Amazon laptops are a joke
Amazon, the online marketplace founded by Jeff Bezos is basically the biggest online shopping site. But, there's quite a few scams, and I've seen two laptop scams recently, and I want to put into perspective how crappy these laptops are if they weren't on sale (to be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they were always on sale as a FOMO tactic).
I'm going to focus on one today, but I've seen something worse in the past, where a news outlet straight up wrote about the laptop which contained a Celeron CPU (the lowest end CPUs Intel sells since they've killed Intel Atom off).
For £500, this ain’t half bad. But at it’s original price of £1900, it's a complete ripoff. If you want to visit the page, see https://www.amazon.co.uk/jumper-1920x1080-Ultrabook-Dual-WiFi-Bluetooth/dp/B0C49T96C1.
To start, it's crucial to note that this laptop is using a low-power Intel 10th gen processor, the i5-1035G1. This is the second lowest end CPU with Iris Xe graphics in this generation. I'm pretty sure Intel also was planning to cut support for 10th gen graphics drivers at one point as well (it does seem to still have support though, the last update was the 15th of June at the time of writing). However, looking deeper, I did see a Celeron icon somewhere, and I'm seeing reviews specifically state a Celeron CPU and 4GB/12GB RAM models. I assume this might just be another model that the company used to sell since I've seen something similar before.
Next, let's move onto the RAM. This laptop contains 24GB of non replaceable DDR4 RAM. The first red flag is this being 24GB, instead of something like 32GB. This means that you'll be losing performance in certain activities due to not having dual channel RAM. Dual channel RAM essentially requires you to have two sticks of the same size and speed for better performance. For now, you can only get 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB DDR4 sticks, which means that this laptop will not be running in a dual channel configuration, and you can't change it due to the laptop's RAM being non replaceable.
The last thing I'd like to note is the fact that this laptop is definitely made by a Chinese company. This may mean that there could be pre-installed spyware on the device, we've seen spyware pre-installed on Chinese Android TV boxes, so I would be cautious in buying it.
Actually one final thing, apparently this laptop comes with a US Keyboard and they supply an overlay to make it a UK keyboard? This is just weird. I've never heard of a manufacturer providing an overlay, which you could easily lose for a laptop keyboard.
It's also a bit weird looking at the reviews. I had mentioned that I've heard different models, but I did scroll past a review which reportedly stated that the laptops that people received didn't necessarily have the specifications that were advertised or had Windows activation issues. Customer service was another complaint I noticed as well. Like I mentioned earlier, it also mentioned different models, like ones that had less RAM or had Microsoft 365. None of these models are listed on the page, which sucks. I'm also a bit sketched out with people saying they're using it for gaming. Yes, I did use an i5-7200U and Intel HD Graphics 620 years ago, and I thought it was decent enough for games like Roblox, but for more modern stuff, the Iris Xe graphics in here probably isn't going to hold up. It's also likely that some of these reviews are fake, like who is going to say ‘It is also having Jumper cooling fan technology which helps to dissipate the heat.’ as part of their review? Just seems a bit odd.
I'd also be interested to see how exactly they can game on this thing for 6 hours, unless they’re playing something really light. If we're using all of the CPU's TDP, which is 25W, this laptop is probably going to last for 2 hours or less. Scrolling further, I also see someone specifically complaining about the laptops temperature, so this person definitely needs to show me how good this cooling technology really is.
I think it's safe to say to not buy this. Instead, I'll give you a better suggestion, which is probably better suited for the types of people using this laptop anyways.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-Vivobook-M1603QA-16-0-WUXGA/dp/B09X63ZS4H/
Yes it’s two generations behind, but you’re getting 2 extra cores, plus you will be getting much better performance by going to a high performance AMD CPU. You might be losing 8GB of RAM, but I guarantee for most people, they probably don't even need 16GB. The storage is a bit lower at 512GB, but if you can find like a 2.5in SATA to USB enclosure, you could make an external 512GB SSD for £50 or so.
Anyways I'm going to stop here for now, hope you found this helpful (if you're searching for a new laptop I guess).