For the past four days I've been covering Prime Day laptop deals, and while there have been some brilliant offers at Amazon and rival retailers, I've also noticed a worrying trend. Namely: there are too many third-party sellers pushing laptop deals that seem too good to be true – and which on closer inspection turn out to be bad deals.
The problem is that these deals can often appear alongside real deals that are actually worth buying, and it can sometimes be difficult to identify which is worth buying and which should be avoided.
Buying a new laptop can be confusing enough at the best of times, so having to think about which deals are good and which are misleading only makes things harder.
• See more Amazon Prime Day deals
So, I've put together this guide to not only help you avoid wasting your money on a bad deal, but also to point you towards 10 of the best laptop deals on Amazon that are worth buying.
Make sure you also check out our guides on the best laptops, best MacBooks and best Chromebooks; if you see any of the laptops we suggest in those guides on sale, then you can buy with confidence.
How to avoid bad deals
To begin with, let's take a look at one of those bad deals and I'll point out some of the red flags.
I'm not going to show the specific deal here, but it is a genuine listing that you can find if you look for it. It's for a 16in Windows 11 gaming laptop and according to the listing, the regular price is $1,499.99 – but it's selling for $331.49.
Sounds too good to be true, right?
Well, sadly, that's because it is. I would not touch this deal, no matter how cheap. Here are some red flags:
🚩 Massive price cut – a gaming laptop for $331.49 is a big red flag, especially with the claim it's usually selling for $1,500. Legitimate deals are good, but this would be a huge discount, especially for a gaming laptop
🚩 Unknown brand – I've never heard of the brand selling this laptop, so have no idea what its reputation is (if it has one). At least with the likes of Dell, HP and Apple, you know what you're getting
🚩 Dodgy specs – this is the real killer. The specs either don't make sense or are worryingly vague. The '12th Quad-Core Processor' turns out to be a three-year-old Intel N97 CPU that apparently outperforms the 'Pentium N5030 and Celeron N5095', which are both old and weak CPUs, definitely not something you'd want in a gaming laptop.
It also comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM, when modern gaming laptops should really be offering the newer and faster DDR5 memory. Crucially, there's no graphics card, just an undisclosed integrated GPU, which would make this essentially completely useless for playing games on.
🚩 Customer reviews – this is the biggest red flag, I think, as customer reviews can be a great way to see if a product is worth buying. If there are no reviews at all, you can't make that call. Also, it suggests that either no one has bought it, or the listing has just gone up. Either way, that's not a good sign.
If the product does have customer reviews, it's worth taking time to read them to get an idea of what the device is like. Sadly, customer reviews can also be faked – tell-tale signs are reviews that read like the product description (even using the same phrases and language), or if there are a small number of reviews that are all extremely popular. Even the best laptops will have a healthy range of reviews, as no product is perfect, and popular devices should have hundreds of reviews, rather than a handful.
So, how much of a problem is this? Unfortunately, I've seen quite a few similarly bad laptop deals on Amazon's sites, and while I want to stress that these are not being sold by Amazon, it does make finding legitimate deals harder.
I've not bought or tried any of these laptops, and who knows, maybe they work fine. After all, spending only around $300 on a laptop means you can't expect to be getting cutting-edge technology.
What I do take issue with is the suggestion that this laptop was previously sold for $1,500 (unless we're talking three years ago). The fact that it's being called a gaming laptop is also misleading, as you will not be able to play modern games on this thing.
How to spot good deals
The good news is that there are some easy things to help avoid misleading deals and save money on a laptop that will do everything you need. Here are my top tips:
✅ Look for those red flags I mentioned above. If any deal you look at has even one of those red flags, let alone all of them, then use caution.
✅ Take your time and do research. With Prime Day now stretching over four days, you don't need to rush. Planning what you need from a laptop can make finding a good deal even easier. If you see a deal that catches your eye, make sure you check out reviews for the laptop, including from reputable review sites like us at TechRadar, as well as any customer reviews on the Amazon store page. Lots of good reviews mean you should be able to buy in confidence. Bad reviews, or no reviews at all, are a bad sign.
✅ Use our buying guides. We have loads of great buying guides that give you clear, unbiased buying advice for a range of devices, and they have been hand-picked by experts with years (and in my case, decades) of experience. For laptops, make sure you check our best laptops, best gaming laptops, best budget laptops, and best MacBooks guides - we also have a widget that finds you the best prices for each laptop as well.
✅ Buy from reputable retailers. Avoid websites you've never used before (or heard about), and when it comes to buying from Amazon, for big-ticket-items like laptops, it's safest to buy direct from Amazon itself, rather than a third-party retailer. These third parties sell their items through the Amazon website, but they have nothing to do with Amazon.
✅ Use my Prime Day laptop deals live blog for inspiration and advice. Throughout this week I'm running a live blog highlighting all the very best laptop deals that I find, with direct links to the retailers so you can buy the ones that catch your eye. I've been writing about laptops for nearly 20 years now, and I'm only picking deals that are worth spending money on, and that includes only linking to trusted retailers, and only suggesting laptops with decent specifications.
Bonus tip: it seems like a lot of the misleading deals I'm finding on Amazon by third party retailers are using AI-generated artwork with creatures and characters seemingly coming out of the screens. It's a cool effect, but it's enough of a pattern to suggest you'd be better off avoiding them.
To be clear, the misleading deals aren't from Amazon itself, and there are loads of genuinely great Amazon laptop deals. Read on for my pick of 10 of the best.
The 10 best Prime Day laptop deals at Amazon
More Amazon Prime Day deals
- Amazon Devices: 50% off Kindle & Echo
- Apple: AirPods + iPads from $99
- Back to school: deals from $5.99
- Beauty: up to 50% off Oral-B & Philips
- Headphones: up to $120 of Beats, Apple & Sony
- Kitchen: up to 50% off Ninja, Breville & Instant
- Laptops: HP, Lenovo & Apple from $119
- Prime Student: six-month free trial for 18-24 year olds
- Tablets: iPad and Fire Tab from $54.99
- Toys: 40% off Lego, scooters & Toniebox
- TVs: cheap TVs from $69.99
- Vacuums: Shark, Bissell & Dyson from $49.99
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