This is the most obvious answer — buy a new laptop at the same time that everything else you want to buy has the best deals. As with TVs, Instant Pots, game consoles, and much more, the best laptop deals are often part of Thanksgiving-adjacent promotions like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Cyber Week. The same can be said for Prime Day, Amazon’s in-house major shopping event that the e-commerce giant holds every July.
Though the term “Black Friday” is generally understood to be referring to the idea of the overwhelming post-Thanksgiving sales driving retailers’ ledgers “into the black,” as in profitability, Dictionary.com notes that meaning started in the 1980s. Instead, the original intent behind the name was to denote the potential chaos of the day, with many retailer workers choosing to call in sick instead of dealing with the crowds.
However it came to be, some of the laptop discounts that SlashGear found last year were pretty significant, like a MacBook Pro for 20% off, a Microsoft Surface Pro 8 for 33% off, and, most impressively, a Gigabyte G5 MD gaming laptop for 45% off. Cyber Monday added more gaming laptop deals three days later, as well. In general, it’s probably the likeliest time of the year to find MacBooks of all stripes below Apple’s strictly-controlled retail prices.
2023’s Prime Day, meanwhile, brought the base M1 MacBook Air down from $999.99 to $749.99, although that deal has continued to stick around past the special event.
