Beware Of Laptop Sellers Counting Cloud Storage As Part Of Total Capacity

If I'm offering to sell you a laptop, and I tell you that the laptop has 1.1 TB of storage, you would likely expect that it has a 1TB SSD and perhaps another, smaller SSD. Well, don't get tricked by sketchy listings like this one that Redditor /u/bmr99 spotted on Amazon, which say "1.1TB storage," but are actually referring to a 1TB OneDrive offer included with the machine. The included on-device storage is just 128 GB.

The laptop isn't being offered by Amazon itself; it's a third-party marketplace seller going by the name of Smartisan Tech, but this is hardly the only listing. As the Redditor points out, you can search "laptop onedrive" to find many more examples, and indeed, the Reddit post includes many links to similar "deals".


To be fair to the seller, they do explicitly call out the truth in the item title: "1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive and 128GB SSD)" is fairly clear, as long as you bother to read it. The real objection worth raising isn't even about the confusing "1.1TB Storage" claim but rather the price they're asking for this machine. The HP laptop in question has a 1366x768 TN LCD, an Intel N100 SoC with four Gracemont E-cores, no P-cores, and a whopping 32GB of RAM, in an attempt to make the laptop seem like it's worth buying.

It particularly isn't worth the price in the face of the new Macbook Neo, which is just $100 more at $599 and will absolutely wipe the floor with this thing in every metric that matters besides "runs Windows." Yes, just 8GB of RAM, but honestly, for the kinds of basic browsing tasks you'll use an entry-level laptop for, the Macbook Neo is unquestionably the superior value. If I'm telling you this, as a devoted x86 fanboy, you can take my word for it.

In any case, this is just yet another reminder to keep your mind alert when shopping for... well, anything, really, but particularly tech items where a few flashy specifications can make a mediocre product seem solid. If you need some cheap earbuds, the TOZO A1s we were shilling a few weeks ago are still on sale for under $15, and not even the bundled year of Microsoft 365 Personal makes this portable worth purchasing.

_{Props to Videocardz for spotting the post on Reddit.}