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It's only two days until Christmas. We're well into the panic zone for gift buying, but you've got just enough time to make the most of your cash and choose the right techy treats for your friends, family (or, you know, for yourself).
You might think that, now Black Friday has been and gone, the top discounts may be reserved for Boxing Day but, in reality, you'll see a ton of the BF offers keep rolling on from many retailers. This includes the impressive Huawei MateBook D15 that sits atop our selection below. Aside from this great value-for-money option, we’ve scoured the web for decent deals from Samsung, Asus, TCL, Ecovacs and more.
So laptop-locating, television-tracking, monitor-monitoring and headphone-hunting deals veterans will be spoiled by the selection in our guide below. Read on for these festive season finds and come back for more as we'll be updating this edit throughout December. Check out our edit of the best Boxing Day deals live today.
It’s Black Friday 2023. Check out the WIRED team’s picks for the best Cyber Monday deals in the UK here.
The Best Tech Deals in The Christmas Sales
This latest version of the Kindle Paperwhite marks the first time the series has had a screen size upgrade. Every model until now had a 6-inch screen. This one takes the jump to 6.8 inches, with only a small increase in the footprint of the reader itself. It has bath-ready water resistance, a warmer tone display light with adjustable colour temperature and a battery rated for up to 10 weeks of reading off a charge. The old Paperwhite is also on sale, for £90, but this new version is worth the additional £20.
Honor’s laptops are similar to Huawei’s, but often cost slightly less. This 14-inch MagicBook is one of the best-value Windows laptops available anywhere at the moment. Its core spec is flat-out excellent for the money, the kind we wouldn’t be surprised to see cost twice as much elsewhere. You get a high-capacity 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM and an 11th Gen Intel Core i5 processor, which uses the surprisingly capable Intel Xe GPU. Its shell is aluminium, the display Full HD. It does not have a touchscreen but that is the only significant downside to this £300-off deal.
You can find the Dyson Cyclone V10 Animal cordless vacuum for £300 at most of the big retailers at the moment. This is £50 off the price direct from Dyson. John Lewis goes a lot further, offering the V10 Dok as a rather tasty freebie. The Dok is a £150 charging dock that includes five extra tools. There’s one made for mattresses, two brush heads, an extension hose and a module that allows the head to twist into different angles, for hard-to-reach places. The Dyson V10 Absolute, at £100 more, includes the Dok too. The Animal is the better buy, though, as the soft roller head of the Absolute is available separately for well under £100.
You might not associate Christmas with horror, but The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes would make a great game to play over the festive period. Bear with us. This is a relatively compact 5-6 hour game that is heavily narrative driven. Your decisions and actions affect how the story plays out, so onlookers can have some fun as backseat sofa drivers. This is the third part of The Dark Pictures Anthology series, and is widely considered to be the best of the trio. House of Ashes has not appeared on PS Now or Xbox Game Pass, making this decent saving all the more appealing.
Nintendo’s Switch console is such a popular Christmas buy that deals are thin on the ground. Just getting hold of the new OLED model at its standard price is hard enough. However, you can get around £20 off the vanilla Nintendo Switch from Shopto, via its eBay store. This is the second iteration of the console, with improved battery life. You don’t get any bundled games, but there are sure to be some good Xmas deals available on Nintendo’s eShop to avoid any unnecessary tears on Christmas morning.
This Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 deal has slunk onto John Lewis shelves almost incognito, with no reference to how much you’re saving. But by our calculations it is around £250-270. This laptop is the Microsoft equivalent of a MacBook, a classic non-hybrid computer — but it does have a touchscreen. The AMD Ryzen 5 processor will be powerful enough for 99% of people, the screen is lovely and the keyboard uses the series’s Alcantara finish. There’s just one potential problem here. The SSD only has 128GB capacity, and to jump up to 256GB you’ll pay an extra £250. However, it’s such a good deal we’d suggest picking up an external SSD to solve the problem.
DJI’s Mavic Mini is a great starter drone. It’s small but far more advanced than the cheap little toy drones you may have dabbled with before. It will fly for up to 30 minutes off a charge, has a 2.7K resolution camera and GPS. On the page, a £200 discount sounds fantastic but, do bear in mind, this is the last-generation version. However, this is still a more than sound deal, particularly as it is the “Fly More” combo, which includes three batteries, propeller guards, a fast charger and spare propellers.
This Wex deal is one of the best available if you’re looking to buy a full-frame mirrorless camera. It includes the Panasonic Lumix S5 body with 20-60mm kit lens, worth £1800, plus a shooting grip mini tripod worth £79 and an additional battery, which Wex sells for £74. It is, for once, an even better buy than the retailer itself suggests. Panasonic’s mirrorless cameras often receive a bit less attention than Sony’s, but the Lumix S5 is arguably significantly superior to the popular Sony A7 III. It can shoot 4K video at 60fps with 10-bit colour, where the Sony is capped at 30fps. A 2021 firmware update also unlocked 12-bit 6K video. Its IBIS, in-body image stabilisation, is great too. A great workhorse camera for stills and video.
There are a lot of last-season sales about for Asics running shoes at the moment. The best deal we’ve found online is for the Asics Gel-Cumulus 23, at £84 rather than the usual £120. This is a comfortable running shoe that sits a step below the Kayano and Nimbus ranges. It has slightly less cushioning, but is lighter, and the neutral fit should suit most casual runners well. If you’re on the lookout for one of Asics’s top-end lines, head to the Asics Outlet instead. Most of the top 2020/2021 shoes are on sale, including the Gel DS 25 and Kayano 27, and Asics seems to offer more stock in more sizes than most other retailers are the moment. However, for the best deal, this Gel-Cumulus 23 pair is our winner right now.
Shark is always a good brand to consider if you’re drawn to the idea of owning one of those Dyson cordless vacuum cleaners, but end up repelled by their prices. At full RRP, this model is justifiably not cheap, and has legitimately spent a good chunk of the year selling at the claimed price of £400. Now, however, it is less than half price. Suction power is similar to Dyson’s mid-range cleaners, the battery lasts for up to 40 minutes and is removable. This is listed as an “Amazon Exclusive”, but that just means its colour pop parts are red rather than orange or blue. Those colours are on sale at other sites, too, but are listed at £230. This is the one to get.
It’s been a Christmas or two since Huawei was taking the West by storm, with some stellar mobile devices. It may have retreated in that space but its laptops remain a potentially perfect gift, still being priced extremely competitively and remain unhindered by US sanctions. This D15 offers a design similar to that of the Apple MacBook, if using less high quality feeling materials. The performance is plenty for productivity users. Good looks and swift speed made this a great student pick.
Many of the more sensible board game players have moved from classic Monopoly to Monopoly Deal, a much faster-paced game that hasn’t been distorted by generations of folks making up the rules. But if your relatives think Monopoly isn’t Monopoly without a board, check out Monopoly Super Electronic Banking. This is the “contactless” version of the game, where bank details are stored on a little micro computer. Players swipe the game's credit cards to make transactions, so there’s no need for those fat wads of notes. It’s a much tidier game as a result and is a bargain at £15. It currently costs over £40 at Amazon.
Xiaomi has become obsessed with sales. The Poco M4 Pro is, more or less, a new phone, and this “first sale” promo feels like a christening. Now, you only get £20 off, but it is enough to make this one of the best budget 5G phone buys of the moment. It offers good battery life, fast charging, a fairly large Full HD screen and stereo speakers. However, if you’re not remotely bothered about 5G we’d recommend the Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro instead. It’s a WIRED Recommends favourite and is available at the same price from Carphone Warehouse at the moment.
Gloomhaven is a hardcore board game—which you can tell by its cost. Play is split into manageable 1-2 hour chunks, as even the most ardent board gaming fan eventually loses the free time to sit around a table for eight hours at a time. There are 95 scenarios and the choices made in them affect how future games will play out. At £140, this is one of the more expensive board games, but this discount takes the sting out a bit. The game has sold at around this price plenty of times before, but it hasn’t been much cheaper in 2021.
Tile has released a new range of trackers to try and compete with Apple’s AirTags. You can currently get the all-purpose Tile Mate for less than half the cost of Apple’s alternative. This is a Bluetooth tracker that helps you find your keys when in range, and will show you its last known position when not in range. It has IP67 water resistance, and while the battery is non-replaceable, you’re only paying £14 (however, e-waste is an issue here). The Mate doesn’t have UWB, which is what lets an AirTag pin-point the tracker’s location within centimetres. For that you’ll have to wait for the 2022 Tile Ultra, but it’s unlikely to be this cheap.
Amazon has cut the prices of its entire Fire TV stick range, just as it did during Black Friday. All are excellent value, and one of the cheapest ways to make your TV feel fresh while spending £15-40 rather than £400-2000. This top-end Fire TV Stick 4K Max supports 4K streaming and Wi-Fi 6, includes an Alexa voice remote, and has a significantly more powerful processor than the step-down 4K version. However, if you’re just looking to refresh a second TV that won’t benefit from 4K movie streaming, the £15 Fire TV Stick Lite may suit you just fine.
This is a last-generation 55-inch LG OLED TV, however, it is only fractionally different to the latest LG C1 set. It’s an excellent buy at £899. To get this price, you need to use the “VISION100OFF” code at the Currys checkout. The new C1 set is slightly brighter—although, this will vary slightly from TV to TV—and has minor gaming improvements. The LG CX6 is still miles ahead of most OLED TVs for PS5 and Xbox Series X owners, thanks to its support for VRR and HDMI 2.1.
Karcher’s K 5 Premium is the sweet spot in this pressure-washer range for most people. It can provide up to 145 bar pressure and a 500l/h flow rate. Karcher’s own use case guide is a good indicator of why this may well be the right option. It’s good for bikes, outdoors paving, cars and walls. It doesn’t actually recommend the lower-end K 4 for cars, while the top-end K 7 is better suited for RVs and swimming pools. The last time we checked, most people in the UK don’t own those. This is a great deal, around £300 off the “original” price, but £87 off what you’d have paid at Amazon in recent months.
ProCook is holding a sale across the entire Nihon knife range, but we think the best buy is this 20cm chef’s knife. It’s something of a surprise, as this makes a good all-purpose knife—even if it is a little long for casual chopping. The blade is made of X50 steel, which has 0.5 percent carbon content for added hardness, and 15 percent chromium for corrosion resistance. There’s also a Nakiri knife from the X50 series for £10, made specifically for vegetable chopping. You’ll have to pay £3 postage and packing if you spend less than £50, but the ProCook Clearance section is full of goodies worth a look, including dual-walled insulating drinks bottles.
The Jam Heavy Metal has been around for more than half a decade but is still one of the best-sounding small, bar-shaped Bluetooth speakers. It’s one of the best you can get for a mere £30. Treble is clear, bass is relatively deep and powerful, and maximum volume is great for its size. This speaker feels much tougher than most, as its outer shell is aluminium, rather than plastic. Its battery life sits around eight hours and there’s no official water resistance at all. But if you’re after a speaker to use at home and for occasional trips out, this is a great way to spend £30.
Lego hogs the toy limelight each Christmas, but Playmobil has sets worthy of a place on a 40-year-old’s shelf. Yes, it’s suitable for kids too. This kit is a rounded-off replica of the Aston Martin DB5 car from 1964’s Goldfinger film. Detail touches include retractable front guns, an ejector seat, figures based on Bond, Oddjob and Goldfinger. This is the cheapest the set has been on Amazon, with it selling for £70 up until November.
This bottle of Woodford Reserve Bourbon Whiskey is a good buy for someone who likes a drink and offers no present-buying suggestions. It’s a multi-award-winning small batch, smooth-tasting bourbon beloved by straight whiskey drinkers — but not so expensive it’s sacrilege to slosh some into a cocktail. It is currently the number one seller among whiskeys at Amazon, and a scan around for other prices online explains why. Most of the big supermarkets sell this same bottle for £32, just as Amazon claims.
Want a Christmas board game less likely to cause an argument among family members? Wired Recommends favourite Ticket to Ride is a good option. It’s available at around £10 off at Amazon, or slightly less at Zatu Games—but you’ll have to pay for postage there. In this version of the game, it sees players establish rail routes across Europe. There is, of course, a competitive element here. However, we find beginner players tend to end up focusing on their own goals rather than trying to block others at every turn. This reduces the chance of the board being flung into your new OLED TV.
High-end gaming keyboards can cost well over £100. The Corsair K55 RGB Pro Wired is available for under £30 but still has gamer-friendly features like dedicated macro buttons, multi-zone RGB lighting and a comfy fabric-lined palm rest. How it is so cheap? Point one: it’s a clearance item. It’s outta here soon. Point two: it uses membrane keys rather than mechanical ones. These feel a little mushier, but are significantly quieter and still offer a solid key feel. Corsair lists the original price of this keyboard at £55, although you can find it for around £40 elsewhere.
Novelty booze can seem a bit naff, but Edinburgh Gin’s Christmas concoction is no quick and cheap festive cash grab. It has been around for the better part of a decade and is based on the distillery’s lauded classic dry gin. We had to get that justification out of the way first, because the list of botanicals sound like the stuff of a Hallmark Christmas card. There’s frankincense and myrrh, plus cassia to provide a cinnamon-like hit of spice. The bottle sells for £35 direct from Edinburgh Gin, making this discount a solid deal.
Coup is a WIRED Recommends top board game pick for adults. It’s particularly handy for Christmas, as there’s no lengthy setup involved. This is a card game of deception, politics and espionage. Players are dealt two cards, and each could represent a captain, assassin, ambassador, contessa or duke. The character types have differing abilities, but players can lie about which they hold. If you prefer the idea of ironically playing Pandemic, a longer board game, that’s on sale at Amazon too.
The Lenovo Smart Clock Essential is a smart bedside clock that sells at the same price you might pay for the dumbest kind. You can talk to Google Assistant, to set alarms, play podcasts or radio stations through the integrated speaker. Its ambient light sensor changes the intensity of the display to suit the room. The sound quality isn’t as good as that of a larger smart speaker, but for £19 that does not matter so much.
Retailer Very discounted Apple’s Magic Keyboard during Black Friday and the deal is now back. Price drops this big on Apple gear are pretty rare, but there is a reason. Apple released a new version of this keyboard with Touch ID in 2021. However, if you actually trust the people in your house, or don’t own a MacBook that supports Touch ID, this older version is just as good. It uses Bluetooth for transmission and the battery lasts around a month between charges.
Amazon’s claim of a £271 saving on the Fenix 6S Solar is a little ripe, but most other retailers sell this band for £110-120 more. It is a terrific fitness watch for those who would rather not live with a gigantic wrist-dominator. The “S” in the same denotes it is part of Garmin’s smaller-faced range. This also means it has a smaller battery, but the clever solar-power element in the screen makes up some of the difference. A huge range of fitness tracking modes offers exceptional depth, you can hook up with wireless accessories like HR straps. And it can handle the basics of smartwatch functionality, like receiving message notifications from your phone.
Zavvi has some of the best available deals on LEGO sets adults will love. At this time of year you’ll usually see the Bugatti Chiron wheeled out, but let’s take a look at the Lamborghini Sian instead. It’s a 3,696 piece kit with a working steering wheel, moving motor pistons and suspension on the front and rear. If you’re turned off by all the lime green, Zavvi also offers the classic Bugatti Chiron kit — which is out of stock at most retailers. The Porsche 911 RSR and Porsche 988 GTE are also sound deals if you’d rather spend less.
Not much says last minute Christmas gift idea more than a beard trimmer set but getting a worthwhile one isn’t all that easy. This Braun is one of our favorites and it comes boxed with a tonne of attachments as well as a Gillette razor. The different guards offer up a stunning 39 length settings, giving you plenty of options to keep your beard from getting to that cumbersome Santa Claus-esque length.
A high-quality insulated bottle like this Stanley Classic is perfect for campers, or hikers willing to put up with some extra weight in order to drink a hot cup of coffee. It’s a multi-wall insulated container that can keep food or drink hot or cold for an inordinate amount of time. Stanley claims 32 hours, or 160 hours when keeping cold items chilled with the aid of some ice.
It’s cold out. Have you noticed? This Peter Storm Blisco jacket should come high on many a wishlist to solve this key winter concern. Plus, it will come in handy for the post-dinner Christmas Day walk no-one really wants to go on. It’s quite a looker too, and is available in four colours. Don’t hang about too long as we can image the more popular sizes quickly selling out. This is not a heavily water-proofed jacket, but it does have layers of puffy polyester insulation and a hood. People will likely assume you spent more, even if it is an own-brand Peter Storm jacket.
Nothing says “holiday season" quite like getting down to some video games away your overly chatty loved ones. Samsung’s Odyssey gaming monitor range is mostly known for its super wide behemoths like the G9 but there’s quality at lower prices too. For under £170, you can get this model that puts a decent 1080p 144Hz combo on a 24in panel. It also offers height adjust and pivot for getting it at the perfect angle for your long gaming sessions.
The Huawei Watch GT2e is a great fitness watch with enough smarts to feel like a smartwatch, and it lasts up to two weeks off a charge. It has full GPS for the runners and cyclists, a great OLED screen and tough stainless steel watch face surround. It’s a steal at £84, even if it has been around for a while at this point. According to the folks at HotUKDeals, you can snag an extra £10 off direct from Huawei with the code “A10GT2EDEC”, but only the Mint Green version is in stock there at the time of writing.
Most big retailers have dropped the Sony WH-XH710N headphones down to £70. This is an impressive £60 off their original published price, but it is more like a £30 discount judging by recent online pricing. However, it's enough to make them a much more realistic Christmas present buy than the better — but far more expensive — WH-1000XM4. The Sony WH-CH710N offer long battery life, fun sound and active noise cancellation (ANC). Their ANC is not nearly as effective as Sony’s best and the build is all-plastic but you get a lot for £70 here.
A bottle of booze can seem a lazy present. But not this one, not in this gift guide. Amazon seems to have price-matched this quality single malt Scotch Whisky with Waitrose’s current deal, saving you a little over £14. It won a silver medal at the 2017 San Francisco Spirits competition so should satisfy accustomed whisky drinkers and, with a name like Winter’s Gold, it’s suitably Christmassy. While we haven’t tried this Dalwhinnie offering, we have tried a few whiskies from this distillery before. For this whisky, the tasting notes talk of heather and peat, with a pinch of spice.
Watchnation offers the current best price for this striking QLOCKTWO W watch, which abandons arms altogether in favour of 110 light-up stencilled characters. It’s sophisticated, and you don’t even have to be able to tell the time to use it. This is the slightly larger, more expensive, version of the watch with a 39mm-wide face. Despite its modern appearance, it still uses a classic Quartz movement inside. This particular watch has a black leather strap and bare stainless steel surround.
These Asics running shoes avoid the misery of longer running sessions out on muddy tracks because they have a Gore-Tex waterproof layer. No more muddy socks or freezing, wet feet. This also means they will be perfect for hikes and walks on less rugged terrain, where greater ankle support is not a must. Just bear in mind the waterproofing will reduce their breathability. At the time of writing several of the most popular men’s sizes are available.
Accessory makers have tried to get to grips with controllers that turn a phone into a handheld console for over a decade. The Backbone One is the closest to perfection we’ve reached so far, with this iOS-only controller edging out the Razer Kishi. While there’s no white-hot discount to be had at the moment, the controller does include one month of access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, worth £10.99. It is the best way to play console games streamed to an iPhone—even if Apple’s App Store rules mean you’ll need to use a clever Safari-based workaround to get cloud streaming going—and it has its own wired audio jack for sound pass-through.
For those who love the idea of no longer having to dodge around their home to get vacuuming done, the ever-cheapening robot vacuum market will be a welcome sight. This Ecovacs model focuses on kicking up dust with its brushes before vanishing it from your precious floors. It's a clever disc that’ll return to its charging point, works with Alexa and can get the job done on hard floors as well as carpet.
Massage guns are knocked out by countless no-name Chinese brands. Nevertheless, the cheap models we’ve tried still work surprisingly well. This is a percussive deep tissue massager, with much greater travel in the head mechanism than a classic vibration-based shoulder massager. It is one of the smaller, more recent models and uses USB-C charging. You get four attachments in the box and it can run at five different speeds. Amazon advertises the deal as a £9 saving but it actually sold for £22 more before the price drop.
JBL’s excellent Flip 5 Bluetooth speaker had a price drop for the Black Friday season, and it has stayed low since. It typically costs £130, although sold for around £104 at Amazon from August to September. This is not a speaker where quibbling over whether you’re getting £40 or £25 off should put you off, though. It is excellent, with standard-setting sound quality you may not typically associate with JBL. IPx7 water resistance means you can take it anywhere without worry, it’s small enough to use as a holiday speaker and the dual passive radiators supply impressive bass depth and punch for its size.
Like its A-series phones, Samsung’s equivalent tablets are cheap, stylish and useful. This sub £120 tablet has a well-sized 8.7in display and surprisingly slim bezels, especially since you can pick up this one for such a reasonable cost. You’ll be able to watch movies and scroll social media for hours on end with this tablet with a beefy 5,100mAh battery inside.
Apple charges £29 for its AirTag Loop cases. It’s a heck of a lot for some polyurethane and a little dot of aluminium. Amazon’s deal for the bright Sunflower yellow version brings the cost to a more realistic £18.80. Other colours cost slightly more, but the saddle leather version for £22 is also worth a look. You’ll, obviously, AirTag to go along with it, unless you already find yourself with some Apple trackers lying around.
Costco currently snips £100 extra of the price for a high-end spec of the value-driven Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop. You’ll find a similar version of this laptop selling elsewhere, for around £100 more, with half the storage. It nets you a 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card and a Ryzen 7 5800H CPU for under a grand. If you can find a better spec for less money, we’ll be impressed. Buying from Costco does require a membership, but, at £15, for a year it’s worth it for this deal alone.
The original prices of some Oral-B toothbrushes are high enough to make you wince. This deal brings one of its most advanced brushes down to a more palatable level. The Oral-B Genius 8000 has one of the company’s most useful advanced features. It is dressed up in “artificial intelligence”, which usually sounds like a bit of a marketing gimmick. However, this implementation uses motion sensors to work out which parts of your mouth you are brushing at any one time, and spits out a report of the parts you neglect in the phone app. The pack also includes three heads and a travel case.
This VivoBook from Asus is a great example of how high quality features aren’t restricted to top-end laptops. You get great specs in the form of AMD’s latest Ryzen 7 5700U laptop processor, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. But, the star is an OLED display. With 400 nits of brightness, this display is plenty colorful across its 15 inches.
PowerA makes some of the best low-cost alternatives to Nintendo’s excellent Switch Pro pad. But let’s not mess about, the PowerA Enhanced wireless is not quite at the Pro pad’s level. The buttons feel a little cheaper and, while its case is solid, it feels less so because there are no rumble motors or batteries to add weight. It’s a no-nonsense wired controller for the Switch but, arguably, a much more sensible purchase than a pricey pad if you only use your Switch docked occasionally. The “Enhanced” part refers to the two programmable shortcut buttons on the back.
The Galaxy Buds 2 have now hit the shelves, meaning this older model has received a decent discount. These may be pricier than your average stocking stuff but, with the rise of wireless earbuds, they may be a clever go-to buy for the gift-buying procrastinator. The Buds Live, and their bean-like shape, aren’t made to be wedged into your ear like many wireless earbuds in 2021. Instead, they sit a bit less snug. Nevertheless, they offer ANC, up to 21 hours battery life, three microphones and capacitive controls.
These Makita drills sit below the company’s pro-grade LXT range but will do the job for DIY enthusiasts. At a price similar to what you might pay for a drill and battery set, you get an additional impact driver and a second battery. A two-pack of the batteries alone costs around £80 online. To get the set for £100, use B&Q’s festive20 discount code. Think twice if the person you are buying for is already a Makita devotee, though, as the batteries used by this system are different to those of Makita’s LXT range.
It’s been a while since it was safe to say that most Chromebooks are ugly, but it was a thing. Thankfully, models like this Asus represent a massive seachange towards thin and well-built machines. Along with the lightweight ChromeOS, the C434 comes with a rotating 1080p panel making this ideal for watching some of your favorite shows or taking full advantage of this laptop’s touchscreen.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
