Amazon’s July Prime Day event is July 11-12 and, in case you were curious, it is a good time to buy a laptop. You’ll be able to find deals on some of the best laptops available — from lightweight ultraportables to powerful gaming laptops. The discounts can potentially save you hundreds of dollars, making it possible to grab a better laptop at a lower price.
However, to get the Prime-exclusive deals on Prime Day, you do need to be an Amazon Prime subscriber ($139 a year). (There is a way around it, though.) The good news is Amazon isn’t the only retailer dropping prices on laptops right now. PC makers like Dell, Acer and HP are offering discounts when buying directly from their sites, too. And you don’t even need to wait until next week.
As one of CNET’s PC experts, I’ve scanned the current sales and dropped some of the best deals I’ve found so far. We’ll keep updating this list as older deals expire and new ones drop, so check back for the latest offers.
Best early Prime Day deals on laptops
This 14-inch laptop regularly sells for about $930 and gets you impressive specs for the price. Its performance was strong and it can handle basic content creation such as editing photos and video. And although it’s not made specifically for it, the Swift X 14 makes a good casual gaming laptop, thanks to its entry-level Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics chip. Battery life lasted for more than 12 hours in our tests, too.
There is one catch to getting this Prime Day deal, however: It’s available by invitation only. Because supplies are limited at its $630 sale price, you have to request an invitation from Amazon through a button on its Amazon product page. Still, if you’re in the market for a small laptop with extra graphics performance capabilities, request the invite.
Read our Acer Swift X 14 review.
Ahead of Prime Day, Acer is having a Black Friday in July sale and one of its best deals is on this gaming laptop. The Nitro laptops are the company’s budget-friendly gaming models, so the prices are already good for what you’re getting. But this particular configuration is loaded with upper-midrange components including an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, 8GB of memory and 32GB of DDR5 SDRAM.
This configuration (AN515-46-R0EQ) was priced at $2,200, which was reasonable when it was initially released last year. The current sale price of $1,250 is the lowest I’ve seen it.
Read our Nitro 5 review.
This Dell hits the mark if you want a laptop with a bigger display but that’s still slim and light enough for travel. This is the latest model and it’s filled with components you’d typically find in more expensive laptops — $250 more, to be specific. It’s still 4.4 pounds, so you’ll still know it’s in your backpack. But given its size and price — and that it’s a two-in-one — it’s not bad at all.
The HP Laptop 17 is a super-basic laptop with a big 17-inch display. The $300 configuration will cover you for simple home office tasks, web browsing, email and keeping up with friends and family on video chat or social networks. If you can afford to spend $130 more, I recommend stepping up to the $650 version we tested that’s currently on sale for $430 for more processing power to keep it from feeling slow.
Read our HP Laptop 17 review.
Other early Prime Day or Black Friday in July laptop deals:
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