Which Retailers Offer the Lowest Prices for Computers and Devices?
Last updated May 2025
Once you decide on a device, shop around for a good price. If you compare performance, features, and prices offered by several manufacturers, you’ll find that prices vary considerably for similar setups. And even when comparing stores’ prices for devices configured with the exact same screens, hard drives, processors, memory, etc., you’ll likely encounter substantial price differences.
Consumers’ Checkbook’s undercover shoppers collected prices for 34 carefully specified and configured devices from a sample of sellers. We found big store-to-store price differences for most of the items. For example, for a specific Dell Precision laptop model, prices ranged from $3,220 to $4,388. For a specific ASUS Chromebook Flip model, prices among major retailers ranged from $276 to $469.
We used the prices collected by our undercover shoppers to calculate price comparison scores, reported below. These scores show how each retailer’s prices compared to the average prices quoted by other surveyed stores for the same mix of items. A price comparison score of $105, for example, means that prices at this store were, on average, five percent above the average for the same items for all surveyed stores.
Our price comparison scores indicate that some retailers, on average, charge as much as 20 percent more than their competitors. In our survey, our researchers most often found the lowest prices on the websites of HP, Micro Center, Walmart, Microsoft, Amazon, and Costco.
If a store gives you great advice, but you find a much better price elsewhere, before skipping out give the helpful store a chance to match its competitor’s price. As we previously reported, many stores have little-known price-matching policies that are easy for consumers to trigger: You just ask.