Best Holiday Deals on Laptops, Desktops, and Chromebooks

At roughly $11 less than what it was on Black Friday, this is now the lowest price we’ve seen for the brand new 2025 MacBook Air (13-inch), While we’ve only tested the 15-inch model (which is also on sale, at the same Black Friday price), we expect this 13-inch version to deliver the same top-tier performance and all-day battery life. It’s an ideal choice for travelers or students who need power in a significantly smaller package. You might miss having the extra screen real estate of its big brother, but the speed of the M4 chip and the sharp Retina display make this a standout deal all the same.

The Surface Pro could be considered Microsoft’s take on the iPad Pro: a high-end device that’s equally suited to work as a tablet as it is a laptop. It runs Windows 11 and is equipped with one of the new Snapdragon processors, which helps stretch its battery life to nearly 16 hours in our tests. All in all, a good deal on a good device, even if it has gone up $50 since Cyber Monday.

The Lenovo Yoga 7i, now $250 less than it was at the start of the month, is sorta like the Swiss Army Knife of laptops. It has a 360-degree hinge that lets you flip the screen around to use the device as a tablet or prop it up like a tent for watching movies (great for cramped airplane trays). The model we tested has premium specs: an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. This one’s a bit more mainstream: an Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of memory, and a 512-gigabyte solid-state drive. But, unlike many sub-$700 laptops that cut corners with dim screens or plastic bodies, it has a premium all-metal finish and a bright, colorful display. It’s perfect for students or professionals who need a machine that looks and feels expensive but costs less than a standard MacBook.

Hailing from HP’s line of entry-level gaming laptops, this Victus should deliver solid performance for popular games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Rocket League, thanks to the RTX 4050 graphics card. And if you haven’t played a game since the original Super Mario, the extra graphical power still comes in handy when you do things like photo or video editing. No, this isn’t the most powerful laptop in our ratings, but it’s hard to argue when the price is so low.

This model may not have “Gaming” in its name, but it should deliver a solid streaming experience. It has a 16-inch display and a big, comfortable keyboard, complete with RGB lighting that makes typing in the dark easier and more colorful. The display supports a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, which can make games appear silky smooth in motion.

If you are curious about switching to a Mac, or perhaps just tired of Windows, the 2024 Mac Mini is a great entry point into the Apple ecosystem, provided you already have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard handy (or are prepared to buy them). It is also a fantastic, low-stakes machine for anyone looking to get their feet wet with iOS programming; it runs Xcode (Apple’s app development software) beautifully, making it a great gift for a budding developer or a student.

The iPad Air is the model to get if you don’t want to "settle" for the entry-level model (which is simply called "iPad") nor need the full power afforded by the iPad Pro. The result is a happy medium ground: Powerful enough for everyday tasks like browsing the web and reading books and magazines while offering nearly 12 hours of battery life and weighing an air-like 1 pound on the dot. Pairs nicely with popular subscriptions like DC Universe Unlimited (for comic book lovers) and Apple News+ that includes dozens of magazines like Wired, Outside, and Food Network Magazine.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 aces nearly all of our tests, from speed to camera quality. It’s a generation old, but it still sits near the top of our ratings among Android tablets. The 11-inch screen is bright and sharp, though the colors are slightly undersaturated. Its battery lasts a convenient 10.8 hours when browsing the web and 13.2 hours when playing video. Overall, it’s a top-notch tablet, with a premium price tag to match. 

If you’re looking for a versatile printer for your home office, the HP Smart Tank 7602 ticks a lot of boxes: It’s an all-in-one model, which means it can handle copying and scanning, too. It delivers high-quality text and graphics, though at a slightly slower rate than some other options. And, because you refill the “tanks” with bottled ink instead of pricey cartridges, ongoing ink costs remain super low.

If you print in color frequently enough to justify buying an inkjet printer, consider a model that will save you money in the long run, especially when it’s on sale. The Epson ET-2800 tank printer has a reservoir you can refill with low-cost bottled ink instead of expensive ink cartridges. It uses only about $5 worth of ink a year, according to our estimates, instead of the $70 or more you might have to pay for a cartridge model. Those ongoing savings make the Epson’s purchase price far more palatable and give it a two-year cost of ownership that’s at the top of its class.

The ET-2800’s overall performance isn’t strong enough to earn a CR recommendation. But the text quality and speed are decent and should be fine for home use. The model doesn’t excel at printing photos, charts, or graphics; it does those jobs about as well as any ink-stingy inkjet.

The speedy Eero Max 7 is one of the first WiFi 7 routers to hit the market. It aces our throughput tests at every distance and is a breeze to set up. While you’ll need two units to build a mesh network, even a single router can cover a lot of ground.

This is a pretty good deal on one of the better-rated wireless routers that we’ve tested. The Asus ZenWiFi router uses the current WiFi standard known as WiFi 6, which improves performance relative to WiFi 5 as you add more and more devices to your WiFi network. Like many modern routers, it has a mobile app that you can use to set up and manage everything. And it has a feature known as QoS that helps ensure that, say, your Zoom calls stay rock solid even if someone else on the network is watching Netflix or playing Xbox.