essentially turns your phone into a desktop computer with capabilities similar to a Chromebook. With this setup, you can comfortably browse the web, work on Office documents, and use Android apps. If you want to be portable, there are portable monitors you can buy instead of desktop ones.

And lastly, Chromebooks. Yes, you could buy one in this price range. But they are based on the same hardware as the cheap laptops we purchased. Even though Chrome OS runs better on low-powered hardware, it will still be a rough experience.