Tiger Direct Black Friday 2014 deals include Microsoft Surface 2 tablet for $300
With the big boys' Black Friday deals revealed several days ago, we're mostly left waiting on ads from smaller, more regional retailers like hhgregg and Micro Center. While Tiger Direct is a major online player in all things tech, its Black Friday specials are limited to in-store purchase only, which makes them viable only to people in six states (including Florida, Illinois, and Texas) and Puerto Rico.
If you're living near a Tiger Direct, and you're in the market for a Microsoft Surface 2 tablet, it's selling the base 32GB configuration for the low price of $299.99 — matching Best Buy's doorbuster price, and much less than the current $449.99 price for a new model. In fact, if you aren't an Apple fanboy, you'll be happy to note that Tiger Direct has no iPads or iMacs or MacBooks in its ad.
There are other Windows 8 tablet deals as well. An hourly special at 1 p.m. on Black Friday is the Dell Venue 8 Pro for $149.99, though note that this version uses a slightly older Intel Atom processor, and Dell itself will be selling a similar model all Black Friday for the same price. If you are looking for an Android slate instead, you can grab the Asus Transformer Pad 10.1 with KitKat for $149.99, but only between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Black Friday morning.
Other doorbusters during that time include a pair of Asus two-in-one Windows 8.1 devices: The T100TAM Transformer Book with Atom Z3775 quad-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 64GB SSD, and 10.1-inch touchscreen for $299.99, or $100 off the regular price, and the more fully featured TP500LA-DH71T Transformer Book Flip with Core i7-4510U processor, 8GB of RAM, terabyte hard drive, and 15.6-inch display for $599.99. That's much less than its current $829.99 price, but $50 of that discount is via a rebate.
That $50 rebate resurfaces with a Dell Inspiron notebook, which features a 15.6-inch touchscreen, Core i5-4210U chip, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB hard drive for $549.99 before the rebate. Other laptop deals include a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E540 with Core i7-4702MQ quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, 15.6-inch screen, and Windows 7 Professional for $599.99, as well as a Lenovo gaming notebook, the Y50, that includes a Core i7-4700HQ CPU, a whopping 16 gigs of RAM, terabyte hard drive, Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics, and a full 1080p HD 15.6-inch display for $949.99. (A similar configuration is available today from Amazon for $989.99.)
It wouldn't be a Black Friday ad this year without a sub-$200 Windows 8.1 PC; in this case, Tiger Direct only has a desktop for $199.99. It's the same Lenovo H500s (Intel Celeron J1800, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, DVD burner) that Micro Center is selling for the same price. A more powerful desktop from Lenovo is the ThinkCentre E73 10AS with Core i5-4570S, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, and Windows 7 Pro (with Windows 8 Pro as an option) for $449.99, the discounted price that's already available on the Tiger Direct website.
Finally, Tiger Direct will have a couple of living-room-friendly gaming PCs on sale. Its Alienware X51 configuration appears to be a decent value at $899.99, equipped with Core i7-4790, 8GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive, and GeForce GTX 745 graphics card. There's also the first "Steam Machine" we've seen in a Black Friday ad this year — the quotes pointing out that the SteamOS has still not been released, so these are essentially Windows PC gaming consoles. The Syber Vapor line comes from CyberPowerPC, and Tiger Direct is slashing $50 off the price of the cheapest configuration. For $549.99, you get an AMD Athlon X4 840 quad-core processor, 4 gigs of system memory, 500 gigs of hard drive space, and an AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card.