Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed, now the more rational Christmas season closeouts begin. As always, I have my own opinions on what represents a bargain. For a personal computer or laptop I recommend a minimum of an intel i5 or AMD Ryzen 3 or A8 or better to support Windows 10 or Mac OS. I know there are a lot of machines out with other processors that may look attractive; but, other designations for processors are either a few years old or quite a bit less capable and thus a poor choice for a personal computer.
Historically, I have addressed some exceptions to the above processor guidance and I will repeat that here because there are some real nice machines that aren’t in my above guidance. These machines are intended for folks who do not need any processing power in their device; folks who want to read email, daily news, maybe respond to an occasional letter and maybe view a spreadsheet. For this kind of application, where all the processing is done on the internet, the whole plethora of machines opens up. Processors like the intel Atom, the N3 series or even the E series processors from AMD are designed for this kind of use and do very nicely.
These “smaller” processors are intended for low power consumption and the resulting devices can be quite small, light and handy to carry. They start to have issues when folks try to do graphics or photo editing, watch high resolution (4k) videos, or any sort of real-time map work. In addition, complicated or large documents and spreadsheets view fine but can be painful (slow responding) to edit on the smaller machines. On the other hand even a minimal battery may provide 7-16 hours of use because they are such low power consuming devices.
Whatever you are looking for, 6-month old designs abound in the marketplace and these are wonderful because they have some history and you can look at reviews and identify the units that have been successful (and the design failures, lemons, can also be identified) and those are the units that will be closeout priced to make room for the new models recently announced.