Amazon is not the only retailer that piles in on Black Friday. Far from it. But it is perhaps the most aggressive in its price matching, bullying its way to sales supremacy and batting away any retail pretenders after its crown. You’ll also find a few discounts at Amazon you won’t get elsewhere. And not just because Amazon stocks just about everything, including pillows that emulate a giant loaf of bread (not part of Black Friday, sadly.)
And Amazon makes stuff. There are all those Echo speakers, the wonderful Kindle e-readers, an army of Black Mirror adjacent smart home cameras, and now even TVs. You’ll find some of these below, alongside a bunch of deals that are either among the best or the most popular. For the whole kaboodle of retailers, check out our main UK page of the best Black Friday deals for 2023.
Reductions on AirPods Pro earphones are never that dramatic. However, we do think this Black Friday deal is good enough to tip many over from not owning a pair to owning one. And much as we’d love to poke a hole in Apple’s work — as we could do with some earlier AirPods — the AirPods Pro are really rather good. Their tuning is great, balancing faithful tonality with mainstream sonic appeal, and the active noise cancellation is super-effective.
The season of the air fryer knows no end. This Ninja model is one of the more popular, and more reliable, of its kind. It’s also a whopper. There are two trays, with a combined capacity of 9.4L. And as well as being able to separate out food types, you can set different temperatures and times for each compartment. Pretty smart, but it’s also dead easy to use. The main problem is you are liable to become an “air fryer person” which may have a detrimental effect on your social skills.
Sony’s latest flagship street headphones. The Sony WH-1000XM5 provides excellent sound and active noise cancellation, which earned them a Wired Recommends badge and a 9/10 score back in 2022. If you find the cost too steep, you can also pick up the previous WH-1000XM4 for £198. They are quite similar, and both have a bass-boosted sound, which can work well when out in town.
Logitech is a mouse master. Lots of its higher-end mice are for gamers, but the Master 2S takes the features of those models and puts them into a more mass-market design. We used one of these Master-series mice for more than a year. They’re dead comfy, and have more buttons than we ever thought to use. This is a Bluetooth mouse, so can be used with devices other than laptops and PCs too.
This is the budget version of the QuietComfort QC45. However, the difference boils down to having a soft case or a hard case. And given how carelessly we treat our headphones much of the time, case quality isn’t going to make a whole heap of a difference. We said the Bose QC45 were not all that competitive at review (7/10) but they deliver the goods at this price: sumptuous comfort, highly effective noise cancellation, and smooth, easygoing sound.
We had not pictured the Meta Quest 2 being one of the stars of Black Friday 2023, but it has become just that. It’s a better deal than it at first appears too. £50 Amazon credit is added to your account when you buy, the next best thing to paying just £200 for the headset itself. So, sure, while the recently-released Meta Quest 3 is better, it’s also a helluva lot more expensive at £480. Improvements include sharper-looking lenses, dual screens for fewer wasted pixels, and a much more powerful processor. There’s a lot of fun to be had with the older headset, mind.
It may sound pricey for a non-Pro iPad, but this tablet has had a storage upgrade, to 256GB from the Air’s base 64GB. It’s also the generation of iPad Air with an Apple M1 processor, as seen in older-series MacBooks. Apple has not upgraded its tablet line to the newer processors yet. It isn’t expected to do so until next year. It’s the current model, and therefore not a discount based on shelf-clearing.
This pair of Amazon-exclusive (the finish, not the entire line) headphones comes around just about every big sales period, bringing with it a waft of homely nostalgia. Why? These are wired, open-back hi-fi headphones. No active noise cancellation. No wireless. Absolutely no use at all on public transport. But we love headphones like this, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find something more comfortable, and better-sounding, at this price for late-night movies and gaming sessions.
Amazon now makes TVs. And there are two tiers of its line-up. The basic 4-series ones are a bit like the sets you might buy in the supermarket. Cheap TVs to fill a hole. The Omni line is much more special. These are QLED sets, with Samsung tech, which use VA panels to provide good contrast in dimly lit rooms. There’s even local dimming, very unusual in a sub-£500 TV. Amazon TVs come with the company’s Fire TV interface built-in too. Sure, it’s not as exciting as a fancy OLED or miniLED, but the picture quality is good and they are hundreds of pounds cheaper. Especially so during this sales period.
This must be among the very best Xbox Series bargains of all time. Microsoft’s full-bore power console for less than the cost of a lower-mid-range graphics card. It’s a dazzler of a deal. You can spend £10 more to get the Forza Horizon 5 bundle with Hot Wheels expansion, a package that would be red hot were the game not included with Xbox Game Pass. That’s Microsoft’s Netflix for games-style service. Alternatively, there’s a Diablo IV bundle for £390.
You can always expect Amazon own-brand devices to go on sale during big events like Black Friday. But the classic Kindle e-reader is up there with our favorites. You can pick the basic £69 model if you like without missing out on too much, as it has a backlit screen these days. However, the Paperwhite marks a good level-up, with a higher-resolution E Ink display and excellent water resistance. The big-pocketed can also check out the Kindle Scribe, a giant note-taking e-reader with a stylus and a 10.2-inch screen.
Apple’s Pencil styluses for iPads are great, but their prices don’t half attach some thorns to an iPad purchase for folks who want to try out digital art. Black Friday doesn’t solve that problem, but it blunts those thorns a bit. You can get the first and second-generation Apple Pencils from Amazon at £30-40 off. Make sure you look up which Pencil model is supported by your tablet, as these things are not cross-generational.
Sophie Anderson, a UK-based writer, is your guide to the latest trends, viral sensations, and internet phenomena. With a finger on the pulse of digital culture, she explores what’s trending across social media and pop culture, keeping readers in the know about the latest online sensations.
