Lenovo V Series 15.6" V15 Black 2026

The Lenovo V15 is a budget 15.6-inch laptop that's fine for web browsing, email, and document editing, but only if you pay the right price. The Intel Celeron N4500 and 8GB of RAM are a bottleneck for anything beyond basic tasks, and the TN display is dim and washed out. Shop carefully, some vendors are charging over $1,000 for a laptop that's worth about $370. If you need a simple machine for school or a secondary computer, and you find it on sale, it's a decent buy.

Let's be real about the Intel Celeron N4500. It's a dual-core processor from the Jasper Lake family with a base clock of just 1.1GHz and a burst up to 2.8GHz. In our database, it lands right around the middle of the pack for CPUs, which sounds okay until you realize that 'the pack' includes a lot of other budget chips. This isn't a processor that handles multitasking gracefully. With 8GB of RAM, you can keep a handful of browser tabs open and a document or two, but push it with a Zoom call and a dozen Chrome tabs, and you'll feel the system wheeze. The integrated Intel UHD Graphics are fine for pushing pixels to the display, but our gaming score of 11.6 out of 100 tells the real story. This is not a gaming machine, period.

The 256GB NVMe SSD is a small bright spot. It's not a huge amount of space, and it sits in the 27th percentile for storage, but it's an NVMe drive, which means boot times and app launches are snappier than you'd get from older eMMC storage. The 8GB of RAM is where things get tight. That's in the 14th percentile, meaning most laptops we test ship with more memory these days. For basic, single-application use, it's passable. For anything more, you'll be bumping up against the limits of both the RAM and the processor pretty quickly.

The elephant in the room is the Apple MacBook Air M4. It's in a completely different league in terms of performance, display quality, and battery life, but it also starts at a much higher price. If your budget is $400, the MacBook Air isn't even a consideration. A more direct competitor is something like the HP OmniBook X Flip, which also targets students and office workers but with a more modern processor and a better screen. You'll pay more for it, but you'll get a machine that doesn't feel slow on day one.

On the Windows side, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition is another step up in build quality and performance, but again, at a much higher cost. The V15's real competition is the sea of other budget 15.6-inch laptops from Acer, ASUS, and Dell that hover around the $350-$450 mark. In that crowd, the V15 holds its own with Wi-Fi 6 and a numeric keypad, features that aren't always guaranteed at this price. Just don't expect it to compete with anything that costs twice as much. The ASUS ROG Strix SCAR and MSI Summit are gaming and business powerhouses respectively, and they're not even playing the same sport.

Value is where this laptop gets weird. At $370, the V15 is a perfectly reasonable purchase. You're getting a new Windows 11 laptop with a 15.6-inch screen, a decent keyboard, and modern connectivity for less than the price of an iPad. That's a solid deal for a student or a secondary machine. The problem is that not every vendor got the memo. We're seeing prices as high as $1,299 for this same configuration, which is frankly absurd. For that money, you could buy a MacBook Air M4 or a high-end Windows ultrabook that would run circles around this Celeron.

If you're shopping for a V15, your only job is to find the cheapest listing from a reputable seller. Don't get suckered by listings that bundle in a bunch of cheap accessories to justify a higher price. The 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM are the baseline. If you can snag a model with 16GB of RAM for a little more, that's worth considering, but don't pay a premium for the base specs. This is a budget laptop, and it only makes sense at a budget price.

The Lenovo V15 is the kind of laptop you buy when you need a big screen and a full keyboard for not a lot of money. It's aimed squarely at students, office workers, and anyone who lives in a web browser. With a 15.6-inch display and a numeric keypad, it's built for spreadsheets and long typing sessions, not creative work or gaming. The spec sheet here is modest, an Intel Celeron N4500, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, but for the target audience of email, documents, and Netflix, that's often enough.

What makes this interesting is the price spread we're seeing across vendors. This exact configuration can be found for as low as $370, but some sellers are listing it for up to $1,299. At the low end, you're getting a functional Windows 11 machine with Wi-Fi 6 and a decent port selection. At the high end, you're getting absolutely fleeced. We'll dig into that more later, but the takeaway is simple: shop around and don't pay more than $400 for this thing.

The V15 also comes in a few different configurations that can trip you up. Some listings show 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which would change the value proposition a bit, but the core weakness, that Celeron processor, remains the same. Our review unit is the base 8GB/256GB model, and that's what we're scoring here. It's a machine for basic tasks, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else, despite some optimistic marketing copy about 'light gaming'.

If you do any kind of creative work, programming, or even heavy multitasking, you should skip the V15 entirely. The Celeron processor will have you staring at loading screens more than getting work done. Gamers should also look elsewhere, the integrated graphics score of 11.6 out of 100 means even older titles will struggle at low settings. Anyone who values a good screen should steer clear too. The 15.6-inch TN panel with 250 nits of brightness is one of the weakest we've seen, landing in the 10th percentile. It's fine for text, but colors look flat and viewing angles are narrow.

Instead, look for a laptop with an IPS display and at least a Core i3 or Ryzen 3 processor. Something like a used ThinkPad or a new Acer Aspire with a Ryzen chip will give you a much better experience for not much more money. If portability is key, a refurbished business laptop like a Dell Latitude or HP EliteBook will have better build quality and a brighter screen. The V15 only makes sense if your budget is absolutely fixed around $400 and you need a new machine with a warranty.

For a student who needs a machine for writing papers, doing research online, and watching lectures, the Lenovo V15 is a solid pick if you can get it for under $400. The 15.6-inch screen gives you room to work, the keyboard is comfortable, and the port selection means you won't need a dongle for your flash drive or external monitor. It's a straightforward, no-frills laptop that handles the basics without complaint.

If your workload includes anything more demanding, like photo editing, programming, or running large spreadsheets, you should look elsewhere. The Celeron processor and 8GB of RAM will frustrate you. For business users, the reliability score is decent, but the performance ceiling is low. This is a machine for one thing at a time. If you're the type of person who keeps 30 tabs open while streaming music and editing a document, spend a bit more on something with a Core i3 or Ryzen 3 and 16GB of RAM. You'll be happier in the long run.