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Dealmaster: All the Cyber Monday 2019 tech deals that are still hot

by arstechnica.com

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with a jumbo-sized roundup of hand-picked Cyber Monday tech deals. To be candid, many of the discounts we’re seeing on Black Friday’s sister holiday are similar to what we saw last week. We do have some new offers worth noting, including new Nintendo Switch bundles, a Sonos speaker sale, monitor deals, and more. Still, for online tech deals, Cyber Monday is primarily a good opportunity to capitalize on the discounts you may not have checked out on Black Friday.

Not that this is a bad thing. Even after sorting through all the junk on offer, we’ve still got a boatload of worthwhile deals that cover just about every type of tech gadget. As we did with our Black Friday deals list, we’ve highlighted a few deals we particularly like ahead of our full rundown. You can see it all below.

(P.S. Because the Dealmaster is a company guy, he’ll note that Ars has its own Cyber Monday sale: 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 Cyber Monday 2019 (for now)

Apple’s latest entry-level iPad is $70 off across retailers. 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. This model was briefly down to $230 over the weekend but is still a great value at $250. Note that the 128GB model is $100 off if you need more storage space.

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.

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 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.

Deals on the latest model of the Nintendo Switch are hard to come by, and this one from Walmart gives you a good amount for your money. This deal covers the newest Nintendo Switch model, which has significantly improved battery life when compared to the original model. Lots of deals, including many this holiday season, were only for the Switch variant from 2017. You also get a microSD card from SanDisk that we like for expanding the Switch’s storage (the device itself only has 32GB of internal storage, so you’ll need more if you plan to play mostly digital games). Finally, it also includes an off-brand controller, which we haven’t tested but may be more comfortable than using those tiny Joy-Con buttons all the same. If game bundles are more your speed, Best Buy has a bundle available for the newest Nintendo Switch that includes Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and Starlink: Battle for Atlas. Either way, if you planned to get a Switch for the holidays anyway, these are nice, if not outstanding, sweeteners.

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.

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 dramatically far off for storing and recording video. It becomes a much better value when you can get 256GB for $28, which is the lowest price we’ve seen on this variant to date.

The Google Pixel 3a was already a good value at its regular $399 price, but it’s a great buy for anyone who needs a new Android phone now at its Cyber Monday price of $299. The Pixel 3a is very similar to the regular Pixel 3, but you get most of the essential features of the latter in the former’s more affordable package. Key among those features are the OLED display and the stellar camera, which is one of the best in a sub-$500 smartphone. It may not feel as luxurious as other all-metal, flagship smartphones, but it’s a strong handset nonetheless—and one that will get first-priority Google updates through 2022.

Our current favorite wired gaming mouse, the Razer Deathadder Elite, is a steal this Cyber Monday at $24.99. We like this mouse for its relatively unassuming design (compared to other gaming peripherals) and its fast and accurate performance. It has a 16,000 DPI optical sensor that presents few tracking issues and seven programmable buttons. It’s a well-made piece of hardware that isn’t as garish as other gaming mice can be and could easily work as an all-purpose mouse if needed. We recommend it even when it’s at its regular price of $44.99, so now’s a good time to grab it at roughly 45% off.

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.

  • Sonos One (2nd gen) smart speaker for $149 at Sonos and Amazon (normally $199).

The Sonos One remains ideal for anyone who wants a home speaker with (most of) the smarts of a Google Home or Amazon Echo without settling for mediocre sound quality. The second-gen model here is $50 off its usual going rate for Cyber Monday. If you don’t want the “smart” portion of the speaker, the Sonos One SL is also $50 off at $129—this has the same quality audio performance, just without any always-on microphones or voice assistants built in.

Amazon device deals

Apple device deals

Gaming deals

Video game deals

TV and home entertainment deals

Laptop and desktop PC deals

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