Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. Deals

Lenovo Back-to-School Sale 2020: The 5 best deals

Add as a preferred source on Google

We’re more than halfway through August and another school year is fast approaching (if it hasn’t started for you already), which means it’s the time of the year for big back-to-school sales. These once-a-year blowouts are an especially good time to score anything computer-related and are chock full of laptop dealsdesktop PC deals, and monitor deals with some of the biggest discounts you’ll see before Black Friday. Lenovo has hit the ground running with its own end-of-summer blowout, so if you need some new gear for work or play, we’ve already picked out the five best deals from the 2020 Lenovo Back to School Sale right here:

21.5-inch Lenovo ThinkVision Monitor — $126, was $194

Lenovo ThinkVision 21.5-Inch Monitor
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Lenovo is definitely a brand that’s best known for its computers, but it makes some pretty underrated monitors, too. This 21.5-inch ThinkVision display is perfect for work and study: Its crisp IPS panel is more color-accurate and offers better viewing angles than VA and TN panels, and it features a Full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080p. It sports VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort hookups to interface with just about any PC, while four USB ports provide power for your mobile devices and desktop gadgets. The Lenovo Back to School Sale knocks $68 off the price, letting you grab this 1080p workhorse IPS monitor for a cheap $126.

15-inch Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Laptop — $525, was $630

Lenovo IdeaPad 3
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Another arguably underrated member of the Lenovo family is the IdeaPad line, which features some excellent and budget-friendly ultrabooks. The IdeaPad 3 might be the perfect no-frills PC for a student, professional, or anyone else looking for a no-frills Windows laptop for work and daily use: With a 10th-gen Intel Core i3 CPU, a full 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 128GB solid-state system drive paired with a 1TB storage hard drive, this machine packs everything you need into a laptop at a price point anybody can agree with. For the Lenovo Back to School Sale, you can grab this slick computer for just $525 after a $105 savings.

14-inch Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 2-in-1 Laptop — $700, was $800

Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The IdeaPad stable also includes a few solid 2-in-1s, and the IdeaPad Flex 5 proves that you don’t have to pay out the nose to enjoy the versatility of a convertible laptop. Packing AMD’s latest Ryzen processors, the IdeaPad Flex 5 14 punches well above its price tag when it comes to performance, and the fact that its 14-inch 1080p touch display folds flat for tablet-like use only adds to its incredible value (it even includes a stylus, something you often have to buy separately). A $100 discount lets you grab this configuration with a Ryzen 7 4700U CPU, 8GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD for just $700 for the Lenovo Back to School Sale.

15-inch Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming Laptop — $715, was $840

Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 Laptop
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Gaming might not spring to mind when you hear the name “Lenovo,” but if you’re in the market for a laptop that can handle the latest games at high settings (while also being a very good all-around machine for work and study), it would be a mistake to overlook this brand. The new IdeaPad Gaming 3 adds such a laptop to the Lenovo stable, with this one packing a 10th-gen Core i5 processor along with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card and 8GB of RAM to deliver great performance for gaming, video rendering, and just about anything else you’d need a PC for. Better still is its price: A $125 savings for the Lenovo Back to School Sale knocks this gaming laptop down to $715.

14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon — $900, was $2,149

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The classic ThinkPads are still going strong, but today, the ThinkPad line also features some fantastic ultrabooks built for 2020. One such laptop is the awesome ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which Lenovo has all but perfected with the latest 7th-generation refresh. This newer 2019 model is sleek yet solid, features a gorgeous IPS display (which was a weak point on earlier models), a great-feeling touchpad and keyboard complete with TrackPoint, and great performance. The Lenovo Back to School Sale and the checkout code THINKDEAL let you grab this configuration with an Intel Core i5-8265U CPU, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD for $900, which knocks a whopping $1,249 off of its original MSRP.

Lucas Coll
Former Deals and News Writer
Lucas Coll has been a freelance writer for almost a decade and has penned articles on tech, video games, travel, cars, and…
Topics
OpenAI’s rogue AI hack was just the beginning, Hugging Face warns
OpenAI’s rogue AI has come back to bite it
OpenAI logo on Microsoft surface

Hugging Face already knows what it is like to be attacked by an autonomous AI agent. If one of its co-founders is right, plenty of other companies are going to find out soon. Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, has called the recent cyberattack carried out by OpenAI models a “wake-up call” for the technology industry.

Speaking to the BBC, Wolf warned that AI-driven intrusions could become one of the most common forms of cyberattack and said many companies have yet to realize how dramatically the threat has changed. This arrives after OpenAI disclosed that its models escaped a restricted cybersecurity evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face while trying to obtain answers for the ExploitGym benchmark. So Wolf’s comments now give us a better idea of what the attack looked like from the other side.

Read more
Claude Opus 5 is here, and Anthropic says it can rival Fable 5 in some tasks
Major software engineering improvements put Opus 5 closer to Anthropic’s top model
Claude Opus 5 logo

Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, its latest frontier AI model for coding, research, business work, and other complex tasks. The company says it delivers a major performance jump over Claude Opus 4.8 while keeping the same API price. Anthropic also claims it comes close to Claude Fable 5 on some coding and computer-use tests while costing far less per task.

Opus 5 is available across Claude’s apps and API. It is now the default model for Claude Max subscribers and the strongest option included with Claude Pro.

Read more
Humans actually prefer talking to an AI than a support person, says gas giant as it cuts jobs
British Gas cuts 1,300 support jobs as its CEO points to changing customer habits
Executive, Person, Electronics

Centrica, owner of British Gas, is cutting 1,300 call centre jobs, and its chief executive says changing customer behaviour is the main reason. The company plans to remove 800 roles as part of a “targeted deployment of AI tools,” on top of the 500 cuts announced last month. Customer service teams in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leicester, Stockport, and Leeds will be affected over the next two years.

Some positions will disappear when employees leave and are not replaced, while the remaining cuts will come through redundancies. Trade unions have warned that Centrica’s AI investment will hand hundreds of human jobs to chatbots.

Read more