HP 16GB for $520: the only cheap laptop worth buying right now

Laptop prices have gone off the rails. Back when $500 bought a decent machine and $900 got you something solid, the difference was build quality and screen — the chips and RAM were cheap. Now RAM has eaten the whole market. Even the $950 Surface Laptop starts with 8GB, which is basically nothing. On the low end, manufacturers are cutting everything: storage, CPU, build quality — all to compete with the $700 MacBook Neo.

The HP OmniBook 3, $520, flips this. It runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, ships with 16GB of RAM, and has 256GB of storage. It’s not fancy — the build is plastic, the screen is 1080p IPS, no Thunderbolt, no fingerprint reader. But the 16GB means it actually runs Windows 11 without choking, and the Snapdragon gives you all-day battery and always-on LTE for the $10/month SIM card. You can buy the SIM yourself at a bodega or Walmart — not some corporate plan.

For a primos who needs a laptop for school, a side hustle, or just to keep up — this is the one. It’s not a treat. It’s a tool. And at $520 with 16GB, it’s the only cheap laptop that doesn’t make you regret the purchase six months later.

Why this matters for us: when a $520 machine finally ships with 16GB of RAM, the next time the government asks you to file a form online or show up to a job interview via Zoom, you won’t be stuck on a machine that chokes.