Lenovo IdeaPad 1 15.6" 82vg00tyus Abyss Blue

A shockingly good budget laptop with a touchscreen and a comfy keyboard, kneecapped only by soldered RAM you can't upgrade. Buy it for school or the office, not for gaming.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 is a budget laptop that somehow feels more expensive than it is, largely thanks to a surprisingly solid Ryzen 5 processor and a touchscreen you wouldn't expect at this price. It's not going to blow anyone away with raw power, but for everyday tasks, it's a smooth operator. The one thing to know is that the 8GB of RAM is soldered down, so you're stuck with what you get. If you can live with that, this is a fantastic deal for students or anyone needing a reliable daily driver.

The Ryzen 5 7520U is the star of the show here. While it sits in the 19th percentile for CPUs, that's a bit misleading because it handles a dozen browser tabs, Office apps, and streaming without breaking a sweat. What surprised us is how well the integrated Radeon 610M graphics keep up with light photo editing, even if it's a total non-starter for gaming. The 256GB SSD is snappy for booting Windows 11, but it fills up fast, and the storage score is a low 26th percentile, so plan on using that SD card slot or cloud storage.

Pricing on this model is all over the map, with a wild spread from $166 to over $9,000 across different vendors. Obviously, ignore the crazy high listings. At the low end, this is an absolute steal for a touchscreen laptop with this level of everyday performance. If you can snag it for under $300, it's a no-brainer for a secondary machine or a student laptop.

Stacked against something like the Dell Latitude 5400, the IdeaPad 1 feels more modern and consumer-friendly with its touchscreen and newer Ryzen chip, though the Latitude is a tank built for corporate IT departments. The MSI Cyborg A13VE-218US is in a different league for gaming with its dedicated GPU, but it's also heavier and pricier. For pure budget productivity, the IdeaPad 1 carves out a nice little niche that the HP ZBook Ultra G1a doesn't even try to touch.

If you're looking to play any modern games or run memory-hungry apps like virtual machines, this isn't it. Go get an MSI Cyborg or a laptop with 16GB of RAM and a dedicated GPU instead. The soldered 8GB here will choke on anything beyond basic multitasking.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 is a clear winner for students, writers, or anyone who just needs a dependable laptop for web browsing, email, and streaming. The non-upgradable RAM is the only real sting, but if you go in with your eyes open about that limitation, you're getting a fast, portable machine with a great keyboard and a touchscreen that punches above its weight class. We recommend it without hesitation for basic productivity.