Cyber Monday is now officially in full swing, with deals available on just about everything imaginable. This gives you a second chance to snag deals you may have missed on Black Friday with some items discounted even more than they were last week. Below we’ve listed the best deals we were able to find currently available. And with so many deals, there’s bound to be something that will pique your interest.
This aluminum-clad 14-inch notebook comes equipped with one of Intel’s recently released Core i7-1165G7 processors. The CPU portion of this chip is fairly average with four Hyper-Threaded cores, but the processor also has a relatively powerful integrated graphics solution that can play games with low settings and even handle some games with medium graphics settings enabled. There’s 8GB DDR4 RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD. Currently, you can get this laptop from Dell marked down from $1,427.14 to just $699.00.
Samsung’s new Galaxy S20 smartphone features several advancements over its predecessor including a high-end 108MP camera with powerful 100x zoom. Add to that 5G network support and a luxurious 3,200×1,440 AMOLED display and the advantages of the Galaxy S20 are made clear. You can now pick up one of these phones with a $250 discount that drops its price from $999.99 to $749.99, which is incredible for a phone that launched just this year.
If you’ve used a robot vacuum before, you may have found the need to empty its small dust bin a frequent nuisance. With the Roomba i7+, this becomes a significantly less bothersome chore, as the robot is able to empty its dust bin into one 30 times larger located in its charging base. Currently, you can get it from Amazon marked down from $999.99 to $599.00.
The federal government has started to adjust to the reality of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th President on January 20th. A lot of things are going to change that day, including the leadership of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Current Chairman Ajit Pai has announced he will resign from the commission on that day. “It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve at the Federal Communications Commission, including as Chairman of the FCC over the past four years,” Pai said, announcing his departure.
Ajit Pai began his career as a lawyer in the Department of Justice and at Verizon. In 2011, he joined the FCC under Obama as one of the commission’s Republican members. The FCC has a long tradition of balance with the party holding the presidency nominating three commissioners and the other party getting two. When Donald Trump took over in 2017, Pai was elevated to Chairman, and he did all the things people expected him to do.
Within a year, Pai had led the new Republican majority of the commission to roll back the Title II reclassification enacted under Chairman Wheeler in 2015. That effectively killed net neutrality for the duration of the Trump administration. And this wasn’t a by-the-books policy change for the FCC. Pai gave interviews and wrote extensively on his rationale for the change — he even participated in a rather tasteless net neutrality parody video with The Daily Caller (see above). Despite a bomb threat during the December 2017 vote, Pai succeeded in reversing net neutrality. Subsequently, he and fellow Republican commissioner Brendan Carr advocated for FCC regulation of social media.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai does not usually dress like a discount mall Santa.
Pai also oversaw the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, accepting the argument that this deal was necessary to accelerate 5G deployments in the US. Sprint is now being slowly digested by T-Mobile, which has access to a mountain of 2.5GHz spectrum that’s ideal for 5G. That’s a problem for Verizon and AT&T, both of which are lacking strong mid-band spectrum for 5G.
Partisanship was a hallmark of Pai’s tenure running the FCC, but the commission also took action that everyone can get behind. The FCC supported efforts to roll out robocall blocking in 2018, and earlier this year it created a national 988 suicide prevention hotline.
The President-Elect’s team has yet to talk about its plans for the FCC, but Pai’s departure makes things easier. On January 20th, President Biden can designate a new Chairperson, and the smart money is on long-time commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel.
As we get into the busy holiday season, don’t forget that it’s important to treat yourself, too! If you trusty Mac could use some upgrades, you don’t need to rush out and buy a new one. There’s an awesome bundle of highly-rated apps available on Cyber Monday sale that can all help make your life easier and breathe new life into your Mac.
The Official Cyber Monday Mac Bundle Ft. Parallels Pro and Luminar 4 includes 12 awesome apps for one low price, just in time for Cyber Monday. The apps individually would all set you back $1,266, but they’re available in this bundle for the crazy low price of $41.99 with the promo code CMSAVE40.
You won’t find better prices on these innovative apps than this awesome Cyber Monday bundle, which is packed with all kinds of fun apps to upgrade your workflow in nearly every area. First up? Parallels Desktop Pro, the ultimate Mac app for uniting the power of Mac and Windows. It allows you to run thousands of Windows Apps right on your Mac, without compromising on performance and rebooting.
If you spend a lot of time editing your photos, the app Luminar 4 help. This app uses AI technology to streamline your photo editing workflow and create beautiful images with just one single click. There’s also help for editing PDFs with PDFPenPro 12, a supercharged PDF editor for Mac. Need to capture or record your screen? Screen Recorder 2021 lets you do that in just one click, allowing you to save webinars, calls or create a tutorial.
Hoping to learn a new language in 2021? uTalk is also included in this bundle. A lifetime subscription lets you learn a new language on any device. Then there’s Gemini 2, which lets you delete duplicate files and clean up your Mac easily. The Swiss Army Knife of productivity is also included, Dropzone 4 Pro, which lets you move, copy, upload, launch, and more.
A lifetime subscription to Goose VPN is included, which will keep your online activity safe thanks to its secure connection. Once you know all your data is safe, it might be time to make a game plan for 2021. eDraw MindMaster lets you lay out all your ideas into coherent diagrams with their mind-mapping tool. Then the app BusyCal 3 will keep you on task to make all your goals happen, saving you time with tools like cross-cloud sync and integration.
ForkList 3 is next, serving as a dual-pane file manager and file transfer client for macOS. And the bundle is rounded out by Art Text 4, an app that lets you create professional logos and graphics without any technical design experience.
Humanity launched the first satellite in 1957, and since then we’ve put thousands of objects in orbit with little regard for the future. Along with about 3,000 active satellites, we now have 900,000 pieces of space junk larger than 10 centimeters. The results could be catastrophic if even a tiny piece of debris collided with a crewed spacecraft or merely inconvenient if it hit a satellite. In either case, that’s something you want to avoid. Cleaning up space to prevent collisions is a tall order, but the ESA has just funded a giant space claw that could show the way forward.
Most launch operators don’t usually go into a mission intended to clutter up the space around Earth. Nevertheless, defunct satellites, booster engines, and smaller bits of machinery can remain in orbit long after their useful life. Some objects will fall back to Earth naturally as their orbit decays, but the volume of space debris is still moving in the wrong direction, and space is about to get a lot more crowded with megaconstellations from SpaceX and others.
To combat the increase in space junk, the ESA has awarded a €86 million contract to Switzerland-based ClearSpace SA to run the first-ever active debris removal operation. The ESA will provide expertise and money, but ClearSpace SA will do all the engineering and design work. It will also seek additional funding for the mission from commercial investors.
The target of the ESA mission is a Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter), which was left in a 400-mile-high orbit since 2013 when it helped launch a Vega rocket in 2013. The team chose this object because its orbit and composition are well understood, and it’s about the size of a small satellite.
The mission, known as ClearSpace-1, could launch as soon as 2025. The claw-shaped spacecraft will rendezvous with the Vespa debris and lock onto it with the grapplers. After that, it simply drags the object down into the atmosphere where it and the claw burn up. You would, of course, need a lot of these devices to clear Earth’s orbital traffic jam, but this is just an initial test. If ClearSpace-1 is successful, the company can design more efficient versions of the claw for capturing junk.
Only time will tell if ClearSpace’s approach to removing space junk is viable, but we will need to do something. The more cluttered space becomes, the more dangerous it is. Some scientists even worry that a chain reaction of space collisions know as the Kessler effect could render the space around Earth unusable for years or decades.
Here at ExtremeTech, we’ve often discussed the difference between different types of NAND structures — vertical NAND versus planar, or multi-level cell (MLC) versus triple-level cells (TLC) and quad-level cells (QLC). Now, let’s talk about the more basic relevant question: How do SSDs work in the first place, and how do they compare with newer technologies, like Intel’s non-volatile storage technology, Optane?
To understand how and why SSDs are different from spinning discs, we need to talk a little bit about hard drives. A hard drive stores data on a series of spinning magnetic disks called platters. There’s an actuator arm with read/write heads attached to it. This arm positions the read-write heads over the correct area of the drive to read or write information.
Because the drive heads must align over an area of the disk in order to read or write data, and the disk is constantly spinning, there’s a delay before data can be accessed. The drive may need to read from multiple locations in order to launch a program or load a file, which means it may have to wait for the platters to spin into the proper position multiple times before it can complete the command. If a drive is asleep or in a low-power state, it can take several seconds more for the disk to spin up to full power and begin operating.
From the very beginning, it was clear that hard drives couldn’t possibly match the speeds at which CPUs could operate. Latency in HDDs is measured in milliseconds, compared with nanoseconds for your typical CPU. One millisecond is 1,000,000 nanoseconds, and it typically takes a hard drive 10-15 milliseconds to find data on the drive and begin reading it. The hard drive industry introduced smaller platters, on-disk memory caches, and faster spindle speeds to counteract this trend, but there’s only so fast drives can spin. Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor family is the fastest set of drives ever built for the consumer market, while some enterprise drives spun as quickly as 15,000 RPM. The problem is, even the fastest spinning drive with the largest caches and smallest platters are still achingly slow as far as your CPU is concerned.
How SSDs Are Different
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford
Solid-state drives are called that specifically because they don’t rely on moving parts or spinning disks. Instead, data is saved to a pool of NAND flash. NAND itself is made up of what are called floating gate transistors. Unlike the transistor designs used in DRAM, which must be refreshed multiple times per second, NAND flash is designed to retain its charge state even when not powered up. This makes NAND a type of non-volatile memory.
Image by Cyferz at Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.
The diagram above shows a simple flash cell design. Electrons are stored in the floating gate, which then reads as charged “0” or not-charged “1.” Yes, in NAND flash, a 0 means data is stored in a cell — it’s the opposite of how we typically think of a zero or one. NAND flash is organized in a grid. The entire grid layout is referred to as a block, while the individual rows that make up the grid are called a page. Common page sizes are 2K, 4K, 8K, or 16K, with 128 to 256 pages per block. Block size therefore typically varies between 256KB and 4MB.
One advantage of this system should be immediately obvious. Because SSDs have no moving parts, they can operate at speeds far above those of a typical HDD. The following chart shows the access latency for typical storage mediums given in microseconds.
NAND is nowhere near as fast as main memory, but it’s multiple orders of magnitude faster than a hard drive. While write latencies are significantly slower for NAND flash than read latencies, they still outstrip traditional spinning media.
There are two things to notice in the above chart. First, note how adding more bits per cell of NAND has a significant impact on the memory’s performance. It’s worse for writes as opposed to reads — typical triple-level-cell (TLC) latency is 4x worse compared with single-level cell (SLC) NAND for reads, but 6x worse for writes. Erase latencies are also significantly impacted. The impact isn’t proportional, either — TLC NAND is nearly twice as slow as MLC NAND, despite holding just 50% more data (three bits per cell, instead of two). This is also true for QLC drives, which store even more bits at varying voltage levels within the same cell.
The reason TLC NAND is slower than MLC or SLC has to do with how data moves in and out of the NAND cell. With SLC NAND, the controller only needs to know if the bit is a 0 or a 1. With MLC NAND, the cell may have four values — 00, 01, 10, or 11. With TLC NAND, the cell can have eight values, and QLC has 16. Reading the proper value out of the cell requires the memory controller to use a precise voltage to ascertain whether any particular cell is charged.
Reads, Writes, and Erasure
One of the functional limitations of SSDs is while they can read and write data very quickly to an empty drive, overwriting data is much slower. This is because while SSDs read data at the page level (meaning from individual rows within the NAND memory grid) and can write at the page level, assuming surrounding cells are empty, they can only erase data at the block level. This is because the act of erasing NAND flash requires a high amount of voltage. While you can theoretically erase NAND at the page level, the amount of voltage required stresses the individual cells around the cells that are being re-written. Erasing data at the block level helps mitigate this problem.
The only way for an SSD to update an existing page is to copy the contents of the entire block into memory, erase the block, and then write the contents of the old block + the updated page. If the drive is full and there are no empty pages available, the SSD must first scan for blocks that are marked for deletion but that haven’t been deleted yet, erase them, and then write the data to the now-erased page. This is why SSDs can become slower as they age — a mostly-empty drive is full of blocks that can be written immediately, a mostly-full drive is more likely to be forced through the entire program/erase sequence.
If you’ve used SSDs, you’ve likely heard of something called “garbage collection.” Garbage collection is a background process that allows a drive to mitigate the performance impact of the program/erase cycle by performing certain tasks in the background. The following image steps through the garbage collection process.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Note in this example, the drive has taken advantage of the fact that it can write very quickly to empty pages by writing new values for the first four blocks (A’-D’). It’s also written two new blocks, E and H. Blocks A-D are now marked as stale, meaning they contain information the drive has marked as out-of-date. During an idle period, the SSD will move the fresh pages over to a new block, erase the old block, and mark it as free space. This means the next time the SSD needs to perform a write, it can write directly to the now-empty Block X, rather than performing the program/erase cycle.
The next concept I want to discuss is TRIM. When you delete a file from Windows on a typical hard drive, the file isn’t deleted immediately. Instead, the operating system tells the hard drive it can overwrite the physical area of the disk where that data was stored the next time it needs to perform a write. This is why it’s possible to undelete files (and why deleting files in Windows doesn’t typically clear much physical disk space until you empty the recycling bin). With a traditional HDD, the OS doesn’t need to pay attention to where data is being written or what the relative state of the blocks or pages is. With an SSD, this matters.
The TRIM command allows the operating system to tell the SSD it can skip rewriting certain data the next time it performs a block erase. This lowers the total amount of data the drive writes and increases SSD longevity. Both reads and writes damage NAND flash, but writes do far more damage than reads. Fortunately, block-level longevity has not proven to be an issue in modern NAND flash. More data on SSD longevity, courtesy of the Tech Report, can be found here.
The last two concepts we want to talk about are wear leveling and write amplification. Because SSDs write data to pages but erase data in blocks, the amount of data being written to the drive is always larger than the actual update. If you make a change to a 4KB file, for example, the entire block that 4K file sits within must be updated and rewritten. Depending on the number of pages per block and the size of the pages, you might end up writing 4MB worth of data to update a 4KB file. Garbage collection reduces the impact of write amplification, as does the TRIM command. Keeping a significant chunk of the drive free and/or manufacturer over-provisioning can also reduce the impact of write amplification.
Wear leveling refers to the practice of ensuring certain NAND blocks aren’t written and erased more often than others. While wear leveling increases a drive’s life expectancy and endurance by writing to the NAND equally, it can actually increase write amplification. In other to distribute writes evenly across the disk, it’s sometimes necessary to program and erase blocks even though their contents haven’t actually changed. A good wear leveling algorithm seeks to balance these impacts.
The SSD Controller
It should be obvious by now SSDs require much more sophisticated control mechanisms than hard drives do. That’s not to diss magnetic media — I actually think HDDs deserve more respect than they are given. The mechanical challenges involved in balancing multiple read-write heads nanometers above platters that spin at 5,400 to 10,000 RPM are nothing to sneeze at. The fact that HDDs perform this challenge while pioneering new methods of recording to magnetic media and eventually wind up selling drives at 3-5 cents per gigabyte is simply incredible.
A typical SSD controller
SSD controllers, however, are in a class by themselves. They often have a DDR3 or DDR4 memory pool to help with managing the NAND itself. Many drives also incorporate single-level cell caches that act as buffers, increasing drive performance by dedicating fast NAND to read/write cycles. Because the NAND flash in an SSD is typically connected to the controller through a series of parallel memory channels, you can think of the drive controller as performing some of the same load-balancing work as a high-end storage array — SSDs don’t deploy RAID internally but wear leveling, garbage collection, and SLC cache management all have parallels in the big iron world.
Some drives also use data compression algorithms to reduce the total number of writes and improve the drive’s lifespan. The SSD controller handles error correction, and the algorithms that control for single-bit errors have become increasingly complex as time has passed.
Unfortunately, we can’t go into too much detail on SSD controllers because companies lock down their various secret sauces. Much of NAND flash’s performance is determined by the underlying controller, and companies aren’t willing to lift the lid too far on how they do what they do, lest they hand a competitor an advantage.
Interfaces
In the beginning, SSDs used SATA ports, just like hard drives. In recent years, we’ve seen a shift to M.2 drives — very thin drives, several inches long, that slot directly into the motherboard (or, in a few cases, into a mounting bracket on a PCIe riser card. A Samsung 970 EVO Plus drive is shown below.
NVMe drives offer higher performance than traditional SATA drivers because they support a faster interface. Conventional SSDs attached via SATA top out at ~550MB/s in terms of practical read/write speeds. M.2 drives are capable of substantially faster performance into the 3.2GB/s range.
The Road Ahead
NAND flash offers an enormous improvement over hard drives, but it isn’t without its own drawbacks and challenges. Drive capacities and price-per-gigabyte are expected to continue to rise and fall respectively, but there’s little chance SSDs will catch hard drives in price-per-gigabyte. Shrinking process nodes are a significant challenge for NAND flash — while most hardware improves as the node shrinks, NAND becomes more fragile. Data retention times and write performance are intrinsically lower for 20nm NAND than 40nm NAND, even if data density and total capacity are vastly improved. Thus far, we’ve seen drives with up to 96 layers in-market, and 128 layers seems plausible at this point. Overall, the shift to 3D NAND has helped improve density without shrinking process nodes or relying on planar scaling.
Thus far, SSD manufacturers have delivered better performance by offering faster data standards, more bandwidth, and more channels per controller — plus the use of SLC caches we mentioned earlier. Nonetheless, in the long run, it’s assumed NAND will be replaced by something else.
What that something else will look like is still open for debate. Both magnetic RAM and phase change memory have presented themselves as candidates, though both technologies are still in early stages and must overcome significant challenges to actually compete as a replacement to NAND. Whether consumers would notice the difference is an open question. If you’ve upgraded from NAND to an SSD and then upgraded to a faster SSD, you’re likely aware the gap between HDDs and SSDs is much larger than the SSD-to-SSD gap, even when upgrading from a relatively modest drive. Improving access times from milliseconds to microseconds matters a great deal, but improving them from microseconds to nanoseconds might fall below what humans can really perceive in most cases.
Intel’s 3D XPoint (marketed as Intel Optane) has emerged as one potential challenger to NAND flash, and the only current alternative technology in mainstream production. Optane SSDs don’t use NAND — they’re built using non-volatile memory believed to be implemented similarly to phase-change RAM — but they offer similar sequential performance to current NAND flash drives, but with vastly better performance at low drive queues. Drive latency is also roughly half of NAND flash (10 microseconds, versus 20) and vastly higher endurance (30 full drive-writes per day, compared with 10 full drive writes per day for a high-end Intel SSD).
Intel Optane performance targets
Optane is now available in a wide variety of formats, including server expansion cards, personal SSDs, and as add-on cache for accelerating a conventional hard drive. Intel has also pushed Optane as a form of direct-attached memory with far more capacity available in total than DRAM, at the cost of higher access latencies.
Check out our ExtremeTech Explains series for more in-depth coverage of today’s hottest tech topics.
Google’s pitch when it launched Android was openness and customization. Unlike Apple, it released its mobile OS under open source licenses, allowing device makers to modify it. This disconnected approach helped Android become the most popular computing platform on Earth, but it’s been hard to reach Apple levels of polish and consistency. Google has attempted to centralize chunks of Android to address this over the years, and a major component called ART is set to get this treatment in Android 12. The result could be vastly improved app compatibility, which is sure to make everyone happy.
Until a few years ago, every update to Android phones required rebuilding the OS from scratch with Google’s latest codebase. That started to change with the addition of Project Treble in Android 8.0 Oreo. This architectural change makes vendor code forward-compatible so new OS updates can plug in without any low-level changes from Qualcomm and other chipmakers. Project Mainline came along in Android 10 to further modularize the OS and deliver core system updates via the Play Store.
According to a new note in the Android open source code, Google plans to move the Android Runtime (ART) into Mainline with Android 12. That means it will be able to update this vital system component across potentially all new Android devices starting next year. ART is vital because, without it, your phone wouldn’t know how to run any of your apps.
ART came to Android in 4.4 KitKat and became mandatory a year later. ART is what’s known as an ahead of time (AOT) compiler. It takes the bytecode from apps and compiles it into native instructions, which are ready for your phone whenever you open the app. ART replaced the Dalvik VM, which was a “just in time” compiler that converted code on the fly and was rather slow as a result.
If Google begins requiring OEMs to include a Google-signed ART component on phones, Google could push updates to it on all certified Android devices. Android app compatibility has come a long way, but there are still times that a phone might render an app incorrectly or break background services because of OEM system modifications. A universal Google-updated ART module could make apps more consistent across devices, which is good for users andgreatfor developers who constantly have to track down device-specific bugs.
None of this is official yet — Google hasn’t announced ART’s inclusion in Android 12, but the project is ongoing in the open-source project. If it comes to fruition, Android apps could get a big usability boost.
Today for Black Friday Dell has two of its well made G5 gaming desktops on sale with up to $400 marked off the retail price. These systems have mid-range hardware and are solid options for gaming at 1080p. They are excellent deals at their current price with the least expensive model costing just $699.99.
The two version of this system that are available are fairly similar with the same exterior and they share some of the same internal components. Both systems are powered by the Intel Core i5-10400F processor that has six CPU cores that can turbo as high as 4.3GHz. The better of the two systems also comes loaded with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD. For gaming it comes equipped with an AMD Radeon RX 5600 graphics card that can run games at both 1080p and 2K resolutions reasonably well.
The lesser of the two systems just has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD, but it does also come with a 1TB HDD that gives it plenty of storage space. The graphics card in this system is one of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti cards, which is roughly equal to the Radeon RX 5600. Overall both are fine choices in terms of their core hardware, but you don’t get quite as much of a discount with this system nor do you get as much RAM.
The Dell G5 gaming desktop with the AMD Radeon RX 5600 typically retails for $1,149.99, but it’s discounted by $400 that drops the price to just $749.99. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti version was priced a bit lower to start with at $979.99, but it’s not discount quite as much and just drops to $699.99. If you’re interested in getting one of these gaming desktops, plan to order soon, as both are available in limited quantities and could sell out soon.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
With the popularity of gaming at an all time high, finding strong gaming hardware to run the latest games on has become quite a challenge. The just launched game consoles have been sold out everywhere, and the same is true for high-end graphics cards like Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. If you’ve been trying to get your hands on one of these cards, now’s your chance to do so and save a few hundred bucks on a new PC at the same time. For Black Friday Dell is offering its Alienware Aurora R11 gaming desktop on sale with a 10 percent discount and you can choose to have these system with either an RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 graphics card.
Dell Alienware Aurora R11Intel Core i7 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Desktop for$1,808.99from Dell with promo codeWEEKEND10(List price $2,009.99)
Dell Alienware Aurora R11Intel Core i7 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming Desktop for$2,528.99from Dell with promo codeWEEKEND10(List price $2,809.99)
Dell’s Alienware Aurora R11 is one of the most powerful gaming desktops ever produced under the Alienware brand. With an octa-core Intel Core i7-10700F processor able to hit speeds as high as 4.8GHz and the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, this system is able to run games with ease even at 4K resolutions. The video card is also able to handle advanced graphics features such as ray-traced lighting, which helps to produce more realistic and immersive images on screen.
With Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 has been sold out virtually everywhere for months now, and this is one of the only places that you can reliably buy one. Dell also has another version of this system with the equally hard to find Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, which is even more powerful and also on sale. Not only that, but it also includes a free digital copy of Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and the system is on sale with over $200 marked off the retail price.
To get these systems with the 10 percent discount just use the code WEEKEND10 at checkout. This will help to drop the RTX 3090 model from $2,809.99 to just $2,528.99 and the more affordable RTX 3080 model will drop from $2,009.99 to just $1,808.99.You will want to do this as soon as possible though, as the deal is unlikely to last long and we frequently see deals like this from Dell sell out in just a matter of hours.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
Black Friday is now officially in full swing, with deals available on just about everything imaginable. Of particular note are some exceptional discounts on laptops and 4K TVs. Apple’s popular MacBook Air is currently sitting at an all-time low price of just $799, and you can also snag a 43-inch 4K TV for just $199. Both of these are exceptional deals, but they are far from alone. Below we’ve listed the best deals we were able to find currently available. And with so many deals, there’s bound to be something that will pique your interest.
Apple’s MacBook Air was designed to be exceptionally lightweight at 2.8 pounds. It also has a high-quality 2560×1600 display, and Apple built the system out of durable 6000 series aluminum. If you would like to buy one of these systems, you can get it marked down today from $999.00 to $799.99 at Amazon.
The new Vostro 15 7500 laptop is a true jack-of-all-trades. Dell’s Vostro systems are oriented as business solutions, and this system is no different, but it also has fairly strong gaming capabilities. Its 100 percent sRGB display is also well suited for editing images. No matter what you need a laptop for, this system should fit the bill. Currently, you can get this system from Dell with a hefty discount that drops the price from $1,712.86 to just $899.00.
Insignia’s 43-inch 4K TV features HDR support and Amazon’s Fire TV software. This allows the TV to stream content from various sources, and it enables you to control your TV with voice commands using an included voice remote with Alexa support. Normally this model would cost $299.99, but right now you can get it for $199.99 from Amazon.
Apple’s AirPods Pro utilizes a new design that’s different from the company’s older AirPod earphones. The key new feature that these earphones have is active noise cancellation. Each earphone also uses a custom driver and a high dynamic range amplifier to improve sound quality. You can snag them with a $50 discount from Amazon that drops the price from $249.00 to $169.99.
This smart robot vacuum is here to make your home life a little easier. It has sufficient power to clean difficult messes such as pet hair, and it supports an intelligent navigation program that allows it to carefully work its way through your home. It also supports Alexa voice commands and can be controlled via your smartphone. One of these vacuums can cost as much as $649.99, but right now you can get one for just $399.99 from Amazon.
