If you’re in the market for a new laptop, you’re in luck – if you’re willing to hold out until this year’s Amazon Prime Day.
Set for October 13 this year, Amazon Prime Day is the new Black Friday with incredible deals on everything from clothes to books to furniture to electronics – and even computers.
While you might spend more than $1,000 / £1,000 / AU$1,500 on a new laptop in normal times – or even more – Amazon Prime Day is the perfect opportunity to upgrade your machine without breaking the bank.
So if you’re fixing to drop some cash on one of the best laptops, read on to find out what kind of deals to look for this Amazon Prime Day.
Laptops with eighth-generation Intel processors
With the release of 11th-generation Intel Tiger Lake CPUs, major retailers are looking to clear out their existing inventory of older laptops, which are perfect opportunities to snag some incredible deals.
While you might be worried about getting a laptop with last generation’s tech – much less the generation before the last generation – 10th-generation Intel processors aren’t necessarily that much more powerful that their immediate predecessors.
With Intel discontinuing production on their eighth-generation CPUs this year, you can expect that any remaining inventory of these laptops to go on sale for absolutely fire sale prices this month.
While Intel’s 10th-generation Comet Lake and Ice Lake processors are faster than their 8th-generation Whiskey Lake silicon, unless you are doing a ridiculous amount of multitasking, the multiple cores on the Whiskey Lake CPUs should be more than adequate for most people.
Unless you are a laptop enthusiast who wants the highest end hardware available, an 8th-gen Intel laptop will still be an incredibly powerful machine at a cut rate price on Amazon Prime Day, making it well worth your time.
Still holding out on buying a Chromebook? Amazon Prime Day might be the perfect time to take the plunge
Chromebooks are still a tough sell for some people – especially those coming from more robust laptops like the Dell XPS 15 or an Apple MacBook Air, but Google’s Chrome OS is the perfect lightweight OS for everyday use – usually at a much lower price than its rivals.
On Amazon Prime Day, you can expect to pay even less for some of the best Chromebooks on the market, making it a perfect opportunity for late adopters to give some of the most popular models from major manufacturers like Lenovo and Asus another look.
With access to the entire Android app ecosystem, Google productivity apps like Google Docs and Sheets, and a working Linux kernel built into Chrome OS, Chromebooks have as much utility as most people would ever really need, all without the expensive hardware overhead .
Best of all, you don’t need to sacrifice all that powerful hardware to enjoy a Chromebook. While some models like the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet are tiny wonders that are a little light on the specs, some – like the Asus Chromebook Flip – pack the latest Intel Comet Late processors, plenty of RAM, and PCIe NVMe M.2 SSDs.
They might not be the gaming laptop of your dreams, but for the price, they’re the perfect utility PC for basic office tasks, video streaming, and web surfing, all for a ridiculously low price. On Amazon Prime Day, though, these already incredibly priced systems will be even cheaper, making them a no-brainer for yourself or for an early holiday gift.
Gaming laptops are prime candidates for Amazon Prime Day deals
With Nvidia’s recent announcement of the GeForce RTX 3000-series GPUs, there’s going to be a real push to move last-gen gaming laptops to make room for what Nvidia has in store for laptop gamers in the months ahead.
While you shouldn’t expect laptops with GeForce RTX 2080 Super GPUs to suddenly take major price cuts, you never know with Amazon Prime Day, but there’s almost certainly going to be some laptops with slightly less-powerful GPUs that will see some steep price cuts.
Some of the best gaming laptops we’ve seen lately feature the less powerful GeForce GTX 1650 Ti GPU, like the Gigabyte Aorus 5, or Radeon graphics, like the Dell G5 15 SE.
With a healthy mix of Intel and AMD CPUs, there were already some very affordable gaming laptops out there before Amazon Prime Day, but they should see even more drastic price cuts on October 13 – making it a perfect time to buy a laptop to game when you’re on the go.