With great strides in processing power, display technology, and battery life in the last few years, laptops have never been in better shape. Whether you want a compact companion to take your productivity up a notch, help you score glorious gaming victories, or just to curl up in bed with Netflix, there are deals to be had. These are the best Cyber Monday laptop deals we have uncovered so far on computers from the likes of Dell, Asus, and Lenovo.
Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2021 is over – check out the best Prime Day deals for 2022 here.
WIRED’s Cyber Monday Edits
If you’re a Mac user looking for some more muscle than the M1 MacBook Air can provide, we suggest you take a look at its (slightly) bigger brother. The 2020 13.3-inch MacBook Pro also comes with the swaggering M1 at its heart, and has a slight edge over the Air in terms of power and battery life (a couple of hours extra of the latter). There’s the touchbar too, if that appeals to you, and a lovely screen and speaker setup.
What you get with the Huawei MateBook D 15 is a laptop with a slick design and more than decent performance to match. Yes, it takes more than a few design cues from Apple, but that’s no bad thing, and we like the fine selection of ports and the hidden webcam in the keyboard. The downsides? Well, the battery life is disappointing but the included 65W USB-C charger can top you up to over 50 percent in just 30 minutes.
While you will find a laptop that looks just like this one selling for around £600 elsewhere, at Amazon you get a bump up from a 512GB SSD to a 1TB one. For £20 less. This is a great desktop-replacer for many people. It has a 15.6-inch Full HD screen and an Intel Core i5 processor. Acer’s Swift series laptops are a little snazzier in parts, but this one is still just about light enough to use as an ultraportable at 1.9kg.
You can find discounts that sound more dramatic than the “£100 off” of the Asus Zenbook UX425EA. But this laptop hits a sweet spot of design, performance and value. It has an aluminum shell and ultra-slim screen borders, and weighs just 1.2kg. Don’t be put off by the strange-looking touchpad. It can turn into a NUM pad, but it uses an LED light underneath. When you want it to look like a normal touchpad, it will.
Sporting a crisp 2K screen, 512GB of SSD storage, 8GB of RAM and an 11th Gen Core i5 processor, the MateBook 14 is more than capable of handling some heavier productivity tasks, despite its 1.49kg weight. There’s a decent 11 hours of battery life (with a 15-minute charge giving you 2.5 hours of standard use) and a fingerprint sensor for swift logins.
Who wouldn’t like £250 off Samsung’s super-thin, super-light AMOLED laptop? Yes, the featherweight design is svelte and sharp, but it’s that AMOLED display that draws attention. It’s a 1920 x 1080 141dpi 60Hz panel, so don’t expect the sharpness of 4K screens, but the contrast and color accuracy on view are superb. Integrated Dolby Atmos AKG speakers deliver plenty of punch, no distortion and even passable bass. The clincher? Excellent battery life.
There’s nothing too fancy going on here: this is a decent budget model that’s ideal as a first laptop for kids, and with a hefty £50 off it’s even more affordable than usual. It’s powered by an Intel Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM, comes with 64GB of eMMC storage and runs on Windows 10 Home S, with a free upgrade to Windows 11 when it rolls out shortly.
Amazon, Argos, John Lewis
If money is tight, you may be interested in one of our favorite budget laptops; the Acer Swift 1 is slim and lightweight. It’s suitable for basic productivity tasks and boasts good speakers and a keyboard with decent travel, although the display is a bit bland. The processor is basic, as you’d expect in a laptop at this price. There’s 4 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. But this laptop also comes with a year’s subscription to Microsoft 365 Personal, which is a nice bonus.
LG’s Gram range is obsessed with low weight. The LG gram 14Z90P weighs a gram under a kilo, but still has inordinately long battery life and a powerful 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor. You also get – unusual for the price – 16GB of RAM. You don’t often see a performance laptop this light. Even the keyboard is well above average, and comfortable for long-form typing. The 14-inch Gram won’t necessarily seem as high-end as a MacBook Pro to your fingers, but this major saving is worth looking at for those after a laptop for roving portable use.
OK, so the cost of this laptop may make your jaw hit the floor. But this is a new model that sold for £670 more in the weeks before Cyber Monday. It is so expensive because this Razer Blade 17 has just about every upgrade you could ask for. You get the top-end 11th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, 32GB RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 4K resolution 120Hz screen. It’s a monster of a gaming laptop, worth a glance even if you can in no way afford it.
We’ve all grown to appreciate the OLED revolution that started with smartphones and swept into our living rooms, but this superior display technology is still relatively rare in laptops. This Asus Vivobook combines a 15.6-inch OLED screen with an Intel i3-1115G4, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. Forget about gaming, but if you want something pleasant to work, browse the web, and watch the odd movie on, you could do a whole lot worse.
Easily the best-looking Windows laptop you can buy, this Surface Laptop 4 model sports a 15-inch touchscreen and an elegant design. There’s an AMD Ryzen 7 with Radeon Graphics inside, along with 8 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage. We like the keyboard and the large trackpad, and the speakers aren’t bad either, but the bezels are quite thick, and there’s no Thunderbolt port.
If you’re keen on a 2-in-1 design, this affordable convertible from Lenovo fits the bill. The keyboard attaches magnetically, there’s a 10.1-inch touchscreen, and it runs Google’s Chrome OS. Battery life is quite good at up to 10 hours, so this is a decent device for light work, web surfing, and movie watching. If you can make do with simply folding the screen back, the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 is also on sale at £180 (£100 off).
Google Store, Argos, John Lewis
The best high-end Chromebook on the market, Google’s slick, minimalist design looks and feels a bit special and stands out from the crowd. It also has some grunt (for a Chromebook), and there’s a touchscreen display, a solid keyboard, and a responsive glass trackpad. Plenty of stamina in the battery department and seamless integration with Google’s apps round out a tempting device. Just be aware that Google’s UK hardware support is somewhat lacking. The 16GB of RAM model is also on sale at £799 (£150 off).
Curries
We were impressed by the build quality of the Triton 300 SE with its lightweight magnesium alloy case and a textured glass touchpad. And it’s no slouch under that stylish exterior with an 11th gen Core i7, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. It has a Full HD screen with a silky smooth 144 Hz refresh rate, and it should run most games you care to throw at it, although it can get hot and loud when you push it.
Amazon, John Lewis
Deep discounts on Apple’s MacBook line are rare, and we haven’t seen any for Black Friday. The truth is that the 2020 MacBook Air has been available at this price for a while now, but we know some people will have their hearts set on an Apple computer. It has Apple’s powerful M1 chip inside with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. This compact MacBook has a 13-inch screen and plenty of stamina, but it’s relatively expensive for what you get.
Dell
If there’s a better compact laptop, we’d like to know about it. Dell’s 11th Gen XPS 13 is a slim beauty with a bright and vibrant 13.3-inch screen. It’s all business, with a Core i7, 8 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and support for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1. Extras like a fingerprint sensor in the power button and voice activation with Cortana may prove convenient. But, with space at a premium, ports are limited, and the trackpad is small.
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