Amazon Props Up Misleading, Junky Laptops No One Should Buy
Beyond the outdated Acer Nitro, I also spotted this Samsung Galaxy Book4. It’s not a bad laptop per se, but at $565 there are better options. There’s the Asus Vivobook 14 (or 16), which costs $650 and sometimes goes down to $550. It comes with the 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X, giving it much better battery life than the Galaxy Book4. There’s also the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X, which has the same chip but is even cheaper at $584.
If you want great deals on laptops that are actually worth buying, check out our recommendations for the best budget laptops, best budget gaming laptops, and best Chromebooks, which I update frequently.
Unknown brands
You always know it’s bad when the laptop brand is not mentioned in the product title. Oh, have you never heard of the well-known and reliable laptop manufacturer Jumper? Or Nimo? Yeah, me neither. Still, Amazon seems to think it’s appropriate to recommend them among the best laptops.
Like the HP laptops above, these are extremely cheap Windows 11 laptops, all under $300. The Jumper laptop suffers from some of the same issues, such as the eMMC storage and Intel Celeron processor, although the company at least manages to include a 1080p display. The large touchpad and edge-to-edge keyboard also look nice. Still, I would never recommend a laptop that isn’t from a reputable manufacturer. It’s not that it’s impossible for these laptops to be decent, but buying ones that have virtually no independent reviews isn’t a good idea.
You’ll also see Nimo branding pop up, specifically around the theme of gaming laptops. Marketing them as gaming laptops is very misleading, as they don’t come with a discrete graphics card or any other notable gaming features. This Nimo laptop is no more of a gaming device than any other $600 Windows laptop you can buy. You can’t actually buy a great gaming laptop that much, and these off-brand companies are exploiting that fact.
It’s not all bad
A few laptops that appeared on the first page of Amazon’s results showed promise. Amazon has placed the Apple M4 13-inch MacBook Air M4 high, which is also our top pick for the best laptop you can buy. Amazon also recommended the Dell 15 laptop, which is a budget device that feels solid. I haven’t tested it myself yet, but it’s a 2025 laptop for $530 with decent specs, like a 120Hz refresh rate, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. But that’s really it. The rest of the results are flooded with sponsored results of varying degrees of quality.
Walmart, which has become another popular online laptop retailer, does an even worse job, appealing to the lowest common denominator. It falls into the same traps as Amazon, showing up super cheap and outdated HP laptops for under $300, and tons of unknown knockoff brands like “RNRUO” and “Coolby.” This problem is even worse at Walmart; 24 of the 40 laptops offered on the first page are from these mystery brands, and most of the rest are from HP. It’s a shame, because Walmart and Amazon both have great deals on some of my favorite laptops, but they often get buried unless you specifically search or filter for them.
