Circuit City plans $99 Black Friday laptop

Large electronics retailer Circuit City plans to capitalize on the often frenetic shopping activity the day after Thanksgiving to set a new record in discount laptops, according to a leaked ad obtained by Black Friday 2006. The store will carry a budget Compaq Presario laptop that will be available for $99 after obtaining an instant discount, a mail-in rebate, and a 12-month subscription to Vonage Internet telephone service. As with similar offers from HP and Wal-Mart, the system is a budget 15.4-inch system with 512MB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive; however, the as yet unnamed Presario model at Circuit City will include a 1.6GHz Celeron M instead of an AMD processor and a DVD rewriter in lieu of the more limited DVD/CD-RW combo drive. The surprise discount from Circuit City, while temporary, reflects an increasingly clear trend towards extremely low-cost portables in the market, similar to the path taken by desktops in previous years.