
Once you're spending $800 for a laptop, potential alternatives include a refurbished Dell XPS 13 or any one of several midrange Asus ZenBooks. Stepping up to a still-modest but more-usable 8GB of RAM adds an extra $100 to the laptop's price, while upgrading to a 256GB SSD costs another $100 on top of that.


Unfortunately, that base model still includes just 4GB of RAM, a limitation you'll feel any time you try to play a game or open more than a handful of apps or browser tabs at once.

The $600 base price is $50 higher than the previous model, but that extra money at least gets you a proper 128GB NVMe SSD rather than 64GB of slow eMMC storage this drive can also be upgraded with something larger later on, which is a good way to save some money on storage if you're comfortable doing the upgrade yourself.
