Amazon’s big Prime Day sale is here, and we’re already seeing some cracking deals – but we've also spotted some cracking bargains on laptops away from Amazon, as rival retailers look to be competitive.
Firstly, we have a Dell 16 laptop, direct from the manufacturer, that has been reduced from $1030 to $500, which is an excellent value proposition given the hardware on board.
Add to that an ASUS Vivobook 14, which is similarly top-notch value direct from the company, with its price reduced from $590.19 to $449.99.
The trouble with cheap laptops is that they often make compromises with hardware that really hamper the experience.
A budget notebook might, for example, cut corners on the components front by sticking in an old, sluggish processor, or not enough system memory. We quite often see laptops that are under $500 running with the likes of ancient Intel Celeron processors, or a paltry 8GB of RAM, or maybe a tiny amount of slow (eMMC) storage.
That’s very definitely not the case with these Dell and Asus. With the Dell 16, you’re getting a plenty powerful mid-range AMD Ryzen processor as the engine of the portable, and a relatively spacious (for this price level) and speedy SSD.
With the Asus notebook, there’s a springy Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPU and again, for the price, storage (and RAM) isn’t stingy at all.
Let’s dive into the specs in more detail and see how these bargains stand out from the crowd of Prime Day laptop price cuts.
Today’s best deals for laptops under $500
For other bargains on quality notebooks, head on over to our roundup of the best laptop deals currently out there, and check out some other options for the Dell Inspiron 15 below.