ASUS L410 14" L410MA-DB02 Star Black

The ASUS L410 is a disposable web browser disguised as a laptop. Great screen, backlit keyboard, and then the Celeron CPU and 4GB of soldered RAM show up to ruin the party.

The 1080p screen is the real surprise here. At 200 nits it's not bright enough for a sunny coffee shop, but the resolution is sharp and the matte finish keeps reflections down. The fanless design means it's dead silent, which is great for a library. But that silence comes at a cost. The Celeron N4020 sits in the 19th percentile for CPUs, and you feel it. Opening more than three Chrome tabs makes the whole system wheeze. The 4GB of RAM is soldered and sits at the 2nd percentile, so you can't upgrade it later. The 64GB eMMC drive is in the 5th percentile for storage speed and capacity. Windows 10 in S mode takes up nearly half of that out of the box, so you'll be living off a microSD card from day one.

The ASUS L410 competes with Chromebooks more than Windows laptops. A Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook gives you a better screen, longer battery life, and an OS that actually runs well on weak hardware. If you need Windows, a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad T480s with an 8th-gen i5, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD costs around $250 and is a real computer. The HP OmniBook X Flip and Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro are in a completely different universe, with 16GB of RAM and proper SSDs, but they also cost four times as much. The ASUS only makes sense if you absolutely need a new, thin Windows laptop for under $300 and you understand you're buying a disposable web browser.

Prices bounce between $252 and $399 across vendors, and at the low end it's almost tempting. Newegg currently has the best deal. But even at $252, the non-expandable RAM and tiny storage make this a ticking time bomb. You'll spend more time managing disk space than actually using the thing. A used ThinkPad with an 8th-gen i5 and a real SSD costs about the same and will run circles around this ASUS for years.

The ASUS L410 is a $250 laptop that looks like it should cost more, and that's its whole game. It's thin, it's light, and it has a 14-inch 1080p screen with a backlit keyboard, which is a rare combo at this price. But the second you try to do more than one thing at a time, you'll remember you're using a Celeron N4020 with 4GB of soldered RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage that's slower than a hard drive from 2010. This is a single-task machine for students or writers who live in a web browser and nothing else.

Don't buy this unless you have no other choice. The ASUS L410 looks good on a spec sheet for the price, but the soldered 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage make it a frustrating experience within months. If you can stretch your budget by $100, you'll get a laptop that lasts three times as long. If you can't, buy a used business laptop or a Chromebook. This is a trap for people who don't know better.