Best Buy is kicking off a two-week promotion Sunday that will serve up $100 discounts on Windows 8 touchscreen PCs, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The discount doesn’t yet appear on the Best Buy site and the retailer didn’t immediately respond to PCMag’s request for further information on which products would be part of the promotion.
It appears that Windows 8 tablets like Microsoft’s own Surface Pro won’t be included in the deal—the WSJ report stated that only touchscreen laptops and desktops would be discounted.
The promotion will run through March 7, according to the Verge.
Microsoft and Intel, the largest PC chip maker in the world, have been touting touchscreens for laptops and desktops, as well as hybrid devices that can function as both laptops and tablets, as necessary for PC makers to offer going forward. Tablets with touch-controlled interfaces like Apple’s iPad have in recent years cut into sales of traditional PCs, spurring Microsoft to optimize its latest operating system for touch.
The software giant released Windows 8 last October, but as the WSJ noted, “touchscreen PCs have not exactly been flying off the shelves” since the arrival of the new operating system.
Best Buy painted the $100 discount as an effort to entice customers who may be turned off by the higher prices of touchscreen PCs — often $200 more than equivalent computers without touchscreens. The company told the WSJ that its internal research indicated that consumers were “significantly happier” with touchscreen PCs running Windows 8 than with non-touchscreen computers, but the higher price of touchscreen PCs appeared to be sticking point for many…
Read More: pcmag.com
