Microsoft's Surface Laptops got expensive this year. For one day, a chunk of that got rolled back.
Amazon's October Prime Day sale knocks up to $750 off more than a dozen Surface Laptop configurations, with prices starting around $1,100. The single best deal is the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 (Snapdragon X Elite, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD), down to $1,349 from $2,099.99 at Amazon - a $750.99 cut that, according to price-tracking site camelcamelcamel, is its lowest price since mid-May. Several configurations of the newer Surface Laptop 8, announced in June, are also discounted by $300 to $750 at Amazon and Best Buy. The new compact Surface Laptop 13-inch, launched in September, has no deals yet.
The discounts matter because Microsoft spent this year raising prices, not cutting them. A memory-chip shortage pushed PC makers to hike costs across the board, and Microsoft raised last year's Surface Laptop 7 by as much as $500 this spring. The Surface Laptop 8 launched in June with those higher prices mostly intact.
For comparison, Apple's MacBook Prime Day discounts top out around 15 percent, roughly half the 36 percent ceiling on Surface Laptops this week. Worth noting: lowest price since mid-May means this exact configuration dipped as low five months ago, not that this is an all-time low or the deepest Surface discount ever offered.