I never recommend buying $250 laptops — except this one

I never recommend people buy laptops under $250. That’s even more true if you’re talking about Windows laptops rather than Chromebooks. As a laptop reviewer, I just can’t in good conscience recommend that people buy these old, cheap laptops that will inevitably end up in the trash in a few months.

But this year, there’s an absolutely killer deal on a laptop that overcomes that advice. As part of the counter-programming for Prime Day 2024, Best Buy is offering the Asus Zenbook 14, a laptop with an OLED screen, for $235. You read that right — $235. That’s $515 off the normal price.

This Zenbook 14 comes with an OLED panel, making it the cheapest laptop I’ve ever seen not using a standard IPS display. OLED takes the whole visual experience to another level on a laptop of this type, and it’s completely unheard of. OLED panels have excellent contrast, accurate colors, and a wide color gamut. Not only is this OLED but it’s also a sharp panel, coming in at a resolution of 2880 by 1800. Again, that’s astounding for a $235 laptop.

Beyond just the excellent display, laptops comes with a large touchpad and tons of ports — despite being just 0.67 inches thick. It comes with HDMI, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB-A port, and an SD card slot.

If the laptop has a downside, it’s the CPU. It uses a two-year old Intel Core i5-1240P. It’s not that this is a bad processor by any means, it’s just that it’s a bit old at this point. The device also only comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. But so long as this laptop is used only for fairly basic tasks, I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed.

So, whether you need a portable laptop for travel or something more suited for college students, I can’t imagine finding a better laptop around this price.