Anyone in the market for a new laptop right now will know the pain of being told something's a great deal, only to find out that it's still basically £1,000 – that seems to be the going rate for a new laptop from the likes for Apple or Dell, and has been for quite some time.
Still, it's also very much the case that in recent years another option has started to get more reliable – Chromebooks. When they first arrived these Chromium laptops were typically underpowered, and they're still not the most high-specced, but you can now reliably get one for less than £200 and have a great little machine for web browsing and admin.
Case in point: this terrific Black Friday deal from Acer, which gives you one of its most solid Chromebooks for just £170.
I'm not going to pretend that the 315 would make sense for a professional who works with image or video processing, of course, but most of us don't really do that stuff. Rather, it's ideal as a family laptop or something that you pull out to check your emails, shop online or fill out forms.
We all have to do those things sometimes, and it can be way easier on a Chromebook than on your phone. If you want to spend even less, of course, you can also get the 14-inch Acer Chromebook 314 for just £140, and that size might even be better for some people.
With all of that said, I still think that my own tastes lean more towards the MacBook Air side of things, and older models can be found for less than you might assume. For example, you can get an M2 MacBook Air at John Lewis for £699 instead of £899 right now. Obviously, that's still more than three times the price of this Chromebook, though, so it'll come down to your budget!
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