As tariffs come for tech, these are the best cheap laptops under $1,000

When it comes to shopping for the best cheap 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 affordable machines that meet most, if not all of our performance, battery life, and build quality standards.

Our top picks

As of April 2025, we believe the best cheap MacBook is now the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air powered by the M4 chip. 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 currently the best laptop under $1,000 that we've tried. It has a peppy processor and a good battery life, it doubles as a tablet, and it starts at $899.99.

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.

"I expect prices to rise on all new laptops, as well as on incoming shipments of in-market models," writes Lead Hardware Analyst Brian Westover. He later adds: "I expect many of the most affordable models to disappear entirely as the tight profit margins on budget laptops disappear."

None of the current top picks on this guide to our favorite cheap laptops have been affected by tariff-related price changes, but the price of one model we have in hand for testing jumped by $100 since it was initially announced at $899.99. That would be the Asus ZenBook A14 with a Snapdragon X Plus processor and a Zabriskie Beige finish. We'll take this into account as we decide whether it'll be a future addition to this guide: "Value" is one of our four big testing metrics.

Read on for Mashable's in-depth guide to the best cheap 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.

Other cheap laptops on our radar

We currently 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 all-new Asus ZenBook A14, the "world's lightest Copilot+ PC," which features an OLED display, a neutral-toned chassis made out of a durable 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.