u/Remarkable-Pizza-558

Saw Microsoft Office 2024 on Woot for $114.99 good deal? And are these keys legit or grey market?

Hey everyone, stumbled across Microsoft Office 2024 Home on Woot today for $114.99 and I’m genuinely on the fence about pulling the trigger. Wanted to get some opinions from people who’ve actually dealt with this kind of thing before.

A few things I’m wondering about:

First, is $114.99 actually a good price for Office 2024 Home? Microsoft sells it directly for around $149.99 so it’s about $35 cheaper, which sounds nice, but I’ve seen sketchy sites sell it for $20-$40 and obviously those are too good to be true. This feels like it’s in a more reasonable range but I honestly can’t tell if it’s a genuine deal or just marketed to look like one.

Second and this is the part I really want to understand, is Woot selling legitimate retail keys here or is this another grey market situation? I know Woot is owned by Amazon so it’s not some random shady website, but I’ve heard that even established platforms sometimes source Microsoft keys from volume licensing channels that weren’t meant for individual consumers. Those keys usually activate fine at first but can potentially get deactivated down the road by Microsoft, which is obviously not something you want to discover a year after buying.

The listing does say the key redeems through setup.office.com/redeem and gets bound to your Microsoft account, which from what I’ve read sounds like how legitimate retail keys work. Grey market volume keys apparently can’t do that, they activate Office but don’t attach to your personal account. So that part at least seems reassuring.

Also worth noting this is Office 2024 Home specifically, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, not Home & Business, so no Outlook. Fine for my needs but just flagging it for anyone else looking at the same listing.

Anyone here bought Microsoft Office from Woot before? Did the key come through cleanly, redeem without issues, and stay activated long term? And does that $114.99 price point seem right to you, or should I be looking elsewhere?

Appreciate any insight, just want to make sure I’m not paying for something that stops working six months from now.

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u/Remarkable-Pizza-558 — 2 days ago
▲ 2 r/macbookair+1 crossposts

Got MacBook Air 13” M5 24GB/1TB for $1,380 ..good deal? Also moving from Intel i5 11th gen as a data scientist, few questions inside

So I finally pulled the trigger. Picked up the MacBook Air 13” M5, 24GB RAM, 1TB storage for $1,275 + tax (~$1,380 total). Coming from an Intel i5-11300H, 16GB RAM, and Intel Iris Xe graphics on Windows 11. Night and day so far honestly.

I’m a data scientist and mostly work with Python, Jupyter, some light ML stuff. I installed Ollama and threw Qwen 3.6 on it just to test… and yeah it throttled 😐 not surprised tbh, it’s a fanless machine. But honestly I mostly use cloud APIs and remote compute anyway so that’s not really a dealbreaker for me.

My questions:

  1. Is $1,380 a fair price for this config or did I overpay?
  2. Is Air M5 24GB genuinely good enough for data science workloads (pandas, sklearn, some pytorch, Jupyter)?
  3. Should I have stretched for the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 24GB? It was ~$700 more and I just didn’t have it.
  4. Will the throttling on local LLMs always be this rough or is it manageable for smaller models?

The machine just FEELS so good. Build quality is insane compared to what I was on. Already loving it. Just want some validation lol 😅

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u/Remarkable-Pizza-558 — 3 days ago