As tariffs come for tech, these are the best budget laptops weve tested

We reviewed the best budget laptops for students, gaming, and everyday productivity, including the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air (M4).

May 17, 2025 - 11:34

As tariffs come for tech, these are the best budget laptops weve tested

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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.

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.