
It features a stunning OLED display that produces vibrant colors and deep, inky blacks, making it great for watching videos, TV shows, and movies. Our pick for the best 2-in-1 tablet under $400 is the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5 (2021), a 13.3-inch Chrome OS tablet with a kickstand and a detachable keyboard. If you have trouble finding one, there's a slightly more expensive 2021 model with newer and more powerful AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs on Amazon, which we haven't tested but expect to perform similarly. Lastly, this laptop may be hard to find as it was first released in 2020 and has been discontinued. The CPU is powerful enough to handle light productivity tasks like text processing and web browsing however, 4GB of memory is very limiting and will likely cause slowdowns when multitasking, and unfortunately, 8GB models are significantly more expensive. You get a spacious and comfortable keyboard, a touchpad with decent tracking, and a wide port selection.įor under $400, you can get an AMD Ryzen 3 4300U model with 4GB of memory and 128GB of storage.

It isn't a particularly bright screen it's bright enough for most indoor settings but not well-lit environments or outdoors in broad daylight. It sports a 14-inch display that looks sharp and provides just enough room for some light multitasking. It's a portable 2-in-1 convertible laptop with a battery that lasts a little over eleven hours of light productivity or nine hours of video playback. If you find Chrome OS limiting or prefer working on Windows, get the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 (2020) instead. If you've never used Chrome OS before, it's best to check that you can do all of your work through a Chrome browser or Android apps because it doesn't support x86 Windows applications. The main downside is that you can only get a maximum of 4GB of memory, so you may experience some slowdowns if you have too many applications running simultaneously. The keyboard feels comfortable to type on all day, and the touchpad is small but responsive. It has one USB-A and two USB-C ports both USB-Cs can output a video signal to an external display and support charging.Īs for the built-in display, it's decently sharp and gets reasonably bright for use in most indoor settings. Its battery life is outstanding, giving you a little over 12 hours of light use, which is plenty for a typical school or workday. You can get it with an Intel Pentium Gold or Core i3 processor, both of which are powerful enough to provide a smooth experience on Chrome OS.

The best laptop under $400 we've tested is the Lenovo Chromebook C340 15 (2020), a well-built 2-in-1 convertible laptop with a thin and light design.
