This is an incredible deal for $99.00 ... in the store ... for an $80 in-store pickup discount!!! It's light, has 4 GBs of DDR3 RAM, and has a 2.4-inch larger display than the lowest-end Windows laptops and Chromebooks with 11.6-inch displays. While it only has 32 GBs of eMMC flash memory, almost half of that is available to the user, even after the incessant Windows updates insist on being installed (always a good idea, since most of what's in them is security updates). I got a 128 GB micro-SD card with an SD adapter for $49.00 from Walmart to ensure I would have plenty of room for typical downloads and for backups, and the combination is a great tradeoff for a hard drive and optical drive, although the flash RAM is a tad bit slower. I can always plug a USB hard or optical drive in for occasions when I need to load things faster than over an IEEE 802.11ac WiFI connection, which works great on this unit.
Performance is actually better than expected for a 1.6 GHz, dual-core, Celeron CPU, most likely due to the 4 GBs of DRAM. I didn't just perform typical web surfing and e-mail testing, I also ran VirtualBox so I could also test out things that only run on older versions of Windows and/or Linux, including the just-released Raspberry Pi desktop on Debian Stretch.
The speakers are as loud as I need, which is frequently a very weak spot in such low-priced laptops. I'm not a gamer, but I am a software developer, working on web server and browser software, so I have a number of tools running in the background all the time. I don't usually need to build huge stacks of code from source, just incremental builds of new code in a few files at a time, so this laptop is fine for that, and I use big silicon on servers over a network for big builds.
I cut the cord many years ago, so I stream everything, and this laptop is completely up to the task, as long as I don't have anything else requiring significant computing power running in the background while streaming in full-screen mode. Keeping off the Usual Suspect cruft that Microsoft and their "partners" insist on stuffing onto consumer systems is also critical to getting the most out of low-end hardware such as this laptop.
The display brightness is more than adequate for outdoor daytime work, and function keys control the brightness, sound volume, airplane mode, etc., without requiring pressing an Fn key (that's used to get to the usual F1 - F12 key equivalents). That's one of the many extremely sensible user-centered design choices made for this product. It has 3 USB 2.x ports, an HDMI output port, and a microphone/headphone jack, in addition to the aforementioned SD card slot I used to add the 128 GB flash RAM micro-SD card in its adapter.
I couldn't be happier with this purchase, especially at the $99.00 in-store price. I had initially looked at this product on-line just after Christmas, and it was $179.00 then, rolled back from $219.00. It had been further reduced to $139.00 by a couple of days before New Years Eve, but I needed to wait until New Years Day in order to be able to get to a Walmart 110 miles from my extremely rural home while traveling home from visiting family. When I checked on-line to ensure they were in-stock at the store before getting on the road, the price had dropped to $99.00!
I knew I could get a refund if it turned out to be a lemon, but it's turned out to be an incredible bargain. It doesn't have a touchscreen, it doesn't fold over to become a laplet/tablet, and it doesn't have USB-3.x, and it's only dual-core running at 1.6 GHz, so it's not what people want now. Demand for laptops has dropped another 7.2% during the past year, so they need to clear out the lower-end units before the next generation show up in the channel during the production period in the months after they're launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2018. So, those who need a moderate-featured laptop at a very low price need look no further than the HP Stream 14-inch Jet Black laptop, with Windows 10 Home, Office 365 Personal (one year included), 1.6 GHz Intel Celeron N3060 dual-core processor, 4 GBs of RAM, and 32 GBs of eMMC flash RAM storage.
