Most of the Prime Day laptop deals are terrible – here are some I’d actually recommend
Wading through the laptop deals on Amazon Prime Day can be a thankless task but there are some worth considering
Looking for a new laptop? Sales like Amazon’s Prime Day and Black Friday are usually a great time to buy but if you want a really top bargain, be prepared to wade through a flood of absolute dirge. Most of the deals I’ve seen with the Prime Big Deals Day flag are anything but: they’re either old and overpriced, the price has been lower before or dirt cheap and nothing I’d personally recommend to anyone.
Take this 16in laptop from Jumper. First, it has supposedly been reduced from an RRP of £450 to the bargain price of £250, but a quick look at its recent price history reveals it has always been £400 previously and has never actually been sold at £450.
And that’s besides the issue of whether it’s worth £400 in the first place. I’d humbly suggest that a laptop with a four-year-old dual-core Celeron 5305U and a mere 4GB of RAM would never be worth even £400, let alone the purported RRP. There’s an army of laptops like this in the Prime Day sale and you should avoid them at all costs. You can do much better, even for this little cash.
Then there are the laptops that are actually quite good but where the discount is distinctly underwhelming, for example this Acer Swift Go 14 SFG14-63. It comes with a decent internal specification – it has an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD insdide – and a 2.8K OLED display, but the price is cut is more of a graze. Again, the RRP on the page is £1,000, while for most of its lifetime it has been £900 and the Prime Big Deal Days discount? A WHOPPING £50 off that. Forgive me if I don’t get my wallet out right away.
Don’t despair, though. If you are seeking a decent discount on a laptop, there are actually some that I would recommend you consider:
Microsoft Surface Pro 11 (was £1,449, now £1,149)
This laptop is a relatively new model and it’s a superb laptop. It comes with a Snapdragon X Elite chipset inside, so performance and battery life are top-notch – it lasted longer than 17hrs 17mins in our battery test, which at the time was the best Windows laptop battery life we’d seen for years.
The display and design are excellent – this new model is the first Surface to get an OLED screen – and we’ve always loved the way the Surface Pro has a kickstand built into the tablet itself. You do have to purchase the keyboard case separately, as is always the case with such laptops, but at a discount of £300, this is a proper deal on a very, very good laptop.
Key specs – Snapdragon X Elite processor, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 13in OLED 2,880 x 1,920 resolution touchscreen
HP 14s-dq5003sa (was £413 on average, now £299)
If you don’t have quite that much money to spend and all you need is a nippy laptop for not much cash, then this 14in HP machine should have you covered. It comes with a 12th-generation Intel Core i3 CPU inside, so performance should be pretty good and there’s a decent 8GB of RAM so it shouldn’t grind to a halt if you have more than a small handful of tabs open in Chrome. It also has a reasonably big 256GB SSD for storage (that’s the same as the much more expensive Surface Pro).
Its Full HD display probably won’t wow you and it isn’t particularly slim and light, but it will do the job and at £300 it’s a good deal, reduced from its average price of £413. It even has a decent selection of ports and sockets scattered around its edges, including a full-size SD card slot.
Key specs – Intel Core i3-1215U processor, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 14in 1,920 x 1,080 non-touch display
Asus Tuf Gaming FA507UV (was £1,262 on average, now £929
For the gamers among you, meanwhile, let me present the Asus Tuf Gaming FA507UV. It has been reduced to £929 in the Prime Big Deals Day sale and although the discount on the recent price of £1,128 isn’t that big, it has averaged higher than that at around £1,250.
More importantly, the specification is excellent for the money, even at the previous price, making this Prime Day deal one to take note of. Here, you’re getting one of AMD’s top-level Ryzen 9 CPUs from the 2023 8000 series, it’s backed by 16GB of RAM, a big 1TB SSD and a powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, so it should be able to play most games at high frame rates.
And although this machine is from Asus’ budget range of gaming machines, we’ve always been fans of the way they’ve been put together. The only small disappointment is the display is a relatively low-resolution 1080p, 144Hz affair. Other than this, however, this is a powerful, likeable laptop at a very decent price.
Key specs – AMD Ryzen 8945H processor, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, 15.6in 1,920 x 1,080 144Hz non-touch display
