Tag: Laptops

Whether you like it or not, Black Friday is here. The holiday shopping season is upon us, and it’s when some of the best deals of the year make their appearance. For Black Friday, Best Buy has really solid tech deals on some of our favorite products we’ve tested and reviewed, ranging from laptops and gaming mice to cordless vacuums. So, whether you’re shopping for the perfect gift for that tech lover in your life or if you’ve been waiting all year for prices to drop on something for yourself, there are a few great options below.

For more great discounts, check out our Best Black Friday Deals roundup and all of our deals coverage here.

Updated November 28: We’ve added the Breville Express Espresso Machine, AirPods Pro 2, and Oura Ring 4.

The Latest MacBook Pro

The M5 MacBook Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is only a month old, and it’s already on sale. It’s the only Mac so far to receive the upgrade to the latest M5 chip, benefiting from improved performance across the board. In my testing, there was a significant step forward everywhere you looked, including the GPU, the CPU, and the Neural Engine for AI tasks. It’s the GPU that’s seen the biggest leap, though, which should speed up both gaming and creative applications. Other than that, this is the same MacBook Pro you probably already know and love, with its bright mini-LED screen, robust speakers, and extra ports (over the MacBook Air, at least).

This base 14-inch model doesn’t have the incredible value of the MacBook Air or the powerhouse performance of the M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro. Ultimately, when it comes to which MacBook you should buy, the answer is still the Air. But the M5 versions of these laptops aren’t coming until next year, so if you’re after the latest Apple Silicon in one of the best laptops you can buy, this deal on the M5 MacBook Pro is solid.

The Best Bluetooth Speaker

The JBL Flip 7 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is a Bluetooth speaker that has it all. As our A/V reviewer Ryan Waniata says, “JBL’s Flip strikes the perfect compromise between mobility and sound quality, offering clean detail with plenty of punch.” Waniata also praises the durability of the Flip 7, which is important in a Bluetooth speaker meant to be used outdoors. There are tons of different color options to match your vibe, and it gets up to 16 hours of battery life. The increased water resistance means it’ll bring the party wherever you need it. Put simply, it’s the best Bluetooth speaker you can buy, and it’s at a great price.

Our Favorite Dyson Vacuum

Everyone wants a cordless Dyson vacuum, but they tend to be exorbitantly expensive. It’s still not cheap, but at $300 off, this is as good a deal as we’ve seen on this vacuum. The V15 Detect is our vacuum expert’s favorite Dyson. In her testing, Nena Farrell says she was impressed by how much dust and dirt it sucked up from her carpet, as well as from hard floors. The V15 Detect also comes with an extra sensor that can actually count the number of dust particles. That’s overkill for most people, but if you have severe allergies (or have friends or family that do), the Dyson V15 Detect can actually verify what you’re picking up.

The Best AirPods Deal

This discount on the AirPods Pro 2 is sold out some other retailers, but it’s still available at Best Buy. These updated AirPods Pro 2 is the model to come out in 2023, introducing the USB-C charging port and water resistance to the already-great pair of noise-canceling earbuds. The price cut to $191 from the retail price of $250 is great, and it’s probably the pair that most people should buy this holiday season. However, I should mention that the newer AirPods Pro 3 launched recently in September, bringing a huge boost to noise canceling, bass, and battery life. It also has the new Live Translation feature. These newer earbuds are $30 off right now, but they cost an extra $30 over the AirPods Pro 2.

The Best TV Deal Right Now

OLED TVs might be the best TVs you can buy, but if you’re shopping for a TV under $1,000 like most people are, the TCL QM6K QLED (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is what you should be eyeing. It’s a 4K mini-LED screen, and our TV reviewers call it “a versatile display that does just about everything well, from naturalistic colors to rich black levels and impressive clarity.” It’s not the brightest TV in the world, but it does come with a 144-Hz refresh rate for gaming and a smart Google TV interface for your streaming needs. There are screen options ranging from 55 inches up to 98 inches, all of which are on sale ahead of Black Friday, with the happy-medium 65-inch model starting at $500.

The Best MagSafe Power Bank

Most people aren’t using the wireless charging on their iPhone to its full extent. Picking up a MagSafe power bank is a great way to do that, and this one from Anker is our favorite. With a 10,000-mAh battery, it can power up an iPhone to a full charge nearly twice. It even works on Android phones because it supports the Qi2 standard. We also like that it comes with a built-in kickstand and a helpful LED light on the side that tells you how much charge is left. It’s $35 off for Black Friday, bringing it to its lowest price so far.

A Fancy Espresso Maker (That You’ll Love)

Don’t let price hold you back from your home barista dreams. $200 off the beloved espresso machine that WIRED editor Julian Chokkattu has been using for seven years without issues. He cites the excellent steam wand, consistent pressure for espresso, and easy cleaning as the top reasons to buy it. But the long-term reliability is its biggest strength. When you drop half a grand on a piece of kitchen tech, you need to know that it won’t need to be replaced in just a few years.

The Best Headphones

The best noise-canceling headphones from Sony are also the best wireless headphones you can buy right now. Bags of processing power can silence even the loudest sounds around you, and the included microphones are excellent for Zoom calls. Sound quality is top-notch, with custom-made drivers delivering Sony’s sleek and flat sound.

A Brilliant USB-C Hub

One of the biggest upgrades you can make to your remote work setup is a solid USB hub or laptop docking station. Most laptops don’t have enough ports, especially not if you’re trying to connect multiple, high-resolution monitors. The plug-and-play nature of this is super helpful, too, as you can have all of your peripherals and accessories connected via USB-C.

While you could just go out and buy any old USB hub, the Satechi Dual Dock Stand has some secrets up its sleeve. First off, it’s designed to prop up your laptop slightly with its wedge shape. My favorite feature, though, is the built-in storage slot. It doesn’t come with an SSD included, but any M.2 SSD will work. It’s a handy feature to have. The best part is the price, which is down to $105, a new low at Best Buy for Black Friday.

The Best Windows Laptop Deal

Just last week, this laptop cost $1,000. Now it’s down to $550. That’s a 45 percent drop in price. And while I wouldn’t say this laptop is worth $1,000, it’s an absolute steal for $550. The Zenbook A14’s calling card is its weight of just 2.16 pounds. It’s light enough that it’ll make you do a double-take when you pick it up off the table. That makes it an ideal travel companion to lug across campus or on airplanes. Unlike ultra-light laptops in the past, the Zenbook A14 doesn’t have any major compromises in battery life, performance, or keyboard. It even has an OLED screen, as so many Asus laptops do.

A Cheaper, Better iPad

This is a great price for the base iPad. But a cheaper iPad is only so good if it’s limited by its software. But with the iPadOS 26 update, you’re also getting a better iPad than ever before. With a more accurate cursor and resizable windows, the iPad is now more like a MacBook than ever before. Multitasking on an iPad has always been a nightmare, but now that you can pull up multiple windows side by side and resize them to your heart’s content. Connect it up with a wireless mouse and keyboard, and you’ve got something that could replace a laptop in a pinch.

The Best Phone Under $300

No one is calling the Moto G Stylus 5G the best phone in the world. In fact, our phone expert (and tech editor extraordinaire, Julian Chokkattu) recommends Nothing’s Phone 3a as the better cheap phone. But the 2025 Moto G Stylus is not only the best Moto G phone you can buy, it also has a lot of high-end features, such as a large 6.7-inch AMOLED screen with a 120-Hz refresh rate. It even has a beautiful blue back, a built-in stylus, and a headphone jack. That’s a lot of uncommon features in a remarkably cheap phone, especially at its discounted pre–Black Friday price.

The Perfect Travel Partner

These earbuds came out a couple of years ago, but they remain some of the best you can buy. When they came out, Sony’s fifth-generation of high-end wireless earbuds were trimmed down to around 25 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter than the previous generation. You also get two extra full charges from the case, for a total of up to 36 hours of listening. That all makes it the best pair of earbuds for traveling in particular. There’s no compromise in noise canceling either. In fact, our A/V experts say the XM5 has “some of the most advanced functionality in terms of EQ, touch controls, and adaptive noise canceling available on the market.” They’re $100 off the retail price ahead of Black Friday, which is the best discount we’ve ever seen on them.

The Smartest Android Phone

You can’t go wrong with Google’s brand-new Pixel 10. The smartest of the best Android phones, it boasts genuinely useful AI features, like Call Screen and Now Playing. There’s also an excellent, versatile, triple-camera system that includes a 5X optical zoom for capturing action from afar. There’s Qi2 support for magnetic wireless charging and magnetic accessories. It’s unusual to see a deep discount on this year’s Google flagship, so it’s worth biting.

An Incredible OLED Gaming Monitor

Samsung makes some of the prettiest gaming monitors, especially in the past couple of years. Within its Odyssey lineup, there’s now just about every size and form factor of monitor you can imagine. The Odyssey G6 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a 27-inch OLED with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 and a 360-Hz refresh rate, which should be great no matter what game you’re playing. Want extreme frame rates for competitive shooters? You can drop the resolution to 1080p and explore the higher echelon of the 360-Hz refresh rate. For slower-paced single-player games, the 1440p resolution is crisp, and the OLED panel gets you gorgeous HDR in games. It’s $250 off the full price ahead of Black Friday, down now to $650.

A Dirt-Cheap Chromebook

You can’t expect a laptop this cheap to be without compromises. But when it comes to budget Chromebooks, this is as good as it gets. It’s a reasonably affordable and attractive laptop, with lots of ports, decent performance, and a comfortable keyboard. For a Chromebook, the specs aren’t bad either, coming with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. Unfortunately, the touchpad isn’t the best, nor is the display. It’s not bright enough, and the colors look off. For a laptop under $300, though, the CX14 should do the trick, especially for a student or a first-time laptop owner.

One Ring to Rule Them All

The smart ring space has been quiet this year, perhaps partially because of how fantastic the Oura Ring 4 is. It’s smaller and lighter, feeling more like a proper piece of jewelry than ever before. With new features like fertility tracking, an improved health app, and over three days of battery life, our reviewer Adrienne So was consistently impressed by the upgrade over the previous Oura Ring 3. At $100 off the full price, the Oura Ring 4 is continuing to feel like the only smart ring anyone should buy.

An Excellent Prebuilt Gaming Desktop

With RAM prices skyrocketing, just buying a prebuilt gaming desktop feels like an increasingly smart move, especially at this price. The Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop is down to just $1,225, coming with an Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti, Intel Core Ultra 7 265F, 32 GB of memory, and 1 TB of storage. That’s cheaper than Dell’s own price for that configuration, but I wouldn’t recommend buying this particular model, as it comes with only a 500-watt power supply. While that’s enough power for the RTX 5060 Ti, you’ll be limited from upgrading to any GPUs more powerful in the future. So, I’d highly recommend buying one of the configurations with the 1,000-watt power supplies, such as the RTX 5070 configuration. Before buying, I’d also recommend comparing prices with Dell.com, as it has some strong deals on particular configurations, such as this RTX 5070 Ti model for just $1,000.

A Gaming Mouse

If you play MMOs, you know how useful it is to map various actions to buttons on your keyboard or mouse. Well, this gaming mouse from Corsair gives you a ton of options to customize your gameplay. There are 12 reprogrammable side buttons, but the mouse also has a high 33,000-dpi optical sensor and 1,000-Hz polling for low input lag and high responsiveness. It can connect via a 2.4-GHz dongle instead of Bluetooth, too.

A Mesh Wi-Fi System

Everyone could use faster and more reliable Wi-Fi, right? This high-performing, tri-band, Wi-Fi 7 mesh is the runner-up in our Best Mesh guide. You’ll get lightning-fast speeds on the 6-GHz band at close range. Each unit has plenty of ports (one 10 Gbps Ethernet port, one 2.5 Gbps port, a Gigabit port, and a USB 3.0 port), and the Deco app is very easy to use. The possibility of a TP-Link ban in the US might put you off, or it might encourage you to pull the trigger now.

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Whether you like it or not, Black Friday is next week. The holiday shopping season is upon us, and it’s when some of the best deals of the year make their appearance. Ahead of Black Friday, Best Buy has been offering some really solid tech deals on some of our favorite products we’ve tested and reviewed, ranging from laptops and gaming mice to cordless vacuums. So, whether you’re shopping for the perfect gift for that tech lover in your life or if you’ve been waiting all year for prices to drop on something for yourself, there are a few great options below.

For more great discounts, check out our Best Early Black Friday Deals roundup and all of our deals coverage here.

The Latest MacBook Pro

The M5 MacBook Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is only a month old, and it’s already on sale. It’s the only Mac so far to get the bump to the latest M5 chip, benefiting from improved performance all around. In my testing, there was a significant step forward everywhere you looked, including the GPU, the CPU, and the Neural Engine for AI tasks. It’s the GPU that’s seen the biggest leap, though, which should speed up both gaming and creative applications. Other than that, this is the same MacBook Pro you probably already know and love, with its bright mini-LED screen, robust speakers, and extra ports (over the MacBook Air, at least).

This base 14-inch model doesn’t have the incredible value of the MacBook Air or the powerhouse performance of the M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro. Ultimately, when it comes to which MacBook you should buy, the answer is still the Air. But the M5 versions of these laptops aren’t coming until next year, so if you’re after the latest Apple Silicon in one of the best laptops you can buy, this deal on the M5 MacBook Pro is solid.

The Best Bluetooth Speaker

The JBL Flip 7 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is a Bluetooth speaker that has it all. As our A/V reviewer Ryan Waniata says, “JBL’s Flip strikes the perfect compromise between mobility and sound quality, offering clean detail with plenty of punch.” Waniata also praises the durability of the Flip 7, which is important in a Bluetooth speaker meant to be used outdoors. There are tons of different color options to match your vibe, and it gets up to 16 hours of battery life. The increased water resistance means it’ll bring the party to wherever you need it. Put simply, it’s the best Bluetooth speaker you can buy, and it’s at a great price.

Our Favorite Dyson Vacuum

Everyone wants a cordless Dyson vacuum, but they tend to be exorbitantly expensive. It’s still not cheap, but at $300 off, this is as good a deal as we’ve seen on this vacuum. The V15 Detect is our vacuum expert’s favorite Dyson. In her testing, Nena Farrell says she was impressed by how much dust and dirt it sucked up from her carpet, as well as from hard floors. The V15 Detect also comes with an extra sensor that can actually count the number of dust particles. That’s overkill for most people, but if you have severe allergies (or have friends or family that do), the Dyson V15 Detect can actually verify what you’re picking up.

The Best TV Deal Right Now

OLED TVs might be the best TVs you can buy, but if you’re shopping for a TV under $1,000 like most people are, the TCL QM6K QLED (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is what you should be eyeing. It’s a 4K mini-LED screen, and our TV reviewers call it “a versatile display that does just about everything well, from naturalistic colors to rich black levels and impressive clarity.” It’s not the brightest TV in the world, but it does come with a 144-Hz refresh rate for gaming and a smart Google TV interface for your streaming needs. There are screen options ranging from 55 inches up to 98 inches, all of which are on sale ahead of Black Friday, with the happy-medium 65-inch model starting at $500.

The Best Phone Under $300

No one is calling the Moto G Stylus 5G the best phone in the world. In fact, our phone expert (and tech editor extraordinaire, Julian Chokkattu) recommends Nothing’s Phone 3a as the better cheap phone. But the 2025 Moto G Stylus is not only the best Moto G phone you can buy, it also has a lot of high-end features, such as a large 6.7-inch AMOLED screen with a 120-Hz refresh rate. It even has a beautiful blue back, a built-in stylus, and a headphone jack. That’s a lot of uncommon features in a remarkably cheap phone, especially at its discounted pre–Black Friday price.

A Classy Gaming Laptop

The Razer Blade 14 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a gaming laptop. The RGB-backlit keyboard and green snakes logo on the lid give it away. But if not for those elements, you could easily mistake the Blade 14 for a true MacBook Pro rival made for content creators and pro users. It’s around the same thickness as the MacBook Pro, despite the fact that it has a powerful discrete graphics card for gaming. That’s what makes it such a great hybrid device that could work just as well for school and work as for late-night gaming.

The Razer Blade 14 didn’t get a massive revamp in 2025, but the new model did make some tweaks. It now has an OLED panel, which is high-resolution (2880 x 1800) and color-accurate, and it sports a faster 120-Hz refresh rate. It’s not the best gaming screen I’ve seen on a laptop, but again, it’s a great comparison to the MacBook Pro. And for this price, it’s a must-buy.

The Perfect Travel Partner

These earbuds came out a couple of years ago, but they remain some of the best you can buy. When they came out, Sony’s fifth-generation of high-end wireless earbuds were trimmed down to around 25 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter than the previous generation. You also get two extra full charges from the case, for a total of up to 36 hours of listening. That all makes it the best pair of earbuds for traveling in particular. There’s no compromise in noise canceling either. In fact, our A/V experts say the XM5 have “some of the most advanced functionality in terms of EQ, touch controls, and adaptive noise canceling available on the market.” They’re $100 off the retail price ahead of Black Friday, which is the best discount we’ve ever seen on them.

An Incredible OLED Gaming Monitor

Samsung makes some of the prettiest gaming monitors, especially in the past couple of years. Within its Odyssey lineup, there’s now just about every size and form factor of monitor you can imagine. The Odyssey G6 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a 27-inch OLED with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 and a 360-Hz refresh rate, which should be great no matter what game you’re playing. Want extreme frame rates for competitive shooters? You can drop the resolution to 1080p and explore the higher echelon of the 360-Hz refresh rate. For slower-paced single-player games, the 1440p resolution is crisp, and the OLED panel gets you gorgeous HDR in games. It’s $250 off the full price ahead of Black Friday, down now to $650.

A Dirt-Cheap Chromebook

You can’t expect a laptop this cheap to be without compromises. But when it comes to budget Chromebooks, this is as good as it gets. It’s a reasonably affordable and attractive laptop, with lots of ports, decent performance, and a comfortable keyboard. For a Chromebook, the specs aren’t bad either, coming with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. Unfortunately, the touchpad isn’t the best, nor is the display. It’s not bright enough, and the colors look off. For a laptop under $300, though, the CX14 should do the trick, especially for a student or a first-time laptop owner.

A Gaming Mouse

If you play MMOs, you know how useful it is to map various actions to buttons on your keyboard or mouse. Well, this gaming mouse from Corsair gives you a ton of options to customize your gameplay. There are 12 reprogrammable side buttons, but the mouse also has a high 33,000-dpi optical sensor and 1,000-Hz polling for low input lag and high responsiveness. It can connect via a 2.4-GHz dongle instead of Bluetooth, too.

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