Amazon isn't usually loaded with great laptop deals on any given day (especially compared to the competition), but things tend to pick up a bit during the retailer's major sitewide sales.
With Prime Big Deal Days coming soon — that would be Amazon's members-only "October Prime Day" sale, set for Oct. 8 and 9 — the Mashable Shopping team is on the lookout for the best, most worth-it discounts there starring Apple MacBooks, Windows PCs, Chromebooks, and beyond.
At the time of writing, the floodgates have only just started to crack open; there's really only one good early Prime Day laptop deal available: A variant of the Acer Swift X 14, our favorite Windows laptop for photo and video editing, has hit a new all-time low.
That said, Amazon also has some MacBook Pros and Airs on sale separately from its pre-Prime Big Deal Days programming. That includes two configurations of the 14-inch M3 Pro, our favorite laptop for photo and video editing overall, which have returned to their lowest prices on record. As such, we recommend that shoppers consider them, too.
We'll couch these recs with a warning that anything on sale now could theoretically get even cheaper next week when Prime Big Deal Days officially starts. (That's when we're expecting the bulk of the best laptop deals to arrive.) But if you need to upgrade ASAP and can't wait until then, these are decent discounts as things currently stand. Below, we go deeper on specs and pricing.
Note: Deals marked with a 🔥 have dropped to an all-time low price.
Read Mashable's full review of the Acer Swift X 14.
The Intel Core Ultra 7-powered Acer Swift X 14 is our top Windows laptop for photo and video editing, nabbing a 4.5/5 rating from Tech Editor Kim Gedeon (and a Mashable Choice Award) for its stellar performance, decent battery life, good build quality, and beautiful OLED display. "The Acer Swift X 14 may not be the most exciting laptop, but behind its boring exterior is a powerful set of internals that will handle your creative workloads like The Hulk," she wrote. This variant features downgraded Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics — our loaner had an RTX 4070 GPU — and 16GB of memory instead of 32GB, but should still be plenty powerful for most users.
Normally $1,499.99, Amazon has it on sale for just $1,099.99 — a 27% savings and a record low. Meanwhile, it's still full price on the Acer website.
Read Mashable's full review of the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M3).
With a super bright mini-LED display, a good amount of useful, creative-friendly ports, gorgeous-sounding speakers, and an M3 chip that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the current-gen MacBook Pro is our No. 1 laptop for photo and video editing (regardless of operating system). It's also the longest-lasting MacBook we've tested to date, clocking in at over 16 hours in our battery life test. It's another Mashable Choice Award winner that earned a 4.5/5 rating from Gedeon.
We highly recommend bumping up to the 1TB variant with 16GB of memory, which is currently marked down to $1,699 (down $300 from $1,999), but the base configuration with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage is also on sale for $1,299 (down $300 from $1,599). Either way, you'll be locking in an all-time low.
Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M2, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) — $849 $999 (save $150)
Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M3, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) — $999 $1,099 (save $100)
Apple MacBook Air, 15-inch (M3, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) — $1,149 $1,299 (save $150)
