Right, but there are thousands of configurations and without spending the time to catch up on processor generations, mobile graphics cards, Latest RAM speeds, display technologies, etc. it’s really just a gamble on whether I would be getting a good deal or not. i7, 8 Gb RAM, 1080p display doesn’t really tell the story when the variations of that can be as low as ~$400 or over $1k. Was hoping someone here had done that recently so I didn’t have to to use once and then be out of date again in a few months.
If not I’ll probably just watch slickdeals for something that nominally matches what I want, but for Black Friday deals knowing ahead of time what you are looking for usually is the only way you can actually get it