Having been poor, for a lot of people, you don't just "go out and buy a laptop." You have to save up for it. You might be working two jobs while going to school

Having been poor, for a lot of people, you don't just "go out and buy a laptop." You have to save up for it. You might be working two jobs while going to school just to cover the bare costs of tuition, housing, food and possibly transportation. I saw one instance where it sounded like they had a computer, but not a laptop. (Or they were stuck in the computer lab.) Another said they wish they had a computer to help them jump-start a career for their family. And like my sibling post points out, sometimes the laptops that are available for $150-200 really are pretty terrible. When you have a limited budget, it isn't appealing to save up for something, and then you buy it, and it's buggy or painfully slow, or unable to run the software you'd need it to for your classes. And finally, when you don't have a lot of money, and you don't already have a good computer yourself, and you maybe haven't learned all the tricks, you don't know how to find a "good" laptop on the internet. (Not that it's wildly hard - Amazon has some decent ones, depending on price point... but you won't be coming from a place of confidence in your buying skills.) The next step up seems to be - how many compromises can I avoid at my price point? (This is super common on SlickDeals: you see $600-1000 laptops, and people pick apart the CPU, the GPU, the weight, the screen technology, the HDD vs SSD, the amount of RAM, the build quality. None of them get all of those right because if they did, they would be $1200+ laptops, not deals!)