If you were eyeing the “budget-priced” Gateway P-6831FX and thought about picking one up at your local Best Buy, you’ll want to wait until this Sunday, February 17th, when Best Buy says it will lower the price again. We say “again” because Dan over at Crave caught Best Buy raising the price by $349 after it was released, from $1350 to $1699, for no apparent reason other than it was selling well.
We called Gateway and they laid the blame directly at Best Buy’s feet, saying the P-6831FX was “selling like gangbusters,” prompting the retail giant to raise the price by $350. We asked Best Buy about the price discrepancy late Wednesday, and the retail giant said they would get back to us. While Gateway offers a series of similar laptops online, called the P-171 series, the P-6831 is available only though Best Buy.
Crave reports that Best Buy has since contacted them and announced they’ll be dropping the price to $1199 come this Sunday—but in the meantime, it’s still premium-priced at the ridiculous $1699. Even for a didn’t-do-your-research tax, that’s pretty steep.
“When is a bargain laptop not a bargain?” [Crave]
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@barfoo: No. No it’s not. But I like the point you were trying to make.
A lot of you guys are missing the point. It’s not that Best Buy can’t charge what it wants — it’s that Gateway has been promoting this laptop (which is a Best Buy exclusive) as a budget gaming laptop, and as soon as it gets popular, BB jacks up the price, even while Gateway continues to pitch it on their site at the original price (which links through to BB, at the higher price).
Personally, I’d rather have this info than not. Raising prices just before a sale is exactly the kind of practice this blog should report on. That being said, at $1,199 for a laptop with an Nvidia 8800 graphics card, it’s an incredible deal.
This makes me wonder why people pay $500+ for Wii’s online…
OH yeah, people want them bad enough, they’ll pay for it. No law against stupid consumers
shouldn’t we have a similar post everyday on big oil companies?
BEST BUY SUCKETH.
i don’t get why it’s a bargin in the first place you can get a very good budget laptop for 700 bucks these days…
DON’T BUY ANYTHING FROM BEST BUY.
Honestly, hello people?
Three Words:
Supply and Demand
It’s a free market. If you don’t like how they do business, you are free to shop wherever you like. If enough people stop shopping there (like they did with CompUSA) eventually they go out of business. that’s how a free market works.
@rjhiggins: Agreed! Bad headline, but the post is Consumerist worthy — if only to remind us, with a real world example, of what can happen if you don’t do your homework. Especially, when the manufacturer sells the same system for $350 (20%) less!
Lesson: Best Buy’er Beware!
Aha, I actually bought one of these the week after they came out… had been eying a new laptop for a while and thought it was a steal at $1350. Then I grab a pricematch when they had it on sale for $1250, and was even happier. I was at BB the other night and saw the $1700 price tag on the thing and thought “damn, glad I got it early on.” Good to hear this price isn’t here to stay, great laptop IMO… except for one of the latches broke on mine. Sent it off to Gateway last week and I’m expecting it back in a day or so. Gods know I wouldn’t let BB work on it. I refused their shitty warranty, and plan on buying an extended warranty directly from Gateway when I can.
@StevieZ83: Yes you can buy a budget laptop for $700. But does a budget laptop have 3 gigs of DDR2, a Geforce 8800m GTS w/512 ram, two harddrive slots that be setup in a RAID, a dual layer DVD burner, and so on…? About the only thing on this laptop that I was disappointed with was the processor, but since it is fully upgradeable I’ll be fixing that problem soon after I get mine back!
@ShadowFalls:
Considering NoA did everything but beat them to death with Wiimotes for the bundle thing, I’d say that was “handled” and doesn’t apply anymore anyway. :p
As an aside, I’d pay to see a Nintendo vs. Gamestop battle royale.
@MantisDragon:
And where’d you find laptop processors for sale? The only time I see them, they’re bundled with “you’re required to buy the kit” miniITX motherboards.
@RvLeshrac: Never said I did find one on sale… but upgrading the base 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo in this laptop to say the Intel Core2 Duo T7250 2.0GHz (bought off of Newegg.com) will still be cheaper than buying the 2Ghz model of the P-series FX directly from Gateway(unless you were stupid enough to pay $1700 for it). And considering what else this system has for a laptop still quite cheaper than most “gaming” laptops. I’m personally weighting to see how prices are in the next month or two(which is my referent for soon), now that the Penryn line of processors is getting to the market I would expect that the older Core 2 Duo lines might actually go down a bit in price.
If the T7250 or the T7500 went down anywhere from $25 to $50 by the end of March it will have been worth the wait and the purchase to have a laptop that runs rings around my desktop that I have almost thrown as much money into.
@MantisDragon:
It uses a desktop processor? Cheap price, then.
Nothing over $1,500 should be called a “budget laptop.”