Entertainment
Walmart+ Week’s laptop deals: Do your shopping elsewhere
UPDATE: Jun. 18, 2024, 1:30 p.m. EDT This story has been updated with more information about Walmart+ Week and some of its “greatest” laptop deals.
Walmart+ Week laptop deals aren’t so impressive, but here are our couple of top picks from the sale:
While Walmart isn’t a great place to find laptop deals on the average day, it usually course-corrects with a smattering of good PC doorbusters for major savings events. We’ve seen this happen during the retailer’s annual Black Friday sales and during its Amazon Prime Day counter-programming the past few summers.
However, its 2024 members-only Walmart+ Week sale is panning out to be a hard skip for bargain hunters.
Live now through Sunday, June 23, the event’s scant laptop deals (so far) involve paltry discounts on gaming laptops and HP notebooks, to the tune of just $50 to $100 off. Some of the featured devices also have wildly inflated list prices, making those discounts appear way better than they actually are.
If you can’t see any of the deals on Walmart’s website, it’s because the big-box store is hiding them for non-members. Don’t fret: You’re not missing out on much.
A Walmart+ membership unlocks other perks besides exclusive discounts on tech and other hard goods during the retailer’s sales. But if you’re just trying to save on a new laptop, it’s hard to justify the price of admission in this case.
What is Walmart+ Week?
Walmart+ Week is an exclusive sale for paid members of the retailer’s Walmart+ program. (You can still see the deals if you have a trial account, but you need to upgrade to actually buy anything.) It’s live online and on the Walmart app from June 17 through June 23.
This is the second time Walmart has hosted such an event, and it’s admitted to switching things up a bit this time around. Last year’s iteration of Walmart+ Week was a four-day affair chock-full of deals that ran in tandem with Prime Day 2023, giving Amazon some healthy competition for its own members-only sale. This year, the retailer moved Walmart+ Week up several weeks, extended it to a full seven days, and put a greater emphasis on the benefits that come with Walmart+. (That includes free next-day delivery, free store delivery, and through Sunday only, 20% Walmart cash back on travel and double fuel savings.)
With that in mind, maybe it’s a bit unfair to come after Walmart for treating the event’s deals like an afterthought. But with all of the hype building around Prime Day, which is confirmed for July, this feels like a missed opportunity.
It’s not just laptop deals, either. According to some of my colleagues, the TV, robot vacuum, headphone, and speaker deals featured in Walmart+ Week 2024 are all flops. (“To put it bluntly,” said Mashable’s Lead Shopping Reporter Bethany Allard, “the deals we’ve seen so far aren’t [even] worth using your 30-day free trial sign up to look at.”)
I’ll personally monitor Walmart+ Week as it progresses to see if its laptop deals improve, and you can peruse some of the “highlights” below. (I’ve corrected their list prices when applicable and weeded out the ones that are cheaper elsewhere, like this one and this one; see Antonline and Amazon, respectively.) In the meantime, though, look for more enticing offers at other retailers and on manufacturers’ sites — we round up the greatest ones biweekly.
Mashable Deals
Greatest Walmart+ Week laptop deal
Why we like it
The Acer Nitro V 15 is an excellent value at its usual sticker price, so any extra discounts are just icing on the cake. (Note that Newegg was matching its Walmart+ Week price at the time of writing.)
Mashable previously tested a configuration that had a 13th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 graphics, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage, and it walked away as our favorite cheap gaming laptop. Tech Editor Kim Gedeon didn’t love its dim 144Hz display, but she commended its ability to keep cool and liked its cool look, giving it a 4.7/5 rating.
This exact model that Walmart has on sale features downgraded specs, including a 13th-gen Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but it was put through the wringer by our sister site, PCMag. Senior analyst Matthew Buzzi gave it a 4/5 (Excellent) rating, noting that “you’d be hard-pressed to find equivalent performance for this price or less.”
More Walmart+ Week laptop deals
Honorable mention
Why we like it
This is technically a permanent price drop Walmart’s been offering since mid-March, not a true deal, but I still want to flag it just because it’s such a good price for a MacBook — even an older one from 2020. (Greatest Buy managed to beat it by $50 one time, but it didn’t last long and eventually sold out there.) Amazing build quality and an all-day battery life are its biggest selling points. We haven’t tested it recently — read our review from back in the day — but it should still perform well through casual tasks.
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