Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i For $620 Off Beats MacBook Neo On Specs & Price

Give Apple credit for launching the MacBook Neo at such an aggressive price point, because without the MacBook Neo, who knows what the Windows PC landscape would look like right now. Following its launch, however, we've seen a wave of more affordable Windows counterparts, and we're not talking about glorified netbooks, either. There are some enticing options, one of which is a Lenovo system with a touchscreen that is Best Buy's deal of the day.

If you act fast, you can catch the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i for just $679.99 at Best Buy (save $620). That deal of the day pricing brings it down to $20 below the starting cost of the MacBook Neo (following Apple's expansive price hikes) while boasting better specifications in some area.

Now, lest anyone think we're hating on the MacBook Neo, we're truly not—see our review after spending nearly an entire month on the road with Apple's least expensive MacBook to date (Spoiler: it earned our Editor's Choice award that we don't just hand out willy-nilly). It's a great option for students and budget buyers alike.

So is the IdeaPad Slim 3i. One of the highlights is the laptop's 15.3-inch IPS display with a 1920x1200 resolution (16:10 aspect ratio), 120Hz refresh rate, and touch support. Try as you might, touching the display on your MacBook Neo won't register any actual inputs, just finger smudges.

Inside, the IdeaPad Slim 3i packs an Intel Core 7 350 processor based on Wildcat Lake with two performance cores clocked at 1.5GHz to 4.8GHz, four low power efficient cores clocked at 1.4GHz to 3.6GHz, 6MB of L3 cache, and a dedicated NPU delivering up to 17 TOPS for AI workloads.

It also serves up 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory (twice as much as the MacBook Neo), a 512GB solid state drive (SSD), a USB 3.2 Type-C port, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack, an HDMI 1.4 output, Wi-Fi 6 wireless connectivity, and a 3-cell battery that Lenovo claims is good for up to 18 hours per charge.

An even more affordable option is this HP OmniBook 5 that is on sale for $579.99 at HP (save $600). This one is also time-sensitive, as HP is advertising it as a flash sale that ends later today.

The base configuration that's on sale features a 16-inch IPS micro-edge display with a 1920x1200 resolution (16:10 aspect ratio) and 300 nits of brightness. It's powered by a 4-core/8-thread AMD Ryzen AI 430 Gorgon Point processor (1x Zen 5 core clocked at 2GHz to 4.5GHz, 3x Zen 5c cores clocked at 2GHz to 3.4GHz) with 4MB L2 + 8MB L3 (12MB total cache), a dedicated NPU capable of up to 50 TOPS, and onboard Radeon 840M graphics (4 cores clocked at up to 2.8GHz) that pushes the chip's total TOPS to 58.

This setup also boasts 16GB of DDR5-5600, though just a 256GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. The other catch is that by default, it's configured with a single stick of RAM; it costs $40 to upgrade to two 8GB sticks, which brings the pre-tax cost to $619.99. Likewise, you can upgrade to a 512GB SSD for $70 or 1TB to $240, among other customization options, such as a touchscreen display for $80 more.