The Australian laptop price index

This is a count, not a forecast. It is every laptop we can see currently listed and in stock at the Australian retailers we crawl, sorted into price brackets, with the median of each bracket. It regenerates on every request.

Live figures, read from our catalogue on 11 Aug 2026.

50 live laptop listings across 4 stores. Median across the whole pool: $2,899.

No movement figure this edition. Our continuous price record is still short, and too few of these laptops have been priced twice far enough apart to say which way the market moved. We'd rather print nothing than a trend built on a dozen listings.

What each bracket buys

Under $1,000: an Intel N-series or older Ryzen 3, 8GB of soldered memory, 128GB to 256GB of storage, and a screen you will notice. Fine for a browser and Office. Poor as a four-year machine, because non-upgradable 8GB is what kills these first.

$1,000 to $1,999 is the volume band and where most people should be shopping. Ryzen 5 or Core 5 class, 16GB, a 512GB SSD, and increasingly a decent IPS or OLED panel. Past about $1,500 you are mostly paying for build quality and screen rather than for speed.

$2,000 to $2,999 is two completely different machines wearing one price: a thin premium ultraportable, or a mid-tier gaming laptop with a real GPU. Know which one you are buying. Above $3,000 you are into workstation GPUs, Apple's Pro and Max chips and 32GB and up, which is a purchase a job should be paying for.

Method

The pool is every currently listed, in-stock laptop at the stores we crawl, priced at $300 or more, with accessories filtered out by title: bags, sleeves, cases, stands, docks, chargers and cooling pads. Two stores listing the same model count twice, because two listings is what a shopper actually sees.

We report medians, not averages. A handful of $8,000 mobile workstations drag an average to a price no ordinary buyer shops at, and the median is unmoved by them. Bracket rows with too few listings behind them are dropped rather than published thin, so a bracket missing from the table means we could not see enough of it to say anything.

What to do with it

Pick your bracket, then shop inside it on screen, memory and warranty. The number worth reacting to is a specific model's own price history, not a category median: a $1,299 laptop is only a deal if that laptop has been sitting above $1,299.

Browse computer and laptop deals, read our best laptops guide, or see how the same reasoning applies to a brand that almost never discounts in is this MacBook deal actually cheap?