Amazon is promoting misleading and annoying laptops that no one should buy

Aside from the outdated Acer Nitro, I also spotted this Samsung Galaxy Book4. This isn’t 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 drops to $550. It comes with an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon There’s also the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X, which has the same chip but comes in 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 gaming laptops, and best Chromebooks, which I update frequently.

Unknown brands

You always know that it is a bad idea not to mention the laptop brand in the product title. Oh, have you never heard of the famous and reliable laptop manufacturer Jumper? Or Nemo? Yeah, I didn’t either. However, Amazon seems to think these devices are suitable to be recommended as some of the best laptops.

Like the HP laptops above, these are very cheap Windows 11 laptops, all under $300. The Jumper laptop suffers from some of the same issues, like eMMC storage and an Intel Celeron processor, even if the company has at least managed to include a 1080p display. The large touchpad and edge-to-edge keyboard look great, too. However, I would never recommend a laptop that is not from a reputable manufacturer. That’s not to say that it’s impossible for these laptops to be decent, but buying some that have almost no independent reviews is not a good idea.

You’ll also see the Nimo brand pop up, specifically on the topic of gaming laptops. Marketing these as gaming laptops is very misleading, as they do not come with a discrete graphics card or any other notable gaming features. This Nimo laptop is no more a gaming machine than any other $600 Windows laptop you can buy. You can’t actually buy a gaming laptop worth that much, and these off-brand companies are exploiting that fact.

It’s not all bad

There are two laptops that showed up on the first page of Amazon results that were promising. Amazon has placed the M4 Apple MacBook Air 13-inch high, and it’s also our top pick for the best laptop you can buy. Amazon also recommended the Dell 15 laptop, which is a budget machine that looks sturdy. I haven’t tested it myself yet, but it’s a $530 2025 laptop that comes with decent specs, like a 120Hz refresh rate, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. But it really is. The rest of the results are inundated with supported results of varying degrees of quality.

Walmart, which has become another popular online laptop retailer, does even worse, appealing to the lowest common denominator. It falls into the same traps as Amazon, with very cheap and outdated HP laptops under $300, and many unknown counterfeit brands like “RNRUO” and “Coolby.” This problem is worse at Walmart. 24 of the 40 laptops shown on the front page are from these obscure brands, and most of the rest are from HP. It’s a shame really, as Walmart and Amazon both have great deals on some of my favorite laptops, but they’re often buried unless you’re looking for them or filtering for them specifically.