HP Envy 13 mini-review: Spectre fans, meet your budget option

It's not a "flagship," but it's just as lux-looking and powerful, and it starts at $799.

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[solomonrex]

AT $799 i'd call it a reasonable mid-priced machine. Relative to some other machines with similar specs it is more of a bargain. But, genuine low budget laptops with reasonable power come in at about $450, or below. For example, this week Amazon had an HP laptop with a 2000-series Ryzen 5 2-GHz quad core processor, 8-GB RAM, and a 256-GB SSD for $399. That was a real bargain. So, it's time for me to wait for a sale on Black Friday, since I will soon need to replace my aging ThinkPad.

The lower trim of these consumer laptops all have various issues, and can't necessarily be seen in the specs. Many have smaller batteries, cheap screens or similar. There's a reason that MacBooks were so popular for so long, they were a good value at their price point, and anything less was a compromise. Sadly no longer true.