Walmart 2017 Black Friday ad features $119 Chromebook, $249 iPad deals

With the release of Walmart’s Black Friday ad, the deals from the big three (Best Buy and Target as well) have been accounted for, and we can spot a couple of trends concerning PC sales for this holiday shopping season.

One trend is that the race for the bottom when it comes to laptop deals is $99 — and only Best Buy has gone that far. Walmart bottoms out with a $119 Samsung Chromebook 3 (Intel Celeron 3060 processor, 4GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, 11.6-inch screen) and adds a pair of HP notebooks for under $200: an HP Chromebook with similar specs to the Samsung but with the additional of touchscreen capabilities for $179.99, and a Stream Windows 10 system with Celeron CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, 32GB of storage and a year of Microsoft Office 365 thrown in for $179. That’s $20 less than the Stream that Staples is discounting for Black Friday, but the Staples model comes with 64GB of built-in storage instead of 32GB.

Walmart has a few other laptop deals on tap for Black Friday, including an HP system with Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, and 15.6-inch touchscreen for $249. The retailing giant offers a similar model but with more power — AMD A12 processor, double the RAM and hard drive space — and a backpack and mouse thrown in for $399. If you need even more performance, the Acer Aspire E5 features a Core i7-7500u chip, 8GB of RAM, terabyte hard drive, and 15.6-inch full HD display for $449.

Another trend is that a one-time Black Friday stalwart — Apple’s iPad — has been relegated to being nearly an afterthought in 2017 ads. Walmart, like Target, doesn’t even have a discount on the iPad mini 4. Its only Apple tablet deal is the same $249 sale on the latest 9.7-inch iPad that Best Buy and Target are also offering.

Walmart has several other tablets on sale, however. There’s a 9.6-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab E for $139 — $10 cheaper than at Best Buy — along with a pair of RCA tablets with detachable keyboards (a Windows model with 10.1-inch screen, Intel Atom processor, and 32GB of storage for $99, and an Android edition with 11.5-inch and 32GB of storage for $87.99). The chain also lists a no-name 7-inch tablet for $29, but you’re probably better off with an Amazon Fire 7, which will be on sale for the same price in many spots on Black Friday (obviously including Amazon itself).

A final trend is that the attempt to bring desktop PCs below the $200 mark (or even the $150 mark) appears to have dwindled. Maybe it’s because buyers are seeking out desktops specifically for more computing power, but budget systems for $200 or less are in short supply thus far for Black Friday 2017.

Case in point: Walmart only has one desktop deal in its ad, and it’s for a (relatively) cheap gaming machine. The VR-ready HP Pavilion Power desktop comes with an Intel Core i5-7400 processor, 8 gigs of RAM, 1TB hard drive, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics for $499.