Technology

Amazon’s Prime Day laptop deals tend to suck compared to Best Buy’s, but we found some early standouts

a razer blade 15 gaming laptop sitting on a surface embedded with colorful striped lights against a black background

Featured picks:

Best traditional laptop deal
Acer Swift X (opens in a new tab)

$ 629.99 during Prime Day (save $ 470)

the Acer Swift X laptop


Best gaming laptop deal
Razer Blade 15 (opens in a new tab)

$ 1,952.92 (save $ 1,047.09)

the razer blade 15


Best 2-in-1 laptop deal

the LG gram 14 2-in-1 with a stylus

It’s easy to find quality deals on a lot of tech during Amazon‘s flagship Prime Day sale — but laptops, not so much. The retailer’s listings are rife with sketchy third-party sellers and discontinued models, making it tough to distinguish the “must-buys” from the “too-good-to-be-trues.” And historically, competing sales elsewhere have featured better, less misleading prices on top brands like Apple, HP, Acer, Microsoft, Lenovo, Dell, and ASUS. (Hi, Best Buy.)

Below, we’ve curated a highly selective list of the best, actually worthwhile laptop deals you can shop on Amazon ahead of this year’s Prime Day sale on July 11 and 12, all of which we’ve cross-checked with each model’s manufacturer to verify listings. Less than two dozen offers made the cut, so it’s not a bad idea to keep your cart empty for now — things will probably liven up once the event officially starts. That said, there’s one especially good day-of deal that requires some preliminary action on your part:

Early Prime Day traditional laptop deals

Why we like it

Last year’s Acer Swift X promises “extreme performance” in a thin, lightweight form factor for on-the-go creators. This particular configuration features a speedy, up-to-task AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor, 16GB of RAM, NVIDIA RTX 3050 Ti graphics, and 512GB of storage. It’s one of ten products featured in Amazon’s new invite-only Prime Day deals program, which means its juicy sale price of $ 629.99 is limited to select Prime members during the event. You’ll need to request access to the offer ahead of time by clicking the yellow button on its product page; if selected to participate, an email with a unique link to buy it will arrive in your inbox once the sale goes live.

Ignore Amazon’s $ 913.07 list price, by the way: This laptop actually retails for $ 1,099.99, making its Prime Day deal even better than advertised. You’ll save a whopping $ 470, or 43%.

More early Prime Day traditional laptop deals:

Early Prime Day gaming laptop deals

Why we like it

This beefy configuration of the 2022 Razer Blade 15 has a 12th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU, and a terabyte of storage space. It earned a 4/5 from our pals at PCMag (owned by Mashable’s publisher, ZiffDavis), who deemed it the gaming rig with “the best premium mix of mobility and performance.” Its sky-high $ 2,999.99 MSRP is one of its only notable cons, but Amazon put a huge dent in it ahead of Prime Day: You can order it now for $ 1,952.92, or just over $ 1,000 off (a 35% savings). It’s now cheaper than another Razer Blade 15 configuration with downgraded GeForce RTX 3060 graphics.

More early Prime Day gaming laptop deals

Early Prime Day 2-in-1 laptop deals

Why we like it

Weighing in at just 2.75 pounds, the new LG gram 14 2-in-1 is a premium convertible laptop with a vivid, non-reflective touchscreen display and a 360-degree hinge that lets it flip into tablet mode. Amazon has the 1TB configuration with 16GB of RAM and a 13th-gen Intel Core i7 processor on sale for $ 1,499, which is a good $ 200 off its suggested retail price of $ 1,699.99.

Early Prime Day Chromebook deals

Nothing yet — check back soon!

Mashable