The Best Black Friday Deals You Can Get Right Now

The majority of Black Friday 2020 deals will launch the day after Thanksgiving (November 26th) in the US as usual, but the pandemic has shaken things up in yet another way. The best deals will be happening online, with fewer in-person sales for the sake of safety. Better yet, some of those great deals are already available, so you can get started on your holiday gift (or personal) shopping. With this post, we’re rounding up the best early Black Friday deals from retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Adorama, B&H Photo, Newegg, and anywhere else we find deals you should know about.

Headphones

I love seeing this $72 off deal on Sony’s WH-1000XM4 headphones (pictured above). It’s happening again at Amazon, matching the lowest price we’ve seen yet. This model of headphones released for $350 in August, improving on the excellent audio quality, sound-dampening noise cancellation, and long battery life of the XM3 from 2018. This newer model doesn’t bring revolutionary changes in either category, but adding multipoint Bluetooth connectivity and auto-pausing sensors makes the XM4 worth seeking out.

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Plus, the best wireless earbuds for most people, pictured in a woman’s ear.
Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Plus wireless earbuds are down to just $110 at Amazon and Best Buy. This is the best price we’ve seen for this model, which usually costs $150 outside of any discounts. Compared to the standard Galaxy Buds, this upgraded model that launched alongside the Galaxy S20 series of phones has improved sound quality, microphones, and battery life.

Laptops / tablets

Acer’s Chromebook Spin 713 is the best Chromebook you can currently buy, and it’s $80 off its normal price. Normally $629, it’s now $549. That might not seem like much, but it’s a good value if you want a high-end Chromebook experience, with a 3:2 aspect ratio display, a decent processor, and 128GB of SSD storage.

 

Misc. deals

The Apple Watch SE was already the most affordable Watch that Apple made at $279, but it’s even cheaper at Amazon, Walmart, and Target. You can score the 40mm GPS version for $230 or the larger 44mm Watch for $260 at Amazon or Walmart. Each size looks similar to the more expensive Series 6 but lacks the always-on display and a few other features. The Apple Watch SE aligns more with the Series 5 in terms of specs, but at $230, it’s a fantastic value. Here’s an in-depth post on how the SE differs from other recent Apple Watch models.

The Apple Watch Series 6 is also cheaper than usual at Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Normally $400 for the 40mm GPS model, it’s down to $350 for the first time for Black Friday. Previously, just a $20 drop was noteworthy.

Peak Design has kicked off its “Super Massive Black Friday sale” with sizeable discounts on bags and tripods. It might be tough to imagine when you might next need a durable backpack that can fit a lot of gadgets within, but the company’s “Everyday” lineup of bags is 20 percent off. Its bigger “Travel” bags are also discounted.

If you’re into photography, Peak Design’s Travel Tripod and a few accessories that are compatible with it are cheaper than usual.

Gaming

If you’re having trouble narrowing down what games you want, why not get several? Target is hosting a “get three for the price of two” deal on video game purchases even for newer titles like Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon, to name a few. The list goes on, though one thing that isn’t eligible are first-party Sony games for the PS5, like the Demon’s Souls remake, but you can pickup Godfall, which is available on Sony’s next-gen console (and on PC.) Even Cyberpunk 2077, a game coming out next month is eligible for this promotion.

Watch Dogs: Legion, the latest installment in Ubisoft’s hack-anything, open-world game, is down to $50 at Amazon, that’s $10 off, while it’s not the lowest we have seen this game go down, this title recently came out and this is still a good discount. What makes this deal even better is that each version will net you an upgrade to the Xbox Series X / S or PS5 copies for free. Even if you don’t have much interest in the game, it’s an affordable way to check out what impressive ray-tracing graphics look like on the new console hardware.

PC upgrades

If you want 2TB of fast storage for your PC, Samsung’s 2TB 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD is $250 at Newegg and Amazon, beating the lowest price by about $40. Over the summer, the price was steady at $350. A PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSD like this will fit in only certain kinds of motherboards (so check before you buy). Alternatively, it can also make for a very fast USB-C drive if you get an M.2 enclosure for it. Either route you take, you’ll get a lot of speedy storage.

Stay tuned for more deals.

Guilty Gear Strive Gets Final 2021 Release Date For All Gaming Platform

Guilty Gear Strive, the latest entry in Arc System Works' acclaimed fighting franchise, aims to take things a step further with improved animations and new fighting mechanics. It's coming to PS4, PS5, and PC, and you'll be able to get your hands on it in 2021.

Releasing for all three platforms on April 9, 2021 (or three days earlier for the Deluxe Edition and Ultimate Edition) Guilty Gear Strive looks to be a good starting point for newcomers without sacrificing the series' famous depth. Among Arc System Works fighters, it's arguably the most "hardcore," with Dragon Ball FighterZ appealing to less-experienced players due to its auto-combo system and streamlined mechanics--not that there isn't plenty of depth in that game, too. Guilty Gear Strive doesn't ditch the 2D art of its predecessors, but it does give the art a ton of detail that make it look like you're watching a climactic anime battle. There are 3D elements to the characters, as well, letting them portray more emotion and adding a new sense of weight to the fights. One of the characters Arc System Works recently showed off was Giovanna, who makes use of a green spirit wolf for some of her attacks. She's one of 15 characters who will be on the roster from the beginning. The Deluxe Edition of Guilty Gear Strive releases on April 6, 2021, and includes the game along with the season pass, while the Ultimate Edition also includes a digital soundtrack, digital artwork, and special colors. There will be five characters in the season pass, and it will also include additional story content. In the meantime, you can try to learn the basics with these starter guide videos.

You are not banned from Fortnite

Fortnite is currently experiencing game-wide problems with logins, keeping some players from accessing their accounts. According to the game’s official status account, “Players who see a message saying ‘You do not have permission to play Fortnite’ or ‘Your account no longer has play access to Fortnite’ because of this issue are not banned from Fortnite.”

Epic Games is currently investigating “issues related to kicks and logins.” The developer has promised updates when the issue is resolved. “As we work to resolve this issue, we have entered server downtime,” the developer said. Epic announced today that players can buy an X-Wing glider in-game, just the latest in its line of Star Wars-themed items.

You can now buy an X-Wing glider in Fortnite 

You can now buy an X-Wing glider in Fortnite, Epic Games announced Monday. The new glider has become available the same day EA released a new animated short introducing the story of Star Wars: Squadrons. The glider costs 1,200 V-Bucks. This isn’t the first time a Star Wars-themed item has appeared in Fortnite. You could buy a number of cosmetics, including skins for Rey and Finn and a First Order Tie Fighter glider, as part of a major crossover event around the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker last year, and you could get the Millennium Falcon as part of the game’s last Winterfest event.

And EA and Epic have teamed up to help promote Star Wars games in the past, too. A stormtrooper was added to Fortnite with the release of Jedi: Fallen Order in November, and you could get it for free if you bought the game on the Epic Games Store. Fortnite continues to be a key promotional venue for major cultural icons and has even played host to other video game crossovers. Fortnite’s current season is Marvel themed, for example, and for a period of time last year, the game had an entire area of the map that was in the style of Borderlands 3, complete with cel-shaded visuals.

Fortnite is getting Nvidia RTX ray tracing support on computer

Nvidia on Tuesday announced that Epic Games is bringing real-time ray tracing to the PC version of Fortnite. The announcement came as part of the company’s Ampere graphics card live stream, where we expect Nvidia to show off the RTX 3090 graphics card later today.

Fortnite will support DLSS 2.0, Nvidia’s feature that uses AI to boost frame rates while keeping the ray tracing effects boosted to their maximum. The video clip above shows some high-fidelity surface reflections.
When ray tracing launched with the RTX 20-series, Nvidia struggled to attract large-scale games to adopt it right away. But support is growing, and it doesn’t get much larger in scale than Fortnite one of the most popular games in the world. Tune into Nvidia’s live stream for more announcements.

Google Stadia tests 4G and 5G Streaming

You can now play games on Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service on your Android phone over 4G and 5G connections, though you have to opt in to an “experiment,” Google announced today (via 9to5Google). Since the service’s launch in November 2019, you’ve only been able to play Stadia games on your phone over Wi-Fi that is, unless you tricked Stadia into playing over a cellular connection by tethering a laptop to a phone or hotspot.

If you want to opt in to the experiment, open up the Stadia app on your Android phone, tap on your avatar, select Experiments, and then “Use Mobile Data,” according to Google. Sean found that when he played Stadia over a 90Mbps LTE connection for his review, “the experience ranged from totally playable to annoyingly stuttery.” But that was all the way back in November 2019, and it’s unclear if Google has made changes to make things run smoothly more consistently when playing over a cellular network, especially when it’s a direct connection (as opposed to a tethered one). Today’s news is one of many notable updates to Stadia since its launch, including bringing the service to practically any Android phone, allowing the Stadia controller to work wirelessly with Android devices, and launching a free version of the service.