Another vote for SSD. Generally less heat, which is important for laptop users, and as others have noted, smaller capacity SSDs have come down in price.

And if price is even more of a concern, there are plenty of machines with eMMC drives of 64GB that probably fit your use case, whether they're Chromebooks or Windows 10 machines if you need tighter integration with the Microsoft universe. My last two travel machines have been computers running Windows with eMMC, one with 32GB (which started in Windows 8 and was upgraded to Windows 10) and the current one with 64 which was Windows 10 out of the box. Microsoft has advised that updating 32GB drives is going to become more problematic, which is one of the reasons I went to 64GB. I add a microSD card (currently 256GB) to handle larger file storage. I've had no problems either with storage or with the performance of my current machine.

These aren't world beaters, but given the uses you've described, they might fit your needs. As a review for my current machine says, it's a typewriter with internet--I suspect a lot of people are actually looking for something pretty close to that in a laptop computer.

Of course, there is no way such a machine would be good for a power user, but if you're running an internet browser, an email client, and a word processor, then I'd focus on the screen size you want and your budget.