Nadia Dubois
September 9, 2026
14 min read
Labor Day fell on September 7 this year, but the laptop deals it kicked off are still running. Best Buy’s Apple sale, officially timed to end on Labor Day itself, is showing pricing that outlasts the calendar. Lenovo never pretended otherwise: its own sale page spells out a window that runs through September 13, nearly a full week after the holiday. If you slept through the long weekend, you have not missed much.
The timing matters more than usual this year. Memory and storage costs are climbing across the industry, and that is starting to show up in laptop configurations with more RAM and bigger SSDs. Shoppers chasing a 24GB or 1TB machine are working against a pricing backdrop that looks nothing like last September. Below is what is actually still discounted, who is selling it, and why the deals on higher-spec machines are worth grabbing before the window closes.
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Best Buy Keeps the MacBook Air M4 at a Record-Low $799
The single most-cited deal of the weekend is Best Buy’s price on the 13-inch MacBook Air with the M4 chip. The retailer dropped it to $799, down $200 from its usual $999, and that figure was independently confirmed by Tom’s Guide, TechRadar, and Engadget as a record low for that configuration. The 15-inch version of the same M4 Air also dropped $200, landing at $999 against its regular $1,199 price.
Best Buy’s own event page states the sale “ends 9/7/26 at 11:59 p.m. CT,” but the same page carries a caveat that matters for anyone reading this after the holiday: prices are “valid during, but may start before and end after, the sale dates.” In plain terms, that is the retailer’s way of saying some of this pricing is expected to persist past the formal end date, and multiple outlets have already reported it doing exactly that.
Best Buy is also running a trade-in stack on top of the direct discount. Customers who trade in a qualifying MacBook can save up to $950 on a new one, a detail buried lower on the retailer’s Labor Day Apple page but worth checking before buying outright. Combined with the base discount, it turns the MacBook Air deal into one of the deeper Apple price cuts of 2026 so far.
MacBook Pro M5 Deals Are Still Live at Best Buy
Apple’s M5 MacBook Pro line is also discounted, though the cuts are smaller in percentage terms than on the Air. Best Buy lists the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD at $1,849. A step up in memory, the 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD Space Black configuration, sits at $2,049. Best Buy’s broader Labor Day Apple page frames the category promise as “save up to $500 on select MacBook,” and one specific example backs that up: an M5 MacBook Air 13-inch with 24GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD in Midnight is priced at $1,699, a $100 cut from its $1,799 list price.
These are not the deepest discounts of the weekend in dollar terms, but they are notable because they apply to configurations with more memory and storage, the exact specs that are getting more expensive to build as component costs rise. A 24GB, 1TB MacBook getting any discount at all this fall is arguably a bigger deal than it looks on paper, a point covered in more detail in the pricing section below.
Apple’s Refurbished Store Undercuts New M5 Pricing
Best Buy is not the only place Apple gear got cheaper this weekend. Apple’s own refurbished store ran its own version of the sale, and 9to5Mac’s roundup flagged the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD at $1,359, down from a $1,599 list price, a $240 cut. That configuration was available in Midnight, Starlight, and Sky Blue, matching the color options Apple sells new. For buyers comfortable with Apple-certified refurbished hardware, that price undercuts most of what Best Buy is offering on comparable new M5 units, and it comes with the same one-year warranty Apple attaches to every refurbished machine it sells directly.
The refurbished channel tends to get less attention in Labor Day roundups because it lacks the flashy “record low” framing of a new-unit deal, but the numbers here are hard to ignore. A $240 discount on a 1TB, 16GB M5 Air is a bigger dollar cut than anything currently posted on the new M5 lineup at Best Buy.
Lenovo Extends Its Sale a Full Week, Through September 13
Where Best Buy’s Apple pricing is technically tied to a Labor Day end date with some pricing lingering unofficially, Lenovo built its extension into the sale from the start. The company’s own announcement states that “from August 31 through September 13, shoppers can find special offers across laptops, gaming PCs, tablets, monitors and accessories” at Lenovo.com. That is a two-week window that treats Labor Day weekend as the midpoint rather than the finish line.
Lenovo’s structure also rewards shoppers who wait. Starting September 7, the day after the holiday weekend began winding down, the retailer introduced a spend-more-save-more threshold: up to $100 off purchases over $500, running through September 13. There is also a single-day incentive on September 7 itself, when Lenovo offered 2X Rewards sitewide, or 6% back on purchases, for that day only. Anyone who missed that specific bonus can still catch the broader threshold discount through the following weekend.
ThinkPad and ThinkBook Pricing Shifts Between Week One and Week Two
Lenovo’s sale is not static across its full two-week run. According to the company’s own campaign breakdown, the ThinkBook 14x G1 started at $699 during week one, covering August 31 through September 6. The ThinkPad T Series started at $1,599 during that same first week, then moved to a $1,779 starting price in week two, September 7 through 13. The ThinkPad X13 followed a similar pattern, starting at $1,409 once week two began.
The upward shift on some ThinkPad starting prices between the two weeks is a detail easy to miss if you only checked Lenovo’s site once. Shoppers who bought during the opening days of the sale generally got the better headline number on business-grade ThinkPads, while the current, still-live pricing through September 13 remains discounted versus full retail even after the week-two adjustment.
Separately, PCMag’s coverage of the weekend sale pointed to specific Lenovo laptops marked at $1,199.99 with a listed savings of $450, working out to roughly 27 to 30 percent off. That figure lines up with the scale of discount Lenovo has applied across its mid-range and higher-end laptop tiers this year.
Dell, HP and ASUS Show Up in the Multi-Brand Clearance Bins
DealNews‘ aggregated Labor Day laptop roundup is where shoppers looking beyond Apple and Lenovo are most likely to find something. The site’s coverage lists Lenovo laptops starting from $340, alongside a 14-inch Chromebook from $339.99 and ThinkPad or ThinkBook units ranging from just over $1,000 up to $1,539. The steepest single price in that roundup is a ThinkPad X13 Gen 2 with 16GB of RAM at $278, a clearance-tier price on an older-generation unit rather than a currently shipping model.
That same DealNews coverage references an Apple MacBook Pro at $299 and an M1 MacBook Air from $394, both clearly legacy hardware being cleared out rather than current-generation stock. It is a useful reminder that the deepest percentage discounts of any Labor Day laptop sale tend to land on older Intel-era and early Apple Silicon machines, not on the newest M4 or M5 lineup, where Best Buy’s $799 MacBook Air is the exception rather than the rule.
Dell, HP, and ASUS show up in these multi-brand clearance sections without individually confirmed SKUs or prices in the reporting reviewed for this piece, so treat any specific unit from those three brands as something to verify directly on the retailer’s page before buying. The pattern across DealNews’ listings, however, is consistent: mixed-brand clearance sections are where the rock-bottom prices live, while Apple and Lenovo’s branded sale pages carry the better-documented, current-generation discounts.
Why RAM and SSD Prices Are Driving This Year’s Deal Structure
None of this year’s laptop pricing makes full sense without the memory market behind it. Retail DDR5 pricing has climbed sharply over the past year, and our own tracking on DDR5 RAM price increases found the module market running far above where it sat in mid-2025. Component trackers cited across the industry put retail DDR5 pricing at roughly 486 percent of its July 2025 baseline, meaning prices are close to five times higher than a year earlier. By mid-August 2026, desktop DDR5 was averaging $15.27 per gigabyte, against $7.61 per gigabyte for the older DDR4 standard.
NAND flash, the memory type behind SSDs, has followed a similar trajectory, if slightly less extreme. Prices have roughly doubled since late 2025 according to market trackers, and a 2TB NVMe SSD that cost $120 to $150 a year ago is now running $300 to $480. NVMe pricing specifically has climbed about 115 percent, compared to roughly 75 percent for the slower SATA SSD category. Apple’s supply-side response to this pressure is visible in its own multi-year NAND supply agreement, signed to lock in flash memory access before prices climb further.
Analyst firm Gartner projects a combined DRAM and SSD price surge of up to 130 percent by the end of 2026 compared with 2025 levels, a jump expected to push overall PC prices up roughly 17 percent and smartphone prices up about 13 percent. TrendForce’s July 2026 analysis backs the direction of that trend, projecting DRAM contract prices to rise 13 to 18 percent quarter over quarter in the third quarter of 2026, with NAND and SSD contract prices climbing 10 to 15 percent over the same period. That is the backdrop against which this year’s Labor Day discounts on 16GB, 24GB, and 1TB laptop configurations should be read: retailers are absorbing some of that cost pressure to move inventory, at least for now.
Labor Day 2026 Laptop Deals at a Glance
How Component Costs Compare: 2025 vs. 2026
Historical Context: Labor Day Has Become the Second Black Friday
Labor Day did not use to be a laptop event. For most of the 2010s, it was a mattress and grill sale, with electronics tacked on as an afterthought. That changed as back-to-school and back-to-work timing collided with retailers’ broader shift toward year-round promotional calendars. By the early 2020s, Best Buy, Lenovo, and Dell were all running dedicated Labor Day computer sales timed to catch shoppers who missed July’s back-to-school window but still needed a machine before fall semester or fiscal-year budgets locked in.
What is different in 2026 is the willingness of retailers to let the sale bleed past the holiday itself. Best Buy’s own fine print, allowing prices to “start before and end after” the stated dates, is a tacit admission that a single-day cutoff leaves money on the table. Lenovo went further and built a two-week window into the plan from day one, treating the holiday weekend as a marketing anchor rather than a hard deadline. That is a meaningfully longer promotional runway than Labor Day sales carried even three or four years ago, when most retailers closed pricing out by the Tuesday after the holiday.
Market Impact: What Extended Sales Signal About Retailer Inventory
Extended sale windows are rarely just generosity. They typically signal that a retailer wants to move a specific slice of inventory before new stock, new pricing, or a new product cycle arrives. In Lenovo’s case, the two-week window through September 13 lines up with back-to-school budget cycles for both consumers and IT procurement teams still finalizing purchases into September. Stretching the promotional period gives Lenovo more days to hit whatever unit-sales target the campaign was built around.
For Apple’s retail partners, the calculus is different. Best Buy is not clearing out old inventory so much as competing for the same shopper Amazon, Walmart, and Apple’s own store are all chasing during the same week. A record-low $799 price on the M4 Air is as much a statement to competitors as it is an offer to consumers, and the fact that TechRadar and Engadget both independently verified the number suggests Best Buy wanted that price to travel across multiple outlets rather than stay buried on one product page.
The rising cost of RAM and SSDs adds a second layer to the market impact. If Gartner’s 17 percent PC price projection holds through the rest of 2026, laptop configurations with higher memory and storage will likely carry smaller discounts, or none at all, once retailers work through current inventory bought before component costs spiked. That makes this specific week, while 16GB and 24GB configurations are still being discounted at pre-spike-adjacent pricing, a narrower window than it might first appear.
Apple vs. Lenovo vs. Multi-Brand Clearance: Which Deal Type Wins
Each of the three deal categories covered here serves a different kind of shopper. Best Buy’s Apple pricing is the strongest pick for anyone set on a current-generation MacBook and comfortable buying before an unofficial cutoff that could arrive without much notice. The $799 MacBook Air M4 is the most aggressively discounted current-generation machine in this entire roundup, both in dollar terms and as a percentage of list price.
Lenovo’s sale is the better fit for anyone who wants a confirmed, published end date and the option to stack a spend-based discount on top of a base price cut. The trade-off is that some ThinkPad starting prices rose between week one and week two of the sale, so the best individual unit prices likely already came and went by the time this article published.
The multi-brand clearance route, best represented by DealNews’ aggregated listings, is the place to look for the single lowest dollar amount on a laptop, full stop. A $278 ThinkPad or a $299 MacBook Pro beats every other price in this article by a wide margin. The catch is generation: these are clearance units, not the current M4, M5, or latest Lenovo hardware, so buyers are trading spec currency for rock-bottom pricing. For context on how Apple’s broader hardware business is performing amid this pricing environment, see our coverage of Apple’s record Mac revenue quarter and the recent leadership transition at Apple, both relevant to how the company is positioning its laptop lineup heading into the holidays.
What Happens After September 13
Once Lenovo’s window closes on September 13, expect a gap before the next major promotional event, most likely tied to early-October pricing ahead of the holiday shopping season. Best Buy’s Apple pricing is the bigger unknown. Given the retailer’s own language about prices starting before and ending after the stated sale dates, the $799 MacBook Air could persist for days or even weeks past Labor Day weekend, or it could vanish without warning once Best Buy decides inventory targets are met.
Component pricing will keep shaping what these sales look like going forward. If TrendForce’s quarterly projections hold and DRAM and NAND contract prices keep climbing through the rest of 2026, the next round of seasonal laptop deals, likely centered on October and November, will probably show smaller percentage discounts on higher-memory configurations than what shoppers are seeing this week. Competing device categories are watching the same trend: Samsung’s recent Galaxy Book6 launch in Korea priced its base configuration well below flagship territory, a pricing strategy that may become more common as OEMs try to protect entry-level price points against rising memory costs. Broader hardware and chip pricing trends across the industry are tracked on our AI chips and hardware pricing hub.
Five predictions follow from the reporting above. First, Best Buy’s $799 MacBook Air M4 price is likely to hold for at least another week before reverting closer to $899, based on how the retailer has phrased its own “may end after sale dates” language. Second, Lenovo’s ThinkPad starting prices will likely rise again once the September 13 window closes, following the same pattern seen between week one and week two. Third, multi-brand clearance pricing on older ThinkPads and legacy MacBooks will keep expanding as retailers clear pre-price-spike inventory before restocking at higher component costs. Fourth, expect the next wave of laptop promotions, tied to October’s early holiday shopping push, to show noticeably smaller discounts on 16GB-and-above, 1TB-and-above configurations if Gartner’s price projections hold. Fifth, Apple’s refurbished channel will likely remain a quietly better value than new-unit retail deals through the rest of 2026, given the $240 discount already on the board versus Best Buy’s smaller cuts on comparable new M5 hardware.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the MacBook Air M4 still $799 after Labor Day?
As of this report, Best Buy’s $799 price on the 13-inch MacBook Air M4 was still active. The retailer’s own sale terms note pricing “may start before and end after” the stated Labor Day end date, so the price could hold for a limited time past September 7, but there is no confirmed hard end date.
How long does Lenovo’s Labor Day sale run?
Lenovo’s official Labor Day sale runs from August 31 through September 13, 2026, covering laptops, gaming PCs, tablets, monitors, and accessories at Lenovo.com.
Why are laptop deals on high-RAM and high-storage configurations getting more attention this year?
DRAM and NAND flash prices have both climbed sharply through 2026. Gartner projects a combined DRAM and SSD price surge of up to 130 percent by year-end versus 2025, which is pushing baseline PC prices higher and making current discounts on 16GB, 24GB, and 1TB configurations comparatively more valuable.
Is the Apple Refurbished Store a good alternative to new-unit Labor Day deals?
Based on current listings, yes. A 13-inch M5 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD was priced at $1,359 on Apple’s refurbished store, a $240 cut from its $1,599 list price, a larger dollar discount than most comparable new-unit deals currently posted at Best Buy.
Are Dell, HP, and ASUS laptops discounted for Labor Day 2026?
Multi-brand clearance roundups from sites like DealNews reference Dell, HP, and ASUS alongside heavily discounted Lenovo and older Apple hardware, but individual current-generation SKUs and prices for those three brands were not independently confirmed in the reporting reviewed for this article. Check each retailer’s own Labor Day page directly for current Dell, HP, or ASUS pricing.
Why did some ThinkPad prices go up during Lenovo’s own sale?
Lenovo’s Labor Day campaign ran in two pricing phases. Some ThinkPad models, including the T Series, had lower starting prices in week one (August 31 to September 6) than in week two (September 7 to 13), even though both weeks fall within the same overall sale window.
Will laptop prices keep rising through the rest of 2026?
Industry analysts expect them to. TrendForce projected DRAM contract prices to rise 13 to 18 percent quarter over quarter in Q3 2026, with NAND and SSD contract prices up 10 to 15 percent over the same period, pressure that is expected to filter into retail laptop pricing over the following months.
