More and more people are switching over to laptops as their primary computing device these days, and its no surprise: the amount of compute power that most people really need has been pretty flat for a while now. Intel and AMD have been pushing out faster and more power efficient processors for decades, but unless youre doing something truly demanding you dont need anything close to the latest and greatest CPU and GPU for most tasks.

Of course part of the reason for the plateau can also be attributed to smartphones and tablets: the fastest SoCs of today are still substantially slower than modern desktop and laptop processors. Their advantage is that they use far less power and are far more portable, and with so many people using such devices weve seen more companies creating apps and websites that target lower performance devices.

While many might also be tempted to "just get a tablet and be done with it", there are still plenty of tasks that are far easier to accomplish on a laptop than on a tablet. Yes, you can add a keyboard case/dock to a tablet and make up some of the difference, but particularly for people that arent tiny, theres a real benefit to keyboards on larger (13.3" displays or more) laptops. So if youre looking for a decent laptop and you dont want to spend more than $500, thats what were going to cover in this guide. (Note that weve covered Chromebooks in a separate piece, so we wont discuss those here.)