Overview
Table of Contents
When it comes to shopping for the best budget laptops, you can do a lot for less than $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 with different operating systems and use cases, and we recommend several budget-friendly options that meet most, if not all of our performance, battery life, and build quality standards.
Our top picks
As of May 2025, we believe the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air powered by the M4 chip is the best cheap MacBook for most people. It’s seriously speedy, super quiet, equipped with a nice new camera, and priced at an almost unfathomable $999 to start.
Among Windows PCs, the Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 (Gen 9) is the best budget pick we’ve tried. It has a peppy processor and a good battery life, it doubles as a tablet, and it starts at $899.99.
Read on for Mashable’s in-depth guide to the best budget laptops of 2025. FYI: We’ve listed the pricing and specs of our testing units, which may not apply to each laptop’s base model.
Our Pick
The Good & The Bad
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Lightweight and thin
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Sooo speedy and quiet
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Bright display
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Battery lasts a full workday
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12MP Center Stage camera
- Great price
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Could use more ports
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Still has a 60Hz refresh rate
- New sky blue color is basically just a new shade of gray
We haven’t put it through the full paces of our testing process just yet, but we’re comfortable giving it a spot on this guide based on our time with the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air, which has two extra speakers, a slightly higher-resolution display, and a 10-core GPU instead of an eight-core GPU. Mashable Senior Editor Stan Schroeder called it “impressively powerful” while noting how quiet it ran; it got a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 14,992, which is one of the highest in our testing database. (It’s faster than many more expensive laptops.) I don’t expect the 13-incher’s score to be that much different. For reference, PCMag‘s CPU benchmarking for the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air resulted in a multi-core score of 15,048.
The 13-inch Air comes with the same new 12MP FaceTime camera as the 15-inch model, which now supports Apple’s zooming Center Stage feature. Schroeder called it a “big upgrade” compared to the 1080p webcam on his daily driver, an older 16-inch MacBook Pro — “the image is sharper, a bit brighter, and more detailed,” he writes. Its other notable upgrade is added open-lid support for two external displays, meaning you can still use its own screen even when it’s hooked up to monitors.
Looks-wise, this is the same MacBook Air we’ve had since the M2 era. (There is a new sky blue colorway, but it’s very subtle.) It could still use some more ports and a bump to its 60Hz refresh rate, said Schroeder. Still, he wound up rating it a 4.5/5 overall, helping it clinch our Mashable Choice Award.
Details
The Good & The Bad
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Fast performance
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Runs cool
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Great keyboard
- Decent battery life
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Hinges should be stronger
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Muted and dim display
- Finicky trackpad
When you get down to nitty-gritty design details, the Yoga 7i feels a little hit or miss. Its keyboard is “well-spaced and enjoyably springy,” Chaney wrote, with adjustable backlighting and a built-in Copilot key that pulls up Microsoft’s AI assistant. But its trackpad was laggy in testing. Its hybrid form factor gives it versatility, but its hinges aren’t super strong and its display is a bit dim. It has a good selection of ports, but we wish its USB-C ports weren’t restricted to one side. Still, those cons could be put-up-withable for $900 if all you really care about is excellent performance. If it helps, we’ve seen it drop down to a mere $549.99 at Best Buy before.
Details
The Good & The Bad
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Large and colorful anti-glare display
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Stylish metallic finish
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Runs cool and quiet
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Useful ‘Plus’ software features
- Numeric keypad
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Easily scratched
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Touchpad and keyboard take some getting used to
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Unimpressive webcam
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Muffled speakers
- Poor battery life
The Chromebook Plus 15.6 was easily able to carry me through my daily workload, which involves a lot of browsing, document writing, and email sending. (While its Geekbench 6 multi-core score is far from impressive, you don’t need a ton of built-in oomph: ChromeOS is all about the cloud.) After hours, it made a nice portable entertainment device for movie-watching and cloud gaming when my household’s TV was occupied — shoutout to its huge 1080p display, which is colorful and glare-free. It is made of plastic, but it feels sturdy and durable… though I somehow nicked its lid at one point during my testing period. (It literally just sat on a desk or a table the whole time. I’ve got nothing.)
As a Chromebook Plus, this laptop is equipped with some useful AI tools you won’t find in regular Chromebooks, including Google Photos Magic Eraser and video call effects. I don’t think they’re revolutionary, but they’re nice surprises in such a cheap machine.
Details
The Good & The Bad
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Sleek design with a cool, futuristic look
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Good power for the price
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Runs cool
- Quiet keyboard
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Lousy battery life
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720p webcam
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Dim display
- Fingerprint magnet
Acer has made some noteworthy trade-offs to offer that level of oomph at this price point, namely in the realms of display quality (it’s not bright or vivid) and extra fixings (there’s no RGB keyboard or 1080p webcam). Its pathetically short battery life also means it’ll set up permanent shop on your desk — preferably with a microfiber cloth at the ready nearby, as it clings to fingerprints with a passion.
Details
The Good & The Bad
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Long battery life
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Nice 120Hz display
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Satisfying backlit keyboard
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Solid performance
- Cloud gaming is mostly smooth
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Hefty
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Weird lid design
- Refresh rate can’t be turned down
When it comes to game-streaming capabilities, the Chromebook Plus 516 GE left Mashable’s Perry “fairly impressed.” He experienced some input latency when playing titles via Xbox Game Pass, but hardly noticed any video buffering or stuttering. (Games looked the best when streamed via Nvidia GeForce Now’s Ultimate tier, he said.) Though Perry said he’d never swap it for his gaming consoles or Steam Deck, he called the Chromebook Plus 516 GE “an incredible value” and an “excellent” pick for anyone who’s into game streaming. “If you want to cheat your way into sort of having a high-end gaming laptop, this is a way to do it,” he wrote.
Next time around, Acer should just make it less clunky, clean up its lid design — the half matte/half gloss thing is “awkward,” per Perry — and give users the ability to turn its refresh rate down. That’ll preserve its battery life when it’s not being used for gaming.
Details
You can’t judge a laptop by its appearance or advertised specs alone. As such, Mashable utilizes a rigorous hands-on testing process to review and recommend the best laptops to our readers, drawing upon takeaways from real-world usage and the results of industry-standard benchmarks. We record the findings of our testing in a rubric, and each laptop gets scored on a five-point scale on the basis of performance, design/build quality, battery life, and value. Read our full laptop testing methodology.
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Performance: The laptops we review get put to work as our primary computers. This includes trying any unique software or use cases they support. We also subject all of our loaners to a multi-app/tab stress test and Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6, which measures CPU performance in common tasks. Gaming laptops get put through additional graphical benchmarking.
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Design/build quality: As we’re using a laptop, we zero in on certain components to evaluate its build quality. These include the display, keyboard, touchpad, webcam, speakers, and ports. We also assess its overall aesthetic and portability.
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Battery life: To gauge a laptop’s stamina, we conduct a battery rundown test that involves playing a looped 1080p version of Tears of Steel, a short open-source Blender movie, at 50 percent brightness and 50 percent volume. Ideally, we hope to get at least 16.5 hours of battery life from MacBooks, 9 hours from Windows laptops and Chromebooks, and one hour from gaming laptops. (They’re notoriously power-hungry.)
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Value: We determine the ultimate value of a laptop by comparing its performance, design/build quality, and battery life to other laptops with similar pricing, specs, release dates, and use cases. We consider any accessories it comes with, any upgrades from its predecessor(s), and its future-proofing.
A note about tariffs
President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported Chinese goods have made a mess of the tech market, causing several manufacturers to raise their laptop prices over the past few weeks. (The Trump administration recently moved to exempt laptops from some of its tariff plans, but that will probably change soon.) This is bad news for budget shoppers, according to our sister site PCMag, which reports that cheap laptops stand to see the most dramatic impact from tariffs.
None of the laptops that are currently featured in this guide have been affected by tariffs, but one model we have in hand for testing, the Asus ZenBook A14, has gotten $100 more expensive since launch because of them. We’ll take this into account as we decide whether it’s a new top pick: “Value” is one of our four big testing metrics.
Other cheap laptops on our radar
We have the latest Intel-powered Framework Laptop 13 on deck for testing. While it comes in just over our “budget” threshold of $1,000 when purchased prebuilt (the DIY Edition starts at $899), the fact that it’s upgradable and repairable makes it seem like a solid long-term value. We were big fans of an older version.
We’ll also soon review two sub-$1,000 Asus laptops. One is the aforementioned Asus ZenBook A14, which features an OLED display, a neutral-toned chassis made out of a durable yet lightweight material called “Ceraluminum,” and an advertised battery life of up to 32 hours. (We briefly tried it in Asus’ private showroom at CES 2025, and it left us extremely impressed.) The other is the Asus ZenBook S 15, a second-gen Copilot+ PC with a Snapdragon X Plus processor, a 3K OLED display, and an RGB keyboard. They start at $999.99 and $899.99, respectively.
What no longer makes the cut
We removed the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 from this list in May 2025, as it feels too overpriced and outdated to recommend for 2025 buyers. Plus, a (seemingly) better option is on the horizon: Microsoft just announced a new 13-inch Surface Laptop that starts at $899.99. It’s set for release on May 20.
Frequently Asked Questions
Certain times of the year are better for laptop shopping than others. If you’re looking for a good deal on a laptop, we recommend buying around Black Friday, during back-to-school season (with a close watch on Amazon’s Prime Day sale), and over long holiday weekends. If you’re just after brand-new models with the latest specs, bargains be damned, you’ll see them hitting the market in January and February after the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
For more intel and buying tips, check out our guide to when you should buy a laptop.
Haley Henschel is a Chicago-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable who reviews and finds deals on popular tech, from laptops to gaming consoles and VPNs. She has years of experience covering shopping holidays and can tell you what’s actually worth buying on Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day. Her work has also explored the driving forces behind digital trends within the shopping sphere, from dupes to 12-foot skeletons.
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