I think it's a BF specific model number so people can't pricematch who bought earlier. But otherwise identical. In any case there are some pretty good laptop deals out there.
Nope it is not a Black Friday special model number. HP numbering actually make sense once you are familiar with it. I used to work at retail at Frys so I am familiar with it somewhat (Frys never got its own special model numbers, but it will buy wholesale from HP if there were canceled purchase from other supplier.) With a quick google here is what some of the HP letters in the model number means.
For Specific Retail Suppliers
nr : No rebate
cl : club model (models only available to club stores like costco)
dx: best buy model
wm : walmart model
Regions for Warranty
na : North America
ea / ee / e+letter: Europe / Middle East
us : United States
ca : Canada
la : Latin America
br : Brazil
au/ax : Asia/Australia with AMD/Intel CPUS (AU = AMD + UMA, ax =AMD + discreet UMA while TU =Intel +UMA and TX = Intel +discreet)
ap: Asia Pacific
sc : Scandinavia
Other Letters
t : Intel CPU
z: AMD CPU
ae : Artist Edition
bw : Broadband Wireless Series
sb : Small Business Series
se : Special Edition
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Now I did not include MS even though I am confident the MS stands for Microsoft Store, or Microsoft Signature Edition, for I do not know 100% sure what the MS stands for. It could be Microsoft Store, or Signature Edition, or another thing in the Microsoft Orbit but not exactly what I said.
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This was a big deal with working retail and making weekly signage, for all HP laptops with US in their model number had $50 or $100 Mail in Rebates and they reset roughly every month. Yet this did not apply to the NR models which often we only got limited supplies of and they were often the cheapest HPs (aka Black Friday deals.)
The cl, dx, and wm exist only to prevent price matching. Frys with its 30+ stories did not have enough of a store presence to get those models. Yet sometimes Frys did acquire dx models months afterwards if Bestbuy was no longer purchasing that model from HP and there was surplus. Those dx models often had much higher margin and were often an intel cpu model that was 3 or 6 months behind everything else when intel was releasing new skus regularly that were 100 mhz upgrades in the early 2010s (it has not been like this for years now though, for intel fabs barely improve.)
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Sorry for the oversharing here but no these are not necessary black friday skus. That said Costco is getting an instant rebate from HP for their $279 model you can tell for they are including the dates for this promotion and they are calling manufacturing savings which is the "key term" what HP called their instant rebates with retailers.
It would be nice if you can guarantee getting a quad core i5 with the Costco sku (which is a mistake on someone part.) That said that model still only has 4gb of ram even though it has an 1080p ips screen (no touchscreen). It appears though you can upgrade it if you want to get your hands dirty. Here is the PDFs
Here is the product page
https://support.hp.com/gb-en/product/hp-14-dq1000-laptop-pc-series/29205783/model/31046513/manuals Notice there is a User Guide and 4 PDFs and one of them , the 3rd one is the maintenance and service guide for this specific Costco model.
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c06403450
Of course that only applies to that specific HP, there is a similar manual for the Microsoft Store Ryzen 3 model, and its ram is upgradable as well, but why upgrade when it is already at 8 gb of ram for this $249 laptop.
ark.intel.com
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