The Verge Digest: December 1, 2025

GE’s indoor food smoker is cheaper than ever this Cyber Monday

1 Dec 2025, 3:00 pm by Brandt Ranj

GE’s Profile smart indoor smoker can help pitmasters stave off the winter cooking blues, and it’s $424.15 ($275 off) at Amazon during Cyber Monday. The countertop appliance uses filtration and gaskets to prevent smoke from escaping (and possibly setting off your fire alarm), while still emitting the welcome smell of what you’re smoking, be it meat, vegetables, or both.

GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker

The GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker is an excellent gadget for smoking meats, veggies, and more from the comfort of your kitchen. While it didn’t handle the more classic BBQ cuts as well as I’d hoped, if you love that smoky flavor and don’t have room for an outdoor machine, it's a great — if expensive — option.

Where to Buy:

• $699.99 $499.99 at GE Appliances
• $699.99 $424.15 at Amazon
• $699.99 $498.96 at The Home Depot

To be clear, this gadget doesn’t cook your food with smoke like the charcoal or pellet smoker you might have outside. It’s an oven that uses a heating element to do the cooking, while relying on burning wood pellets to infuse your food with a smoky flavor. A benefit to this approach is that it takes a lot less time to cook your smoked meal compared to using a traditional smoker.

This hefty countertop appliance has enough space to cook three racks of baby back ribs, a brisket, a whole chicken, up to 40 wings, or a 14-pound pork butt. We tested it with a whole chicken, two racks of ribs, and a halved brisket and didn’t run into issues with cooking. It may not replace your full-sized outdoor smoker, but this gadget can help you easily keep up your intake of delicious smoked foods year-round.

Read our review of the GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker

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Why IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is still hiring humans in the AI era

1 Dec 2025, 3:00 pm by Nilay Patel

Today, I’m talking with Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM. IBM is a fascinating company. It’s still a household name and among the oldest tech firms in the US. Without IBM, we simply wouldn’t have the modern era of computing — it was instrumental to the development of a whole stack of foundational technologies in the 20th century, and it still has a lot of patents to show for it. 

But it’s a lot harder for most of us to see what IBM has been up to in this century. Watson, the company’s famous AI supercomputer, won Jeopardy! back in 2011. Yet since then, as far as most consumers are concerned, it’s been mostly ads during football games and not a lot else. 

IBM has been busy, though, just not in a way most of us can see. It’s fully an enterprise company now, as Arvind explains, and that business is booming. But there’s a huge change coming to that business as well. The AI technology that Watson pioneered, all that natural language processing and the beginning of what we now call deep learning? Well, that’s given way to generative AI, and with it, a new way of thinking about how all the systems that run a company should be built and interact with each other.

Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.

So I really wanted to ask Arvind how he felt about IBM investing in all of that Watson technology and showing it off a decade before everyone else, only to have maybe made the wrong technology bet and potentially miss out on the modern AI boom. 

You’ll hear Arvind be pretty candid that the way IBM was approaching AI back then was off the mark — he says outright that pushing Watson so early into the healthcare field was “inappropriate.” But his take, as you’ll hear him discuss, is that the infrastructure and research from that era weren’t wasted because developers and companies can still build on top of that foundation. So sure, Arvind says IBM got there a little too early. But he doesn’t seem too concerned that IBM will be stuck on the sidelines.

Of course, I did have to bring up how the AI industry has all the hallmarks of a bubble, and it’s one that I and a lot of other folks, even OpenAI’s Sam Altman, are pretty sure is going to pop. Arvind’s more optimistic — or maybe less cynical — than I am, though, and he’s pretty confident this isn’t a bubble. But you’ll hear us compare the current moment to the dotcom boom and bust of the early 2000s — before the smartphone came along to realize the promise of ubiquitous computing  — and how ultimately disruptive all that was in a lot of really negative ways for a lot of people, even though all of the bets from the early dotcom era did eventually prove to be correct. 

One other thing I had to ask him was: if this isn’t a bubble, then who’s going to win? Because it feels like Apple and Google managed to keep all the profit from the transition to a digital economy, thanks to their hugely successful ecosystems and app stores that effectively collect rent from the labor and transactions of almost every other player that has an app. If the AI economy goes that way, will there be room for IBM or anyone else to get big from it?

Arvind’s answer seems to be to play a different long-term game, which is where the company’s big bet on quantum computing comes in. That bet still isn’t making useful products for most people, but you’ll hear Arvind explain why he still has some faith. This is a good one; we went a lot of places, and Arvind is remarkably candid. 

Okay: Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Arvind Krishna, you’re the CEO of IBM. Welcome to Decoder.

Nilay, great to be here with you.

I’m excited to talk to you. IBM is one of the most famous companies in the world, but candidly, I think most consumers don’t know why anymore. It’s very much an enterprise company. It has a lot of businesses. You have been there for 35 years. What has IBM been, and what are you trying to make it today?

You’re right, IBM is an enterprise. It’s a B2B company, to use a more common parlance, as opposed to a B2C. Historically, IBM did create a lot of consumer products. We did that iconic typewriter that people kind of knew about. We did the IBM PC — even though it hasn’t been here for more than 20 years —  and a few other consumer things along the way. 

I would say candidly that for the last 30 years, we’ve really had no consumer products. So, what does IBM do? Our role is to help our clients deploy technology that makes their business better. Whether they’re on multiple public clouds, want to take advantage of their data, or want to get to their customers faster, that’s what we are really about today.

A lot of people know the Watson brand, which IBM has talked about for years. Famously, Watson competed on Jeopardy!. Now I think the brand has turned into Watsonx. There’s a lot of what I would call “airport” and “football advertising” around Watson that’s aimed directly at CIOs of companies and not at consumers, but we still all experience that advertising. How does Watson fit into the IBM brand? I think that’s what people really hook onto.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to give a slightly longer answer. It’ll be a few minutes, but stop me and ask questions.

So, if we think about the Watson brand, it did really well initially with putting AI on the map. The Watson computer won Jeopardy! and that shocked people. It was really the first time that a computer could understand human language, think about open-ended questions, and was more right than wrong. I wouldn’t say perfectly right, but more right than wrong. I think that woke people up to the possibilities of AI. I will take credit and say that it got us going on the current AI journey. 

It fell off because we did things that were a little bit wrong for the market at the time. We were trying to be too monolithic, and we picked healthcare, maybe one of the toughest areas to go into, which I think was inappropriate. The world is ready to take these things as building blocks. Engineers want to open them up. They want to see what’s inside. They want to build their own applications. “I want to use it for this, but not that.” 

So when LLMs came along, we had a chance to say, “Let’s rebrand things. Let’s really rebuild the stack, and let’s give people both the pieces, but also a lot easier capability.” That’s what Watsonx is. So it builds on that Watson is associated with artificial intelligence. I’m convinced that AI is a really big unlock for people. I call it the eighth technology, but that’s a later conversation. So, that’s what the Watsonx brand is all about.

Let me push on that a little bit. You described Watson as a computer, and it was a single computer that could go play Jeopardy!. Then, you described the introduction of LLM technology, and this ecosystem of building blocks. 

What was the AI technology bet with the initial Watson computer? Do you think that that was the wrong bet as a technology? Because I have a lot of questions about LLMs as a technology and the bet we’re making, but I’m curious now that you’ve had that experience, what was the technology in the initial Watson computer, and was it the right bet or the wrong bet?

It’s literally the same technologies. So, LLMs were not known at that time, but various other neural network models were. Neural network models span from what we call machine learning to what was beginning to be called deep learning. What was inside the Watson at that time was a mixture of machine learning and a lot of statistical learning, which was the core of what became deep learning. 

Let me just note, the first big deep learning algorithm was a year after Watson won Jeopardy!Watson won Jeopardy! in 2011, and 2012 was when the term came to be. But the early incarnations of those things were in there. Unfortunately, they were not there in a way that you could tune them, take one out, make it modular, and take another one. We were trying to give it to you as a monolith — that’s what I meant by monolith —  and that was the wrong approach, just to be straightforward. Right technology, wrong go-to-market approach.

Can you draw the connection between that set of technologies and LLMs today? The counterargument that I would give to you is… I’ll just pick on Google. Google has made a number of bets across machine learning, deep research, and LLMs for a long time. It showed off LLMs really early. I remember [CEO Sundar Pichai] demoing it and saying something like, “I can talk to Pluto,” and no one knew what he was talking about. Then three years later, ChatGPT happened, and Google was like, “Wait, we invented all of that.” That was its technology bet, that was its paper: “Attention is all you need.” 

You’re saying you had it, too, but it feels to me like there was actually an inflection point where the industry picked a different technology, they picked LLMs. So can you just draw the connection for me?

For sure. From 2010-2022, around 12 years, deep learning made incredible progress. No question about it. Here was the catch. Deep learning, to me, was incredibly bespoke. You could take a lot of data and employ a lot of people to label that data. It could do one task incredibly well, it really could, but tasks don’t stay static. The data changes. The tasks change. If I have to redo all that human labeling, relearning, and retraining, I’m calling that bespoke and fragile. So, the return was always a little bit out there. That applies if you have a massive, singular B2C task, maybe suggesting which photograph or ad you may love. It’s worth it because in the month or two months I use that model, I can get a lot of return. That’s a little harder in an enterprise context because it takes a lot more time to make up for all the costs.

To go back to the original work you referred to, when there were massive amounts of data, labeling goes away. Wow, that drops the cost by half. You do a brute force approach using a lot more compute and a lot fewer people. Wow, the cost comes down even more because tech always gets cheaper over time. 

So now, half a dozen people and a ton of compute could do what previously may have taken 30 or 40 PhDs and 40 or 50 engineers over six months. You can now do the task that much shorter. That’s a huge unlock. In short, it looked like a 2x or 4x advantage, but if I compare from the beginning to the end, this is a 100x advantage in terms of speed, tuning, and deployability. That’s industrial scale. Plus, these models can be tuned for many tasks, not just one. I’m not saying all tasks, but many, which means that the applicability is massive.

Also, when I want to ingest new data, I don’t have to restart at the beginning. I can add some. At some stage it makes sense to restart, but I can do a bit more there. All of these are massive unlocks, which is why I think it’s the right technology to help massively scale AI. By the way, I don’t think it’s the end all. We’ll come back to that, but it is a hundred times better than the prior.

That’s the turn that I’m really interested in. There were all these shots at AI before, deep research being one of them. There were machine learning algorithms deployed broadly across the industry. Apple was talking about neural accelerators in the iPhone years ago, but they didn’t add up to what LLMs have since added up to in the industry. 

I’m curious though. You mentioned cost and that the cost can come down, but you and I are talking at the end of an earnings cycle, and everyone’s costs are skyrocketing. Their CapEx is skyrocketing. There are some layoffs associated with the increased CapEx that I do want to ask you about. 

But just purely on cost, it doesn’t seem like it’s that much cheaper, right? It seems like to win, you have to spend vastly more money, and that money does not, at the moment, have a defined ROI. There are a lot of bets. Can you reconcile the idea that there are lower costs in the industrial scale versus the actual expenditures we’re seeing?

I can, but if you’ll allow me to say this, there’s a difference in the B2C world versus the B2B world. First, let’s just talk about the cost. Are there huge amounts of not just capital but operating expenses being spent on populating data centers with GPUs and building out those infrastructures, and are those amounts being committed now up in the trillions? It’s absolutely true, and that’s what you just mentioned: “Hey, that doesn’t sound cheap. That doesn’t sound a lot cheaper than before.”

It doesn’t even sound safe, just to be clear. I don’t even think that sounds safe based on the potential returns.

Maybe we’ll come back to that. What I meant when I said it’s going to get a lot cheaper is that if I take a five-year arc, what has the semiconductor industry shown time over time? Go back to the beginning of the PC. You have half a dozen competing technologies, and some begin to win. That was the beginning of Moore’s Law really, right? 

Every two years you get a 2x advantage in what you can do. I look at the semiconductor side, and I say, “Over five years, we’ll probably get a 10x advantage in pure semiconductor capability, or the amount of compute for a dollar you can spend.” Got it. That’s one. Second, nobody has said that a GPU is the only architecture that is great for deploying these large language models. It’s certainly one. There are other companies coming up. We have a partnership with Groq, they have a different kind. You have Cerebras, they have a different kind–

That’s Groq the processor company, not Grok, Elon [Musk’s] AI company. 

Correct. Groq, the processor company. Yes, the word comes from computer science. A lot of people use the word. But yes, Groq, the inferencing chip company. At least in these first steps, Groq looks like it’ll be 10x cheaper. But that, again, is not going to be the only design possible. I think you’ll get a 10x advantage on the pure silicon side. You’re going to get a 10x from the design side. Then there’s the third piece. I think there’s a lot of work to be done around memory caching and how you deploy these models. Do I quantize them? Do I compress them? Do I always need the biggest? 

So, there’s a 10x advantage from the software side. You put those three 10s together, and that’s a thousand times cheaper. I’m simply saying, “Hey, maybe we won’t get all of it in the next five years, but even if you get the square root of that, that’s 30 times cheaper for the same dollar spent.” That’s why I believe that this is going to play out. It is going to get a lot cheaper, but it’ll take five years to play through.

Five years right now, feels like forever to most people living through this disruption. It feels like forever when you can see the hundreds of billions of dollars being deployed today in data centers that are running mostly Nvidia GPUs. You talked about Moore’s Law. I look at all of that and I actually see a massive disincentive for Nvidia to come out with the next generation of its GPUs. There’s a lot of equity tied up in the H100 being the literal unit of currency that these deals are taking place upon.

That’s a weird dynamic, right? It sounds like you say there’s going to be competitors that upend that dynamic.

Not necessarily upend but provide a lot more competition, and that’s the nature of it.

You kind of nodded in agreement when I said there was a disincentive for Nvidia to release the next generation of GPUs. Do you think that’s true?

I think that when you have an incredibly valuable company that’s making its profit stream from a few products, there’s always an inherent or organic disincentive to try to modify that. That said, I would never bet against Jensen [Huang]’s ability to disrupt himself and go towards the next plateau, if there is one. So, you have both. I think certain companies are able to disrupt themselves, others hesitate to do it, and that is actually what causes the up and down of companies in the tech world.

I’m obviously leading towards the big question, which is that this feels like a bubble. A lot of people think it’s a bubble. You have a markedly different view of how this industry will play out. You’re investing, and I want to talk about the fact that you’re hiring while some of your competitors are doing layoffs at a huge scale. But let me just ask the question directly, and then we can go into everything else. Do you think we’re in an AI bubble right now?

No. Do I believe that there will be some displacement and some of the capital being spent, especially the debt capital, will not get its payback? Yes, but let’s just look at it. So, this is a place that is a B2C, and then there is the B2B world. There is a lot of common tech in both, but let’s just look at the B2C. If you build a set of models that are very attractive in B2C, and half a billion people become consumers of that (which are roughly the current numbers), it makes economic sense to build a slightly better model by spending another $50 billion that can attract another 200 million users. 

So, this is a race towards who can get more and more of the world’s 7.5 billion people to become subscribers of a given model because the next bet becomes that network scale and those economies of scale that will allow you to go succeed. You’ve seen that movie play out. That was social media in the last generation. So, I react with, “It makes sense for them.” 

Now, if 10 of them are going to go compete, we know that maybe two or three of them will be the eventual winners, not all 10. To me, it makes economic sense that they’re chasing that. My point is that not all of that will see a return. By the way, if I look at fiber optics in the ground back in the year 2000, not all of those people got a return.

However, this is the beauty of capitalism, and I’m calling it a beauty. We spend the money, it gets corrected back to 30 cents on the dollar. At that point, it makes an incredible amount of sense for somebody else to get that asset and turn it into a profit stream, but not all of it will get lost. As I said, two or three are going to make a ton of money, and the others won’t. So, I think the equity being put in will actually get a return. Some of the debt will not.

I love the fiber comparison, and if you’ll indulge me, I want to sit in it for just a minute. I was very young when the fiber rollouts were happening. I was very excited to get faster internet access, and I remember that bubble well. Part of that bubble was wanting to build infrastructure for the internet, and the thing that really drove the bubble was wanting to move the entire economy onto the internet, and that didn’t work. 

There was the Pets.com IPO, and that was the sign that we hadn’t quite moved the economy, but we built the infrastructure. The important thing and the important difference is the fiber in the ground didn’t go bad.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Gary Smith, who’s the CEO of Ciena, which does fiber multiplexing. It can get infinite returns on fiber that was deployed 30, 40 years ago to this day, and their technology helps them build data centers. That was really why he was on the show, because he really wanted to tell everyone that his technology could build data centers. The GPUs go bad. They’re already failing at a rate between 3-9 percent in the data centers. There also might be an H200, or the chip you’re investing in with Groq might displace the H100. 

So, all of this CapEx is not going to be here 30 years from now for the next generation of entrepreneurs, like Gary, to build upon and create more capacity with. We’re just going to throw it away.

No, no, let’s decompose it. So, you’re building a physical data center that’s a lot larger. I think concrete and steel survive. Next to it is a power plant. We need the electricity. Actually, I believe those power plants will even get hooked up to the grid over time, which is even better for national infrastructure. That’s useful. 

Now, the fiber coming out of them — the networking, storage, and CPUs inside these places — are all useful. I’ll acknowledge right now there is a very high failure rate, but being a bit of a semiconductor geek, though I’m not anywhere near as deep as some of my friends and competitors in those spaces, if you can run something at 3GHz and you try to run it at 4GHz, it will actually run but has a higher failure rate. 

Maybe it’s great if you try to run it at 300W. If you run it at 400W, it has a higher failure rate. So, if today you just need the performance for training a model that much faster, it actually is worth it to tune it and say, “I’m okay to have that failure rate. I got software that worries about moving stuff around.” But you can de-tune it slightly for higher resilience.

I think that is actually a design point. That’s not really a bug, so to speak. Do I acknowledge that these will move up over time? I began by saying, “I think in five years, our semiconductors will be 100 times better.” So you’re right, there’s a five-year depreciation to the GPU or some of the compute infrastructure, but the other half is useful. But in five years, you don’t throw away all the CapEx. You throw away a little piece, and you replace that with something that is better at that point.

I think the specific comparison to fiber making — and maybe it’s too pedantic — but the fiber was in the ground and then it was there. It did not incur a recurring cost to the people who wanted to use it outside of wanting to create more capacity by multiplexing the fiber.

You’re right, the fiber in the ground is endurable. Maybe not forever, but at least for 100 years. At some point, even glass begins to occlude and do all kinds of weird things, but it’s good for 100 years. But people also built a lot of end stuff on top, all of which had to be thrown away.

You’re now forgetting all the failures. People were building Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). People thought that they could build really intelligent video streaming and put the guts of that inside. People were talking about doing Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), since you talked about Ciena. Then, it became simpler. Here’s dark fiber, it’s a dump pipe. Go throw your bits in it at a terabit, the intelligence belongs at the cloud end. That took 10 years to unfold. So there was actually a change in how it transpired. I’m sorry to be that geeky. 

No, this is why we’re here, that’s why I asked the questions. I would actually argue that was one of the most exciting periods in tech, when no one knew how it would work, and there were many, many more shots being taken. It all did pop in a catastrophic bubble. But it was very exciting.

It did go down, and then today you could turn around and say, “But all the companies that got built on the back of that clearly proved that that investment was worthwhile.” If I look at it at a national or an aggregate investor level, while some people did lose a lot of money, some people made a lot of money.

I want to take the other part of that bubble comparison, which is that we were going to move the entire economy to the internet. You brought up social media. As someone who covered it very deeply from the beginning of the iPhone to now, I would characterize it as wanting to move the entire economy onto your phone. 

First, we were going to put it all online. Maybe it didn’t have the distribution because we’re not all going to look at CRT monitors on our desktop, so that didn’t happen. But then we all got phones, and the idea that we could move an enormous amount of at least the consumer economy onto our phones happened. That occurred. We’re all living with the results of that today.

Do you feel like the argument, at least in the consumer space as you’ve described it, is that we’re going to move that app economy to AI? Because how I see it is that the same class of investors who got rich moving the economy onto smartphones now think they can run the playbook again with AI. Maybe we’ll re-architect the applications with [Model Context Protocol] (MCP) and maybe there’ll be agents using the websites instead of people, but the argument from the same set of characters feels broadly the same to me.

If you don’t mind, I’ll go a little bit deeper on your first part.

You’re absolutely correct that the front end of the economy moved on to the phone. It was definitely a massive unlock the moment the phone gave you access so that it could be with you everywhere and you were not just anchored to a desk with a laptop or a desktop. Let’s acknowledge that. But there is still a physical economy. 

I always talk about how 60 percent of the workers in the United States are still frontline: people who do construction, people who have warehouses. If you’re buying a tangible good, it’s still coming from a warehouse. It’s maybe not from a retail store near you because they had a front end, but in the back, there’s a warehouse, a truck driver, and maybe multiple routes of distribution. We still go to restaurants, there’s still food, there’s still groceries, there’s physical healthcare, there’s all of that. It becomes more efficient, easier, and more convenient.

But now I say, “I don’t have to spend that much time, I’m going to have an agent or a front-end AI that helps to unlock even more and puts together four or five things that I have in my head,” I completely agree with you. Why wouldn’t we want that to happen? That is going to happen. You can see the early instances of that already happening. It’s so appealing now because it gives a chance for people (without me taking any names) to reform who are the biggest players, and it gives a chance for some disruption. On the other hand, I think it goes beyond the consumer and into the enterprise. I actually believe there’s going to be a billion new applications written.

Now, if you think about the smartphone ecosystem we talked about, people talked about half a million, a few million, I think this could be a billion. There may be a few million that sit on the consumer side, but if there are let’s say 1,000 enterprises and you go across the number of enterprises times 1,000, then that unlocks a lot more.

Let me ask you one question there, and then I do want to ask you the Decoder questions and about IBM specifically. The biggest winners of that move to put all economic activity onto the smartphone were in many ways Apple and Google because they collected an enormous amount of rent on the back of that transition with app store taxes and the fees.

Maybe that’s going to get unwound now with whatever antitrust litigation is happening in Europe, but it happened. They collected a huge amount of fees. They are some of the richest companies in the world on the back of that. Apple just reported its quarterly earnings, and its services revenue is higher than ever on the back of App Store fees. That’s what that line really is. I think it runs the TV business just to pretend that reality is not the reality.

Do you see that playing out in AI? Because I look at OpenAI announcing what looks like an app store. I look at Google announcing that Google Search will have inbuilt custom developed applications as you search. It’s very cool, but I see these points of centralization emerging again that don’t look like Apple and Google, and maybe there’s competition for that. There might be competition for that in the enterprise. Do you see those same points of centralization?

I wouldn’t say that we know who the winners are today because we are only in the first innings of the game. There will be some winners. How about I agree with you on that.

But do you think those winners look like the central points of control that we saw in the smartphone era?

There will be a few different winners. If you go back to the smartphone analogy, you had one who built a vertically integrated stack. It was an easier, more convenient device, and then to get access to that device, people had to come into the App Store. That was that model. The other model said, “We are completely open,” with the Android operating system. However, to get access to everything else, you had to go into the Play Store or into Google Search. That was the second model. It wasn’t identical, but it was similar. So, those became the two entry points to get access to the end individual. That’s why they could charge the appropriate… you’re calling it rent, which is from an economics term. Let’s say they could charge an appropriate margin from a business standpoint.

I think Tim Cook would call it a margin, but the developers I know feel very differently about that margin. 

But there is also a massive amount of cost for those who build out that massive infrastructure. It’s not like they can maintain it forever. As the Chinese have shown, you can build competing products. If you can keep running ahead, then people will prefer these devices. But at the end of the day, the value is in the apps, as you were saying. If that app is available on something else or if the friction and innovation on the main platform slows down, people will switch. 

It’ll take maybe three or five years. It’s not like there will be guaranteed returns forever. It will switch. As many other companies have seen, that switch takes a few years. It doesn’t take decades. When it happens though, it’s disastrous to the original company. Some manage to recover because they wake up and say, “Hey, wait a moment, I got to change.” Some don’t.

I think this brings me to IBM. This is the process you and IBM have been in for many years now. You took over as CEO in 2020, and you’ve been at the company for almost 30 years when that happened. 

I ask everybody these questions. You have a unique perspective here. You’d been at the company for a very long time when you took over as CEO. How was IBM structured when you took over, and how have you changed that structure?

It’s much more about culture, focus, what we do, and how we do it than the formal organization structure. If you say that you’ve got to be focused on innovation, you’ve then got to be focused on where you can provide a unique value back to your clients. That’s the first question. I want to be clear that our sweet spot is helping our B2B clients succeed. You might say, “Okay, well, that’s a very big remit. What then?” 

I hold two points of view that are somewhat unique. One, I don’t believe that the majority of our customers are going to go to a singular public cloud. Some will, but the majority will not. People outside the US tend to want to be somewhat split between an American cloud and something more sovereign. Then, there are people who use plenty of SaaS properties. There’s a huge amount of economic value in what they’ve already written in their preexisting applications. I’ll use the word hybrid to describe that. 

Is there a place for a vendor to have leading-edge tech to help our clients in that journey? That’s the hybrid approach we took, and that has shown to be of incredible value over time. About 60 percent of the total spend is outside the US. Even inside the US, anyone in a regulated industry is going to be hybrid in some sense. So that’s the first. 

The second is focusing on where AI can be deployed in the enterprise. Let’s not go try to compete. I will not try to compete with Google on building a chatbot that… what’s the current number? It’s 650 million active subscribers. That’s not where we have brand permission and credibility. But I can walk into a health insurance company and say, “I’ll make sure that your clients’, your patients’, health data is protected, but let’s unlock AI to make those people feel even happier and get quicker, easier answers.” Those people tend to trust us because in 114 years, we have never misused that data, not even once. You get that, and then you can give them the tech and get it deployed. 

So we picked those two. Then, I asked, “What are we really good at?” We’re really good at building systems. I decided early on that the third bet was on quantum. Let’s see whether we can change it from being a science challenge to an engineering challenge. Once it’s an engineering challenge, how do we scale it to really get deployed? That was really the big inflection point as opposed to trying to do lots of things. I used the word innovation. That meant commodity services had to leave the company because you can’t do both. It meant that if we are going to be hybrid, I had to partner with everybody else that I talked about.

So, you begin with the clear view of what should be done, and then you say, “It doesn’t matter, I’ll make all the hard decisions of changing the way the sales teams are paid by changing the incentives of all the executives to align with what’s needed to make those things succeed.” Sorry for a really long answer.

No, that’s great. A trope on this show is that if you tell me your company structure, I can predict 80 percent of your problems. You might say culture and structure are divorced, but I see the connection, and they feed off each other. 

So, you were at IBM for a long time. Vanishingly few people will ever interview to be the CEO of IBM. What was that process like? Did you come in saying, “This company is focused all wrong. We got to let go of the commodity stuff. I’m going to make these changes?” Then, once you had decided to do that, how did you actually change the structure of the company to focus on those things?

I probably didn’t spend 30 years aspiring to this job, just to be upfront. I think it was more of a process of discovery, even for myself, in the couple of years before that. I made the hybrid observation deeply in 2017. As I was making that, I said, “Okay, how do I test this? ” I actually had a partnership with Red Hat, and I said–

Is this why you have a red hat? I noticed you have the red hat behind you.

I have a red hat there because when we announced the decision in 2018, it took a year to get through regulators and close it. It was 30 percent of our market cap. Very few companies spent 30 percent of their market cap on a conviction and a belief. So, I keep the red hat there because to me it was clear: if that conviction turned out to be wrong, I should be fired. People hesitate to say those things, but I say, “If I’m that wrong, I should not be working here.” That is why I keep the red hat as a reminder to myself that not only must you have the conviction but you must then do the really hard action. 

So, that’s the culture part of making conviction succeed. Otherwise, people will just fall back into the lanes they were in. There’s comfort in doing things the way they’ve always done them —

Put me in the room. It’s 2020, you’re going through the interview process with the board. Did you have a deck that said, “We’re doing too much commodity stuff. I’m going to cut it down, and we’re going to focus on these areas and the big bet with the quantum stack change?”

My deck was three pages of pros. It was not like 100 pages of analysis. I believe that you should talk about what you want. I said, “We have to grow, and my view is very simple: you’ve got to grow well above GDP growth, otherwise you’re not going to be relevant in the future.” “Okay. If you’re going to grow, where are you going to grow?” 

If you look at us, our brand permission is fundamentally being a technology company. That was code for “high innovation.” Now, this is where I think many companies fall short. If you’re clear about that, then things that don’t belong should not be in the company. So, that is why the spinouts took a couple of years to get done. 

Then, I said, “We have to grow in software because that is where our clients perceive value.” You talk about structure. Well, if you’re going to grow in software that becomes a big fundamental change. That’s where capital allocation and resource allocation go. That’s where you’ve got to put way more investment than you historically had. Then, how do you fundamentally line up with partners? That is organizational change because you got to say, “How do the sales teams get paid? How do you have the right incentives?” So, those were maybe the three first really big decisions I made in the first two years.

As you do that, you also realize people tend to be very risk-averse. How do you unlock them so they take that risk? To me, there’s no risk-free path to success. If you want to be risk-free, you’re going to almost always be slammed against the bottom end of performance. How do you unlock risk-taking in people so that they feel motivated to do it more often than not?

This leads me into the second go-to question I ask everybody. I have a sense of it, but I’m curious how you will describe it. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework for making decisions?

You always start with if there is value. If it’s a decision that’s going to impact what we do and how we do it, does a client benefit from this new way of doing it? If you’re pretty convinced of that — and I’ll come back to where you get your conviction — I always believe that you should triangulate. I will always talk to a number of people on the inside and outside. Maybe not with a full description because sometimes you don’t want to give that, but with enough to validate my assumptions or what the possible victory would be. 

So, you arrive at a conviction, you triangulate it with a few people, and then you ask yourself, “What needs to change inside if we really want this to go all the way?” Once you arrive at conviction and all those, you are then able to go execute it.

I build on my own strengths. I think I’m a reasonably deep technologist. I think I generally understand where the tech can go, but I may not always fully understand what a client can do with the tech. That’s why the first piece is really important. Then, I triangulate. I don’t mind reaching 10 levels down in the organization to talk to somebody who I think has an opinion on that topic or knows about it. Talk to possible clients about it. Talk to partners about those things. It just informs your opinion. In any case, when you’re out talking to them, keep your ears open for what they say. That could actually inform some things later.

Let’s put that into practice on the farthest bet you’re making, which is quantum. All the big tech companies have quantum divisions. I’ve had Jerry Chow, who runs part of your quantum team, on the show before. That was a great conversation. I’ve looked at a lot of rooms where someone tells me that this is the coldest place on Earth to run their quantum or whatever qubit they’re trying to generate on that day. 

None of that has paid off yet. We’re not close to what they call “utility-scale computing” in quantum. That’s not something your customers are asking for yet. That’s outside of structure and culture’s purview that you’re deciding. That’s a big bet where there will be a massive step change in how we build computers that unlocks vastly more value for everybody. You have to keep that investment even through all the turmoil, all the data center investment everyone else is doing, and Amazon saying, “We’re laying off 14,000 people because of AI” while you’re saying, “We’re going to hire more college graduates than anybody else.”

What is the decision to stay focused on quantum in that way? How do you maintain that decision?

You are right that you can’t go check with a customer because they don’t know what to do with it today. But that’s not fully true. So, over the first five years, 2015-2020, you’ve got to have a belief in what it could do. Maybe because of my graduate school math background, I thought, “Wow, if we can do that, I can immediately see what kind of problems could get unlocked.” But trying to explain that to anybody but the people excited in the field is impossible. I completely acknowledge that those five years were about an internal bet on a set of people and a possibility.

But from 2020 onwards, we began to say, “These are not utility scale. Let me acknowledge it. They’re full of errors. They are small. Could clients still get excited by it?” I did perform a full check. We have 300 non-commercial clients. There are 300 people working with us in… let’s call it a research mode. There are 100 who are purely commercial, 100 who are in the world of materials or medicine, and 100 who are pure academics. Those are the rough buckets. 

That’s why HSBC proved to itself we could do bond trading pricing on it. Vanguard proved to itself that if it got big enough, it could build a portfolio that better appeals to your needs. You have Daimler working on EV batteries. You have Boeing looking at corrosion on materials. So, there is a proof point. They’re not saying they’ll buy it the way it is today. All they’re saying is, “Hey, if you get to that point, this is really interesting to us.”

There is validation, even from clients. Then I said, “How do I know there’s enough interest?” So, I asked the team to put the software out open source. Now, I’ll say for many people, including some currently in AI, that’s not common to do early on. Why open source? How will developers and universities use this stuff and get any excitement if you put a price on it? So, we put out all our software open source. The fact that there are 650,000 people globally who use it tells me that there is excitement, there is a movement, and that people are hungry for a new approach to solve other kinds of problems. 

Those were the two validations on my framework that were useful. If that 650,000 had been 100,000, I might still be okay. The fact that it’s 650,000 tells me there is real, real traction. But if 650,000 had been 1,000, I would have told my people, “Guys, these are your physics friends. This is not a market.”

I’m curious about that. That is the kind of long-term bet, and the early interest from people who think, “This type of computing will let us do many more things.” It’s funny on the consumer side. I hear about it in terms of, “Well, when there’s quantum computing, we’ll need quantum proof encryption.” It’s like there’s a secondary market now based on whether or not you will succeed in quantum computing that has almost nothing to do with quantum computing succeeding. It’s a bet. It’s a strange hedge against your success, Microsoft’s success, or whoever else is doing quantum. 

What does actual success look like? Is it a step change in computing that is as big as the re-architecture of all computers around AI that we’re experiencing today? Is it bigger than that? What does that feel like to you?

I actually think it’s an add. So, there are CPUs. GPUs did not replace CPUs, it was an add. Now, GPUs are priced much higher than CPUs, so the market is bigger for GPUs than CPUs, but it was a complete add. It didn’t displace what AMD, Intel, and ARM do.

I feel like Intel feels differently about that right now. Sure, I agree with you.

Some companies have many other issues. The number of x86 chips being sold per year is as high as it has ever been. How about if I phrase it like that?

Fair enough.

Okay. So, it’s an add, but if the next one has more immediate value, you can price it at a different price point. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Let’s just use the term QPU just to keep it simple with quantum. QPUs are going to have an incredible value when they come because they can solve problems that you actually cannot solve on GPUs and CPUs in any economic terms in the near term. Look, everything you can do on a GPU, you could do on a CPU, but it’s going to be a thousand times slower and not be as economically feasible. So, GPUs opened up a whole class of new problems. 

QPUs are similarly going to open those up. It’s an add, not a displacement. But given there’s finite dollars in the world, if there’s an add and we have a first mover advantage, like what one of the companies you named had with GPUs, that opens up a possibility that the market is that big.

So we did work. We asked a couple of our friends in the consulting world, like Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey. “Tell us what you think the value is if we can arrive at some utility point?” They both came back and gave us a pretty consistent answer. It was very sparkly, but think of it as, “We think there’s $400 billion to $700 billion of value early on per year.” Great! “How much do you think the tech world could get out of that?” “Probably 20 to 30 percent. Seems reasonable.” I said, “Okay, that’s the size of the prize  we’re going to chase.” How much of that share will we get versus others is out of the question, and that’s the journey we are on for the next five years.

You think you’ll be able to pay off the quantum investment in five years?

It’s really hard for engineering to put a dot on it and say, “This is not like building the next mainframe.” There, I really know what I’m doing. I know exactly how many months it’ll take, and I could put a dot on it. 

Here, I gave it a spectrum. Will we get to something remarkable in maybe three and a half years? I’m going to give it low odds. It’s possible, but the odds are maybe 20 or 30 percent. Can we get there in four years? My odds go way up. Can I get that in five years? My odds go really high. So that’s why I say five. That’s not to say it’s really five years. I think it’ll be a bit of a spectrum. I’m hoping you’ll see some really early adopters in around years three to four. There’ll be more at the end of year four, and then the risk decreases for people after that.

That’s a lot of action in 24 months. That will be a very exciting two-year period if you hit it. 

This is really interesting to talk about in comparison to AI. You’re talking about how you estimated the market size for a nascent technology that you have to develop actual capabilities for. You estimated how much of that market share you could take, and  you’re making some investments based on the potential return. 

So, that last part, why us? I assume others can do all of this. Why would we succeed? Because I think it’s much more. There’s so much talk. You mentioned the various qubit technologies, cold rooms, and alternate technologies. I actually love the fact that there is that much, but that’s not building a computer. I always tell people, “You absolutely need a great QPU and a great qubit. You also need a way for them all to talk to each other. You also need a way to control all of them. You also need a way for it to function by itself without six quantum physicists standing in the room tuning it.”

This is a great employment plan for quantum physicists. Come on.

[Laughs] So, you need all those things, and we are one of the unique players who have a lot of those skills in house. It unlocks people to go do that, and it really motivates and excites them. I think that is an advantage we have today in terms of underlying skills.

I would call that a very sober, very thoughtful, almost conservative approach to deploying billions of dollars in CapEx against a technology that has not yet proven itself in the market.

You’ve made some estimates. You have an idea of what your company can do to add value. You’re going to do the hard research, and then you’re going to get there. I would just compare that to OpenAI and the AI market that we see today. Just this week, OpenAI converted to a for-profit company. There’s reportedly a trillion-dollar IPO coming. There’s everything we’ve talked about in the enterprise space, where you can see how AI and enterprise can help accelerate data use and all this unstructured data that companies have. Fine. 

But the bet is in the consumer space. We’re just going to build a full-fledged agent that’s going to run around and do stuff for you, and that will replace your smartphone. None of that seems sober, conservative, based on a real market estimate, or even whether consumers want the  product. It’s just a pipe dream.

How do you reconcile those two things? The bet is there will be AGI. At the end of the day, the whole market is based on that someone’s going to figure out AGI, and then all of this would have been worth it. The press release from Microsoft announcing the restructured deal with OpenAI mentions several times in bullet points that the terms expire when OpenAI declares AGI. 

I read that and I thought that this is the most remarkable press release I’ve ever read in my entire life. No one can even define this term, and now two of the richest companies in the world are issuing press releases saying their deal will restructure itself when that happens. That’s very different from your bet on quantum. How do you read that discrepancy?

Of the ones you mentioned, one has a huge amount of cash flow and ability to invest. 

That’s Microsoft.

But it’s something that could be incredibly profitable. The other one is a classic Silicon Valley startup. Some will succeed, some will not. I’ll offer you an opinion. First, I don’t think deeply about the consumer side and how much money they’ll spend. It’s interesting to observe, but I’m not going to pretend that I deeply–

Well, let me ask you this question. Do you think there’s an enterprise ROI that would justify the spend we have today? Because I look at it and I say, “Absent AGI, this spend might not be worth it.”

I’ll actually put it this way. You said I’m a little numerical, I’m a little geeky. 

I’m having the time of my life in this conversation, by the way. I love it.

So, let’s ground this in today’s costs because anything in the future is speculative. It takes about $80 billion to fill up a one-gigawatt data center. That’s today’s number. If one company is going to commit 20-30 gigawatts, that’s $1.5 trillion of CapEx. To the point we just made, you’ve got to use it all in five years because at that point, you’ve got to throw it away and refill it. Then, if I look at the total commits in the world in this space, in chasing AGI, it seems to be like 100 gigawatts with these announcements. That’s $8 trillion of CapEx. It’s my view that there’s no way you’re going to get a return on that because $8 trillion of CapEx means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest.

Have you told Sam [Altman]? Because he seems to think he can get both the CapEx and the return.

But that’s a belief. It’s a belief that one company is going to be the only company that gets the entire market. I got it, that’s a belief. That’s what some people like to chase. I understand that from their perspective, but that’s different from agreeing with them. “Understand” is different from “agree.” I think it’s fine. I mean, they’re chasing it. Some people will make money, some people will lose money. All the [infrastructure] being built will be useful if it goes away, but if they make it, then they are the sole surviving company.

Nilay, I will be clear. I am not convinced, or rather I give it really low odds — we’re talking like 0 to 1 percent — that the current set of known technologies gets us to AGI. That’s my bigger gap. I think that this current set is great. I think it’s incredibly useful for enterprise. I think it’s going to unlock trillions of dollars of productivity in the enterprise, just to be absolutely clear. 

That said, I think AGI will require more technologies than the current LLM path. I think it’ll require fusing knowledge with LLMs. We have words, and I’m not sure that’s the only way to create knowledge. 

People talk about neuro-symbolic AI, but if I just said “knowledge” in a broader sense, I mean hard knowledge that people have spent thousands of years discovering. If we can figure out a way to fuse knowledge with LLMs, maybe. Even then I’m a maybe, I’m not like 100 percent, but that’s from a geeky technical view.

Actually, that was my question, and you started answering before I asked it.

I’m on the same path as you. I look at what LLMs can do today. I look at how people talk about the scaling laws they might hit, the need for more data that doesn’t necessarily exist at the scale it might be needed, and I say, “I don’t think LLMs can do it.” I don’t see a here-to-there path for this technology to get to what everybody says it can do. 

It sounds like you don’t think that’s true either. I would just connect that to what we started with. IBM developed Watson, and it was very good at its tasks, but it wasn’t the right set of bets at that moment and you had to pivot. Do you see the next technology that LLMs or the AI industry would have to pivot to?

Let’s look at three examples. Machine learning was not actually replaced. Machine learning is incredibly useful for lots of simple tasks. Your little thermostat in your house uses machine learning, not LLMs.

We did the first profile of the Nest, and I remember meeting their machine learning person to talk about the Nest thermostat in 2011.

That’s incredibly useful. People look at it like golf ball, baseball, tennis ball trajectories. That’s all machine learning, it’s not being replaced. It’s really useful, but it’s not going to answer questions. 

Deep learning will be replaced with LLMs. I actually think LLMs are here to stay, I don’t think they’ll go away. But that’s not the end technology for AI. There is a next one and the next one will be an add, too. There’s machine learning, which is robust. There are  LLMs, which I think are robust but are statistical in nature. So, where’s the deterministic piece? Where’s the knowledge piece? Is there something beyond LLMs? 

Look, this stuff is eight years old at this point. The first paper I think was in 2017, when intention and this approach with transformers came together.  Is there another one? I don’t know. I suspect there is, but we don’t know. It’s the same as in 2016 when you couldn’t predict the current LLM technology.

A comparison I would make is there’s now a core technology that everyone feels very invested in. I live in New York, and when I go to San Francisco, I joke that it’s just a different planet. Everyone is maybe much happier and more optimistic about AI than I am. I look at the companies springing up with the people who have left OpenAI to start super intelligence companies or AGI labs. They are all still betting on LLMs. The core of their work is still LLMs. 

The idea that you can feel the AGI is from a lot of people using Claude to write code and saying they can feel the AGI. Are you worried that there’s not enough investment in the stuff around the edges that might supplant or augment LLMs?

No, because I think when it is so unknown, it should not be companies that change it. I think that academia should change it. I do think there are enough AI researchers in academia who are going to be working around these topics, but when you don’t make enough progress, there isn’t going to be any media coverage or any other coverage. But from me talking to my friends — whether at MIT, at Illinois, or Chicago — there is work going on. It’s just not occupying attention because the airwaves are completely LLMs only.

That’s why I’m asking. Do you think that there’s enough work happening? It sounds like you do, even in America in 2025 where there is pressure on universities to not bring in foreign graduates or have other kinds of academics going on. It seems tenuous at best.

Do you think that investment is still happening there?

I’m more optimistic than pessimistic. Is there some of what you described happening? Absolutely. But when I look at the number of top faculty in  the top 20 engineering schools, it’s not really decreasing. Are there some funding cuts? We’re talking like under 10 percent. It’s not like it’s massive. Yes, there are much larger numbers in some areas than in others that are not hard sciences — by hard sciences I mean physics, chemistry, math, and engineering — but that’s not where I spend my energy. If I think about physics and hard engineering, I’d say there are some cuts, but it’s not that extreme.

I also look at the national labs. No cuts. So it looks pretty good.

I’m happy the frontier is good. 

Let me end by talking about the near term. We spent a lot of time talking about how things might go, how the core technology bets you’re making might play out over time, whether or not GPUs are dark fiber, which is one of my favorite arguments to have, I don’t know if you could tell. 

In the short to medium term, what we are seeing is a bunch of companies saying, “Okay, we have AI. We can just do it. We’re going to make the job cuts.” Accenture had a bunch of job cuts. Amazon had a bunch of job cuts. UPS had a bunch of job cuts just in the week that we’re talking.

If I was to be as harsh as possible about the work of your average big consulting firm, I would look at it and say, “Boy, a lot of that can go.” You can just let the AI make those decks all day long because the point of this contract is to let the CEO restructure the company. We just need the gloss of external validation to make the changes and the layoffs that we’re already going to make. 

That is McKinsey’s function in the world: “Boy, it’s a lot cheaper and faster to just let the AI make the deck that no one ever reads in the end.” I feel like I see that playing out. How do you think people should react to that inside of the timeframes you were talking about where the real change comes?

Could there be up to 10 percent job displacement? I believe that’ll be likely over the next couple of years. It’s not 30 or 40 percent, but it is up to 10 percent of the total US employment pool. It is very concentrated in certain areas. 

Now, as you get more productive, companies are going to then hire more people but in different places. That was the point I was making. We are hiring more because people say, “I don’t need to do the entry-level task because an AI agent can do it.” I’m looking at them like, “Really?” Think strategically for a moment. Wouldn’t you rather have an entry-level person and AI makes them more like a 10-year expert? Isn’t that more useful to me than the other way around? Otherwise, where is the talent who’s going to come up with the next great product? Where is the person who’s going to be able to convince a client to deploy technology the way it should be deployed? That’s why I think some are being shortsighted.

But I also think that some of this is happening right now because if you look at the total employment numbers, I think people gorged on employment. I used that phrase during the pandemic and the year after. Some of the displacement is just people saying, “I don’t need so many people because I went up 30, 40, 50, 100 percent from 2020 to 2023.” There is going to be some natural correction. Business is never completely optimized. I think in engineering terms, it’s an underdamped system. When there’s a need, it goes above. Now, it has to correct. It’s probably going to go below what’s needed, and then it’ll hit the correct equilibrium, depending on  market demand and growth.

Do you feel like the broader market is stable or predictable enough at this moment for that natural business correction cycle to play out in a healthy way?

People talk about, “With all the wars, with all of the cyber attacks, with interest rates, doom is coming. GDP is going to fall.” I kind of held the view where if I look at the demand, I think that global GDP growth near 3 percent looks likely. But that ignores inflation, so in real terms, we are at like 5 percent. I think that those two together are probably going to hold for quite some time.

I’m curious because I hear from our readers who are consumers and some who work at tech companies and build the products. The split between how they feel about AI and what AI is doing to the economy and what people are claiming AI will do to the economy is as vast as any split I’ve ever experienced in my time covering technology.

I think people who got trained on a certain set of technologies and who are experts with their expertise don’t acknowledge it, but it’s deeply tied to their identity. Now suddenly, the person who’s been coding the product for 10 years finds that a kid coming in from college using generative AI tools is three times faster than them. They didn’t know the code, but the AI knows the code, and they don’t know how to use the AI.

You’re the CEO of IBM. Is that your experience at IBM? Because what I hear from our readers is that it would be great, but it’s not true. It’s not happening.

We took a tool we built ourselves and that wasn’t one of the industry tools on code to help our people do software development. Within four months, the 6,000-person team that embraced it — so not a tiny number — was 45 percent more productive. Just to compare, we have 30,000 others who don’t yet use that tool. 

So, those are real numbers. We are going to grow those teams. We’re not trying to cut any of them because if we can be that much more productive at software development, that means we can build a lot more products, which means we can go get more market share. It doesn’t mean that it’s a fixed amount of work. I think the amount of work is infinite. So, we can be more productive. 

The calculus always is if it’s that expensive to build, is there enough margin so that it’s a viable business? If the answer is it’s cheaper to build it, I can sell it cheaper and still have a great margin. Does that make sense?

Oh, it does. Yeah. .

That is our lived experience, which is why I’m leaning into hiring more programmers and more tech people.

Arvind, this is great. Tell people what’s next for IBM. What should they be looking for?

Watch what we are going to do on quantum. I think that in about two or three years, you’ll see some surprising results.

Well, we’re going to have to have you back on Decoder very soon as this market shakes out, and then when the quantum bet pays off. That’s an exciting 24 months that I want to make sure you’re back for. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

Pleasure being with you.

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These great Cyber Monday tech deals will likely be gone tomorrow

1 Dec 2025, 2:36 pm by Sheena Vasani

December is kicking off with a bang. Cyber Monday is today, and it’s one of your last chances to score major deals before the holiday rush plows us all over. It’s a great moment to snag gadgets — many of which have been tested by The Verge — at (or close to) all-time lows if you missed out over the weekend, or if you methodically waited to shop until now.

We’ve combed through the thousands of deals and gathered the best available below, so you can make the most of what’s left. Not only that, we’ve also created some budget- and category-specific roundups: looking for items under $50? We’ve got you covered. Only interested in TVs or Apple gear? We’ve got those, too.

Apple deals

AirPods Pro 3

The recently released AirPods Pro 3 have a new design that improves their fit, superior noise cancellation, better bass, and fairly accurate heart rate sensors. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $249 $219.99 at Amazon
• $249.99 $219.99 at Best Buy
• $249 $219.99 at Target

13-inch MacBook Air (M4, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD)

Powered by the M4 chip, Apple’s latest 13-inch MacBook Air is faster than its predecessor and offers double the base RAM. It can also connect to two external displays with the lid open, unlike prior models, and features an improved 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $999 $749.99 at Amazon
• $999 $749 at Best Buy
• $999 $749.99 at Costco

• Target has marked the AirPods 4 down to around $69.99 ($60 off), which is their best price to date. Apple’s latest non-Pro AirPods sound great despite their open-style build, support voice isolation for clearer-sounding calls, and have a streamlined setup process and multipoint pairing with Apple devices. The version with active noise cancellation is also on sale for $99.99 ($80 off) at Amazon. Read our review.
• The AirPods Max (USB-C) are Apple’s latest pair of over-ear headphones, and they’re $399.99 ($150 off) at Best Buy and Walmart. The headphones can last up to 20 hours per charge. The AirPods Max also support personalized Spatial Audio for better performance when listening to Dolby Atmos-ready tracks. Read our review.
• Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air with the M2 processor is still a great laptop for most people, despite being a bit old, and Best Buy has discounted it to $599 ($200 off). It has the same design as the M4 MacBook Air, and comes with 16GB of RAM.
• The 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 is $949 ($250 off) at Best Buy and Amazon — the same discount as the 13-inch. It’s much the same excellent computer as the 13-inch version, just with a bigger screen, more battery life, and better speakers. Read our review.

Apple AirTags

Apple’s AirTags are unobtrusive, waterproof, and tap into the massive Find My network for out-of-range locating.

Where to Buy:

• $29 $17.97 at Amazon
• $99 $79.98 at Amazon (four-pack)
• $99 $69.99 at Best Buy (four-pack)

• If you need to sizable step up in power for a Mac laptop, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro processor is down to $1,699 ($300 off) at Amazon. It has a 12-core CPU and 16-core GPU, 512GB SSD like the base M5 model, but 24GB of RAM and faster Thunderbolt 5 ports. You can also step up to a bigger and beefier 16-inch version with a 14-core / 20-core M4 Pro chip, 48GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD for $2,499 ($400 off) at Best Buy and Amazon.
• The Mac Mini is one of the best bargains available if you want a lot of computing power in a wildly small desktop. The base M4 model is down to $479 ($120 off) at Best Buy and Amazon, which is just $10 shy of its all-time low. Meanwhile, the more powerful M4 Pro version is going for $1,249.99 ($150 off) at Amazon, which is also one of its better prices to date. If you already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, there’s no better deal for this kind of power. Read our review.

Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2025, M5)

The M5-equipped MacBook Pro is mostly a chip bump from the M4 model of 2024. But it remains an excellent choice for beginners and students in creative fields. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $1599 $1349.99 at Amazon
• $1599 $1349.99 at Costco
• $1599 $1399 at Best Buy

• You can also buy the newfangled Apple Watch Ultra 3 at Amazon with either an Ocean Band, a Trail Loop, or an Alpine Loop for $699 ($100 off). Apple’s latest wearable is its most rugged and capable to date, with a larger wide-angle OLED display, satellite and 5G connectivity, and a battery that can last up to 42 hours on a single charge (up from 36 hours on the Ultra 2). Read our review.
• You can pick up the 40mm Apple Watch SE (second-gen) with GPS at Walmart starting at $129 ($120 off), which is a new low price (the 44mm variant is also on sale starting at $159). If you’re on a tight budget, the last-gen Apple Watch SE is still worth considering. It lacks some of Apple’s newer sensors and doesn’t offer an always-on display, but it remains relatively fast, given that it uses the same chipset as the Apple Watch Series 8. It also provides all the essentials, including daily activity and sleep tracking, heart-rate monitoring, fall and crash detection, and access to the newer Vitals app in watchOS 26.

Apple Watch Series 11 (42mm, GPS)

Although the Apple Watch Series 11 is the same size as its predecessor, it features a 5G cellular modem, a display that’s twice as durable, and slightly improved battery life. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $399 $339 at Amazon
• $399 $339 at Walmart
• $399 $329 at Best Buy

Apple Watch SE 3

The Apple Watch SE 3 offers some big upgrades over its predecessor, including an always-on display, allowing you to glance at the time or unread notifications. It also has Apple’s powerful S10 chip, which enables on-device Siri requests. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $249 $199 at Amazon (40mm, GPS)
• $279 $229 at Amazon (44mm, GPS)
• $249 $199 at Costco (40mm, GPS)

• The second-gen HomePod is Apple’s latest smart speaker, and you can pick one up for $269.99 ($30 off) at Best Buy right now. The great-sounding speaker can play Dolby Atmos tracks with proper separation, though you can also pair two together for even better separation. The speaker doesn’t support Bluetooth, which means your device has to be on the same network to stream music to it. You can also ask Siri to play tunes, control various smart home accessories, set timers, or answer questions, but all of those functions still require a stable internet connection. Read our review.
• The latest 11-inch iPad Pro has only been out for about a month, but that hasn’t stopped Amazon from cutting the price of the 256GB / Wi-Fi model to $899 ($100 off). Apple’s newest, most powerful iPad has the same design as last year’s model, but features a faster M5 processor, which you’ll notice most when performing resource-intensive tasks like playing games. Lower storage configurations of the iPad Pro also have 12GB of RAM (up from 8GB), while all models have faster memory bandwidth. Read our review.

11-inch iPad Air M3

The new 11-inch iPad Air comes with Apple’s M3 chip and GPU upgrades. It’s available in dark gray, blue, purple, and a “starlight” cream shade. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $599 $449.99 at Amazon (128GB, Wi-Fi)
• $699 $549.99 at Amazon (256GB, Wi-Fi)
• $899 $749 at Amazon (512GB, Wi-Fi)

iPad (2025)

Apple’s entry-level iPad is an excellent tablet for casual use. Its high resolution screen is great for watching video, and its A16 processor is fast enough to handle light games and productivity apps. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $349 $274 at Amazon (128GB, Wi-Fi)
• $349 $274 at Best Buy (128GB, Wi-Fi)
• $449 $374 at Best Buy (256GB Wi-Fi)

• The Apple Watch Ultra 2 in black is back down to $599 ($200 off) at Amazon and Best Buy, one of the lowest prices we’ve seen this year. The upgrades to the new Apple Watch Ultra 3 are relatively minor, so you may as well save as much as possible if you want Apple’s most rugged smartwatch. The Ultra 2 comes in one size — 49mm — and is geared more toward athletic types. It also features a bright display and fantastic battery life, though the Ultra 3 can last longer between charges.

Streaming service deals

Disney Plus, Hulu Bundle (with ads)

You can get an ad-supported Disney Plus and Hulu bundle for $4.99 a month ($8 off) for an entire year. Both streaming services feature a deep catalog of new and classic TV shows and movies, including The Simpsons, Andor, Toy Story, The Fantastic 4: First Steps, and Freakier Friday.

Where to Buy:

• $12.99 $4.99 at Disney Plus (monthly)

HBO Max

An HBO Max Basic subscription provides access to shows like House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, and The Pitt, as well as films like Superman and Weapons. You can get a year of the monthly, ad-supported subscription for $2.99 ($8 off) a month until December 1st.

Where to Buy:

• $10.99 $2.99 at HBO Max (monthly, with ads)
• $109.99 at HBO Max (annual, with ads)
• $184.99 at HBO Max (annual, ad-free)

Apple TV (six-month subscription)

Apple is hosting a Cyber Monday sale that lets you lock in six months for just $5.99 per month, which is over 50 percent off the usual cost. This promo isn’t applicable to those eligible to redeem three free months earned through buying a new Apple device, nor will it work for those who get the subscription through a third party, like Amazon.

Where to Buy:

• $12.99 $5.99 at Apple (monthly)

Paramount Plus (two months)

You can get a two-month subscription to Paramount Plus Essential (ad-supported) or Paramount Plus Premium (ad-free) for $2.99 until December 2nd. The deal saves you up to $20 and includes access to a catalog of over 40,000 TV shows and movies, including Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, The Naked Gun, South Park, and The Daily Show.

Where to Buy:

• $7.99 $2.99 at Paramount Plus Essential
• $12.99 $2.99 at Paramount Plus Premium

Headphone and earbud deals

Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones

Bose’s last-gen flagship headphones are a replacement for the Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 that offer a more travel-friendly design, spatial audio, better call quality, excellent comfort, and some of the best noise cancellation around. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $429 $299 at Amazon
• $429 $299 at Best Buy
• $429 $299 at Bose

Sony WH-1000XM6

Sony’s latest pair of flagship headphones feature improved comfort, better noise cancellation, and the ability to charge while in use. They even fold down for travel, which can’t be said about the last-gen XM5. Read our initial impressions.

Where to Buy:

• $449.99 $398 at Amazon
• $449.99 $398 at Best Buy
• $449.99 $399.99 at Target

• Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds are the brand’s boldest, most unique earbuds — and you can pick them up at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for $199 ($100 off), their lowest price to date. Instead of sitting in your ear canal, the earbuds cling to your outer ear like a piece of jewelry. That design means you’ll always hear external noise, which isn’t ideal if you want to block out noisy coworkers; however, it’s great if you need to remain aware of your surroundings, such as when walking or riding a bike. Read our review.
• The Google Pixel Buds 2A are currently on sale for an all-time low of $99 ($30 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store. Google’s latest pair of wireless earbuds feature crisp sound quality, a comfortable design, and solid active noise cancellation, which is great considering the budget-friendly price tag. They even offer built-in support for Gemini and, unlike the entry-level AirPods, a purple option! Read our review.

Google Pixel Buds Pro 2

Significantly smaller and lighter than their predecessors, the Pixel Buds Pro 2 also offer stronger noise cancellation, a crystal clear transparency mode, and lengthy battery life. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $229 $168.99 at Amazon
• $229 $169 at B&H Photo
• $229 $169 at Best Buy

Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (second-gen)

The second-gen QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds have dynamic, rich sound and the best noise cancellation available in true wireless earbuds. They’re a terrific pick if you want to listen to your music in peace. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $299 $249 at Amazon
• $299 $249 at Best Buy
• $299 $249.99 at Target

• Now through December 1st, you can snag Sony’s WF-1000XM5 earbuds for around $228 ($101 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Sony’s online store, which matches the price drop we saw during Amazon’s most recent Prime Day event. Sony’s flagship earbuds improve upon the prior model with richer sound, slightly more powerful noise cancellation, and vastly superior comfort thanks to their reduced size and weight. They also come with four foam-style ear tips, offer around eight hours of battery life with ANC enabled, and carry an IPX4 rating with support for multipoint connectivity. Read our review.
• Technics’ EAH-AZ100s are a premium pair of wireless earbuds currently available for an all-time low of around $219.99 ($80 off) at Amazon and B&H Photo. The earbuds’ key feature is that they support three-device multipoint audio, so you can switch between a trio of sources seamlessly. They also sound great (Technics’ app has a five-band EQ, if you’d like to make tweaks), feel comfortable to wear thanks to a slimmed-down design, and sound excellent. Read our review.

Nothing Ear (a)

Nothing’s Ear (a) earbuds have the same general design as the company’s previous earbuds — but you can get these in a snazzy yellow. They include ANC, more than decent sound quality, and other features like multipoint for just under $100. Read our impressions.

Where to Buy:

• $99 $59 at Amazon
• $99 $59 at Nothing

Shokz OpenRun Pro 2

The OpenRun Pro 2 are Shokz’s best bone conduction headphones yet, with better sound and more bass than their predecessor. Our reviewer Victoria Song praised their cozy fit as well as their USB-C charging (goodbye, proprietary charger!). Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $179.95 $124.95 at Amazon
• $179.95 $124.99 at REI
• $179.95 $124.99 at Best Buy

Smartwatch and fitness tracker deals

Google Pixel Watch 4

The Pixel Watch 4 has a bigger display, longer battery life, more repairable design, and new Satellite SOS mode. It also leverages Google Gemini, and introduces an AI Health Coach. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $349.99 $299.99 at Amazon (41mm, Wi-Fi)
• $349.99 $299.99 at Best Buy (41mm, Wi-Fi)
• $349.99 $299.99 at Target (41mm, Wi-Fi)

Oura Ring 4

The Oura Ring 4 is slimmer and more accurate than its predecessor, while adding new AI-powered tools and longer battery life. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $349 $249 at Amazon
• $349 $249 at Best Buy
• $349 $249 at Oura

Fitbit Charge 6

The Fitbit Charge 6 features a haptic side button, an improved heart rate algorithm, turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps, and the ability to broadcast your heart rate on certain Bluetooth gym equipment. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $159.95 $99.95 at Amazon
• $159.95 $99.95 at Best Buy
• $159.95 $99.95 at Target

• The Fitbit Ace LTE is down to around $99.95 ($80 off) at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy, which marks a new low price. The fitness tracker is designed specifically for kids, with movement-based games that encourage physical activity. It also supports GPS location tracking, along with the ability to send messages and place calls to a limited number of contacts. However, keep in mind that a Fitbit Ace Pass subscription ($9.99 per month / $119.99 per year) is required for location tracking, messaging, and access to the Fitbit Arcade. Read our hands-on impressions.
• The Fitbit Versa 4 is on sale at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy for $119.95 ($80 off), which is the lowest price we’ve seen this year. The smartwatch features heart rate, activity, sleep, blood oxygen, menstrual health, and stress tracking, as well as more than 40 exercise modes that automatically detect and track specific workouts. Although it doesn’t support ECG, it can record heart rate variability and monitor it 24/7. It also supports services like Fitbit Pay and Google Maps, extending its usefulness beyond its core fitness tracking capabilities.

Fitbit Sense 2

The Sense 2 delivers premium health tracking, highlighted by top-tier stress sensing via continuous EDA and heart-rate variability. It also offers strong battery life and monitors sleep, ECG, and temperature. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $249.95 $179.95 at Amazon
• $249.95 $179.95 at Target
• $249.95 $179.95 at Best Buy

• The entry-level Fitbit Inspire 3 has returned to its all-time low of $69.95 ($30 off) at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy. The basic fitness band nails the basics, providing heart rate, sleep, exercise, blood oxygen, and menstrual health tracking. It can also provide you with a sleep score every morning, along with tips for improving your sleep. You can also remove the Inspire 3 from its band and wear it as a necklace, which is less obtrusive but disables heart rate tracking. Read our hands-on impressions.

Google Pixel Watch 3 (45mm, Wi-Fi)

Google’s last-gen smartwatch features a large screen, a battery that lasts up to 24 hours, and sensors for measuring your blood oxygen levels and taking an EKG. The wearable also offers a host of useful Google integrations and can provide you with custom running workouts. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $299.99 $199.99 at Amazon
• $299.99 $199.99 at Best Buy

Garmin Fenix 8

The Garmin Fenix 8 adds smart features like the ability to take calls on the wrist, and an on-board voice assistant.

Where to Buy:

• $999.99 $749.99 at Garmin
• $1000 $749.99 at REI
• $999.99 $749.99 at Amazon

• The Venu X1, one of Garmin’s more premium smartwatches, is available from Amazon for a new low of $599.99 ($200 off). The X1 features a 2-inch OLED display and Garmin’s thinnest case yet. It can also track your activity, heart rate, blood oxygen level, and sleep (including naps). It’ll provide you with a morning report based on recorded health metrics, and it offers stress tracking and guided meditations. It can even track over 100 activities and create a running or strength training regimen via Garmin Coach.
• Garmin’s midrange Vivoactive 6 is on sale for $249.99 ($50 off) — its best price to date — at Amazon, Best Buy, and REI. The watch features a circular 1.2-inch OLED screen, a battery that can last up to 11 hours per charge, and Bluetooth support. It can also track your activity, blood oxygen level, sleep, and heart rate, as well as generate fitness plans using the built-in Garmin Coach.

Garmin Forerunner 265 (42mm)

Garmin’s midrange Forerunner watch adds an OLED display, a week’s worth of battery life, and dual-frequency GPS for better accuracy. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $449.99 $299.99 at Amazon (42mm)
• $449.99 $299.99 at Amazon (46mm)
• $449.99 $299.99 at Best Buy (42mm)

• The 46mm OnePlus Watch 3 is available from Amazon, Best Buy, and OnePlus for $249.99 ($100 off) — its best prices to date. The newer wearable retains everything we loved about its predecessor, including dual-frequency GPS and long battery life, but improves the experience with a rotating crown that scrolls and up to 120 hours of battery life. It can also provide a quick snapshot of your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, sleep quality, and more. Read our hands-on impressions.

Garmin Venu 3S

The Venu 3S remains our favorite Garmin smartwatch. It’s a comfortable wearable with up to 10 days of battery life and a vibrant 1.2-inch OLED display, not to mention solid sleep tracking, Atrial Fibrillation detection, and a built-in EKG reader. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $449.99 $349.99 at Amazon
• $449.99 $349.99 at Best Buy
• $449.99 $349.99 at REI

• The Amazfit Active 2 remains our favorite fitness tracker because it offers a surprising feature set given its modest price tag, especially now that you can get it for an all-time low of $79.99 ($20 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. The budget-friendly smartwatch can track your sleep, heart rate, and a slew of activities, while providing a daily readiness score based on what its sensors record. It also features a vibrant OLED display, an estimated 10 days of battery life, and enough built-in sports modes to accurately track every part of your workout routine. Read our review.
• Samsung’s Galaxy Ring is an excellent complement to a Samsung smartphone, and it’s hit an all-time low of around $249.95 ($150 off) at Amazon (Best Buy and Samsung are also selling it for $279.99). The newer smart ring has a slim, lightweight design, long battery life, and, unlike competitors like the Oura Ring, doesn’t lock features behind a paywall (yet). That said, its battery lasts longer when paired with a Samsung phone, and certain features — including the ability to view your daily Energy Score — aren’t available when paired with another Android phone. Read our review.

Tablet and e-reader deals

Kindle Paperwhite (12th-gen)

Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite — aka our favorite ebook reader — is waterproof, has a seven-inch display, and lasts weeks per charge. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $159.99 $124.99 at Amazon (with ads)
• $159.99 $124.99 at Best Buy (with ads)
• $179.99 $144.99 at Amazon (without ads)

Kindle (11th-gen)

 Amazon’s latest entry-level Kindle retains a six-inch, 300ppi display and USB-C charger. It’s brighter and slightly faster than its predecessor, though, and features longer battery life.

Where to Buy:

• $109.99 $79.99 at Amazon (with ads)
• $109.99 $79.99 at Best Buy (with ads)
• $129.99 $99.99 at Amazon (without ads)

• The 16GB Kindle Colorsoft, Amazon’s newest color e-reader, is down to a new low of $169.99 ($80 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. It features a 7-inch screen with 300ppi when viewing text and black-and-white imagery, or 150ppi when viewing color. It has 16GB of storage, a battery that lasts up to eight weeks, and a waterproof design. If you want to carry around more books, the Signature Edition has 32GB of storage, plus wireless charging and an auto-adjusting front light sensor. You can pick the latter up for $229.99 ($70 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target.
• Amazon, Best Buy, and Target have all marked the 2024 Kindle Scribe with 16GB of storage down to an all-time low of $279.99 ($120 off). The Scribe has a 10.2-inch display and a battery that can last up to 12 weeks, and it comes with Amazon’s Premium Pen, which you can use to annotate books or jot down ideas. The e-reader’s built-in AI features, meanwhile, allow you to clean up your handwriting, summarize your notes, or adjust the length and tone of what you’ve written. However, keep in mind that Amazon recently announced a new model, though we still don’t have a firm launch date. Read our review.

Boox Palma 2

The Boox Palma 2 is a 6.3-inch smartphone-sized e-reader that’s highly portable. It also runs on Android and comes with the Google Play Store built-in, allowing you to download apps for other digital bookstores, newspapers, note-taking apps, and more. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $299.99 $269.99 at Amazon (black)
• $299.99 $269.99 at Amazon (white)
• $299.99 $269.99 at Boox

Kobo Libra Colour

The Libra Colour is one of the first e-readers from Kobo with color. It packs physical-page turning buttons, stylus compatibility, and supports a broad range of file formats, while making it easy to borrow books from the Overdrive library system. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $229 $199.99 at Amazon
• $219.99 $199.99 at Target
• $219.99 $199.99 at Rakuten Kobo

• The latest Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids tablet is matching its all-time low of $104.99 ($85 off) at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy. The tablet features a 10.1-inch 1080p display, a kid-proof case, and up to 13 hours of battery life. It also comes with 32GB of storage for loading up apps and other content, along with robust parental controls and a two-year warranty. It also comes with a year of Amazon Kids Plus, which features access to ad-free, age-appropriate content, including books, movies, apps, and more.
• If you’re looking for something more compact, the latest Amazon Fire 7 Kids is currently available at Best Buy, and Amazon, for $44.99 ($55 off), its lowest price to date. The basic tablet offers many of the same features and services found in the larger 10.1-inch model — including an extended two-year warranty, extensive parental controls, and a year of Amazon Kids Plus — but the base Fire 7 Kids comes with 16GB of storage and features a smaller 7-inch display. The device also offers up to 10 hours of battery life, providing plenty of fun while on the road.

TV and streaming device deals

Sony Bravia 8 II

The Bravia 8 II was chosen as the “king of TV” by a panel of judges (including The Verge’s own Nilay Patel) in Value Electronics’ 2025 shootout. The OLED TV has excellent color accuracy, a bright panel, and a 120Hz refresh rate.

Where to Buy:

• $2999.99 $1998 at Amazon (55-inch)
• $2999.99 $1998 at B&H Photo (55-inch)
• $3499.99 $2298 at Amazon (65-inch)

Roku Pro Series 4K TV

Roku’s latest Pro 4K TV has a 120Hz refresh rate, four HDMI ports (two 2.1 ports), full array local dimming for even brightness, and supports both Dolby Vision IQ and HDR 10 Plus for better color accuracy. It also works with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home to integrate easily into most smart homes.

Where to Buy:

• $899.99 $597.99 at Amazon (55-inch)
• $1199.99 $797.99 at Amazon (65-inch)
• $1199.99 $798.99 at Best Buy (65-inch)

• LG’s 55-inch C5 OLED is down to around $1,196.99 ($803 off) at Amazon, B&H Photo, and from LG’s storefront. The midrange TV is a good entry point into the world of OLED technology, offering a solid balance in terms of design, brightness, and high-end gaming features, including four HDMI 2.1 ports that support 4K at 144Hz with variable refresh rate tech. The C5 Series also handles glare and ambient light better than the step-down B5 Series; however, OLED panels are still not ideal for really bright rooms.
• Hisense’s 65-inch S7N Canvas TV is the company’s answer to Samsung’s popular Frame TV, one you can currently grab for $847.99 ($452 off) at Amazon. The 4K set has a matte screen that makes the artwork it displays more akin to a real painting, and Hisense includes a wall mount, allowing you to hang it. The S7N features a QLED panel with a 144Hz refresh rate and four HDMI ports (two HDMI 2.1 and two HDMI 2.0), making it suitable for a mix of current and last-gen gaming consoles.

TCL QM8K Series QD-Mini LED TV

The QM8K is one of the best (and brightest) mini-LED TVs of 2025. And a 65-inch model under $1,000 is an absolute steal.

Where to Buy:

• $1799.99 $899.99 at Best Buy (65-inch)

• LG’s 77-inch G5 OLED is an expensive set, but you can currently snag it for $2,946.99 ($1,553 off) — one of its best prices to date — at Amazon. The high-end 4K TV delivers better brightness than the aforementioned C5, allowing you to use it in rooms that are exposed to a lot of ambient light. It also features four HDMI 2.1 ports that support 4K at 165Hz with VRR, as well as support for the popular Dolby Vision HDR format.

Google TV Streamer (4K)

Google’s terrific TV Streamer (4K) is the company’s best attempt at a streaming device yet, with built-in ethernet, an excellent interface, and smart home compatibility with both Matter and Thread. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $99.99 $74.99 at Amazon
• $99.99 $74.99 at Walmart
• $99.99 $74.99 at Best Buy

Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023)

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max is noticeably faster than its predecessor, features Wi-Fi 6E, and benefits from twice the storage. It can also showcase widgets and artwork when idle, and continues to offer robust Alexa integration.

Where to Buy:

• $59.99 $34.99 at Amazon
• $59.99 $34.99 at Best Buy
• $59.99 $34.99 at Target

• Amazon’s recently rebranded Fire TV Stick 4K Plus is the company’s midrange option, and it’s down to an all-time low of $24.99 ($25 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. The inexpensive streaming device comes with an Alexa Voice Remote that features a built-in microphone, which lets you use Amazon’s virtual assistant to find TV shows and movies, or control compatible smart home accessories using your voice. You can also use it to access Amazon Luna or Xbox Game Pass, allowing you to play games from their respective cloud gaming libraries.

Smart home deals

Philips Hue Festavia string lights

These smart lights have beautiful colors, a nice selection of festive scenes, and an easy-to-use app. They are super reliable when paired with a Hue Bridge and also work over Bluetooth. They come in three lengths, work with all the major smart home platforms, and are Matter-compatible.

Where to Buy:

• $241.99 $145.19 at Amazon (65-foot)
• $395.99 $237.6 at Amazon (130-foot)
• $241.99 $145.19 at Philips Hue (65-foot)

Blink Video Doorbell (second-gen)

Blink’s latest Video Doorbell is one of the best options available if you want a budget-friendly buzzer with motion-activated recording and alerts, night vision, two-way audio, and up to two years of battery life. Just know that a Sync Module is required for the doorbell to work properly.

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 $29.99 at Amazon (with Sync Module Core)
• $59.99 $29.99 at Best Buy (with Sync Module Core)

• The Ring Battery Doorbell and Indoor Cam Bundle is available at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy for $69.99 ($70 off), matching its best price to date. The bundle includes a Ring Battery Doorbell and an Indoor Cam, making it a great starter kit for renters and new home owners. The Ring Battery Doorbell offers head-to-toe video outside your front door, while the Indoor Cam let’s you keep an eye on an interior space. They’re easy to install, easy to set up, and easy to use.
• The Blink Mini 2 is on sale for $17.99 ($22 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which matches its best price to date. The 1080p camera offers all the basics, including color night video, motion alerts, and two-way audio. It also features USB-C support and a wider 143-degree field of view than prior models, letting you see more of the room or porch. Just note that if you want to use it outside to keep tabs on packages, you’ll need a weather-resistant adapter to go with it, which you can get on Amazon for about $10 more.

SwitchBot Bot

If you’ve ever wished you had a robot that could push a button for you, that’s precisely what the SwitchBot Bot does. It’s simple, smart, and works on anything with a button. Stick it on the device you want to turn on or off, and you’re set.

Where to Buy:

• $29.99 $19.99 at Amazon
• $29.99 $19.5 at SwitchBot (with code BFCM35A)

• The Yale Assure Lock 2 Touch is on sale for $199.99 ($100 off) at Best Buy. The stylish smart lock works with every major smart-home platform and supports both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It also lets you unlock your door in multiple ways, including via fingerprint, touchscreen, the app, and even has an auto-unlocking feature. Read our review.
• If Philips Hue’s Festavia lights are outside your budget, Govee’s Christmas Lights 2 are also on sale, with the 66-foot going for an all-time low of $63.99 ($36 off) at Govee’s online storefront. You can also grab the 99-foot strand for $11 more (Govee), the longer 164-foot set for $129.99 (Amazon / Govee), or the 328-foot string for $249.99 (Amazon). The Matter-compatible lights offer an IP65 rating so you can use them indoors and outdoors, but their dro-style head LEDs aren’t as attractive as the Festavia’s. Plus, the Festavia offer nicer preset scenes.

Ring Battery Doorbell Plus

Ring’s Battery Doorbell Plus offers great video quality, a head-to-toe view, and a removable battery for easy charging. It works with Alexa and can send alerts for people and packages with a Ring Home subscription.

Where to Buy:

• $149.99 $79.99 at Amazon
• $149.99 $79.99 at The Home Depot
• $149.99 $79.99 at Target

Google Nest Doorbell (second-gen, battery)

With 24/7 recording, facial recognition, reliable smart alerts, and some free video recording, Google’s second-generation battery doorbell is a great option for home monitoring.

Where to Buy:

• $179.99 $119.99 at Amazon
• $179.99 $119.99 at Target
• $179.99 $119.99 at Best Buy

• The Google Nest Cam — which can be used both indoors and outside — is now available for its lowest price in months at Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store, where you can pick it up for $119 ($60 off). The battery-powered security cam features 24/7 recording, smart alerts for people, pets, and vehicles, and up to 60 days of video history (with a Nest Aware subscription). You can also snag a two-pack for around $228.99 ($101 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store, or a three-pack for $349.99 ($100 off) at Best Buy and the Google Store.
• If you’re looking for an inexpensive smart thermostat that offers a lot of value, Amazon’s Smart Thermostat is down to $51.99 ($28 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target — the best price we’ve seen all year. It lacks native temperature sensors, but it can learn and adapt to your habits over time, which is rather impressive for the price. It also integrates well with Alexa, though it doesn’t support other voice assistants. Read our review.

Amazon Smart Plug

Amazon’s aptly titled Smart Plug doesn’t require a hub and lets you add Alexa functionality to any outlet, which, in turn, allows you to control a range of devices with just your voice.

Where to Buy:

• $24.99 $12.99 at Amazon
• $24.99 at Best Buy
• $24.99 $12.99 at The Home Depot

Google Nest Learning Thermostat (4th-gen)

The striking fourth-gen Nest is $50 off right now and a great addition to your smart home if you’re looking to save money on heating and cooling. With a bigger screen, better dial, and a room sensor included, this is one of the best thermostats you can buy. Read my full review.

Where to Buy:

• $279.99 $209 at Amazon (gold color)
• $279.99 $229.99 at Google
• $279.99 $229.99 at Best Buy

• You can buy the latest Echo Show 8 for $159.99 ($20 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is the best price we’ve seen on the eight-inch smart display. The fabric-wrapped Show 8 offers improved sound over the prior model, along with a better LCD display with wider viewing angles and higher contrast. It’s snappier, slimmer, and sleeker; it’s also designed to run on Amazon’s revamped Alexa Plus AI assistant. Read our impressions of the latest Echo Show 8.
• Reolink’s Video Doorbell is one of our top recommendations if you don’t want to pay a subscription fee to view footage, and it’s returned to its all-time low of $76.99 ($43 off) at Amazon, Newegg, and Reolink’s website. The wired doorbell can record clear 2K HDR footage and store video clips locally on a microSD card, the Reolink Hub, or an FTP server. It’s also compatible with both Amazon Alexa and Google Home, but not Apple Home.

Aura Aspen

The Aura Aspen digital frame lets you upload photos via the companion app, cloud services, or email from anywhere. Its 12-inch LCD display features slim bezels, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and an antiglare screen that mimics the look of real photos.

Where to Buy:

• $229 $199 at Amazon
• $229 $199 at Aura
• $229.99 $199.99 at Best Buy

Nuki Smart Lock

A rare discount on our favorite retrofit door lock, the Nuki Smart Lock, makes it easy to upgrade your home security system without replacing your entire lock and supports every major smart home platform through Matter-over-Thread. Read our full review.

Where to Buy:

• $159 $101.76 at Amazon (with on-page coupon)

• Makers of some of the best smart switches, Lutron Caseta is offering its customary 20 percent off select products for Cyber Monday. A great option if you don’t have neutral wires, you can pick up the Smart Diva Dimmer Kit for $99.95 at Amazon to get started with smart switches.
• The excellent Matter-over-Thread Eve Energy smart plug, which features energy monitoring and works with Matter, Apple Home, Alexa, Google, SmartThings, and more, is down to $33.20 (about $10 off) on Amazon.

Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener

Meross makes a handy add-on that can transform a variety of garage door models into smart doors that you can open remotely. It works with Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings.

Where to Buy:

• $59.99 $39.99 at Amazon

Aqara Smart Lock U300

The first single-borehole smart lock to work with Apple Home Key, the U300 can also be unlocked with a fingerprint, making it an easy, smart addition for shed, garage, or home office doors. It works over Thread and is Matter compatible, with up to a 10-month battery life.

Where to Buy:

• $229.99 $149.49 at Amazon
• $229.99 $183.99 at Best Buy

Robot vacuum and mop deals

Dreame X40 Ultra

Where to Buy:

• $1199.99 $499.99 at Amazon
• $1199.99 $499.99 at Dreame
• $1199.99 $499.99 at Best Buy

• The Dreame X50 Ultra recently replaced the X40 Ultra as our favorite mopping bot for hardwood floors, and it’s currently available for an all-time low of $799.99 (50 percent off) from Amazon and Dreame. In addition to having a higher 20,000Pa of suction power and an improved dual rubber roller system, it has a motorized “swing arm” leg that allows it to climb over higher thresholds (up to 6cm), so it can maneuver around even more spaces than its predecessor.
• You can buy the Dyson 360 Vis Nav from Amazon, Best Buy, and Dyson for around $399.95 ($600 off), its best price to date. Although it lacks an auto-empty dock, the powerful robovac is one of the best robot vacuums we’ve tested for carpets, boasting a whopping 65 air watts of suction. It also features a large roller brush that can reach the edges of rooms and into corners, along with a removable 500ml dustbin. That said, it struggles with more complex floor plans, so it’s best suited to simpler setups. Read our impressions.

Ecovacs Deebot T50 Max Pro

Ecovacs’ Deebot T50 Max Pro is a robot vacuum / mop combo with tangle-resistant brushes, a side brush for cleaning corners, and deep carpet cleaning capabilities. Its charging station thoroughly cleans and dries its mopping pads automatically upon its return, and it supports Matter, allowing you to easily integrate it into any smart home.

Where to Buy:

• $799.99 $499.99 at Amazon
• $799.99 $499.99 at Best Buy
• $799.99 $499.99 at Walmart

• Roborock’s Saros 10R is on sale for $999.99 ($500 off) at Amazon and directly from Roborock, which is a record low price. The pricey robovac uses an AdaptLift chassis to help it climb over high room transitions, and can even lift its mop pads out of the way when they’re not needed. It’s also exceptionally powerful, with 22,000Pa of suction, lidar navigation, and a vibrating mopping pad.
• The Eufy Omni S1 Pro is also matching its all-time low of $699.99 ($800 off) at Amazon and from Anker’s online storefront (with promo code WS24T2080111). The robovac features an 11.4-inch roller mop and dual spinning side brushes, which work in tandem to leave your hardwood floors spotless. Plus, with 8,000Pa of suction power, it’s decent at picking up dirt and debris from carpets; it also features solid AI-powered obstacle avoidance, so you don’t need to worry about it getting stuck in clutter.
• The Eufy X10 Pro Omni, our favorite midrange robot vacuum / mop, has returned to its Prime Day low of $449.99 ($450 off) at Amazon and Anker’s online storefront (with code WS24T2351). The X10 Pro Omni is particularly great for cleaning up carpets and tiles, thanks to its 8,000Pa of suction power. It also features reliable AI-powered obstacle detection, dual oscillating brushes for mopping up floors, and a dock that handles auto-emptying, washing, and refilling.

Tapo RV30 Max Plus

Our favorite budget-friendly robot vacuum offers high-end features, including room-specific cleaning, a capable mop, carpet boost, and smart navigation. It also features an auto-empty dock.

Where to Buy:

• $329.99 $199.99 at Amazon (with code 30RV30MPLUS)
• $329.99 $199.99 at TP-Link (with code 30RV30MPLUS)

Ecovacs Deebot X9 Pro Omni

The Ecovacs Deebot X9 Pro Omni features an extendable mop that can clean itself, just like its predecessor. However, it also features Ecovacs’ Boosted Large-Airflow Suction Technology, which optimizes the airflow path from intake to exhaust, rather than relying solely on suction power.

Where to Buy:

• $1299.99 $699.99 at Amazon
• $1299.99 $699.99 at Ecovacs
• $1299.99 $699.99 at Best Buy

Soundbar and speaker deals

Sony Bravia Theater Bar 6

Sony’s Bravia Theater Bar 6 is a 3.1.2 audio system, meaning the soundbar comes with a wireless subwoofer and features multiple drivers pointed at you — and upward — for playing Dolby Atmos audio. You can also purchase the soundbar in a bundle with rear speakers if you want a more traditional surround sound setup.

Where to Buy:

• $699.99 $498 at Amazon
• $699.99 $499.99 at Best Buy
• $699.99 $499.99 at Sony

• JBL’s Charge 6 is marked down to an all-time low of $129.95 ($70 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. The powerful Bluetooth speaker carries an IP68 rating, offers up to 28 hours of playback per charge, and uses JBL’s AI Sound Boost tool to prevent distortion at higher volumes. You can also plug your phone into its USB-C port and use it as a battery pack, but JBL says it can’t be used to top off a laptop.
• The JBL Flip 7 has returned to its all-time low of around $109.95 ($40 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and REI. The portable Bluetooth speaker features several notable upgrades over its predecessor, including a more rugged design, an enhanced tweeter, and an additional two hours of playtime. It also features JBL’s AI Sound Boost technology, which can boost the speaker’s volume without introducing distortion, as well as a PushLock system that lets you attach interchangeable accessories, such as the included wrist strap.

Echo Pop

The Echo Pop is one of Amazon’s smallest Alexa-enabled smart speakers. It offers a unique semisphere form factor and can function as an Eero mesh Wi-Fi extender.

Where to Buy:

• $39.99 $21.99 at Amazon
• $39.99 $21.99 at Best Buy
• $39.99 $21.99 at The Home Depot

Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 4

The Wonderboom 4 might feature a compact design, but it still delivers big sound for its diminutive size. It also carries an IP67 rating, meaning it’s both water- and dust-resistant (it can even float if you need it to).

Where to Buy:

• $99.99 $59.99 at Amazon
• $99.99 $59.99 at Best Buy
• $99.99 $59.99 at Walmart

• The Bose SoundLink Plus is on sale for $179.99 ($90 off) at Amazon, which is its best price to date. Despite being about the size of a 20-ounce water bottle, it delivers loud, impressive sound with a rugged IP67 build and USB-C charging. It supports multipoint Bluetooth connectivity and, unlike the Micro, doubles as a 15W power bank, with longer battery life that lasts up to 20 hours. Read our review.
• The new Echo Dot Max is on sale for $89.99 ($10 off), its best price to date, at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. The snappy smart speaker delivers significantly improved audio compared to its predecessor, the fourth-gen Echo, delivering richer bass and a crisper sound. It also supports Matter, Thread, and Zigbee, and comes with Alexa Plus enabled out of the box. Read our review.

Bose TV Speaker

The Bose TV Speaker delivers a rich, immersive sound in a compact design. It features a three-speaker setup, a dedicated dialog mode, and Bluetooth connectivity, so you can use the soundbar to listen to music or podcasts.

Where to Buy:

• $279 $199 at Amazon
• $279 $199 at Bose
• $279 $199.99 at Best Buy

• Another soundbar that delivers surprisingly full sound and Dolby Atmos performance for its size is the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar. It’s currently priced at around $699 ($200 off) for Cyber Monday at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy, which is its best price to date. It sounds great with both movies and music, and has a nice slim profile that’s low enough for practically any TV.
• The latest Bose SoundLink Micro is on sale for a new all-time low of $109 ($20 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. The rugged Micro is the brand’s smallest Bluetooth speaker, but it still offers big sound and up to 12 hours of battery life. The second-gen model also features a USB-C charging port, an IP67 rating for full water and dust resistance, and a handy utility strap, so you can clip the speaker to your bag using a carabiner.

Sonos Beam (second-gen)

The latest Sonos Beam fits into the middle of Sonos’ soundbar lineup. It supports Dolby Atmos through virtualized surround sound and offers eARC compatibility with newer TVs. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $499 $349 at Amazon
• $499 $349 at Best Buy
• $499 $349 at Sonos

• The Sonos Era 100 is the company’s entry-level smart speaker, one you can grab for $169 ($50 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo. The speaker has a single woofer and two tweeters, which allows it to play music in stereo — though you’ll get a far wider soundstage by pairing two Era 100s together. You can stream music to it over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, or connect it to a turntable if you pick up an optional 3.5mm to USB-C adapter. Read our review.
• You can pick up Sonos’ Era 300 at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo for $379 ($100 off), which is $20 shy of the smart speaker’s lowest price to date. It offers the same connectivity options as the aforementioned Era 100, plus the ability to play Dolby Atmos audio with surprising depth. You can also use a pair of them as rear speakers in a surround sound system when connected to a Beam 2 or Arc Ultra soundbar. Read our review.

Sonos Roam 2

Like its predecessor, the Sonos Roam 2 is a compact and travel-friendly Bluetooth speaker that easily syncs up with Sonos’ home audio ecosystem via Wi-Fi. While it looks much like the original, the Roam 2 has some small quality-of-life improvements, like a separate button for Bluetooth connections. Read our hands-on impressions.

Where to Buy:

• $179 $139 at Amazon
• $179 $139 at Sonos
• $179 $139 at Walmart

Sonos Move 2

With double the battery life of its predecessor and better-sounding stereo audio, the Sonos Move 2’s improvements don’t stop there. It supports line-in audio, can stream Bluetooth audio to other Sonos speakers, and more. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $499 $399 at Amazon
• $499 $399 at Best Buy
• $499 $399 at Sonos

Laptop deals

Microsoft Surface Laptop, 13-inch

Microsoft’s slightly smaller, entry-level Surface Laptop trims some of the size and a few features from its bigger 13.8-inch counterpart, but it maintains excellent battery life and solid performance. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $899.99 $549.99 at Amazon
• $899.99 $749.99 at Best Buy

• In addition to the base-model 13-inch Surface Laptop hitting a new low of $549.99 ($350 off) at Amazon, the same model with 512GB storage is down to $729.99 ($270 off) at Amazon.
• If you want a Surface with a slightly bigger, nicer display and a higher-end Snapdragon X Elite processor, the Surface Laptop 7th Edition (13.8-inch) from 2024 is on sale for $899.99 ($500 off) at Best Buy and Amazon. It’s still a great machine if you prioritize battery life on Windows and want a nice screen with a 120Hz refresh rate and 2304 x 1536 resolution. Read our review.

Microsoft Surface Pro 12-inch

Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro is smaller, with a new design and updated keyboard. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Arm64 Snapdragon X Plus chip. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $799.99 $649.99 at Best Buy

• Microsoft’s flagship 13-inch Surface Pro is also receiving a big discount, selling for as low as $749.99 ($450 off) at Microsoft with a 10-core Snapdragon X Plus chip, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. It’s quite a deal, though the keyboard and stylus are sold separately. The convertible tablet has great battery life and solid performance.
• We’re currently testing the 14-inch HP OmniBook 5 and liking it, especially for the value it offers. It’s very affordable for a laptop with an OLED display and marathon battery life, and it’s around $519.99 ($180 off MSRP) at Amazon and direct from HP. Its base Snapdragon X1 Plus chip isn’t very speedy, but it’s manageable if you’re not going too wild on multitasking. But the star of the show is this nice 1920 x 1200 OLED panel for such a low, low price.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025)

Asus’ ROG Zephyrus G14 is the go-to choice for a portable gaming machine that’s great at regular laptop duties. It’s got a lovely OLED display, great keyboard and trackpad, and solid battery life. The base model with RTX 5060 graphics is fairly thin at around 0.63 inches, while the highest-end model with RTX 5070 Ti is a little thicker.

Where to Buy:

• $1799.99 $1299.99 at Best Buy (5060)
• $2099.99 at Asus (5070)
• $2399.99 $1999.99 at Best Buy (5070 Ti)

• The base Asus ROG Strix G16 gaming laptop with a last-gen Intel Raptor Lake 14650HX CPU, RTX 5060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD is $1,199.99 ($300 off) at Amazon. For a higher-end model that doesn’t skyrocket in price, the Strix G16 with AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX and RTX 5070 Ti is $1,599.99 ($400 off) at Best Buy. Strix models are much chunkier than their ROG Zephyrus cousins, but they’re a better deal if you prioritize performance over portability.

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (16-inch, Intel)

Lenovo’s Legion Pro 7i is a well built gaming laptop with a lovely 2.5K OLED display and a powerful RTX 5080 GPU, enough to handle 4K gaming on an external monitor. Its only major downsides are a lack of face or fingerprint unlocking and Lenovo’s tendency to pre-load some annoying bloatware.

Where to Buy:

• $3499 $2299 at B&H Photo (RTX 5080, 2TB SSD)

• The Lenovo Legion 7i above is one of our preferred gaming laptops if you like a beefy boy with high-end RTX 5080 graphics, but a solid alternative for less is the similarly-specced HP Omen Max 16. The Omen Max 16 with RTX 5080 graphics, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD is just $1,899.99 ($1,400 off) direct from HP. It’s also at Best Buy with a 2TB SSD for $2,559.99 ($600 off), but the one at HP is the screaming deal that you should nab before it’s gone (you can always do your own SSD upgrade later).

HP Victus 15 (2025, RTX 4050)

The Victus 15 is a popular, budget-friendly gaming laptop that now comes with RTX 4050 graphics, more RAM, and an improved 144Hz screen.

Where to Buy:

• $1049.99 $599.99 at Walmart (Intel)
• $899.99 at Best Buy (AMD)

Razer Blade 16 (2025, RTX 5090)

Razer’s latest and greatest version of its Blade 16 laptop returns to a thinner, more travel-friendly chassis. It comes with RTX 50-series GPU options but each configuration features an excellent OLED display. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $2399.99 $1599.99 at Razer (RTX 5060)
• $2799.99 $1899.99 at Razer (RTX 5070)
• $3499.99 at Razer (RTX 5080)

Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514 (2025)

Where to Buy:

• $699 $549 at Best Buy
• $799.99 $769.99 at Acer

• The closest competitor to the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514 is the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, which is on sale for a new low of $599.99 ($50 off) direct from Lenovo. It’s the base model with a non-touch OLED display, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and the power-sipping MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 processor. The higher-end $749 model with a touchscreen that we tested for our review is slightly better, but these kinds of Chromebooks rarely go on sale.

Gaming deals

Nintendo Switch 2

The Nintendo Switch 2 has a 7.9-inch LCD display, magnetically attached Joy-Con 2 controllers, backwards compatibility with most original Switch games, and exclusive titles including Donkey Kong Bananza and Kirby Air Riders. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $499.99 $449.99 at Walmart (Mario Kart World bundle)

Sony DualSense Edge

Sony’s pro-style controller, the DualSense Edge, might suffer from shorter battery life than the standard DualSense model, but it features great software integration with the PlayStation 5 and plenty of customizable components. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $199.99 $159.99 at Amazon
• $199.99 $169.99 at Best Buy
• $199.99 $169.99 at PlayStation Direct

• Nintendo’s Black Friday discounts are still available, allowing you to save $30 on several fantastic Switch titles that every owner should consider playing. Games like Super Mario Odyssey are $30 instead of $60. Some of these price drops aren’t unprecedented, but the timing is good if you’re getting a Switch 2, as some titles have free Switch 2 upgrades that boost visual fidelity. Also, many of the Zelda-themed amiibo that launched alongside Nintendo’s new console are just $10, down from $30.
• Walmart has discounted the G7 HE Wired Xbox Controller to $37.04 ($22 off) when you clip the on-page coupon, which is a new low. The wireless controller features drift-resistant Hall effect joysticks, Hall effect magnetic triggers, and Hall effect analog triggers. You can use GameSir’s Nexus app (available on PC and the Xbox store) to remap buttons and make other adjustments to optimize it for your favorite games.

Steam Deck (LCD)

The Steam Deck is a portable handheld console you can use to play PC games. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $399 $319.2 at Steam (256GB)

• The 32-inch Asus ROG Swift 4K (model PG32UCDM) is one of the most feature-packed OLED gaming monitors on the market, with a 240Hz refresh rate, 90W USB-C charging, a glossy screen coating, and a built-in KVM switch that lets you control different computers with a single mouse and keyboard. Right now, it’s down to $899 at Amazon, which is a big drop from its usual price of $1,299 (nobody tell Nathan Edwards).
• The Backbone Pro can turn any smartphone or smaller tablet with a USB-C port into a more effective handheld, and it’s fallen to a new low of $134.99 ($35 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Backbone’s online store. The controller has an Xbox-like button layout, plus a pair of remappable rear buttons. It’s also compatible with games available on the App Store and Google Play Store, as well as cloud-based titles that are streamable via Xbox Game Pass. The Pro is Backbone’s first controller to support Bluetooth, too, which allows you to use it with everything from a Stream Deck to the latest smart TVs.
• If you have (or soon plan to buy) a Nintendo Switch 2, you may need a microSD Express card if you foresee quickly expanding beyond the console’s internal 256GB of storage, as it’s the only kind of storage you can run Switch 2 games off of. Fortunately, Samsung’s 512GB P9 is down to its lowest price yet, selling for $74.99 (was $99.99) at Amazon.

8BitDo Ultimate 2 Bluetooth Controller

If you want something cheaper — and in some ways better — than Nintendo’s official Pro controller, there’s 8BitDo’s Ultimate 2, which works with the original Switch and Switch 2. It features TMR joysticks with trigger switches for adjusting the feel, as well as vibration and motion-control support.

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 $55.99 at Amazon (white)
• $69.99 $55.99 at Amazon (black)

• Viture’s Luma Pro VR glasses — which put a 120Hz, 1,200p screen on your face — are on sale at Amazon for an all-time low of $424 ($205 off) for a limited time. The glasses can connect to most mobile devices, including the Nintendo Switch 2, and can create the equivalent of a 152-inch screen. You can also connect them to a Mac or PC if you’d like to use a wearable monitor.
• If you’re looking for a new DualSense Wireless Controller, whether for your PS5, PC, or Steam Deck, every color scheme is $20 off for Cyber Monday. Many color options are available at Amazon and Best Buy starting at $54.99 (previously $74.99).
• If your library of physical Nintendo Switch games is growing, you can easily store them in the Jsaux Game Card case for Nintendo Switch 2. Right now, it’s down to $15.99 ($10 off) at Amazon and Jsaux’s online storefront. The carrying case provides 40 dedicated slots for storing both game cartridges and microSD cards, so you can easily carry your collection of physical and digital titles. The case measures around 6 inches wide and is made of durable hardshell plastic, so your games stay protected in your bag.

PlayStation 5 Pro

The “pro” version of Sony’s PlayStation 5 has a bigger GPU, new PSSR AI-based upscaling, advanced ray tracing, and 2TB SSD (with expandable storage). The new features allow for better graphics at higher frame rates, allowing for the blending of “fidelity” and “performance” modes in some games. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $749 $648.99 at Amazon
• $749 $649 at Walmart
• $749 $649.99 at Target

Smartphone deals

Google Pixel 9A

The Pixel 9A adds more robust water resistance and a brighter, bigger screen to what was already a winning formula for a good midrange phone. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $499 $349 at Amazon
• $499 $399 at Best Buy
• $499 $399 at Google

• You can buy the Google Pixel 10 with 128GB of storage at Amazon and Best Buy starting at $549 ($250 off), which matches the lowest price we’ve seen on Google’s base-model handset. The 6.3-inch phone is our top Android pick for most people, one that features an OLED display with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, a snappy Tensor G5 processor, and Qi2 wireless charging via built-in magnets. Read our review.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is still one of the best phones you can buy, even if its “Ultra”-ness is a little diminished. Two telephotos, a built-in stylus, and a big screen are the main attractions. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $1299.99 $899.99 at Amazon (256GB)
• $1299.99 $899.99 at Best Buy (256GB)
• $1419.99 $1019.99 at Amazon (512GB)

Charging accessory deals

Anker Laptop Power Bank

Anker’s 25,000mAh power bank sports two built-in USB-C cables (one of which is retractable), plus one USB-C and USB-A port. It tops out at 165W when charging two devices simultaneously, or 130W when charging three or four.

Where to Buy:

• $119.99 $87.99 at Amazon
• $119.99 $87.99 at Best Buy
• $119.99 $87.99 at Anker

Baseus Free2Pull Retractable USB-C Cable 100W

Baseus’ slick USB-C charger supports 100W passthrough and takes a puck-like form when not in use, with male connectors on either side that retract inward with a quick tug.

Where to Buy:

• $16.99 $9.96 at Amazon (3.3-foot)
• $21.99 $15.19 at Amazon (6.6-foot)
• $16.99 $11.89 at Baseus (3.3-foot, with code BF30)

• Need a powerful travel adapter for all of your USB-C devices? Tessan’s 140W travel charger supports one plug (it supports types C, G, A, and I), and it features three USB-C ports and one USB-A port. You can get up to 140W max by using the USB-C ports labeled C1 and C2, making it a great pick for gaming devices, tablets, and even some laptops. It’s down to $53.99 at Amazon from its original $77 price.
• If you’re planning on going camping next year, Amazon and Anker have marked the Solix C2000 down to $679.15 ($181 off). The 2,400W generator is equipped with five AC outlets and a 2,048Wh battery that can power a fridge for up to 32 hours, a Wi-Fi router for up to 105 hours, or a TV for over 16 hours. It also has a TT-30 port for powering an RV, plus three USB-C ports and a USB-A port for charging smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other portable gadgets. Also great for a power outage at home. It can be charged through the wall or solar panels.

Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (3-in-1, Dock Stand)

Anker’s MagGo Wireless Charging Station features a MagSafe charging stand, a Qi wireless charging pad, and an Apple Watch charger, allowing you to charge three devices simultaneously. It also comes with a 40W USB-C power adapter and cable.

Where to Buy:

• $89.99 $75.99 at Best Buy
• $89.99 $75.99 at Amazon
• $89.99 $75.99 at Anker (with code WSPDV2OAFIC6)

Anker 140W 2-in-1 USB-C to USB-C Cable

Why settle for a flimsy USB-C cable that can only charge a single gadget when you can opt for a braided one designed to charge two at once? Anker’s two-headed cable supports charging speeds of up to 140W split between two gadgets.

Where to Buy:

• $22.99 $12 at Amazon (white)
• $22.99 $15 at Amazon (black)
• $22.99 $15 at Anker

• Nomad’s ChargeKey V2 is a six-inch USB-C cable with a loop that allows you to attach it to your keyring, and it’s available for $22 ($7 off) at Nomad. The cable can carry up to 240W of power — enough to charge most laptops at their fastest speed — and data at up to 10Gbps. The accessory is a convenient way to make sure you never leave home without a charging cable.
• Nomad’s 100W Slim Adapter is thin enough to fit behind most furniture, has two USB-C ports, and is fast enough to charge most laptops at their maximum speed. Amazon and Nomad have marked it down to around $59 ($20 off), which is a new all-time low. The svelte power adapter is also an excellent choice for travelers who want to maximize their backpack space.
• Anker’s 10,000mAh Power Bank, a solid 30W battery pack, is currently on sale for $29.99 ($15 off) at Amazon and Anker’s online storefront. The power bank has nearly enough juice to top off an iPhone 15 Pro twice, and it can charge two devices simultaneously using its built-in cable and USB-C port. It’s also a power adapter that can plug directly into an outlet.

EcoFlow Rapid Pro Power Bank

The 27,650mAh battery pack has three USB-C ports (one 140W port, plus two 65W ports), a two-foot-long retractable 140W USB-C cable — enough to charge four devices at once — and it has a maximum power output of a whopping 300W.

Where to Buy:

• $219.99 $149 at Amazon
• $219.99 $149.99 at EcoFlow

Board game deals

Catan (6th Edition)

In Catan, up to four players strategically compete and trade for resources. The iconic board game ends when one player reaches 10 “victory points,” which is achieved by constructing a sprawling civilization of roads, settlements, and cities using sheep, ore, wheat, and wood.

Where to Buy:

• $54.99 $29.99 at Amazon
• $54.99 $29.99 at Target

• You can pick up Monopoly Deal on sale for $5.59 (about $3 off) at Amazon, which is one of its best prices to date. To win in this card game, players must be the first to collect three property sets using cards that correspond to spaces on the Monopoly board. There are no dice to roll like there are in the board game, but action cards let you collect rent, steal, or swap properties to get ahead. It also takes about 45 minutes to play, which is far more approachable than an actual game of Monopoly.
• Happy Salmon is currently matching its all-time low of $6.50 (about $7 off) at Amazon. It’s one of the best icebreakers at social gatherings, for both adults and parents alike, and it takes just minutes to learn and about an hour and a half to play. Up to eight players can get in on the action, which will have you doing “fish bumps” in no time.
• Wits & Wagers, which recently received a callout in our 2025 Installer gift guide, is down to $33.99 ($11 off) at Amazon and North Star Game Studio. It drops to this price pretty frequently; however, if you’re looking for a trivia-inspired party game to play with family annd friends over the holidays — one that involves a little good, old-fashioned betting — it’s great option to pick up for Cyber Monday.

Exploding Kittens (Party Pack)

In Exploding Kittens, each player draws cards until someone draws the titular Exploding Kitten. If the player doesn’t have the proper diffuse or action card, they’re out. You can play defensively by using cards that skip your turn or prevent another player from playing an action card, and the last person to avoid an explosion wins.

Where to Buy:

• $29.99 $14.99 at Amazon
• $29.99 $14.99 at Walmart

Azul

Azul is a game in which you arrange patterned tiles in order to create the most beautiful tapestry possible. Arranging tiles in a strategic sequence will help you build your score while limiting your opponents’ ability to grow theirs.

Where to Buy:

• $39.99 $21.49 at Amazon
• $39.99 $21.49 at Target

Lego deals

Lego Boarding the Tantive IV

This 502-piece set re-creates the heart-stopping scene when Darth Vader and a platoon of Stormtroopers board the Tantive IV in the original Star Wars. It comes with seven minifigures, including the formidable Lord of the Sith and two Rebel fleet troopers. You can also flick a lever to “blast” open the main door.

Where to Buy:

• $54.99 $38.49 at Target

Lego Animal Crossing Fly with Dodo Airlines Airport

This kid-friendly, 292-piece playset is a nice little homage to Animal Crossing New Horizons, especially if your kiddo or someone you know has a soft spot for planes… or extinct, flightless birds.

Where to Buy:

• $37.99 $22.99 at Amazon
• $37.99 $25.99 at Best Buy

• Lego’s Icon Pac-Man Arcade building set is a throwback to one of the most iconic arcade cabinets of all time, and it’s down to $188.99 ($81 off), a new all-time low at Amazon. The 2,651-piece set allows you to build a pretty solid replica of the arcade cabinet, complete with a light-up coin slot, movable joystick, and pushable buttons.
• Lego’s Super Mario Captain Toad’s Camp Building set is a 159-piece kit that’s perfect for any fan of the Mushroom Kingdom, and it’s down $11.99 ($3 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. It consists of Captain Toad himself, along with a tent, cooking equipment, and a structure to explore.

Lego NASA Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle – LRV

Who doesn’t love space? Lego’s 1,913-piece version of the Apollo Lunar Lander includes brick-ified versions of sensors, tools, and a battery pack with heating and cooling elements. It also comes with a miniature plaque displaying statistics about NASA’s actual LRV, which serves as a nice complement to the completed kit.

Where to Buy:

• $219.99 $153.99 at Amazon
• $219.99 $153.99 at Target

Other Verge favorites

ChomChom Roller Pet Hair Remover

The ChomChom is a reusable roller that works great for removing unwanted pet hair from furniture, allowing you to skip lint rollers, vacuuming, and other cleaning tools in a pinch.

Where to Buy:

• $27.99 $14.7 at Amazon
• $31.95 $24.99 at Chewy

LifeStraw personal water filter

LifeStraw’s basic filter removes unwanted viruses, bacteria, and microplastics as you drink, giving you a safe way to hydrate no matter where you are.

Where to Buy:

• $17.95 $9.99 at Amazon
• $17.95 $9.99 at Walmart

• The HHKB Professional Hybrid Type-S — the prince of Topre keyboards — is down to $259 (at checkout) on the official Happy Hacking Keyboard store, with a free travel case, lid, and wrist rest thrown in. This sub-60% keyboard has all the keys you need, plus a rock-solid Bluetooth connection. The Type-S version has preinstalled silencing rings for the best stock Topre experience you can get.
• The Classic-GLO, the glow-in-the-dark version of one of our favorite DIY keyboard kits, is down to $75 (from 89) at NovelKeys. You’ll need to supply your own switches, stabilizers, and keycaps, but it’s a fun project with a great payoff.
• The 2024 Tile Pro is on sale at Amazon for $24.99 (about $11 off), which is just $2 shy of its all-time low. The handy location tracker is our top pick for Android users, but it also works well with iOS devices. While it’s not quite as precise as Apple’s AirTag, it can still help you keep tabs on your belongings from up to 500 feet away. And if you subscribe to the $14.99-per-month Life360 Gold plan, it can even send SOS alerts.

Amazon Echo Frames with a free Echo Spot

Amazon’s Echo Frames are down to an all-time low of $114.99, plus the prescription-ready models come with a free Echo Spot smart alarm clock. The smart glasses resemble a pair of regular eyeglasses but can be used to listen to music, take calls, and perform a range of Alexa-enabled tasks. They feature up to six hours of audio playback with their open-ear design.

Where to Buy:

• $299.99 $114.99 at Amazon (original)

Hoto 3.6V Electric Screwdriver Kit

Hoto’s electric screwdriver is perfect for making small- to medium-sized repairs around the house. In addition to a USB-C port, the screwdriver comes with a magnetic case and 25 steel bits.

Where to Buy:

• $79.99 $29.99 at Amazon
• $79.99 $59.99 at Hoto

• If you’re having trouble falling asleep, a sunrise alarm clock can help bring calm to your bedtime routine. Thankfully, you can snag the Hatch Restore 3 from Hatch’s online storefront for an all-time low of $139.99 ($30 off) through December 1st (discount applies at checkout). The Restore 3 features more than 50 sleep sounds and 18 adjustable light colors, with access to hundreds more through the optional Hatch Plus subscription, which runs $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year.
• The Nomad Tracking Card Air is currently down to $22 ($7 off) on Nomad’s website. The tracker is about the size of two standard credit cards smashed together (it’s officially 1.7mm thick), so it should have no problem slipping into the slimmest of wallets. It features a sturdy polycarbonate body that can withstand daily wear, as well as integration with Apple’s robust Find My network. That means that if you lose it, you can view its last known or current location in the Find My app.
• Criterion Collection 4K Blu-rays, 1080p Blu-rays, and DVDs are up to 50 percent off at Barnes & Noble and Amazon right now. The sale at Barnes & Noble runs through December 7th, giving you a great opportunity to stock up on physical media. Some of the titles on sale include Michael Mann’s Thief, starring the late, great James Caan, and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
• If you’re an avid concert goer who’d like to retain your hearing later in life — and who wouldn’t? — Loop’s ultra-comfortable Experience 2 earpugs are on sale at Amazon for $27.95 ($11 off), matching their best price to date. The stylish earplugs won’t reduce noise as effectively as a custom set; however, they do carry a noise reduction rating of 12dB, which is totally adequate for that occasional Turnstile set.

Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1) smart glasses

Developed in partnership with Ray-Ban, Meta’s last-gen smart glasses can perform a range of tasks. They can capture 1080p video and play music, and thanks to a suite of AI-based features, you can even use them to translate from a myriad of languages in real time. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $299 $238.99 at Amazon
• $299 $239.2 at Best Buy
• $299 $239.2 at Target

Ninja Creami Scoop & Swirl

Ninja’s clever 2-in-1 machine can spin up soft serve and traditional hard scoops in a few easy steps, not to mention creamy milkshakes, gelato, and frozen yogurt.

Where to Buy:

• $349.99 $279.99 at Amazon
• $349.99 $279.99 at Best Buy
• $349.99 $279.99 at SharkNinja

• Headspace is offering 50 percent off an annual subscription, bringing the price down to $34.99 ($35 off) through December 4th. The discount only applies to your first year; after that, the subscription will renew at full price. Headspace offers access to guided meditations, online therapy, mental health coaching, and more. At a time when the world feels more dire than ever, Headspace can help bring some calm to your daily life.
• JisuLife’s folding USB fan, a mainstay of our gift guides, is on sale at Amazon in select colors starting at just $11.72 (about $14 off the MSRP). The fan’s rechargeable battery will keep you cool for hours, whether you’re holding it or propping it up on a table, and it features a built-in 2,000mAh power bank in case you need a quick way to juice your phone or another electronic device.
• One of our gift guide mainstays, the six-quart Instant Pot Duo Plus, is discounted to $59.99 ($80 off) at Amazon and Target right now, matching its lowest price to date. The stainless steel multicooker is an excellent set-it-and-forget-it device in many ways, as it allows you to steam, sauté, pressure cook, slow cook, and engage in a variety of simple culinary endeavors without having to pony up for a host of kitchen appliances.

Tessan 140W Universal Travel Adapter

Tessan’s 140W Universal Travel Adapter has three USB-C ports, one USB-A port, an outlet, and three sets of retractable prongs. It has the necessary hardware to charge most laptops at full speed, and be used in over 226 countries.

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 $53.99 at Amazon (black)
• $69.99 $59.39 at Amazon (white)
• $69.99 at Tessen

Medicube Booster Pro + TXA Niacinamide serum

If you’ve got a Korean skincare nerd in your life, sighing at night, doomscrolling because TikTok keeps shoving influencers yapping about how Hailey Bieber uses this into their feed? This is a neat little splurge gift for them at a great price.

Where to Buy:

• $299.99 $169 at Amazon

• The 15-inch Skylight Calendar is an excellent tool for organizing multiple schedules without sending people reminders, and it’s currently on sale for $239.99 ($60 off) directly from Skylight. Once an event is added to the calendar, it’s automatically synced with other people’s devices, whether they use Apple’s Calendar app, Google Calendar, Outlook, or other popular services. Color coding makes it easy to see whose event it is at a glance, too, whether you’re looking at your device or the Skylight itself.
• MasterClass is currently offering a 50 percent discount on any annual subscription, knocking the price of its least expensive plan to $50. The e-learning platform allows you to watch videos courses taught by famous people in their field, including Amanda Gorman, Ringo Starr, David Lynch, and Kevin Hart. You can take courses at your own pace, and re-watch lessons as many times as you’d like.
• Warmups and post-workout cooldowns are easy to skip, but the Theragun Mini Plus may help you look forward to them. Fortunately, Amazon, Best Buy, and Target have all marked the triangle-shaped massage gun down to around $237.99 ($62 off) for Cyber Monday. The Theragun Mini Plus can operate at three temperatures and vibration levels to help provide relief. Presets available within Theragun’s app can also help you optimize pressure and speed based on the part of your body that you’re working on.

Nex Playground

What if the dream of Microsoft’s Kinect lived on? It does in the Nex Playground, an all-in-one, motion-controlled console filled with kid-friendly games. Exhaust and entertain your little ones. You’re welcome.

Where to Buy:

• $249 $199 at Walmart
• $249 $199.99 at Best Buy
• $249 $199 at Amazon

Logitech Casa

The Logitech Casa is a compact (and sleek) kit of accessories that can give you a more ergonomically-friendly laptop setup, including a stand, keyboard, and trackpad.

Where to Buy:

• $179.99 $149.99 at Amazon
• $179.99 $149.99 at Best Buy
• $179.99 $149.99 at Logitech

• If you want a convenient, compact way to connect older accessories to your new Mac Mini, Best Buy has discounted Satechi’s Mac Mini M4 Hub down to a new low of $69.99 ($30 off). The USB-C hub sits below your Mac Mini without restricting airflow, and has three USB-A ports, an SD card reader, and an M.2 NVMe SSD slot. It’s an easy, tool-free way to make extra storage accessible to your Mac Mini without plugging in a portable SSD.
• Robot vacuums are overrated. Black & Decker’s rechargeable Furbuster — now on sale at Amazon and Chewy for $77.79 (about $42 off), its lowest price of the year — is a great handheld alternative that’s well-suited for picking up fur, dirt, and other unwanted debris, especially when you tack on the extra-long crevice tool or the included motorized pet brush.
• Xgimi’s MoGo 4 is a battery-powered, 1080p projector that’s available for a new low of $399 ($100 off) at Amazon and Xgimi. The projector features a 450-lumen bulb, a pair of 6W speakers, and a battery that can last up to 2.5 hours on a single charge. A bundle comprising the projector and its PowerBase Stand is also on sale at Amazon for $439 ($110 off), if you want an additional five hours of battery life.

Insta360 Link 2

The Insta360 Link 2 offers the same auto-swiveling design as its excellent predecessor, only in a smaller form factor. It also offers a slate of new features, including group tracking and no-follow zones.

Where to Buy:

• $199.99 $149.99 at Amazon
• $199.99 $149.99 at Best Buy
• $199.99 $149.99 at B&H Photo

Fellow Stagg EKG Electric Kettle

Fellow’s handsome gooseneck kettle lets you easily choose your desired water temperature and coffee time via a colored LCD display and built-in stopwatch, making it an ideal companion for pour-over connoisseurs everywhere.

Where to Buy:

• $179.95 $143.95 at Amazon
• $179.95 $143.96 at Fellow
• $179.95 $143.95 at Williams Sonoma

• You can buy the Insta360 X5 at Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from Insta360’s online storefront for a new low price of $464.99 ($85 off), with Insta360 throwing in a free hardshell case. The 360-degree action camera delivers sharper, more detailed images than its predecessor with improved low-light performance. Specifically, it now allows you to capture 4K footage at up to 120fps instead of 100fps, and shoot 8K video at up to 30fps or 5.7K at 60fps, while offering support for user-replaceable lenses with a $29.99 kit. Read our review.
• Smoked food is delicious, but can be intimidating to cook yourself. Brisk-It’s Zelos-450 Electric Smoker lets you manage all of its settings using an app on your phone, has beginner-friendly, guided recipes, and it’s $293.14 ($156.85 off) at Amazon for Prime members. We’ve tried the pellet smoker ourselves, and found it very easy to use — even on stressful cooking days like Thanksgiving.
• Gozney’s Tread is one of our favorite pizza ovens, and it’s available for $399.99 ($100 off) from Amazon and direct from Gozney. The Tread is relatively light and features handles on top, making it easy to move the oven in and out of a car. It can get up to 950 degrees Fahrenheit, which is necessary for cooking a proper Neapolitan-style pizza, and it’s big enough to cook a 12-inch pie.
• If you crave homemade barbecued food while you’re cooped up indoors, GE’s Profile smart indoor smoker can help you cook meat and veggies on your countertop, and it’s $424.75 ($275 off) at Amazon. The smoker uses a heating element to cook the food, while simultaneously burning wood pellets to infuse smoky flavors into it. The results were surprisingly good in our tests. Read our review.

Glocusent Neck Reading Light

Glocuscent’s rechargeable book light hangs around your neck to illuminate whatever you’re reading, while offering adjustable brightness and warmth settings.

Where to Buy:

• $38.99 $15.99 at Amazon (with Prime)
• $38.99 $18.99 at Walmart
• $38.99 $23.39 at Glocusent

Bird Buddy Pro

Bird Buddy’s charming, camera-equipped feeder identifies and snaps shots of each bird that stops by. It’s at an all-time low, likely because a new version is coming soon. See it in action in our smart garden video!

Where to Buy:

• $329 $189 at Amazon (solar)
• $329 $99 at Bird Buddy Lite (non-solar)
• $311.25 $189 at Chewy (solar)

• While the Fujifilm X Half is fun to use, that asking price of $849.99 is a tough pill to swallow. Thankfully, though, you can snag the digital point-and-shoot at a discount right now for around $649 (about $200 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Fujifilm’s online storefront. The X Half comes with a 1-inch sensor, a fixed 32mm-equivalent f/2.8 lens, and features that make it feel like you’re shooting with an old-school analogue camera, including vintage film simulations and a mode that even requires you to manually “advance” the roll between shots.
• If Apple’s Studio Display is out of your price range — it’s sure as hell out of mine — you can pick up a comparable monitor for less than half the price. The 27-inch KTC H27P3 5K monitor is currently down to $534.99 ($135 off) at Amazon. The H27P3 has an IPS display with 5120 x 2880 resolution, 60Hz refresh rate, HDR support, 65W USB-C PD charging (for a single-cable connection to a laptop), along with DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 ports.

Xreal One smart glasses

The Xreal One aren’t the most affordable augmented-reality glasses available, but they are some of the best for displaying movies and games on the go. You can connect them via USB-C to your smartphone, tablet, or handheld gaming PC.

Where to Buy:

• $499.99 $399 at Amazon
• $499.99 $399 at Xreal

De’Longhi Nespresso Vertuo Plus Coffee and Espresso Maker

This machine can do both coffee and espresso, depending on the pods you get. Each purchase comes with a sampler box, so you can figure out what you like.

Where to Buy:

• $169 $109.99 at Amazon

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Soundcore’s Space One headphones are a Cyber Monday steal at just $68

1 Dec 2025, 2:00 pm by John.Higgins

I have a lot of headphones that come through my home every year — and I mean a lot. Many of them are at the higher end of most people’s budget (and getting more expensive due to tariffs), but you don’t have to spend top dollar to get great performance. Sure, a budget pair of headphones can’t necessarily go toe-to-toe (or ear-to-ear) with flagships from Sony, Bose, or Sennheiser. Even so, there are cans for under $100 that deliver impressive performance for the price. One of those is the Soundcore Space One, which are on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart for an all-time low of $67.99 for Cyber Monday.

Soundcore Space One

Where to Buy:

• $99 $67.99 at Amazon
• $99.99 $67.99 at Best Buy
• $99.99 $67.99 at Walmart

The Space One are a couple years old at this point, but they still hold up as a great budget option. They’re incredibly comfortable for long listening sessions, and they have the battery life — up to 40 hours with ANC enabled — that will outlast even the longest flights. Since they’re over-ear headphones, they have good passive sound isolation. Once you turn on the active noise cancellation, though, they do an excellent job blocking out lower frequencies, like airplane drones and nearby chatter. They don’t measure up to the Sony WH-1000XM6 or Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones in their ANC effect or sound quality, but they offer admirable performance for a fraction of the price of those headphones.

The high and low frequencies are a bit elevated on the Space One, so they sound a bit bassy and sizzly by default, but you can try over 20 different presets or tweak the sound yourself with an eight-band equalizer in the Anker companion app. Also included is HearID Sound tuning, which guides you through some comparative listening questions to adjust the sound to your preference. The app also has a loudness meter to let you know when what you’re listening to gets too loud and potentially dangerous to your ears.

One way Anker managed to cut costs on the headphones is by including a cloth carrying bag instead of a traditional carrying case, so you may not want to be as carefree about throwing them into your backpack. But beyond the case, there’s a lot to like about the Soundcore Space One. With great ANC and sound, a comfortable fit, and long battery life, getting the Soundcore Space One is a good way to spend $68.

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The race to AGI-pill the pope

1 Dec 2025, 2:00 pm by Robert Hart

Pope Leo XIV probably isn’t the first person you picture when conversation turns to Artificial General Intelligence doomsday scenarios. But last month, AGI researcher John-Clark Levin found himself inside the Vatican on a mission to put those concerns in front of the pope.

Levin hasn’t been acting alone. In the past year, he has been quietly assembling a loose network of roughly three dozen academics, scientists, policy researchers, and priests – a group he half-jokingly calls the “AI Avengers” – who meet virtually to strategize how to get the Vatican thinking more seriously about AI’s more extreme possibilities.

His main worry is that t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The Nintendo Switch 2 got its first-ever discount during Cyber Monday

1 Dec 2025, 1:50 pm by Brandt Ranj

Plenty of Nintendo Switch games and Switch 2 accessories have gone on sale for Cyber Monday, but we didn’t expect Walmart to offer the Mario Kart World bundle of the new console for $449.99 ($50 off). The game costs $79.99 on its own, and Nintendo’s limited-time bundle already saves you $30 compared to buying the console and game separately. Walmart’s discount effectively gets you the game for free while shaving a few bucks off the system’s price as well.

Nintendo Switch 2

The Nintendo Switch 2 has a 7.9-inch LCD display, magnetically attached Joy-Con 2 controllers, backwards compatibility with most original Switch games, and exclusive titles including Donkey Kong Bananza and Kirby Air Riders. Read our review.

Where to Buy:

• $499.99 $449.99 at Walmart (Mario Kart World bundle)

The Nintendo Switch 2 is the long-awaited follow-up to the popular original Switch, and it’s a welcome evolution rather than revolution. It has a 7.9-inch 1080p LCD screen, and includes a pair of magnetically attached Joy-Con 2 controllers, not to mention speedier chips and memory inside. It can play most original Nintendo Switch games, so you can port your digital or physical library without much fuss.

The system’s library is comprised of a growing number of exclusive titles, including Donkey Kong Bananza, Mario Kart World, and Kirby Air Riders. It also supports enhanced versions of original Nintendo Switch games, including Kirby and the Forgotten Land Plus Star Crossed World, and plenty of games being released for the original Switch. The Cyber Monday deal is especially notable since the next big Switch and Switch 2 game, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, comes out this week. Read our review.

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A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress

1 Dec 2025, 1:00 pm by Lauren Feiner

For years, lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried a variety of measures aimed at making kids safer on the internet, from kids-tailored design standards to age verification for individual websites. More recently, a new model has caught on in the states, and now it’s gaining steam in Congress: putting the onus on app stores nationwide.

The new approach to age verification orders mobile app stores to verify users’ ages, then send that information to apps when users download them. The idea has been around for a while, but it was just this year that the first of these laws was passed in Utah, quickly followed by versions in several …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Apple’s M2 MacBook Air is just $599 during Cyber Monday

1 Dec 2025, 12:30 pm by Brandt Ranj

While Walmart continues to sell the 2020 M1 MacBook Air for $549, Best Buy is upping the ante for Cyber Monday with a sweet doorbuster deal on Apple’s 13-inch M2 MacBook Air that has twice the RAM (16GB vs. 8GB), not to mention a better design. Best Buy has marked it down to $599 ($200 off) for Cyber Monday.

13-inch MacBook Air M2 (2022)

Where to Buy:

• $799 $599 at Best Buy (16GB Ram, 256GB SSD)

The laptop was the first model to sport the MacBook Air’s current slate-like design, so it looks similar to the latest M4 edition that’s $749 right now. It has a 13.6-inch 2560 x 1664 display, a 1080p webcam, and a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports. Its M2 processor has an eight-core CPU and eight-core GPU that’s getting a bit long in the tooth for demanding applications, but is sufficiently powerful for most tasks. 

For example, the laptop had no trouble during our testing when editing and exporting high resolution images in Adobe Lightroom Classic, or quickly exporting a 4K video using Adobe Premiere. The MacBook Air’s fanless design means the CPU and GPU will get throttled when they’re under load for an extended period of time, but that’s to be expected.

One of the few setbacks with the M2 MacBook Air (fixed in newer versions) is that you can only connect it to one external monitor at a time. If that issue doesn’t apply to you, or if you’re willing to overlook it at this price, the M2 MacBook Air is a great purchase. Read our review.

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Welcome to fandom’s AI clout economy

1 Dec 2025, 12:00 pm by Kat Tenbarge

Madison Lawrence Tabbey was scrolling through X in late October when a post from a Wicked update account caught her attention. Ariana Grande, who stars in the movies as Glinda, had just liked a meme on Instagram about never wanting to see another AI-generated image again. Grande had also purportedly blocked a fan account that had made AI edits of her.

As Tabbey read through the mostly sympathetic replies, a very different message caught her eye. It was from a fellow Grande fan whose profile was mostly AI edits, showing Grande with different hairstyles and outfits. And, their reply said, they weren’t going to stop. Tabbey, a 33-year-old liv …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Zillow property listings no longer show risk of fires, floods, and storms

1 Dec 2025, 11:45 am by Jess Weatherbed

Zillow has stopped publishing climate risk ratings for sales listings that show the likelihood of properties being impacted by extreme weather, The New York Times reports. The feature introduced by the real estate listings site last year used data from risk-modeling company First Street to forecast which homes are most vulnerable to floods, wildfires, wind, extreme heat, and poor air quality, as climate conditions pose an increasing risk to properties.

The change came into effect earlier this month following complaints from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) regarding the accuracy of First Street’s risk models. “Displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property,” Art Carter, CRMLS chief executive officer, told The NYT.

Sales listings on Zillow now link users to First Street’s website instead, where they can manually find climate risk scores for specific properties. First Street data shows that millions more properties are at risk of flooding compared to government estimates.

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