With PC prices rising — and new competition from Apple at lower price points — Microsoft is putting together a compelling software and gaming package for college students who need a new laptop for finals. The promo includes a year of Microsoft 365 Premium, a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and a custom Xbox controller. Microsoft is putting the value at over $500, and while most college kids aren’t buying Microsoft’s productivity software (either at all, or at retail prices), it really is a nice package. Offsetting rising hardware prices in this way is smart. The controllers are terrific but are high margin, and the software has relatively low costs (there’s licensing, servers, and AI tokens, but the bits are free Microsoft is doing this at scale already).
Eligibility on the laptop side is fairly broad: 6 Acer, 3 ASUS, 14 Dell, 23 HP, 24 Lenovo, and 9 Microsoft Surface laptops are listed across Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm silicon — though not with Intel or Qualcomm’s newest platforms that are juuust starting to hit the market. Price points are well represented, with several premium and gaming options included that have discrete GPUs to take full advantage of Xbox games or for coding/graphics/engineering assignments. Here’s the complete list.
Of course, for a college promo the timing is a bit odd; the offer ends June 30, and the spring 2026 semester typically ends in May.
