Finding a good laptop under $500 was hard enough before RAMageddon. They nearly always had cheap hardware and underpowered, often outdated chips. That's what made the MacBook Neo so disruptive: It offered great build quality and good-enough performance starting at $599. Windows laptops couldn't touch it. Even though it's gone up to $699, it's still the laptop to beat.

So when little-known Chinese brand Chuwi announced a $450 Windows laptop with an aluminum build and a brand-new Intel Wildcat Lake processor, it sounded too good to be true.

It is.

Chuwi UniBook

Score: 3

Pros	Cons
It's $450 Tons of ports for a small laptop (though none are very …

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The HP HyperX Omen 15, which I first saw at CES, replaces the HP Victus 15, a longtime bestselling budget gaming laptop. The Victus cost just $800, or less when on sale, and was a good entry point to decent laptop gaming.

The Omen 15 has nice little upgrades over the Victus. Its RTX 5050 Laptop GPU can play 2026's latest games, albeit on low-ish settings. But it's also got a brighter 16:10 aspect ratio display with higher refresh rate, and a 1080p webcam to make it a little better for non-gaming stuff.

I'd call it a working-class gaming laptop, but thanks to RAMageddon, the Omen 15 starts at $1,200 - a far cry from the $800 that made its …

Read the full story at The Verge.