As an old man yelling about deals at the clouds, I’ve often felt a bit jealous of these back-to-school sales. By my recollection, unless you wanted a new writing pad, some stationery, or a backpack, these deals didn’t really exist.
Now? I can get a gaming laptop that would’ve blown my secondary-school PS2 out of the water at a knock-down price and probably get the latest GPU included, too. Still, if you are looking for a spanking new laptop for work or play, there are a whole host of options available right now. Here are our favorites.
Lenovo’s best back-to-school deals
Lenovo’s deals come in a few options this Summer.
We’ve already covered the $400 saving you’ll find on the Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 10, which comes with a 5070 GPU under the hood and is now under $1,300, but if you want to go even further, you can grab the Legion Pro at a discount of more than $600, too.
That’s a saving of 25% on a big-screen laptop with a 5070 Ti, 32GB of RAM, and a terabyte of storage, but there’s even more available beyond Lenovo.
HP laptop deals
HP’s laptop deals are stacked this time around, but there’s perhaps less of an eye on gaming and more towards work (which, presumably, is what you’re going back to school to do).
Two of the biggest deals we’ve spotted so far are the HP Laptop 17t-cn300 (seriously, HP, who is naming these?) and the much easier to say HP OmniBook 5.
The HP Laptop 17t-cn300 may only have a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, but if you’re looking for an affordable model, it ticks that box. It’s reduced by over 50%, down to $379.99.
The OmniBook 5 is just a little more expensive at $399.99 after a 60% discount, and it’s got double the storage (up to 512GB) and is a nice lightweight model that also does AI bits and bobs with Copilot if you’re into that sort of thing.
Dell laptop deals
“But Lloyd” you say, “this is Rock Paper Shotgun – where’s the gaming hardware?”
Dell’s got you covered in that regard, not only with laptops but with a cheeky Alienware laptop deal, too.
The company undercuts HP with its Dell 15 Laptop (that’s how you name a laptop, HP), which is reduced by 34% and sits at $249.99 as a result, but there’s also the Dell 16 Plus at $599.99, which has 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
Still, they’re not gaming machines (I feel like Lucius Fox in Batman Begins walking you through the inventory of ‘spelunking gear’)…
You can save $500 on the Dell XPS 16, while other models are as low as $749.99 if you’re happy to look at 2024 stock.
About that desktop, though. Less of a “back to school deal” and more of a “blow all your budget and then some deal”, the Alienware Area-51 with an RTX 5090 inside (the most powerful NVIDIA GPU around) is reduced by almost $600.
There’s 13% off a prebuilt version with the Intel Core Ultra 7, or 11% off the Ultra 9 variant, with each coming with 32GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage.
Will you lug it to your classroom each day? That’s for you to report back if you buy one, but we wish you luck.
