25 Great Deals From Best Buy’s Early Black Friday Sale (2022): TVs, Phones, Laptops
Get cameras, headphones, and powerful laptops before Halloween even arrives….
It’s way too early to be talking about Black Friday, but it’s at least objectively cooler to associate the phrase with Halloween than Thanksgiving. So we’ll forgive Best Buy for kicking off its sale a month early. Fortunately, it also means you’ve got extra time to score deals on a ton of electronics from the retailer this week.
Updated October 27, 2022: We’ve added several new deals, like the Pixel 6A and Hisense TV.
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Phone and Wearable Deals
The Pixel 6A (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is our favorite Android phone. It comes with many of the benefits of the higher-end Pixel line—including Google’s Tensor chip, a crisp OLED display, and all the camera and AI wizardry Google typically puts in its phones—in a much less expensive package.
This budget OnePlus phone (7/10, WIRED Recommends) has a surprisingly great array of features for the price, including an AMOLED display (true blacks, vivid colors), daylong battery life, and excellent performance. It even includes NFC for contactless payments, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack. OnePlus will deliver security updates to it for three years too. The downsides? It will only get Android 12 (which makes it already out of date). It only works on T-Mobile and AT&T, and with the latter carrier, you’ll only access 4G LTE.
It’s no surprise that the best smartwatch for iPhones is the Apple Watch. While the Series 7 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) isn’t the newest model, this discount makes it an attractive, affordable option.
Despite Google getting into the smartwatch hardware game, Samsung still makes one of the best smartwatches for Android users right now. The Galaxy Watch5 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) has a lot of fitness features that are comparable to those on the Apple Watch, though some—like electrocardiogram measurements—only work if you pair the Watch5 with a Samsung phone.
Laptop Deals
Apple introduced a new design with its latest MacBook Air (7/10, WIRED Recommends), which is also powered by the new M2 chipset. It has plenty of power for most everyday tasks, solid battery life, and a 1080p webcam. You also get a MagSafe connector so the laptop won’t fly off if you trip on the cable. It’s pricier than its predecessor, but this discount helps remedy that. Just remember that the chipset doesn’t let you connect this machine to more than one external display.
This is our favorite gaming laptop if you’re after the best battery life. This model comes with a Ryzen 7 6800H processor, 16 GB of RAM, an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics card, and a 512-GB SSD. The spacious 15-inch screen is nice, as is the 120-Hz screen refresh rate, and you’ll be able to play most games at high settings sitting around 60 frames per second. Read more about it in our Best Budget Gaming Laptops guide.
Usually, a laptop with a 16-inch screen is cumbersome and heavy. Not the LG Gram. It’s lightweight and slim, and it doesn’t compromise on performance. This model comes with an Intel 12th-gen Core i7 chip, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1-TB SSD. It’s an excellent price for those specs. The downside is the keyboard, which doesn’t feel as satisfying to type on as it doesn’t offer a ton of key travel.
Audio Deals
These Beats headphones (8/10, WIRED Recommends) are particularly great if you’re in the Apple ecosystem. They pair easily with iPhones and other Apple devices, get an incredible Bluetooth range, and have at least 20 hours of battery. Unfortunately, Android users might not enjoy the same battery life.
Our resident audiophile, Parker Hall, called the Galaxy Buds2 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) “the new standard in midrange wireless earbuds.” They’re comfortable, with active noise canceling and enough water resistance to survive your workouts.
If your workouts are more intense than those of the average person, you might prefer headphones designed to keep up with you. On that front, the Jabra Elite 7 Active is our favorite. In our testing, they fit people with wildly different ear sizes without falling out. They also have great noise canceling and at least eight hours of battery life.
Google may be a relative newcomer to the world of earbuds, but the Pixel Buds Pro (9/10, WIRED Recommends) impressed us with seven hours of playtime, intuitive touch controls, and the ability to easily swap between devices. Unfortunately, they’re missing some features if you use them with iPhones.
We haven’t tested this specific model, but Sony’s WH-1000XM4 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is still our top overall pick for wireless headphones. This model is normally slightly cheaper than other options, but today it’s downright affordable while featuring many of the benefits of Sony’s headphone design and expertise.
Camera Deals
The Hero11 from GoPro (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is one of our favorite action cameras. This model adds a taller sensor that’s great for vertical video, if you’re into that sort of thing, and can record up to 5.3K video—though you’ll need a new-ish phone for the latter.
Sony’s A7 cameras are consistently among our top picks for most people, and while the A7 IV (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is our favorite, it’s also really expensive. If you don’t mind missing out on some newer autofocus features, however, the A7 III is also a great pick, and it’s on sale right now.
Another step down from the A7 III (though still a great camera in its own right), this AII kit comes with a 28- to 70-mm variable lens. If this is your first mirrorless and you don’t already have Sony lenses, this is a great place to get started without unloading a ton of cash.
Ecosystem lock-in is real in the camera world, and if you’re a die-hard Canon fan, the EOS-R is our top pick for you. It’s a hefty camera with satisfying machined metal bits, phase-detect autofocus, and even a handy cover that pops out to protect your sensor when you change lenses.
Sales on Nikon gear don’t come too often, though this is a small discount on what’s arguably one of the best cameras from the company. There’s excellent dynamic range, a superfast autofocus system, and great video quality. The interface is intuitive and the camera is comfortable to hold. The only strange thing? It uses dual-interface cards: one XQD/CFexpress and one SD card.
Home Theater Deals
This M-Series soundbar from Vizio (9/10, WIRED Recommends) strikes the perfect balance of detailed surround sound audio without breaking the budget. We particularly like this one for gaming as it makes it easy to hear that enemy sneaking around behind you.
We haven’t tested Hisense’s U8H, but its predecessor, the U8G (8/10, WIRED Recommends), remains one of our favorite TVs (particularly for gamers). With this sale, the newer model’s price is in line with the one we reviewed, so it’s a no-brainer to take the upgrade. There’s also a 55-inch model on sale for $700.
Smart Home Deals
Google’s Nest Hub Max (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is our favorite smart display overall. It has great speakers, a spacious 10-inch touchscreen, and a camera for video calls. Google’s software can also identify specific members of the house to show only the reminders and events that are relevant for that person, and it even has a guest mode so other people can use it without seeing your personalized results.
If you prefer your smart display without a camera (and there are plenty of reasons you might), the smaller 7-inch Nest Hub (7/10, WIRED Recommends) does most of what the Max can, in a cheaper package. It supports gesture control so you can pause videos with a hand movement, making it great in the kitchen, but it can also use radar to track your sleep habits, so it’s a solid option for the bedroom too.
There’s no cheaper way to get into the Google smart home ecosystem than with the Nest Mini (7/10, WIRED Recommends). At $20 each, you could put one of these in most rooms of your house. They don’t have the robust speakers of more expensive options, but if all you need is to set timers and get reminders, this is an excellent entry.
The Nest Audio (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is what you want if you primarily plan on pumping music with a smart speaker. It still has Google Assistant inside, so you can ask the voice assistant all sorts of queries and use it to control your smart home devices. What makes it great is its audio quality—you get bold sound with plenty of bass. You can pair two together for stereo sound.
The fourth-generation Echo (8/10, WIRED Recommends) provides a nice upgrade over the basics. It comes with room-filling sound, a 3.5-mm output to connect to a bigger sound system, and the usual host of Alexa commands.
Lenovo makes some pretty great smart home accessories for the Google Assistant ecosystem (sometimes even nicer than those from Google itself). This alarm clock is a great example. It offers a 4-inch smart display and alarm clock features to help you wake up, and it comes with a spot to wirelessly charge your phone at night.
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