You can find plenty of laptop deals this Black Friday, but finding sales on good cheap laptops has been tough—at least if you aren’t in the market for a Chromebook deal. But fear not: If you’re on the hunt for a solid laptop at a rock-bottom price, we’ve found a spectacular deal for you. Staples is selling the Asus VivoBook 15 for just $280, a hefty discount from its usual $450 price.
That alone would make it interesting, but better yet, the VivoBook 15 checks all the boxes for buying a budget laptop without getting screwed. It comes with an Intel 10th-gen Core i3 processor, a 15.6-inch 1080p display, and a responsive 128GB SSD—modest specs, to be sure, but flat-out great ones for under $300.
This would be a very capable everyday laptop with specs like that. But Asus went the extra mile and outfit the VivoBook 15 with some nice extras you don’t often see in laptops going this cheap, like a backlit keyboard, a slim sub-4-pound design, Bluetooth, an SD card reader, and a 720p webcam.
The one potential downside is its relatively skimpy 4GB of included memory, but that shouldn’t be an issue if you keep expectations in check. “Even 4GB of RAM is fine for web browsing, writing a term paper, online shopping, personal accounting, and hundreds of other computing tasks,” we said in our budget laptop buying guide. “Just don’t pick up photography or video editing as a hobby.”
The notebook also ships with Windows 10 in S Mode, which restricts you to using apps from the Microsoft Store alone. But if you want to use Chrome, Steam, or any of the endless other PC programs available on the wider Internet, switching over to full Windows 10 Home is fast, free, and easy.
Bottom line? This is the best budget laptop deal we’ve seen on Black Friday. You may find Chromebook deals for even cheaper, but they won’t deliver the full Windows 10 experience, or an overall package that’s quite this nice.
