Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of discounts to share—and, well, it's the big one. While the holiday sales have been steadily trickling in over the past few weeks, it's now Black Friday, and that means the floodgates are officially open for tech deals across the Web.

Now, as is often the case with major shopping events like this, the majority of the offers retailers are pushing don't totally hold up. Sometimes the prices aren't much lower than you'll see at other points in the year, and other times the products aren't worth buying in the first place. (If there's a product you're interested in but don't see below, we recommend using a price-tracking site to ensure you're not overpaying.) But with lots of consumer tech, Black Friday and Cyber Monday often do result in the lowest prices of the year. With that in mind, the Dealmaster has been burning the midnight oil to find the Black Friday tech deals that are most worth considering. You can find the fruits of his labor below.

There are simply too many notable deals going on now to give a quick recap here, but we've called out a few of our favorite offers based on testing the Dealmaster and the rest of the Ars team has done in the past. There's a truckload of discounts on video games, PC gear, headphones, TVs, streaming devices, and more alongside that. We'll do our best to update this roundup as deals expire and new ones become available, but for now, let's try to make your holiday shopping a little less hectic.

(P.S. Don't forget that Ars is having its own sale this weekend: New Ars Pro++ subscribers can get discounts on a YubiKey 5c or YubiKey 5 NFC device.)

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Table of Contents

Top 10 deals of Black Friday 2019 (for now)

Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K media streamer for $24.99 at Amazon (normally $49.99).

If you're still in need of a cheap way to stream 4K video, Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K is down to $25 for Black Friday. That's a $25 discount and matches the streaming dongle's price from Amazon Prime Day. We've gone over the pros and cons of the Fire TV Stick 4K a few times before: in short, it's powerful, it supports nearly all of the major streaming services, it works with a variety of HDR formats, and its voice searching functionality is about as good as it gets with these things. Its user interface can be somewhat messy, though, and it tends to push Amazon content first and foremost, which might be annoying if you don't use Prime Video. We still like the overall package a little bit more than the Roku Streaming Stick+, but if you want a more simplistic UI above all else, we'll mention that Roku's alternative is going for $30 for its Black Friday sale.

Apple Watch Series 5 (40mm) for $354.99 at Amazon (clip $24.01 coupon - normally $384).

Down to $355 with an on-page coupon, this is one of the first big discounts we've seen on the latest flagship Apple Watch. Apple usually sells the Series 5 for $399, but Amazon has had it for $384 for the past couple of months. You can check our review for full details, but rest assured that this is still very much an Apple Watch, with all the build quality, health tracking, and platform lock-in that implies. It's probably not worth the upgrade if you have a Series 4, but if you have a Series 3 or earlier model, this might be a good chance to make the jump.

10.2-inch Apple iPad (32GB) for $229.99 at Amazon and Target (normally $329).

With a $100 discount across retailers, Apple's latest entry-level iPad is down to lowest price to date. We'll note that if you can afford to pay another $200 or so for an iPad Air, you'll get a not-insignificant step up in build quality and long-term processing power. We haven't seen any noteworthy deals on that tablet, however, and the new 10.2-inch model here remains an excellent tablet for casual media consumption and lighter work here and there.

Cooler Master MH751 wired gaming headset for $59.99 at Amazon (normally $77.99).

The top pick in our guide to the best gaming headsets, Cooler Master's MH751 is down to its joint-lowest price to date and $15-20 cheaper than its usual going rate on Amazon. Have a look at the guide linked above for a more complete review, but to sum, this is a no-frills headset that excels at the fundamentals: sound, mic quality, and most of all, truly fantastic comfort. Its detachable mic and relatively understated design allow it double as a nice pair of everyday headphones when you're away from the gaming rig, too.

Instant Pot Duo 60 (6qt) 7-in-1 electric pressure cooker for $49 at Walmart and Amazon (normally $79.99).

It wouldn't be a seasonally-specific shopping season without an Instant Pot deal, and this $49 price for the Instant Pot Duo 60 is one we can get behind. We usually see it sit in $60-70 range. This 7-in-1 device combines a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, sauté pan, yogurt maker, and warmer into one, with 14 smart cooking modes for completing recipes with simple button presses. It has high and low pressure settings, an important feature that makes it different from the baseline Instant Pot Lux, and it also gives you a bit more control over how your food is cooked when using the pressure cooking setting.

In general, the most popular Instant Pot models range from $69 to $129 when not on sale, but big shopping events like Black Friday here are when it drops the farthest. This deal on the Instant Pot Duo 60 is about as low as we've seen it to date.

Samsung EVO Select (256GB) microSDXC card for $27.99 at Amazon (normally $39.99).

Here's a good opportunity to add a bunch of microSD storage space to your smartphone, Switch, GoPro, or whatever other device for not much money. The EVO Select isn't as fast as something like the also-discounted SanDisk Extreme Plus—particularly if you wanted to, say, run a Raspberry Pi's OS off of it—but it's not not dramatically far off for storing and recording video. It becomes much better value when you can get 256GB for $28, which is the lowest price we've seen on this variant of to date.

Anker PowerWave Stand for $11.55 at Amazon (normally $15.99).

Our favorite budget wireless charger is now even more affordable—now you can get Anker's PowerWave Stand for just $11.55. Regularly priced at $15.99, this wireless charging stand works with Android smartphones and iPhones, powering the former up to 10W and the latter up to 5W. It may not be as strong as other wireless chargers when it comes to iPhones, but it still delivers a decent amount of power in a short amount of time. On average, it provided 26 percent power to iPhones with just one hour of charging, and it provided an average of 32 percent battery to all other smartphones we tested.

The Anker PowerWave Stand is slim and light, and you can place your handset on it either in portrait or landscape mode. That feature combined with the stand design (rather than a flat charging pad design) means you can more easily use your smartphone while it's charging. The Anker PowerWave Stand was always a good value for the money, but its Black Friday price makes it an easy buy for those that want an affordable Qi wireless charging pad for their office or nightstand.

If you're willing to pay for a premium pair of noise-cancelling headphones, this $70 discount on Sony's WH-1000XM3 should lighten the load on your wallet. As we noted in our recent travel tech gift guide, these are a superb blend of comfort, fun (and customizable) sound quality, and the strongest active noise-cancellation we've tested on a pair of headphones so far. They'll get you more than 20 hours of battery life, too. We'll note that Bose's QuietComfort 35 II is going for the same price for Black Friday—that pair has physical buttons and a slightly lighter design, so if you can't stand touch controls, you'll still be getting a good pair. But we think the XM3s are still the more complete product.

SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD (1TB) portable external SSD for $124.99 at Amazon (normally $169.99).

SanDisk's Extreme Portable SSD has always been a great investment, but this Black Friday sale price of $139.99 for the 1TB model makes it even better. It's a surprisingly small SSD, measuring 3.8 x 1.9 x 0.3 inches, but it's also more rugged than most external drives. It's IP55 water- and dust-resistant, and it can withstand shocks (up to 1500G), vibrations (5g RMS, 10-2000HZ), and drops from up to two meters.

It's also one of the fastest portable SSDs we tested when we picked our favorite USB-C accessories (our general favorite, the Samsung T5, is also on sale for $13 more). Built for PC and Mac users, it's great for storing high-res images, videos, and other documents that you want to keep in place that's both digitally and physically safe. It also comes with a USB-C to C cable and a USB-C to A cable, allowing you to connect it to nearly any computer without needing an adapter. SanDisk's Extreme Portable SSD usually stays at $165.99, only dropping close to $139 on rare occasions, so now's the time to snag it if you're looking for an all-purpose, high-performing, and ultra-portable SSD.

HP Envy 13t laptop - Intel Core i7-10510U, 13.3-inch 1080p, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 16GB Optane for $649.99 at HP (normally $899.99).

It may not be a flagship, but HP's Envy 13t laptop is a solid laptop made even better by its Black Friday price of $649. The Envy line doesn't have as much flare as the Spectre line, but over the past few years HP has added more to it to make it a bit more luxurious. The 13t laptop has a metal design with a silver satin finish along with angled edges that give it a more lux feel. It's not the thinnest or the lightest laptop, but that actually helps it in some ways—in particular HP kept it thinner than most laptops in its price range but managed to include two USB-A ports with draw-jaw designs on its sides.

It also has a few key features that have become standard in flagship devices, namely a fingerprint sensor and a webcam kill switch. The former lets you log in using your fingerprint and Windows Hello, while the latter cuts off the electricity to the webcam so you can increase the level of privacy you have while using the notebook. This particular model that's on sale is pretty powerful as well, featuring a 10th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD plus 16GB of Intel Optane memory. It's arguably just as powerful and efficient as an HP Spectre machine, just with a more subdued design and a few fewer, high-end features. Our biggest complaints with this machine are its lack of Thunderbolt 3 port (but it does have one USB-C port) and its barrel charging port, but those are small prices to pay for a laptop that's well worth its Black Friday price of $649.

Amazon device deals

Apple device deals

Gaming deals

Video game deals

TV and home entertainment deals

Laptop and desktop PC deals

Electronics deals

Smartphone deals

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Audio deals

Storage deals

Networking deals

Accessories and miscellaneous deals