The hidden costs of cheap laptops: Why your $300 deal could cost you more in the long run

My Acer Aspire E 15 carried me for years throughout college, so let it be known that I cherish the best budget laptops. However, sometimes, a deal that seems too good to be true actually is too good to be true.

I recently reviewed the Acer Aspire 3 15, which is on sale for a little over $300 and hits nearly all of the notes we expect a budget laptop, both good and bad. However, the key it missed was battery life.

I once made it my mission to tell you that budget laptops do not need to sacrifice battery life, but now I’m on a different quest. Let me tell you all about how those super cheap laptop deals might come back to bite you.

Plan for the future

That sweet $300 laptop deal sounds pretty tempting, right? No! Now, imagine I slapped your hand away from the One Ring.

I’m not saying all cheap laptop deals are bad, but you need to be careful about what you’re getting. Making your budget $300, you risk buying something that won’t last long. And guess what? You're going to have to buy another one when that thing dies.

The display and audio are the first things to go in a budget laptop. These are not quality multimedia machines.

Then there’s the performance. Let’s face it, it won't be the best, but a good budget laptop can be pretty decent, and others… Well, they’re just bad. The problem with poor performance is longevity. This is a laptop that will not last you for years to come. I’ve seen some laptops perform so poorly out of the box that I want to throw them into the sun. When you are sitting there counting the seconds to load a single webpage, you'll regret the bargain basement laptop.

As I mentioned, you can get great budget laptops that don’t sacrifice battery life, but it's not guaranteed on laptops this cheap. The Acer Aspire 3 couldn’t even get 7 hours on our battery test. That's with the display set to 150 nits; it'll be worse on full brightness, and batteries degrade over time, so that battery life will only worsen.

Do yourself a favor and save for that $500 or even $700 laptop. I know that can be difficult, but patience will serve you here. That’s where you can greatly extend the life of use. For example, the Acer Aspire 14 AI is a strong choice. It’s $749 at Costco right now (we've seen it for as little as $699). Yes, it is over double the price of the Aspire 3 15 on sale, but it also offers over double the performance and battery life.

If you really want cheap and don’t mind a Chromebook, then get the Acer Chromebook Spin 312, which is currently $329 at Best Buy right now. It features similar performance, but because ChromeOS is a much lighter operating system, you’ll see fewer slowdowns than you would on Windows. Also, the Spin 312 offers over 10 hours of battery life.

If you haven’t noticed the theme, it’s that Acer makes some pretty solid budget laptops… but they aren't all winners. If you want anything but an Acer, try for the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425M). You can find the Intel Core Ultra 5 model at Amazon for $599. Getting an OLED display at this price is a huge win. Not to mention that the Zenbook 14 offers stellar battery life. The Core Ultra 5 performance won’t be as strong as the one we tested, but it’ll certainly outpace the Aspire’s measly AMD Ryzen 3 7320U.

The trick to shop for a budget laptop is to shop for premium laptops. You can find wild deals on premium laptops that’ll take you well under $1,000. Many of these can be found on our best laptop deals page. I mean, even the MacBook Air M4 13-inch is $849 on Amazon right now.

If you want a laptop that’ll last you longer than a year, be patient. You can get your ideal laptop to fit within your budget (so long as your budget is realistic).