Affordable laptops are hard to find, and they might get a lot harder to find very soon. So, when I spotted a Dell Inspiron model with a big touchscreen and 16GB of RAM, I knew I had to post it. Best Buy is offering just that today, and only today, with a $250 discount. That brings the final price of the Inspiron 15 down to just $549.99.
The Inspiron line is definitely on the budget side of things, but this one has a surprising amount of power thanks to a Ryzen 7 7730U processor with eight cores and a maximum speed of 4.5GHz. 16 gigabytes of RAM is also great at this price — that’s as low as I would go for any laptop with Windows 11, by the way. 1TB of storage and a 15.6-inch touchscreen are also rare for a laptop this affordable, and I like that there’s a full-sized HDMI port and an SD card slot.
Having said that, let me be sure to set your expectations appropriately. With a two-year-old processor and integrated graphics, this Inspiron 15 (model 3535) can handle some very basic gaming duties, but it won’t be putting out huge framerates on any recent 3D title. I also wouldn’t expect that 41-watt-hour battery life to last very long, especially with a big touchscreen. Since it has a barrel charging port, I would also say it’s a pretty good bet that it can’t charge with the USB-C port, which is definitely a bummer.
That said, this laptop might be a good candidate for cheap upgrades. According to this video, you can pop the bottom of the laptop open to access two, count ’em, two SO-DIMM slots, plus the M.2 storage slot. The AMD 7730U supports up to 64GB of RAM, and that M.2 slot should support up to 2TB of storage. Those are on the older DDR4 and PCIe 3 standards, by the way, which are a lot slower than newer laptops, but should also mean much cheaper parts. Do some checking around before you plan for upgrades, though — I’m going off official specs, so the actual laptop itself might not be able to handle those maximums.
This is Best Buy’s Deal of the Day for Monday, April 14th, and the site says the deal is good until 1 AM Eastern/10 PM Pacific. If you miss it, you can find a similar laptop (unfortunately with 512GB of storage) for $503 over at Newegg.
Get a Dell Inspiron 15 with touchscreen and 16GB of RAM for $550