Buying a Laptop in a Sale? Spend on What You Can't Change

Put the money where the machine cannot be changed later. Memory, screen and processor are decided the day you buy. Storage is not, and storage is the line the configuration page marks up hardest.

The awkward pair of facts about laptop sales

Two Adobe findings, both about the same season, that read oddly together.

Computers are discounted the least. They peaked at 23.4% off list against 30.9% for electronics as a whole — the shallowest cut of any major category.

And electronics is where buyers trade up hardest. The share of units sold that were the most expensive goods rose 56% in electronics against the rest of the year.

So this is the category where the sale saves you the least and moves you upmarket the most. A laptop sale is not mainly an opportunity to pay less; it is an occasion on which people pay more. Knowing that is most of the defence.

The upgradeable/not test

Everything on a laptop specification sheet falls into two piles, and only one of them is a decision.

Cannot be changed after purchase:

• The processor. Never.
• The screen. Never. Resolution, brightness and refresh rate are permanent, and brightness in nits is frequently not published at all — which is itself informative.
• Memory, if it is soldered. Increasingly it is. The specification sheet will say SODIMM slots or it will say soldered, and those are different products. How to check your laptop’s real RAM limit is the two-minute version.

Can be changed later, cheaply:

• Storage, either by replacing the drive on machines that allow it, or by not paying for it in the first place.
• Peripherals, obviously.

The list is short and it is the whole argument. Every pound that moves from storage to memory or screen buys something you cannot buy again.

Where the configuration page gets you

Storage upgrades are the highest-margin line on most manufacturers’ configurators, and they are presented at exactly the moment you have already decided to buy — which is when resistance is lowest.

An external drive is the same capacity for a fraction of the price, works with the next laptop too, and is the one part of this decision that is genuinely reversible. The exception is a machine you will edit video on, where internal speed earns its money.

Memory is the opposite case. On a machine with soldered RAM, the configurator is your only chance at it, ever.

What to actually do

• Look up whether the memory is soldered before anything else. It converts a preference into a deadline.
• Buy memory you will want in three years, not today. It is the one spec that ages badly and cannot be fixed.
• Do not pay for internal storage you could add externally, unless you edit video.
• Find the screen brightness in nits. If the sheet will not say, assume it is dim — that is why it is missing.
• Set your number before the sale and hold it. The trade-up effect above is measurable, it is aimed at you, and this is the category where it works best.
• If you want the picks rather than the principles, our laptop shortlist averages published scores from six outlets — none of them ours.