Black Friday meh roundup 2022
As seems to be the trend we’re catching up with our Black Friday deals the day of and in an underwhelming fashion. It’s not that we aren’t as excited as the next publication to throw flashy “buy this item” links up but that the deals are as underwhelming as ever this year although there are a few gems to find if you sift through things.
PRICE CHECKING TOOLS
Before getting too deep into things I want to highlight price checking tools, they’ll help you avoid artificial “deals” created by vendors raising the prices over the past month to lower then back to their normal or slightly lower than standard retail price. Tools like camelcamelcamel and Honey both work for tracking prices and locating deals although in different ways. Our desert dwelling option focuses solely on amazon and has years of history on the price of items letting you track how an item has behaved over months or even years, Honey(now paypal deals apparently) on the other hand only stores roughly a month of history for items but searches multiple retailers and if using the browser extension and will highlight if you’re at the wrong site for the best deal. Both work well at what they do I encourage using one or one of their competitors if there’s a service you prefer.
Displays
Lets start right off with the fun stuff, Viotek sent us details of a swath of displays that are on sale(11 in total) Instead of listing them all though I’m going to link to their amazon store and call out a few of the ones I think are most exciting. The RFI25CBA Reaper(glad something finally got a name even if it’s super gamer) is a 25″ 1080P 144hz IPS panel coming in at 129.99, with type-c as an input even this is a fully modern panel that should make most midrange gamers happy. Moving the price up just a little to 149.99 we have the slightly smaller NFI24DBA coming in at a still better than normal 75hz but an impressive 2560×1440 more content creation focused individuals that only game casually would be happy with it or it’s larger 32″ sibling(that I’ve unboxed here and have on my desk at work) for 189.99. Last but not least is the GNV32DBE It’s not a monitor I’d pick for myself but it does appeal to a certain demographic. At 259.99 It’s a VA curved 1440P 165Hz gaming beast, the 120% sRGB rating puts the color at good although likely needs calibration for any serious work and although I’m not a fan myself some people just love curved monitors.
Headphones and Audio
Headphones always seem a prime target for Black Friday deals and this year is no exception. One of our favorites the Cleer has their whole lineup on sale including the audiophile grade NEXT although it’s been there before and 599.99 is still a tough thing to suggest for wired headphones(they’re the best I’ve ever heard, it’s just a car payment for headphones is tough to swallow) On to thinks we’re testing now the Cleer arc is currently 129.99 and the enduro 100 which we’ve used and love is down to 79.99, seriously I use the enduro daily and the battery still lasts as long as it ever did regularly going over a week between charges sometimes as much as three depending on the usage pattern. There’s also an assortment of ANC versions(although that cuts the enduros rated battery to a paltry 60 hours) in their store. Other audio companies aren’t being left out either, Sennheiser has their HD 599 SE marked all the way down to 89.99 less than half it’s normal retail and yes well below any price it’s ever been before. Not to be left out of the wireless party they’re also cutting the HD 450SE with ANC and a 30 hour battery down to 74.95 from 199.95. Speakers are included too, Harmon Kardon has their Onyx studio speakers at 134.30 for the Studio 4 and 164.99 for the studio 7, I personally have and love my studio 4 units even having spent something on the order of twice that for them. Smaller speakers are JBL’s bread and butter with the clip 4 being a 44.95 deal and the larger Flip 6 being discounted to 89.95, I don’t own one to comment sadly but the people I know that have them love them.
Storage
A cornerstone of any deal roundup or gift guide for pocketables is always storage, and out of the gate we stumbled on a steal from SanDisk, if you’re not afraid of the diminutive size they have the 512GB Ultra fit down to 37.99, that’s less than the 512gb drives microcenter carries in store even if it’s more than we’d suggest carrying in such an easy to lose format. The perennial favorite T183 and T193 are down to 14.99 and 15.79 respectively for black Friday although that’s a price they’ve been bouncing off for the past few months. On the note of portable storage crucial has their well regarded X6 1Tb portable at an impressive 69.99 while it’s NVMe based sibling the X8 is a steal at 79.99. Looking at internal drives the P5 plus also from crucial is at 93.49 for 1Tb a price I hope it stays at for a gen4x4 TLC SSD Mushkin is also offering the Vortex Redline for 169.99
Closing thoughts
Hopefully for such an underwhelming year we have some deal that caught your interest, if not cybermonday and a gift guide(if I can finish the thing) Are right around the corner, One last deal to shoehorn in is the keychron C2 a beast of a mechanical keyboard is down to 59.42 If I was in the market for a keyboard it would likely be on it’s way here!
