Back-to-school season is often a stressful, expensive time, especially since it often requires the purchase of a new laptop for yourself or for your student.
Laptop makers generally take advantage of the time of year to offer seemingly too-good-to-miss discounts on laptops under the guise of saving you some much-needed cash. Unfortunately, many of the laptops with the deepest discounts attached aren't worth a second glance.
Spending between $500 and $600 on a laptop is usually the lowest range I recommend; I know that might seem like a lot, but the PCs at this price are surprisingly capable and feature-rich, just as long as you know what to look for.
That's where my nine years of laptop coverage come in handy. I know what specs to look for, and I know which deals are actually worth considering. Rather than blowing your money on a lemon laptop, I found a handful of options under $600 that I can easily recommend.
Updated August 4, 2025: Best Buy just killed two of the top sub-$600 deals, but I expect they'll be back before long. I added some great alternatives to consider in the meantime. — Cale Hunt
Back-to-school laptop deals: Quick Links
- Up to $800 off with back-to-school laptop deals at Best Buy
- Up to $600 off with back-to-school laptop deals at B&H
- Up to 50% off laptops at Newegg's back-to-school sale
- Rotating laptop deals available now at Amazon
The ASUS Zenbook A14 at $599 is an incredible deal for any student
ASUS knocked us for a loop with its Zenbook A14, which launched earlier this year. It's a Copilot+ PC powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset, complete with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for localized AI tasks.
It's our top pick when it comes to the best AI laptops on the market today, but even if you avoid all things AI, it remains a stellar device. As our expert laptop reviewer, Zachary Boddy, remarks in their Zenbook A14 review:
With a magnesium chassis as light as air and as tough as stone, Snapdragon X series chipsets that barely sip on the physics-defying massive battery, and a great balance of practical function and aesthetic form, the Zenbook A14 is one of the best laptops of the year.
Boddy was able to get an average of 12 hours of battery life during real-world usage. That's incredible, and that's despite having a gorgeous OLED display with perfect contrast and vivid color.
👉 Related: Windows 10 is dead: Here's why it makes sense to buy a Snapdragon X PC for an upgrade to Windows 11
One of the few downsides was the price — $900 for the entry-level config at launch — but that's been remedied with near-permanent discounts.
HP's OmniBook X Flip adds versatility and runs standard Windows 11
Not everyone wants a laptop that runs Windows on Snapdragon like the Qualcomm-equipped Zenbook A14, likely due to app compatibility. While the vast majority of apps work as normal — now including Adobe's flagship creative apps — you can forget about incompatibility by sticking with a PC running an Intel or AMD chip.
That's the case for the HP OmniBook X Flip 14, a PC configurable with both versions of CPU. The model I'm highlighting here, down to $579.99 at Best Buy from the usual $849.99, has an Intel chip inside, but you can check out AMD models at the HP website.
👉 Related: HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 vs. OmniBook X Flip 14
Either way, this is a solid 14-inch convertible that has 360-degree hinges for tent, stand, and tablet modes. It supports inking for quick note-taking or sketching, it has a large touchpad, and it features a generous selection of ports.
One of the only drawbacks, aside from less battery life than my top pick (it'll still go for a full day of lessons and classes), is the lattice-free keyboard. It might take some getting used to due to how close the keys are together, but it shouldn't be a dealbreaker.
Our own Zachary Boddy also reviewed the HP OmniBook X Flip 14, remarking:
The keyboard aside, the HP OmniBook X Flip 14 (2025) really is a great, affordable AI-powered laptop with some solid overall hardware, but it does feel like it's made to go on sale. I say that because it started seeing some serious discounts before I even finished my review.
The OmniBook X Flip 14 is an AI PC and a Copilot+ PC as well, so you're not missing out on anything in that respect.
As for the display, it measures 14 inches with a touch panel, 1920x1200 resolution, and 400 nits brightness. It's not as impressive as the OLED screen in the Zenbook A14, but it'll do a fine job for a student.
More laptops deals I can comfortably recommend to students
ASUS and HP have two of the best laptop deals on the go right now, but here are a few couple more that are worth considering.
Why you shouldn't buy the cheapest laptop you find for school
As I mentioned above, buying the cheapest laptop isn't usually the best idea. But that doesn't mean you have to go out and spend thousands on one of the best Windows laptops of the year. There's definitely a sweet spot in the middle.
For example, something like the 17.3-inch HP laptop currently on sale for just $320 at Best Buy looks like a great deal — $260 off the regular price! — but its Intel Core i3 N305 processor, 900p display resolution, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD are all features that I strongly recommend avoiding.
Amazon, too, is full of laptops that are cheap in every sense of the word. Sure, this jumper model that's currently just $210 after a $410 discount seems good, especially with a "five-star" customer rating, but it would be a terrible PC for a student.
The 4GB of RAM will barely run Windows 11, never mind anything else. The 128GB of storage will fill up immediately, and the HD display is grainy and hard on the eyes. You get the idea.
The reality of the laptop market is that the more you spend, the longer a laptop is going to last. At least that's the general rule.
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