Black Friday Laptop Deals
Your guide to finding the best cheap laptops
Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving, and it’s considered to be the unofficial first day of the Christmas shopping season. Many stores open at 5 a.m. or earlier and offer their best deals of the year on electronics products. This year, Black Friday falls on November 27.
Though digital cameras and big screen televisions are still the most sought-after consumer electronics items on Black Friday, laptops aren’t far behind. The good news for early-morning bargain seekers is that retailers know what you want and they will be offering some very enticing deals on laptops this year.
Black Friday 2008 generated an estimated 10.6 billion in sales and 178 million shoppers which was an increase of almost 5 percent over 2007. With the continued financial uncertainty of 2009 most consumers have continued to avoid buying many material items. Experts predict that Christmas purchase may dwindle by 29% or more this year, but retailers are expected to do their best to entice shoppers with terrific deals.
Many retailers will be selling discount laptops (in other words, laptops that normally retail for $500 or less) for $300 or less. These machines are perfect for people who want to be able to do basic things like surfing the Web and word processing while they’re on the go. Commuters and college students are among the target demographic for these laptops.
On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who wants a laptop to use for activities that require more computer power (such as playing graphically intensive video games or editing movies), you may want to grab a more expensive machine. Many top-of-the-line laptops will be on sale this Black Friday.
The Best Deals This Year
Black Friday is chock full of amazing deals on laptops and other consumer electronics. This year, like every year, there are a few outstanding sales that are worth noting:
- Kmart is offering 32” Sony Bravia L Series LCD HDTVs for $380, Nintendo DS bundles with 5 games for $170 and Magellan Roadmate 1220 GPS navigation system for $85 from 6 - 11am.
- Walmart has an HP G60-W519WM laptop for $298 with a 2.2 GHz, 1MB cache and 800Hz FSB Intel Celeron 900 processor. It comes loaded with Windows 7 home premium, a 250 GB Hard Drive and 3072MB DDR2 system memory. For $348 you can get an Acer laptop PC with an AMD Athlon 64 dual-core processor plus Windows 7 home premium.
Black Friday Facts
Think you’re an expert on Black Friday? Here are some fun facts you probably didn’t know:
- Many people mistakenly believe that the name Black Friday is derived from the fact that it’s the day when most stores’ revenues rise out of the red (net losses for the year) and into the black (net profits). The truth is that the name Black Friday probably comes from a tongue-in-cheek comparison to the chaos and confusion of Black Tuesday (the day the stock market crashed in 1929).
- Black Friday is generally considered to be the busiest shopping day of the year, but this is not always the case. The last Saturday before Christmas is usually the busiest shopping day of the year, but Black Friday always ranks among the top five.
- Exact figures are hard to determine, but most experts agree that over 150 million shoppers hit the stores on Black Friday weekend and they spend an average of over $300 each.
- More and more people are choosing to avoid the lineups on Black Friday and to do their shopping on Cyber Monday, the unofficial start of the online Christmas shopping season. Other opportunities to avoid crack of dawn lineups and still snag a great deal include check out Walmart’s pre-Black Friday sales starting Saturday, November 7 2009. Each week six exclusive items from Blu-Ray Disc players to Xbox 360 consoles are offered at deep discounts in limited quantities.