Review: HP improves its $200 laptop a lot, but it’s still a $200 laptop

Andrew Cunningham

HP's new Stream 11.

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Cheap phones and computers aren’t as capable or as exciting as high-end phones and computers. We tend to focus on the expensive ones here because they’re where new tech usually shows up first, but plenty of people are buying based mostly or entirely on price and not on features.

For people who don’t have $400 or $500 to drop on a laptop—more or less the minimum amount we’d recommend for anyone looking for a primary machine—there are computers like HP’s Stream 11. We came away pretty impressed by this $200 11.6-inch laptop when we reviewed it last year, and now HP is back with a follow-up that tries to retain what made the first one good while addressing a few of its flaws. More impressively, the company does this without driving the price up.

This is still a niche laptop. $200 just isn’t going to buy you a powerhouse. But it’s a solid upgrade to the first model, and it’s a worthy Windows-based competitor to most budget Chromebooks out there if you’re just looking to do some basic computing.

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