Generally I find Black Friday a bit overhyped, the "bargains" are best checked against price history with (say) CamelCamelCamel before you buy.
Not Black Friday, but in the UK and maybe other countries, Amazon Warehouse is currently doing a 20% off sale, so 20% off the price when you get to checkout.
I've had a few good "As New" things off there in the past, worth having a look.
There's also a 50% off books sale on the UK Warehouse, loads of tech books, though I don't know how many decent ones are left.
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Specific Black Friday deals though: Quest Apps on sale:
You would think so, I've often wondered similar myself, there's obviously opportunity to increase the chance of finding genuinely good deals but I don't know to what extent Amazon's API and historical data is available generally, these docs look like the relavent ones (eg the pricing section):
A great alternative to Adobe's suite. Version 2 is fresh from the oven. Affinity Photo = Photoshop, Affinity Designer = Illustrator, Affinity Publisher = InDesign. The Universal License includes Mac, Windows, and iPadOS apps.
I use heavily for keyboard customization. I have all sorts of macros, like moving windows to different parts of the monitor (e.g. left, right, center, top center for video calls), making keyboard navigation more similar across Linux and Mac, launching and positioning apps with a single keystroke, auto-entering common data on a website, and so on.
And there's tons of other use cases (which I don't use), including gestures, controlling gestures, trackpads, MIDI settings, Elgato StreamDeck, and more.
My number one use is a three finger swipe up/down to change tabs in the browser, terminal, IDE, etc. BTT also includes a window manager that lets you drag apps to an edge to half-screen them or snap them to other window edges. It also allows you to create a custom notch bar or custom touch bar, along with many other little tools. I'd buy it again in a heartbeat.
Worth noting Affinity is a strictly one-time purchase valid forever (or while their licensing servers are up) while offering functionality on par with Adobe. I got their v2 suite at discount.
I just tried three times to buy Trickster on their website and failed each time. The checkout UX is horrendous not letting you go back or telling you why it failed.
It's really nice. I bought it last year, but don't use it frequently enough and didn't renew it this year. If you're in the same boat https://mitmproxy.org is really helpful and with `mitmweb` offering a web alternative to their TUI it's really convenient.
If you have ProxyMan you can renew with the discount, too.
The license is a perpetual license. One license key allows you to use the app indefinitely. You are also eligible for one year of free updates.
If you don't want to renew your license after one year, you can continue to use the last version of DevUtils that you have for as long as you want.
You can renew your license here with a 40% discount for another year of updates. That means the renew price is 60% of your purchase price (before discount) and won't be affected if the app price increases in the future. (e.g., $24 for the Basic License)
The first: I bought "unlimited" worldwide maps from Osmand, which I use a TON for offline maps when I bike. It's $9.99 for unlimited worldwide offline map downloads right now. Great deal if you'd like to move away from Google Maps for navigation (not so great for business search, but it's slowly getting there!)
The second: not actually a Black Friday deal, but I recently switched to https://purelymail.com/ for email. It's a one-man show, significantly cheaper than the competition because... it's not bootstrapping some massive startup or running off VC capital. If you just want IMAP for desktop/mobile for cheap, but can't self-host because Google will throw all of your emails into spam, this is a great option. $10/year or less estimated cost. And it's fully encrypted on their servers, not used for advertising, pretty much exactly what you want if you JUST want mail.
Oh, and the Gigabyte M28U 144hz 4k 28" monitor that I use is now down to an all-time-low cost of $450. If you're looking for a beautiful monitor for your home office, this is it.
I wish we had better words to describe encryption and the specific tradeoffs of each approach. I did not know purelymail, but knowing IMAP I had a gut feeling that things were a bit more complicated than a blanket "fully encrypted on their servers".
Sure enough, reading between the lines of their documentation they can pretty much decrypt any email on an account by just using the password given by the client when connecting to their IMAP server. Since most clients either connect regularly to fetch emails or maintain a long-lived connection to the server, they can pretty much decrypt anything, any time. So it's back to trusting them just like it emails were stored in plain text.
I don't want to pick on this small player, I applaud their effort in pushing email forward, but I have enough with companies using encryption to handwave security concerns. A big example of that is Apple iCloud.
Well said. In their docs they actually call out this exact issue, and mention that they'd like to improve it in the future, but it would require significant work and that's not necessarily worth it for them.
It would be nice to see a lot of competing small-fry players innovating in the email space. In an ideal world, I could just shop around between mail providers with my domain and pick whichever option provides the best price:features ratio for my needs. I was pretty keen on Proton for a while but they're diving deep in the VPN space, and their approach to encryption makes it nearly impossible to use them with simple mail apps like K9 and Apple Mail.
Much like the browser space, it's not healthy for Google to run a near-monopoly of email. We need a healthy number of alternatives out there so they can't push consumer unfriendly standards and creep more and more advertising into their email product.
There are a couple of players in town, namely MXRoute and Migadu (that I know of). The only thing that keeps me off switching to them is, well, bus factor and support. I was on Proton too, and the encryption finagling is what made me switch to Fastmail. Unfortunately for most people, Google IS the internet.
> the Gigabyte M28U 144hz 4k 28" monitor that I use
How is the brightness when set to minimum? I have an LG that with brightness set to 0 is too bright to use in the evening (compared to my laptop screen, for example, where brightness 0 is very dim, hardly visible, as it should be)
I'm pretty impressed by the KVM feature -- it's a little weird that you need to use USB A for the second computer's USB hub connection, but I'm pretty happy with it in general.
FYI: even now, monitors aren't necessarily shipping with the latest firmware. They've improved response times significantly since the early firmware, so it's likely worth your while to update the firmware when you get the monitor. Sadly you need a Windows computer to update the firmware -- if you manage to run the updater via Wine, let me know!
It's a simplified video editor that removes pauses and dead air, and creates a cut list you can then import into a "real" editor.
Saves a bunch of time if you're doing talking-head videos, vlogging, podcasts, screencasts... the sorts of content where the first step of editing is to chop out the long pauses and mistakes. I originally built it because I was doing screencasts and wanted the process to go faster :D
Not right now, no. As far as I know Camtasia can't import XML, so I need to export something in their own format. It's on my list of export formats to add.
An Anker Power Bank (24,000mAh) has a £40 discount right now on Amazon UK.
This is a really nice piece of tech that has helped me to work outside the house with peace of mind. Can keep my phone charged (which I use for tethering) for over a week, no problem. Drains way quicker when charging my M1, but that one has far less battery issues when compared to my phone.
The discount is real, as well. I know because I bought it recently, but you can also check it against camelcamelcamel or keepa.
Anyone else bothered that they do not specify the energy in watt-hour? Back when USB was 5V it was pretty easy to do the conversion from Ah, how does it work now that USB can negotiate voltage dynamically?
You should be able to calculate the watt hours based on the voltage of the internal batteries. Its likely a 3.7v lithium, so this anker bank would be 3.7v x 24,000mAh = 88.8Wh
The issue is comparable to mileage numbers... I dont trust that at all.
Usually they just multiply the number of cells with their "rated" mAh-value, but who knows what their cutoff voltage is. Also you need to integrate over the voltage (which keeps falling during discharge) and the discharge graph also depends on how much power you draw. Then the 4.2V=>5V (or 9..19V for USB PD) conversion losses are also not counted.
Anker does specify the Wh ratings. Just on the battery itself, not the website. In flyspeck 2.8pt size font (I just checked with my Peak 10x inspection loupe with reticule, the characters are exactly 1mm x-height), dark gray on black for maximum unreadability, that needs a microscope to read. On my 737, it says 86.4 Wh.
I've jump started lots of cars over the past 30 years and was super skeptical of these at first. They are pretty incredible. 3-4 starts off of one charge easily and make for a hell of a battery pack.
Just mind the size because they are quite a bit chunkier than average power packs.
edit: I’ve bought a few of these as gifts. I *strongly* prefer the ones with a molded softshell case to manage the jumpers. I haven’t found any from a well-known brand that weren’t just re-badged noname products with a big mark up. Project Farm on YouTube has some of the best product reviews out there, it looks like he’s done a bit of a bake off, might be worth your while watching if you’re looking at these.
I bought one off of Amazon that stopped working after three months, extraordinarily frustrating. Hard to find a decent brand since they all seem to be cheap junk.
This thread reminded me that I was thinking about picking one up, I just looked again and it’s almost impossible to pick from the offerings that are out there.
Can you give an example of one? It blows my mind that this is possible - I mean not the technology exactly, that makes sense, but just that something reasonably portable that I would carry around in case my phone dies can also have the level of utility of jumping my vehicle in a pinch.
The battery packs for jumping cars (at least the ones I've seen) are generally more of a size appropriate for putting in a trunk than a backpack or pocket.
I had one a while ago when road tripping in the US, served me a few times, it won't fit in your average jeans pocket but it easily fits in a jacket, you could fit 20+ in your glovebox
That does look like a good discount, but in the US it's still pretty pricey ($100). For my needs, the 535 looks like a better deal — it's $50 and has 30W max. Fine for my M2 MBA and certainly my iPhone and other peripherals. It's 20k instead of 24k, but it's half the price and still has USB-C. Not a bad deal!
That's a feature I wish all batteries had. The 737 is twice the weight of my Nitecore NB20000 for not much extra capacity, and I don't have a laptop that draws more then 45W anyway, but I got it for that one feature alone.
Companies release products 6-12 months in advance. On the day of their release they are at their most valuable. Every day that goes by they slowly lose a little bit of desirability. For practicality, and human marketing reasons, companies do not adjust their prices every day to reflect the reduction in demand. Instead they gather all the erosion into one big clump and release it in a frenzy on Black Friday.
So are there "deals" on Black Friday? Not really, in the sense that you are buying a product that is of truly lower value. At the same time, many people don't care about the newness of various products, so are happy to trade that time for money in their pocket. In short, Black Friday is about segmentation than it is "deals". It's a way to charge the most eager top dollar at the beginning of the curve, while also cashing in later with the rest at the end of the product lifecycle.
Certainly true for larger retailers, but there's plenty of small and independent businesses that offer true discounts today. For example, many artists that sell enamel pins keep them at the same price forever. So a discount today is a true discount.
Beyond that, you can also look for any retailer selling gift cards at a discount. Given that gift cards spend at their face value, you know for certain the discount is a real discount.
:D That question is not really answerable, it only depends on what mid-cycle products you're interested in and how much oldness you are willing to tolerate.
Not only that, but at least some companies just increase the prices slowly before Black Friday, such that what is shown as a discount on Black Friday is not really one. You might end up paying less 3 months after.
Not always. In order to attract business amid all of the other sales, plenty of companies do offer genuine black friday discounts. Particularly when you’re not selling a physical product (think gym memberships or spa days, for example) these sorts of things don’t decline in value each day.
Create a list of the products you need and try to find deals for this list.
Otherwise, there is a huge chance to buy something you don't actually need, just because it's a good deal. Then it will be a good deal for the seller :)
This. I have a "want list" in my notes and have a weekly check on a few retail sites (if it is a retail item) to see if it isn't suddenly in sale. By now I know the prices by heart so if it's a real deal, I'll notice. This also ensures that I don't get impulse charmed on a day like Black Friday, unless it is really significantly cheaper than what it was in the past 6 months.
I always thought that, with Dropbox, you weren't paying so much for the tech as for the storage space. I'm on a free Dropbox plan, which is presumably using essentially the same tech as a paid plan, just with less storage.
TBF that is 3 licenses – for one license it is $35. Also quite a lot IMO: it's really just a screenshot cropping and editing tool, since macOS has a screenshot tool already.
I mean, it's worth it because it's been so helpful, but I bought Recut (which takes the silences out of video editing and is on that list) a couple of weeks ago, and now it's 50% off.
I wonder if marketers ever think about how black friday sales annoy customers.
Hey, Recut creator here :) Glad to hear it's helpful! I also hate this feeling of missing a sale by mere days, so I've been offering partial refunds to folks that bought very recently. Feel free to shoot me an email! (in my profile)
Bought myself a Razer Core X (Thunderbolt 3 eGPU enclosure) for CAD$109.99 a few days ago. Was a discount of 71% off from an original price of CAD$389.99. Not sure if the US site reflects the same kinds of savings.
E: Thanks for all the replies. I have a XPS 15 that was, maybe 5 years ago occasionally reliable for playing Doom 2014 at 1080p for half an hour before the gpu would shut itself down, maybe I could have benefited from one of these + a desktop GPU...
If you want to do GPU-intensive work on a laptop that can’t fit a high powered GPU (some of the desktop ones are quite large), then you can put it in an enclosure like this and plug it in to your laptop.
I'm considering moving from a desktop with powerful GPU to a laptop + external GPU using a device like this. Would be nice working from a single machine both at home and away.
With the caveat that desktop GPUs are most of the times connected via 16 PCIe lanes. Depending on the workload, reducing it to 4 lanes may seriously bottleneck the GPU.
To my understanding, it's just a lack of support from both macOS and third-party vendors. There are numerous other reports of successful usage in Bootcamp albeit with some caveats.
Regarding VMs, and this is hardware dependent due to IOMMU groups (and is based on a Linux host), but I also recall cases where this is possible on reddit.com/r/VFIO
MBP 14" are $500 off sticker again like they were recently. It's still expensive, but the M1 Pro based laptops really are that good and I'm happy as a pig in poop.
M1 Airs are 800 and great for your lower tech relatives.
> MBP 14" are $500 off sticker again like they were recently. It's still expensive, but the M1 Pro based laptops really are that good and I'm happy as a pig in poop.
Where are you finding them? Apple themselves do not seem to have any such discount.
The VPS provider that I use, Time4VPS has some pretty nice discounts until the 28th of November: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (affiliate link)
Another already affordable VPS provider, Contabo, also seems to have nice deals: https://contabo.com/en/ (they expire in an hour at the time of writing)
If you garden then you may want to know your actual amount of rainfall to gauge how much watering you need to do. You'd be surprised how much rainfall can actually vary over a small area compared to a regional average.
And for people in rural areas that are not near other weather sensors, or areas that may not have regular internet connectivity or frequent outages (and coastal areas subject to storms and high winds). And of course weather nerds and sensor nerds, because those MQTT databases won't fill themselves.
Yes, growing crops. The hyper local weather has been drastically different the last few years (dry; redwoods are stressed, etc).
Also, there is no vaguely-accurate local weather station for our place (internet services report wind speeds and temps that are routinely off by 20% / 10 degrees F, and rainfall that is off by 5x)
They're good, too. Accurate and good battery life.
I have mine feeding to Ambient Weather, but also a custom API endpoint that feeds the data into a local database, so I can use my own software/scripts to do as I please without having to make external API calls.
Proton Unlimited (ProtonMail, Drive, VPN, Calendar) is 40% off the two year plan (172.56 €) or 35% off the 1 year plan (93.48 €). Good for those who like the service.
I'm developing microtonal algorithmic music, leaning towards chiptune sound, and for sounds/timbres/instruments I found the Plogue synthesisers to be the best - https://www.plogue.com/index.html - they have 3 great FM-synthesizers/emulators of Yamaha chips: OPL2, OPN from megadrive, and DX7. Bought 2 of them on this black friday.
I put off buying a new gaming laptop for my daughter until I could find one with decent specs for under US$1000. I'd check every week or so. Finally, thanks to Black Friday, I found two yesterday that had just crept under.
They're really almost identical; I ended up buying the TUF (which has since gone up but only by $20) because it had a larger SSD. I'm sure somebody else can do better - please comment here if you do! - but this seems to set a pretty good benchmark.
I owned the previous generation of the Asus TUF, the A15, along with my wife, and can recommend it.
My experience with these low-end gaming laptops is that the screens are low quality. You might buy her an external monitor and a wireless keyboard + mouse so she can use it in clamshell mode.
But those are fantastic deals -- kind of jealous actually. Last year I paid ~$1,400 on Black Friday for an MSI GE76 Raider 11UE that has these specs:
I picked up some discounts on recurring software/app subscriptions I use:
Fitbod Elite - Workout tracking/planning - 40% off - 47.99 annually - I was paying 12.99$ a month!!!
Plex Pass Lifetime - 25% off - 90$ once - Regular $120
I have used YNAB for budgeting for years. I wish I could find a discount on that. Still keeping an eye out for any other similarly useful deals on stuff I already pay for.
Maybe for you. Myself and my colleagues have found good deals where things aren't marked up - your experience is hardly the standard, and it's quite rude to imply that it is.
Sony WH-1000XM4 wireless headphones for $228 (normally $350) at pretty much every store (Sony, Amazon, Best Buy, etc). Just got them and they are great but I never had wireless headphones. They do take 10-20 seconds to connect to my iPad, but that might be because they are also set up with my phone.
I considered the newer version but the reviews made it seem like it wasn't a huge upgrade and in some ways a downgrade, like the newer version doesn't fold to a smaller size.
I have the newer XM5s. The main reason for me to go with them instead of the cheaper XM4s was the call quality.
I use my headphones very often in conference calls and the XM5s have excellent microphones compared to their predecessors. Side note: before, I have tested the Bose QC45 but those microphones are absolutely garbage. Sad, because the QC35 microphones were good.
I don’t mind that the XM5s don’t fold anymore. In a way I like the new design better compared to my wife’s XM3s.
Careful buying used stuff off Amazon. I've received duds more often than not. It's patently obvious that Amazon doesn't actually do any QA/checking of stuff they sell as "used" - I bought a pair of headphones once where one of the ears was simply not working, something that any tester would catch immediately. The lower price is not worth the hassle of having to return if it doesn't work.
Not sure if it's available in other countries, but in France you have Dealabs which allows you to vote on deal and offers a bit like on reddit, allowing the community to highlight the best bargains.
It's also used as a commercial device by companies directly nowadays but the good deals there are usually worth checking out.
If you scroll down to the very bottom, it tells you it's part of the Pepper platform and you can select the local version from the dropdown menu. I check it out every now and then and have a few alerts set for things.
Sadly Michael Tilson Thomas has retired in March due to being afflicted by brain cancer (glioblastoma). I lost my aunt to that horrible, atrocious disease, and wish him the best. Apparently there still are some performances of his scheduled in January.
It's a trap. Notoriously, electronics bought for Black Friday are the worst batch available. You can expect higher error rates and technical issues for CPUs and GPUs bought during BF.
It is a bit conspiratorial. Since everything that’s is being made is shipped immediately and nobody has a warehouse to store bad Black Friday electronics I would take such statements with a grain of salt.
Not so conspiratorial, I don't know about AMD but companies like Samsung do sell modified SKUs (I believe mainly TVs) with generally worse processor power than their not BF counterparts. A quick Google (or HN even) search should bring up a few articles about this behavior.
I've had good luck with Acer Aspire windows laptops. They're basically Intel/AMD Chromebooks, and are in the $100-$500 range.
Keyboards and trackpads are generally tolerable (so, 75th percentile or so).
I wish they'd make windows ARM laptops with less locked down (than Chromebook) BIOSes (that would also run Linux), but windows on arm is perpetually non-viable.
The pine book pro is also a decent choice for a cheap Linux laptop.
I'm offering 25% off all plans for https://www.paced.email and https://www.vend.email with BF2022. Not really had much success with BF/CM in the past, but alas, I'll try again this year now the products are in more solid positions.
I'm doing a 50% off (first year) for my SaaS KTool, https://ktool.io
It allows you to send multiple types of content to your Kindle: Reddit posts, Hacker News discussions, Twitter threads & newsletters. It supports multiple file types too: PDF, DOCX, markdown etc.
We're running a deal for 38% off ($99 vs $159) for a yearly membership to StackAbuse.com. We have a number of data visualization courses, guided projects, and a pretty extensive course on Deep Learning for Computer Vision.
The best deals are usually in software. For physical goods, find a price tracker.
That being said, I grabbed a lifetime Laracasts subscription for $219 - about 2 years of the ordinary yearly price ($99, on sale at $54). Great resource for new & rusty Laravel developers.
For those of us old enough to remember when holiday sales really did start on the day after Thanksgiving, in my area, most of the shops started their Black Friday sales on Monday. If you waited until today, you missed out on a lot.
Every Layout. Not directly for specific solutions and components but more to get inspired from them and from latest CSS capabilities they use (seeing them in action beats reading specs). Updates for life are promised.
I am addicted to Rotring pencils. I already have more than I will use in a lifetime (56). I have taken to gifting them to my loved ones. I am not sure all appreciate the quality, and the longevity of these pencils, but for those who do, this is a gift greatly appreciated.
That said, I was unable to resist myself and bought four to gift to my direct reports this holiday season, so, thank you OP!
Adding to this: ~30% off Keychron keyboards (https://www.keychron.com/pages/bfcm-2022) for those who've been burned by Razer peripheral drivers before. I love my keychron, if you use a Mac I think it's the nicest mech keyboard out there since they offer versions with a proper mac CMD ctrl-opt-cmd layout.
We also occasionally run 100% free courses for 1000+ students (also broken down in smaller pods), for those you just need to apply by filling out the form:
Not Black Friday, but in the UK and maybe other countries, Amazon Warehouse is currently doing a 20% off sale, so 20% off the price when you get to checkout.
I've had a few good "As New" things off there in the past, worth having a look.
There's also a 50% off books sale on the UK Warehouse, loads of tech books, though I don't know how many decent ones are left.
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Specific Black Friday deals though: Quest Apps on sale:
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/section/15301901340...