5 Of The Best Laptop Deals This Presidents' Day

As with many forms of consumer electronics, there is indeed a best time of year to buy a new laptop computer. Besides back-to-school sales and the discounts on older MacBooks when a new model comes out, the best time to buy laptops is often the best time to buy TVs and other tech products: Sales tied to major holidays. 

Whether it's Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, or Presidents' Day, there are going to be deals to be had regardless. Since it's February, that means that it's Presidents' Day's turn to offer new discounts and deals this coming Monday.

With that in mind, we tried to narrow down five of the best laptop deals available in the Presidents' Day sales that have already started. Spreading out the love a bit, we have suggestions for MacBooks (a few of them), a lightweight/ultraportable Windows notebook, a mid-priced Windows notebook, a gaming laptop, and a Chromebook. Hopefully, this means that there's something for everyone looking for deals on a new laptop.

If you're in the market for an Apple MacBook, then there are several great deals to be had across the entire line heading into Presidents' Day. Regardless of whether you want the latest and greatest, or can do fine with settling for an older model, there are some excellent deals available.

Let's start with the most recent MacBook, the 14" MacBook Pro that runs Apple's M3 system on a chip. In an October 2023 press release, Apple stressed the significant speed improvements it had made since the first generation of Apple Silicon, the M1 — with the GPU, most notably, being 65% faster. If you want to get the base model of the newest Pro with 8GB RAM and 512GB storage, Amazon has it for $1,449.00 — $150.00 off the retail price. Stepping up to 1TB of storage will cost you $1,599.00 — $200.00 off the MSRP.

Stepping down to the M2 MacBook Air, you can get the 13-inch base model (8 GB RAM/256 GB storage) at Best Buy for $949.00 — $150.00 off — or you can get an absolute steal by stepping up to the 15-inch model for $999.00, which is a whopping $300.00 off. 

Also a great deal? It requires checking off one of those weird Amazon checkbox coupons specifically, but you can get a base M1 MacBook Air (8GB RAM/256 GB storage) for $749.99 — $249.01 off retail price. Yes, it's over three years old, but it's still a strong performer with great battery life.

When LG first introduced its "gram" line of high-end ultraportable laptops in 2016, we theorized that it could be a "MacBook killer" among Windows notebooks. We weren't alone: Laptop Magazine and Tech Radar went on to express similar sentiments in 2019 and 2022, respectively. Now, going into Presidents' Day 2024, Amazon and Best Buy both have the latest and greatest version, the LG gram Style 16 OLED, for roughly the same price, $1,1196.99 and $1,199.99, respectively. 

For your $1,200.00, you get a 16-inch laptop with a 3200x1800 ("quad HD+") display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness, a 13th generation Intel Core i7 CPU clocked at 2.2GHz, a 1TB NVMe solid state drive for storage, 16GB RAM, and a battery rated as lasting 14.5 hours. All of that comes in a package that weighs 2.76 pounds, about the same as a 13-inch M1 or M2 MacBook Air.

If you're looking for a laptop with a medium-to-large screen, but are worried about adding the kind of heft that a MacBook Air lacks, then the LG gram Style 16 OLED might be the right pick for you. If anything, with it weighing about the same as the Air with a larger surface area, if might even be more comfortable to carry in a backpack than the more dense Air.

Speaking very broadly, there are two kinds of laptops: Cheap ones and more premium ones. The dividing line tends to be in the $500.00 to $700.00 range — something lower-priced, like under $500, will generally be a lower-end budget laptop, and the more "serious" notebooks come as you get higher than that mark. 

Of the laptops on sale for Presidents' Day, the best option on a smaller budget is probably the 15.6-inch version of the HP Envy x360, which is on sale at Best Buy for $649.99 — $400.00 off. Whether you're going by the retail price or the discounted one, it sits comfortably in a price range where a higher level of quality is expected.

The x360 features a 1080p full HD display, an AMD Ryzen 7 7000 Series APU, 16GB of RAM, and a 516GB solid-state drive. As reviews go, Wired recommended it, calling it a strong laptop for its price range with particularly good performance in business apps — albeit while wishing for a higher resolution display, and PC Mag shared similar sentiments. At this sale price in particular, you shouldn't necessarily be expecting something super flashy so much as something solid, and by all accounts, the x360 is solid.

On the more expensive side of the notebook computing continuum sits gaming laptops. Needing to carefully balance raw graphics horsepower with battery life, the price can easily run pretty high if you want to do PC gaming on the go, but sometimes, sale events bring those prices closer to earth. 

With that in mind, the HP OMEN 16 stands out as a particularly good gaming laptop deal for Presidents' Day 2024, going for $1,199.99 at Best Buy — a whopping $650.00 discount from the retail price of $1,849.99.

In an October 2023 review, Wired described the OMEN as a "beefy laptop" with "Earth-shattering performance across the board," and is a particularly good deal when it's on sale. In their battery life test, the OMEN posted an impressive eight hours on a full-screen YouTube loop, ahead of other gaming laptops that they reviewed — older OMEN models included — that barely lasted two hours. PCGamesN was also impressed by the battery life, while Pocket Lint singled out the smoothness of the 240Hz display.

If you're looking for a gaming laptop in this week's sales, then the HP OMEN 16 looks like a very good middle ground when it comes to power vs. price.

With regards to that note from earlier about pricing, there's an exception to the basic rules of laptop value propositions: Chromebooks, which run Google's ChromeOS. 

In terms of performance and stability, you're probably going to get better results from a cheap Chromebook than a similarly spec'd cheap Windows notebook, specifically if you're working primarily in Google apps. And when it comes to the Presidents' Day 2024 sales, the best Chromebook deal is the HP Chromebook Plus for $299.00 at Best Buy, which is $200.00 off the retail price of $499.00.

Though the earliest Chromebooks over a decade ago were often starved for computing power, that's not really the case anymore. Most any Chromebook you can find in 2024, particularly with the Chromebook Plus branding, will provide a nice, zippy experience with minimal slowdown. 

With an Intel Core i3 CPU and 8GB RAM, you have nothing to be worried about here. As long as you understand the software limitations of ChromeOS and just need a notebook for web browsing and web apps, then this is a fine choice, especially for roughly $300.00.