Amazon’s October Prime Day two-day shopping extravaganza is less than a week away. Though the official sale doesn’t start till Tuesday, Oct. 10, the deals have already begun, including a number of steep laptop discounts. And the savings aren’t limited to Amazon itself. There are competing sales at Best Buy and Walmart that can save you big money on a new laptop.
This story is part of Amazon Prime Day, CNET’s guide to everything you need to know and how to find the best deals.
I’ve been reviewing laptops and tracking deals for CNET for years. As one of CNET’s laptop experts, I’ve hunted around for the biggest price breaks on laptops that are worth buying, and here are the best current laptop deals I’ve found. And when the official Prime Day sale starts next week, I’ll update this list with the latest laptop deals at Amazon and elsewhere.
Apple/CNET
Battery Life/Runtime 1,026 minutesWeight 2.8 poundsDisplay size/type 13-inch, 2560 x 1600 IPS LCDProcessor tested Apple M1 8‑coreGraphics tested Apple M1 7-core
The MacBook Air with Apple’s M1 processor may be 3 years old, but it’s still a valuable member of the MacBook family. It’s the most affordable MacBook, and it’s even more affordable right now with its hefty $249 discount. That’s only $1 less than the biggest price break we’ve seen for it. The M1 processor has been surpassed by Apple’s M2 chip but still has more than enough oomph for the majority of what you’ll use the laptop for, whether it’s for school or work or home use. The M1 MacBook lacks the Touch Bar (which could be viewed as a positive), and has a 13.3-inch Retina display that’s only a smidgen smaller than the 13.6-inch panel you get with the newer M2 model.
Read our M1 MacBook Air review.
Dan Ackerman/CNET
You can save big right now on the smallest MacBook Pro. This isn’t a previous model on sale but the latest M2 version. Sure, you might not enjoy the Touch Bar — it’s the last model to feature the poorly received, seldom-used strip above the keyboard — but the 13-inch MacBook Pro offers a great mix of power and portability at a great price.
Joshua Goldman/CNET
IMHO, this is the best-looking gaming laptop on the market. Impossibly thin for a high-powered gaming laptop, with a sleek, slab look, this 15.6-inch Razer Blade machine also boasts a powerful component lineup, albeit one with previous-gen part. Still, the 12th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU and RTX 3070 Ti GPU should be plenty powerful to play AAA titles at 1080p with most quality settings at acceptable levels. There’s nothing lacking with the display. It’s a 15.6-inch OLED panel with a crisp QHD resolution and speedy 240Hz refresh rate. This Razer Blade 15 config is $1,000 off right now at Amazon and a great deal at its discounted $2,300 price.
Read our Razer Blade 15 review.
Razer
This is a bigger version of the above Razer Blade 15, with an even bigger discount. You can save $1,200 on this previous-year Razer Blade 17, which is based on a 12th-gen Core i9 CPU and RTX 3070 Ti graphics while also supplying an ample 32GB of RAM. The roomy, 17.3-inch display isn’t an OLED panel and not quite as fast but should fit the part with its 4K resolution and 144Hz refresh rate.
LG/Amazon
It’s thin and light and on sale. The LG Gram 16 is impressively compact for a 16-inch laptop, weighing just 2.62 pounds and measuring a mere 0.66 inches thick. And it’s a whopping $581 off. It features a previous-gen Intel chip, but the Core i7-1260P is a member of the midrange P series and should be plenty powerful for most users. (It has more raw processing power than an efficient U-series chip commonly found on thin-and-light laptops.) Plus, this Gram 16 model serves up a sufficient 16GB of RAM to help with performance, along with a roomy 1TB SSD. And the expansive 16-inch, 16:10 display boasts a crisp 2,560×1,600 resolution. You also get a 1080p webcam, two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a microSD card slot. We reviewed the preceding model based on the 11th-gen Core CPU and liked it.
Josh Goldman/CNET
This Lenovo midrange two-in-one convertible laptop features an all-metal body and a 14-inch display powered by a Core i7-1355U CPU and featuring 16GB of RAM. The display has a fine 2.2K (2,240×1,400) resolution, is rated for an acceptable 300 nits of brightness and can be rotated 360 degrees into tablet mode.
Read our Lenovo Yoga 7i (2022) review.
Josh Goldman/CNET
Dell’s latest 2-in-1 convertible is based on a 14-inch touch display with a 16:10 aspect ratio that gives you more vertical space than a widescreen 16:9 panel, for less scrolling through webpages and documents. Inside, you get an AMD Ryzen 7 7730U CPU to go with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. While it provides twice the solid-state storage capacity as the above Yoga 7i, its display has a lower, 1,920×1,200 resolution and is rated for only 250 nits.
MSI
This MSI Sword model is the rare example of a gaming laptop that costs less than $1,000 and features a graphics processor from Nvidia’s current GeForce RTX 40 series. It pairs an RTX 4050 GPU with a previous-gen Core i7-12650H CPU to go along with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The 15.6-inch display has full HD resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate. Its current price is signifcantly less than its original price of $1,099.
Matt Elliott/CNET
The Acer Swift X 14 has a gorgeous 14.5-inch OLED display and the latest Intel and Nvidia silicon in the form of a 13th-gen Core i7 H-series CPU and an RTX 4050 GPU. We usually find such a duo in a larger machine; content creation laptops typically feature 16- or 17-inch displays to give creators more room to work. The Swift X 14, however, provides the needed muscle for demanding graphics work (and some gaming) but in a more portable package. The overall design is a bit boring, but the OLED panel with its 2,880×1,800-pixel resolution is fantastic.
Read our Acer Swift X 14 review.
This post was modified on 2023-10-05 21:35:13