Amazon's two-day October Prime Day laptop sale ended at midnight Pacific last night, so most of its marquee MacBook and Surface Laptop discounts are already gone.
During the 48-hour event, Amazon cut the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) to $1,099, a $200 discount that undid the price increase Apple applied to its whole MacBook lineup back in June. A 2024 Surface Laptop 7 (Snapdragon X Elite, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) fell 36% to $1,349, its lowest price since May. A loaded 14-inch MacBook Pro (M5 Pro, 24GB RAM, 2TB SSD) dropped $500 to $2,699. Those prices were specific to Amazon's sale window, which closed October 7, so anyone checking those same listings today should expect regular pricing to have returned.
That timing matters because laptop prices have risen anywhere from $100 to $950 this year amid an ongoing memory crisis, making any sale that reverses those hikes unusually significant rather than routine. The good news for latecomers: Best Buy and Walmart are running their own, separately scheduled sales this week, and deals like a $599.99 Dell XPS 13 or a $1,399.99 HP OmniBook Ultra 14 at Best Buy were never tied to Amazon's midnight cutoff.
A sale with a deadline isn't automatically a better deal than one without, it's just louder. Before assuming Amazon's expired event was the best game in town, it's worth checking what Best Buy and Walmart still have running.