Our Favorite Early Black Friday Deals

The AirPods Max are cool, sound really good, and have superb and flexible noise canceling. However, at their normal street price of $500, they cost more than almost every other pair of headphones in our ratings. The Maxes have transparency mode, to pipe in outside sound, as well as spatial audio capability. The biggest selling point for the Maxes is the distinct look and the premium feel you’ve come to expect from an Apple product. And they provide the seamless compatibility with the company’s other products that you get with all AirPods.

If you’re a Samsung Galaxy lover and due for a phone upgrade, you can save $150 on the latest S25 smartphone. (The S25+ and S25 Ultra are also on sale, if you want a larger or more deluxe model.) Either way, expect a vibrant display and an excellent camera system.

If you want an iPad, this 2025 entry-level model is our pick as the best tablet for most people. It has a beautiful 10.9-inch display, 128GB of storage, and the ability to record HD video. And its battery lasts a decently long time in our testing: 14 hours during video playback and 9 hours browsing the web.

Weighing in at just about 5 pounds, the 6-quart Our Place Perfect Pot Dutch oven is a real lightweight—but only in the best sense of the word. When it comes to performance, no other Dutch oven in our ratings matches it. It earns excellent scores from ease of cleaning to bread baking, sauce simmering, cooking evenness, and speed of heating. Made of aluminum with a ceramic coating, it’s also induction-compatible and oven-safe to 425° F. It typically only goes on sale during these big events.

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch7 is down to the best price we’ve ever seen, beating its Prime Day price by $10 (and it’s $50 more everywhere else). This is a sleek and high-performing pick, particularly if you own a Galaxy phone. It delivers the latest from Samsung in health, fitness, and safety features—including sleep apnea detection, swimming stroke analysis, and daily AI-enabled Sleep and Energy scores.

The 75-inch Roku 75R8C5, one of the company’s 2025 Pro-series models, excels in almost all aspects, including picture quality, high dynamic range performance, and sound. Like its predecessor, it features a Mini LED backlight, which enhances contrast and black levels. It supports both the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ formats, as well as Dolby Atmos audio.

Samsung’s Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 is a premium 2-in-1 laptop that flips between tablet and clamshell modes with ease. It features a gorgeous OLED touchscreen, a thin-and-light build, and long battery life. Now it’s $200 less than it was for Prime Day in July.

Apple’s AirPods 4 are somewhat unusual for noise-canceling earbuds, as they lack the padded ear tips typically found on noise-canceling earbuds. They don’t offer much passive noise cancellation, but they still have reasonably effective noise-canceling tech. And so, you can elect to turn the noise-canceling feature off and hear what’s going on around you, which can be great when you’re on a run or walking on a busy street. In terms of sound and fit, the buds are very similar to the regular AirPods 4, which are also on sale for $89 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart if you don’t care about noise-canceling).

The large Ninja Foodi DZ550 has two separate baskets and two separate cooking zones, and in addition to air-frying, it can also bake, roast, broil, and dehydrate. Another plus is its leave-in thermometers that enable you to monitor your food as it cooks (especially handy for meat). This air fryer earns very good marks for its easy-to-use controls and for being relatively easy to clean, but it only earns a mediocre score for noise, so you may need to raise your voice a bit to talk over it when it’s working. This is only $20 more than the best price we’ve ever seen, and it’s the biggest discount since Prime Day in July.

The Amazon Fire HD10 isn’t a high-end tablet, but it offers plenty of power if you just want to tackle “tablet-y” tasks, such as streaming video, reading e-books, or browsing the web on something larger than your phone. You can also snag a discount on the smaller 8-inch Amazon Fire HD 8 and the larger Fire Max 11. 

Breville blenders as a brand receive a very good score for owner satisfaction in CR’s member surveys, and the Breville Super Q BBL920BSS1BUS1 is a model that also aces our evaluations for puréeing, in which we blend raw ingredients into a soup, and durability, which we determine by conducting three rounds of 15 consecutive ice crush tests. It also gets a top score for convenience, but like most blenders in our ratings, it receives only a mediocre score for noise.

Anyone looking to save some space—or cut down on items to plug into their TV—may want to consider the Roku Streambar SE. It doesn’t go on sale all that often, and it actually dropped $10 compared to last week. This soundbar that includes a built-in Roku streaming player. Given its small footprint, it probably works best for smaller TVs, not that jumbo-sized set you’ve been eyeing.

This 55-inch 4K TV is from Amazon’s step-up Omni series for 2024. It does well for the overall picture quality, but not as good for high dynamic range. It does have a wider-than-average viewing angle for an LCD set. It’s a QLED model with a Mini LED backlight, which can help boost contrast and improve black levels. It supports Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10+, and a 144Hz variable refresh rate for gaming.

A stand mixer like the KitchenAid Artisan Series KSM195PSBK is a prized possession on many bakers’ countertops, and this price makes it easier to add it to yours. This stand mixer earns an excellent score for whipping time in whipped-cream tests, and an excellent score in our mixing tests, where we observe how much a mixer labors when mixing thick chocolate-chip cookie dough. It comes with a stainless steel bowl with a handle, a whisk, and a dough hook. This model can also run attachments like a pasta maker or spiralizer, bought separately.

Despite its small size and low price, the sphere-shaped Dot offers the same smart speaker functionality as its far more expensive brethren. It can also serve as an inexpensive way to introduce smart speaker functionality throughout your home in an Alexa-based multiroom system. You can even pair an Echo to a Bluetooth speaker you already own to lend that one smart speaker functionality. The Dot provides an inexpensive way to test the smart speaker waters, and the price makes it a reasonable gift even if you’re on a budget. We’ve seen it sell for under $25 during Black Friday last year, so it might be worth holding out if you’re thinking of giving it as a gift.