My $300 laptop is a few years old. It has a Ryzen 3 3200U CPU, it has a 14" 1080p display, backlit keyboard. It came with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, I upgraded to 16GB from RAM acquired by a dumpster dive and a 256GB SSD for like $10 on clearance at Microcenter. I upgraded the WiFi to an Intel AX210 6e for about another $10 off Amazon. It gets 6-8 hours of battery life doing browsing and texting editing kind of workloads.

The only thing that is itching me to get a new machine is it needs a 19V power supply. Luckily it's a pretty common barrel size, I already had several power cables laying around that work just fine. I'd prefer to just have all my portable devices to run off USB-C though.