Laptop prices have been climbing all year, and a memory shortage pushed Apple to raise Mac prices across the board back in June. That makes Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days fall sale, running this week, one of the few chances to buy a laptop for less than it cost over the summer.
The MacBook Air with the M5 chip is $200 off, bringing the 512GB, 16GB RAM configuration down to $1,099, according to Wired, which said that's the cheapest the laptop has been since June and that the discount applies to every configuration on Amazon, including the larger 15-inch model. The M5 Air came out this spring and, per Wired's testing, currently sits at the top of its recommendations as the best laptop on the market, Mac or Windows. The MacBook Pro and the newer MacBook Neo are not seeing comparable cuts.
On the Windows side, the 2026 Surface Laptop with Microsoft's Snapdragon X2 Elite chip is getting its deepest discount since launch, listed at $500 off its retail price and $70 below any previous sale, Wired reported. The outlet had been steering buyers toward the cheaper 2024 Surface Laptop for months because of the price gap between the two, but says this cut narrows that gap enough to make the newer model worth the extra money, citing the X2 Elite's GPU performance over the older X1 chip. The 2024 13.8-inch Surface Laptop is still selling for $1,096 for shoppers who'd rather stay closer to four figures.
Budget buyers have the HP OmniBook 5 in their sights. Wired has called the 16-inch OLED laptop its favorite cheap Windows machine for a while, pointing to a Snapdragon X chip that delivers strong battery life, even though the touchpad remains a weak spot in its testing. HP.com typically sells it for $780, but Amazon's Prime Day price of $750 for the 16-inch model also comes with 512GB of storage, double what's in the discounted HP.com version. Wired notes it still prefers the 14-inch variant, where the 1920 x 1200 screen looks sharper.
Gamers on a budget get the Lenovo LOQ 15 with an RTX 5050 GPU, which Wired says is as cheap now as it's been in months. The outlet has long recommended it over rivals like the Alienware 15 and MSI Cyborg A16, citing color accuracy on its display that those competitors don't match at the same price. Shoppers with more to spend might look instead at the RTX 5060 configuration selling for $1,499 at Walmart, which Wired says delivers noticeably better gaming performance, though that price sits outside Amazon's sale.
The Asus Zenbook A14, a 2.16-pound ultraportable with an OLED screen, isn't discounted for Prime Day at all. Wired is instead pointing shoppers toward the previous-generation Zenbook A14, which carries a Snapdragon X Plus chip, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage at a lower starting price than the 2026 model.
Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days sale is running through this week, and prices on individual configurations can shift or sell out before it ends.
DDFiled by The Deals Desk
Price drops and sales on tech worth buying, with the price, the retailer and the time it was reported. Prices move; every deal says when it was seen.
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