While not ideal for hardware enthusiasts, Acer's Aspire E 15 (E5-576-392H) laptop is a solid budget system that works really well for the less-demanding users in your life. Normally $362, the entry-level configuration of the E 15 is now just $289 for Prime Day.
For the price, you get some really good specs: a 1080p screen, a Core i3-8130U CPU, 6GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. The large keyboard has a numpad and, for anyone that still has discs, there's even a DVD drive.
The Aspire E 15 is a chunky, but well-built beast. It weighs 5 pounds and is made of simple plastic, but the deck and lid have a brushed-metal feel to them.
The screen provides plenty of real estate, but according to our colleagues at Laptop Mag, it registers a modest 227 nits of brightness and can reproduce a dull 62 percent of the sRGB color gamut. However, at this price, it's great to have a 1920 x 1080 resolution display, considering that laptops this cheap usually have 1366 x 768 panels that make it difficult to stack two windows next to each other and force you to do a ton of scrolling, because so little text appears on the screen at once.
You probably won't be using the E 15 on many airplane tray tables, but it does have long battery life. It lasted nearly 9 hours on Laptop Mag's web surfing battery test.
The Aspire E 15 is also really easy to upgrade. Open a hatch in the bottom and you can replace both the RAM and the 2.5-inch hard drive. So, if you want to move up from 6GB or pop in an SSD, you can do it.
While I wouldn't buy it for my personal use, I would and have recommended the Aspire E 15 to people like my sister-in-law, who just wants something cheap for surfing the web and doing social media. It's also a good laptop for families to share with children. Even if you were to build your own desktop for the kids, you'd be hard pressed to get all the components, a monitor and a keyboard / mouse for this cheap.
For more savings, check out our list of best Amazon Prime Day deals and best pc hardware deals overall as well as dedicated lists of current sales on ssds, cpus, gpus and gaming laptops
