Posts tagged with "accessories"

Just the Best: MacStories’ Black Friday 2025 Picks

Black Friday deals started very early this year, and we’ve covered a lot of ground on the MacStories Deals Mastodon and Bluesky accounts since publishing our Early Black Friday Picks. A lot of those deals are ongoing, so it’s worth revisiting that story as you start your holiday shopping in earnest.

However, today, I wanted to hit the highlights of what we’ve covered over the past week on MacStories Deals and add some new deals to the mix that you probably haven’t seen yet, so buckle up, it’s time to go shopping.

MacStories Pixel Icons

All three MacStories Pixel Icon sets are 40% off until Monday, December 1.

Two of the icon sets are specially-designed for Shortcuts. We’ve all been there. You work hard on a shortcut and want to give it the perfect icon, only to realize that Apple doesn’t offer what you want in the Shortcuts app. The MacStories Pixel Icons fill that gap with an extensive set of painstakingly hand-crafted icons with multiple color options created by MacStories’ long-time designer, Silvia Gatta. We also offer a set of Perspective icons that are perfect for OmniFocus Pro and other uses.

Visit our dedicated MacStories Pixel page today to preview all three icon sets and purchase them for 40% off until Monday, December 1.

Apple Hardware

There are a lot of Black Friday deals on Apple hardware, but most of them are good, not great. I’m picky, so I’m only going to focus on just the great deals.

One of the best deals on Apple hardware during Black Friday is the M4 13” MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. If you want more memory or storage than that, you’ll have to settle for a smaller percentage discount, but even with more memory and more storage, you’re still doing better than any other deal this year. The 15” M4 MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and a 256GB SSD is a good deal, too.

Among the many iPad deals, the best is on the 128GB iPad mini with an A17 Pro chip. I’ve had a mini since they were released and love it. The size makes it an excellent reading and video-watching device.

AirPods 4 are also heavily discounted for Black Friday. Apple’s most affordable wireless earbuds come with active noise cancellation and without. The model with no active noise cancellation slightly edges out the model with ANC as far as the discounts are concerned, but both models are a bargain.

However, the very best deals available from Apple in terms of the percentage discount are a 4-pack of AirTags and the Apple Pencil Pro. If you need either, now is the perfect time to buy them.

Smart Home

The holiday season is a great time to catch up on projects and start new ones. For me, that’s often tuning up my smart home setup and setting up some new devices thanks to Black Friday sales. Here are the best ones I’ve seen:

Aqara already makes some of the most affordable smart home devices out there, so you really can’t go wrong with their Black Friday deals. One of my favorites is the FP2 Presence Sensor. It’s far more sophisticated than a simple motion sensor. To start with, it can tell when you’ve left a room, which motion sensors can’t do. I’ve used an FP2 Sensor in my office to control lighting for a couple of years, wrote about it for Club members, and have been really happy with it.

Other great deals from Aqara include its U100 Smart Lock that works with Apple Home Key and HomeKit, the Aqara M3 Home Hub that I recently set up at home and love, and 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro, an outdoor HomeKit camera that I reviewed earlier this year.

My Aqara 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro is paired with an Ecobee Smart Video Doorbell, which is also on sale for Black Friday. I’ve used various Ecobee smart home products for years and have never been disappointed. The same goes for its smart doorbell. I’ve had it installed for over a year, and it’s been reliable despite facing the sun on some very hot summer days.

Black Friday is also a great time to buy a robot vacuum and mop. There are lots of deals, but the model I’ve tested for the past couple of months and love is the Narwal Freo X10 Pro. It handles vacuuming and mopping, navigating via LiDAR and does an excellent job compared to other robot vacuums I’ve tried. I’ll be reviewing the Freo X10 Pro about it soon, but now’s the time to get it at a steep discount.

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Our Top Amazon Early Black Friday Picks

If you haven’t noticed, it’s not Friday, and Thanksgiving is still a week away. Yet here we are, talking about Black Friday deals. That’s because every year, Amazon pushes the start of its deals a little earlier.

This is far from the first article you’ll come across about Black Friday deals, and it won’t be the last. But what’s different about our approach to Black Friday is that we’re pickier than most sites.

When I sat down to consider Amazon’s Black Friday deals, I looked at a long list of factors, including:

  • whether we’ve reviewed and recommended a product on MacStories,
  • the percentage of the discount,
  • the absolute dollar amount of the discount (which we can’t list due to Amazon rules),
  • whether each deal beats past deals,
  • and a bunch of other factors.

What we’ve come up with is a list of a couple dozen excellent deals that will save you loads of money on everything from great holiday gifts to nerd staples like storage, networking gear, and upgrades to your computing setup.

Every time I write one of these roundups, I inevitably run across even more great deals after the story has been published. So in addition to this story, we’ll be posting deals on the MacStories Deals Mastodon and Bluesky accounts.

Club MacStories Plus and Premier members will be sharing their Black Friday deal finds on Discord too. If you’re not a member, you can sign up here. The Discord server is just one of the many perks of joining the Club.

Finally, please note that the Amazon links in this article are affiliate links. If you follow one of our links and buy something, we make a small commission.

Storage

Some of Amazon's best deals are on storage.

Some of Amazon’s best deals are on storage.

Storage is a staple of Black Friday, with excellent deals on hard drives and SSDs of all shapes and sizes. This year is no different. Whether your Mac’s drive is filling up and you need to offload some large files or you’re looking for a backup solution, now is the time to pull the trigger and get more storage.

I mention Samsung portable SSDs a lot on MacStories and the MacStories Deals accounts because I’ve used them for years and they’re reliable. Samsung’s fastest model – the T9 – is my favorite because it uses USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2, making it equally good for quick backups and working on large files externally.

Currently, both the 4TB Samsung T9 SSD and the 2TB model are on sale on Amazon, with the biggest discount on the 4TB model. You can save a little more with SanDisk’s 2TB external drive, but it runs at half the speed of the Samsung T9, so I recommend the T9. However, if you want to go really big with an SSD, SanDisk has Samsung beat with an 8TB model that, while expensive and half the speed of a Samsung T9, will be far faster than a mechanical hard drive for backing up a Mac with lots of internal storage. Samsung sadly does not offer an 8TB T9 drive.

SSDs are great, but even on sale, they’re more expensive than mechanical hard drives. If you don’t need the fastest speeds and can tuck your hard drive away somewhere the heat and noise won’t bother you, Amazon has a great deal on a 14TB Western Digital Elements hard drive. I’ve used Elements drives a lot over the past several years for archiving big projects and Time Machine backups, and I’ve been very happy with their performance. If you need a big drive, now is the time to pick one of these up; they’ve never been cheaper.

Smart Home

For starters, the Aqara 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro is deeply discounted for Black Friday. I reviewed this outdoor HomeKit-compatible camera earlier this year and love it. From the feedback I’ve heard, MacStories readers seem to love the camera, too.

I also reviewed the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K this summer. Paired with Philips Hue lights, it’s remarkably capable, syncing the colors of your lights to whatever is on your TV. While it’s not a smart home essential, it is a lot of fun, and if you need a little push to pull the trigger on this sort of gadget, this discount is a great excuse.

On the more practical end of the spectrum, Philips Hue is also offering a great deal on its Go Smart Portable Table Lamp, which works plugged in or via its built-in battery. I’ve had my eye on this lamp for a while because it’s very portable and would add nice accent lighting when I’m working on my balcony in the evening or anywhere else with less-than-ideal lighting.

Finally, as I mentioned on the Setups video that Federico and I recently released, I love my new SwitchBot Smart Desk Fan. It oscillates left and right as well as up and down, and it has nine speed settings. Best of all, I can control it from the buttons on the front of the device, using the included remote control, or with Shortcuts because it works with HomeKit.

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Synology Drops Branded Drive Requirement→

Brad Linder, writing for Liliputing:

Earlier this year Synology announced that you’d need to use Synology-branded hard drives in its 2025 line of “Plus” branded network-attached storage devices if you wanted full functionality. While you could theoretically use a non-Synology drive with the Synology DiskStation DS225+, DS425+, DS925+ and other models, you’d be unable to create data storage pools, or use volume deduplication.

As Linder reports, six months later, Synology has reversed course on what was a widely unpopular decision among Mac and PC users that was viewed by many as a way to lock them into overpriced drives unnecessarily. The change of direction was revealed in a Synology press release announcing DiskStation Manager 7.3, the OS that runs the company’s Plus line of NAS hardware.

This is great news for Mac users who felt betrayed by Synology’s previous announcement. However, as Linder also points out it does not change the fact that the same “Plus” series of 2025 NAS hardware does not include hardware-accelerated transcoding of H.264 and HEVC video, which previous models supported.

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iPhone 17 Pro Max: The First Three Days

Last Friday, just before midday, my new iPhone 17 Pro Max arrived at my home – a Deep Blue model with 512 GB of storage. Since then, it’s dropped neatly into my daily iPhone routine. In many ways, it’s not that different from the iPhone 16 Pro Max that I’ll be trading in. I’ve been on iOS 26 for months, so the operating system isn’t a big change, but there are some notable differences that I thought I’d share.

Setup

This year’s setup process was smoother than usual. I was in a rush to set up my iPhone because it arrived at about 11:30 AM and Federico and I were planning to record this week’s episode of AppStories all about our hardware first impressions. Given time differences, that didn’t leave me much time to get up and running.

I decided to go with restoring from an iCloud backup, which gets your iPhone to a usable state faster than other options but can take a long time to download all of your apps. It was a good call because by the time we started recording about 45 minutes later, not only did I have access to the basics, but most of the apps assigned to active Home screens had already been downloaded, giving me a chance to play around with things a bit before recording.

I had plans to go out late in the afternoon and was hoping to get as much of the transfer finished by then as possible, so I connected my iPhone 17 Pro Max to an Ethernet adapter and let it do its thing. When I left the house around 4:00 PM, I was pleasantly surprised to find that nearly all of the 520 apps I had installed were already downloaded.

Heat

The 17 Pro Max dissipates heat with the help of a vapor chamber.

The 17 Pro Max dissipates heat with the help of a vapor chamber.

Apple made a big deal of the iPhone 17 Pro line’s new vapor chamber, which, combined with the aluminum case, is designed to dissipate heat better than before. In my experience so far, it absolutely does manage heat better, but that’s not to say the phone doesn’t get pretty warm. When I was setting up my new iPhone, it got quite warm, as did my old 16 Pro Max. However, while the 16 Pro Max got hot above the Apple logo on the back of the phone, the 17 Pro Max’s heat was more evenly distributed. That meant no one spot got as hot as the 16 Pro Max, but more of the phone got warm, including the sides, which I’d never really noticed with the previous model.

In the three days since I set up the 17 Pro Max, I’ve noticed it get warm now and then, but nothing close to as warm as the 16 Pro Max typically did. I’ve been out a couple of times on warm (80—85℉) sunny days taking photos and videos, and while the 17 Pro Max gets a little warm, it’s much less noticeable than before.

Hardware Design

Initially, I was a little underwhelmed by Apple’s iPhone lineup this year. I love the Air, but the camera tradeoffs were more than I was willing to make. As for the Pro line, I’m not a huge fan of the two-tone style and giant camera bump. It feels too industrial to me, which may be the point, but I prefer a sleeker look.

The orange case is great, but Cosmic Orange isn't for me.

The orange case is great, but Cosmic Orange isn’t for me.

I was also disappointed by the Cosmic Orange color. I like orange but prefer something brighter like the orange Apple Silicone Case. As you can see from the image above, it’s brighter than the Cosmic Orange iPhone. I had a chance to compare them in person at a local Apple Store over the weekend, and all it did was confirm to me that I’d made the right choice getting the Deep Blue model.

Apple didn’t make a black iPhone 17 Pro this year, which led some people to expect the Deep Blue model would be closer to black than blue. As it turns out, although Deep Blue is a very dark blue, it’s not a blue that would be mistaken for black. It looks great and minimizes some of the phone’s industrial look that I don’t like, so it’s a big win in my eyes.

My Nomad MagSafe-compatible wallet usually covers the part of the 17 Pro Max with the Ceramic Shield.

My Nomad MagSafe-compatible wallet usually covers the part of the 17 Pro Max with the Ceramic Shield.

The only caveat is that the Ceramic Shield on the back makes a rectangular patch that looks a little closer to gray than I’d prefer. It’s not a huge deal since I usually have a MagSafe wallet hiding that area, but again, I’m not that into the two-tone look.

I love the rounded edges of the 17 Pro Max.

I love the rounded edges of the 17 Pro Max.

Surprisingly, another aspect of the 17 Pro Max that I absolutely love is the unibody design. There’s something about how the metal wraps around from the back to front that really works for me. Part of it is that the edges are rounder than on the iPhone 16 Pro Max, making the 17 Pro Max more comfortable to hold. The unibody design also makes the phone seem more sturdy. Plus, while I know intellectually that my new phone weighs 6 grams more than the 16 Pro Max, it doesn’t feel that way when I hold both, which I think has something to do with the fact that the rounder edges of the 17 Pro Max make it feel slimmer than it really is. In what may be another mind trick, the front glass of the iPhone 17 Pro Max feels a little smoother, too.

As I mentioned, I swung by my local Apple Store on Sunday to check out the iPhone Air and the latest accessories. I’ll get to the accessories in a bit, but when I saw the Air, I had that moment of amazement that it could be so thin and light, but not one moment of regret. The Air looks great, and I’m excited for what that sort of miniaturization of iPhone hardware means for future models, but it’s not for me.

I just like having a big battery and three cameras too much to trade those for a thin iPhone. Yesterday, I charged my phone early in the day, used it relatively lightly while I was working at my desk, and then headed out in the afternoon to test the cameras some more. When I went to bed last night, I left my phone on the couch by accident, where it sat until I got up today. It still had about 50% of its battery left. I love that I rarely have to think about whether my iPhone is charged, let alone worry about it.

The Cameras

Over the past few days, I’ve been experimenting with the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s three rear-facing cameras. In Austin Mann’s review of the iPhone 17 Pro’s cameras that I linked to yesterday, he said:

On the 16 Pro, the 5x (120mm) often felt a little too tight. The new 4x (100mm) feels far more natural and much more familiar. It’s a classic portrait and landscape focal length in the photography world, and with the bump up from 12MP to 48MP I’ve been really happy with the results.

I’m no pro photographer, but having used the new zoom cameras, I have to agree. Both focal lengths feel great, but the real star is the detail both can capture thanks to their 48MP sensors.

To show off what these cameras can do, I picked three scenes of things I might snap a quick photo of while out on a walk. I left the cameras on the Standard Photographic Style and didn’t do any cropping or editing, taking 24MP shots, which is also a default setting, with the Wide, Main, 2×, 4×, and 8× options.

First up is an island in Lake Norman:

Next, I walked over to Davidson College and took a series of photos of the steeple of the campus church:

Finally, I took a similar series of shots of Chambers Hall on campus:

I’m really pleased with the results. It was a bright, sunny day, which always helps, but to my untrained eye, there’s a noticeable improvement in image quality now that all of the iPhone 17 Pro’s cameras have 48MP sensors.

Accessories

I like the Neon Yellow Silicone Case with the Deep Blue iPhone 17 Pro Max.

I like the Neon Yellow Silicone Case with the Deep Blue iPhone 17 Pro Max.

When I stopped by the Apple Store over the weekend, I checked out the latest accessories, too, but didn’t buy anything. I prefer to use my iPhone caseless, but I wanted to see what my “official” options are because I do use a case when traveling.

Purple Fog goes well with Deep Blue, too.

Purple Fog goes well with Deep Blue, too.

The TechWoven cases struck me as durable options, although I wasn’t wowed by any of the colors. Instead, I was drawn to the bright Silicone Cases. Historically, these cases aren’t the most durable, but as someone who gets a new phone every year, that’s less of a consideration. The bright orange is great, but for my Deep Blue iPhone 17 Pro Max, I think I’d probably go with Neon Yellow or Purple Fog.

I like the new Beats case but wouldn't like having a lanyard full-time just to have a way to prop up my iPhone.

I like the new Beats case but wouldn’t like having a lanyard full-time just to have a way to prop up my iPhone.

I also checked out the new Beats cases. I love the little pill on the lanyard that you can pull apart to create a perfectly sized divot for propping your phone up. The colors are nice in person, too, but in the end, I didn’t buy one because I don’t want a lanyard on my iPhone.

So that’s my mini-review of the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It does the same Pro Max things I love with some nice perks like better cameras and a unibody design that’s functional and comfortable to hold while making the phone feel more substantial. Photographers and fans of great battery life really can’t go wrong with the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The Best Labor Day Deals on Amazon Right Now

It’s almost Labor Day in the U.S., and like most holidays, it’s a time to save money on your favorite gadgets. Before we get to that, though, I want to thank everyone who has followed MacStories Deals on Mastodon and Bluesky.

We brought back MacStories Deals after a seven-year hiatus because I wasn’t happy with any of the deal sites or social media accounts I was following myself. The volume of posts was too great, and the quality of the deals was often suspect, but in the end it all came down to a case of French’s Yellow Mustard.

One day while scrolling through Ivory, I came across a deal for a case of 12 bottles of mustard for $9. That’s a pretty great deal, but it’s not what I wanted.

Amazon and Apple’s stores are full of deeply discounted products, but most of them aren’t what I want to see. The websites and social media accounts following those deals aren’t very discriminating, either, because they’re all about getting people to click links at scale.

Our bet with MacStories Deals is that we can succeed in a much different way. Our occasional deal roundups here and the media picks and deals on MacStories Unwind showed us that the deals we share are popular with the MacStories community because we’re picky. You can get a firehose of deals anywhere, but what you get from us – and now from MacStories Deals – is an editorial filter that respects your time by eliminating the noise.

So instead of sharing as many deals as possible, our approach is to share just a handful of deals each day and supplement MacStories Deals with the occasional post on the site when the deal volume warrants it. In an era when AI is flooding the zone with slop and lowering the common denominator for all content, we believe that experience and editorial constraints will serve the MacStories community better.

So thanks again for following MacStories Deals on Mastodon and Bluesky. It’s just one small project of many that are in the works, but I hope you all appreciate the approach and take advantage of a deal here and there while we earn a small commission from your purchases.

Now, on to the Labor Day deals.

M4 MacBook Airs

The 2025 13-inch M4 MacBook Air in Midnight.

The 2025 13-inch M4 MacBook Air in Midnight.

Students are returning to school, and many will be looking for deals on Mac laptops. Currently, every M4 MacBook Air in both the 13-inch and 15-inch configurations is at an all-time low price on Amazon. The MacBook Air is one of my favorite portable computers of all time, and now is a great time to pick one up.

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One Month with the Aqara G410 Video Doorbell

Last month, after an advanced preview at CES back in January, Aqara released an update to its G4 smart video doorbell dubbed the Doorbell Camera Hub G410 Select. I had been keeping my eye out for this release ever since its announcement, and it just so happened to coincide with the passing of my existing smart doorbell from Netatmo. That was more than enough reason to purchase the G410, and over a month of daily usage, I’ve been enjoying several of the camera’s excellent new features while also wishing for some improvements in other areas.

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Philips Hue Adds Flexibility to the Play Line with New Wall Washer Lights

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been testing a pair of Philips Hue Play wall washer lights along with a Play HDMI sync box 8K that the company sent me to test. The wall washer lights are a new and interesting approach to accent lighting for the Hue Play line that I like a lot, but they also come with a premium price tag, so it’s worth taking a close look at what they offer.

Philips Hue's Play wall washer lights. Source: Philips Hue.

Philips Hue’s Play wall washer lights. Source: Philips Hue.

I’ve been using Philips Hue Play lights for a while. I have two Play gradient light tubes in my office; one sits behind a shelf on my desk, providing a backlight to my work environment, while the other is on the top of a tall bookshelf, illuminating what would otherwise be a dark corner of the room. I typically set them to a natural light color using Adaptive Lighting in Apple’s Home app, but they can do fancy gradient colors, too, which can be a fun way to mix things up.

A more traditional Play wall washer setup than mine. Source: Philips Hue.

A more traditional Play wall washer setup than mine. Source: Philips Hue.

But the downside of tube lights is that they take up a lot of horizontal space. That’s where the new wall washer lights come in. They’re cylindrical with a vertical and angled slice taken out of one side, which is where the LEDs are located. Most notably, though, at around six inches tall by a little more than three inches wide, the wall washers work in a much wider variety of places than tube lights. That compact footprint has been perfect for fitting behind my TV, where I’ve already crammed gaming consoles, a Wi-Fi router, and other gear.

Other highlights of the Hue Play wall washers include:

  • ColorCast, Philips Hue’s term for the way the wall washers generate highly saturated multi-colored gradients,
  • 1035 lumens of light, which is impressive for such a small device, and
  • the ability to display white light in a wide 2000–6500 Kelvin range.

The Play wall washers require a Hue Bridge and are compatible with HomeKit, allowing you to use either the Hue app or the Home app to turn them on and off, dim them, and change their colors.

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MacStories Setups Update: Fresh Approaches, Wi-Fi Upgrades, and Handhelds→

Our setups.

Our setups.

It’s time for another update to the MacStories Setups page, where you’ll find all the gear and apps that Federico and I use for work and play. With Prime Day upon us, it’s a great time to revisit our setups and see what’s on sale. Plus, there’s a handy changelog at the top of the page for those of you who are only interested in what’s new. If you want to hear more about what drove the latest changes to our setups, we’ll be discussing them in more detail on this week’s episode of MacStories Unwind, too.

Federico's PC accessories.

Federico’s PC accessories.

It’s been a little while since we last heard from Federico about his setup, which took a recent turn with the developer beta of iPadOS 26. The iPad Pro is back at the center of Federico’s workflow, but he’s been able to keep everything as streamlined as ever with the help of his ASUS ROG PG27UCDM monitor that features a built-in KVM switch. That display lets him easily switch between the iPad, an M4 Max Mac Studio, his custom-built gaming PC, and the Nintendo Switch 2. When he’s not at his work and gaming monitor, Federico has the latest Viture Pro XR glasses that serve as a USB-C connected external display.

One highlight of both of our setup updates is the TP-Link WiFi 7 Deco BE85 routers. Federico got a two-pack, and I have a three-pack, thanks to my three-story condo. Home Wi-Fi 7 mesh networks are still on the expensive side, but they are much faster than Wi-Fi 6 and 6E in my experience, and the models that Federico and I each installed earlier this year are discounted during Prime Day.

My 11" iPad Pro and GL.iNet portable Wi-Fi 7 router.

My 11” iPad Pro and GL.iNet portable Wi-Fi 7 router.

My setup has been simplified a bit with my latest update. I’m carrying a smaller tomtoc bag when I’m away from home (which I’ve been loving), I upgraded my travel router to Wi-Fi 7 with the GL.iNet GL-BE3600 (Slate 7) Portable Travel Router, and I’m a big fan of the compact elegance of the MOFT Invisible Laptop Stand that I reviewed earlier this year.

At my desk, I swapped a Belkin AirPlay 2 receiver for the more powerful Arylic LP10 AirPlay 2 Wireless Music Streamer, which drives my Harmon Kardon SoundSticks III speakers. I also replaced a pair of broken podcasting headphones with the inexpensive but very comfortable CCZ Yinyoo Melody In Ear Monitors. And I recently started using the Kensington SD5000T5 Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station to expand my Mac Studio’s peripheral options.

Finally, you’ll notice I’ve trimmed down my handheld console setup. There’s still a lot there, but I’ve been focused on flip-style handhelds and picking a favorite of each form factor instead of jumping endlessly from one handheld to the next. With this update, the big additions are the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 and the Miyoo Flip.

Both of us have added other apps and gear, too, so be sure to browse through the Setups page to find the complete listing of our current setups.

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Amazon Prime Day 2025: Our Top Picks

You’re sure to see a lot of Prime Day roundups around the web today, but ours is a little different. Although there are a lot of great deals during Prime Day, we gather ours from among the hardware we’ve actually tried and can recommend to readers. Here are the best deals we’ve found.

For even more deals, join Club MacStories+ or Premier to become a part of our Discord community, where members are sharing their favorite finds, too.

Storage

Lexar's 1TB blue microSD card.

Lexar’s 1TB blue microSD card.

I’ve tried just about every major brand of microSD card at this point while testing handheld gaming consoles for NPC: Next Portable Console. One of my go-to brands is Lexar, which has a bunch of cards on sale for Prime Day:

Also on sale are Lexar’s portable external SSDs, which I most recently used at WWDC for transporting large podcast files. You can get the 2TB SL500 model, with USB-C 3.2 data transfer rates, for 31% off during Prime Day.

The Lexar Professional Go SSD.

The Lexar Professional Go SSD.

If you shoot video with your iPhone, you might want to check out Lexar’s 2TB Professional Go SSD and Hub, which I used to shoot video for NPC during CES in January. On sale for 30% off, the SSD fits right on the end of your iPhone, adding a bunch of extra storage for video footage, and with the hub (also 30% off), you can add an extra port for charging as you shoot videos. The 1TB version of the SSD is on sale for 26% off, too.

Apple Gear

AirPods Pro 2.

AirPods Pro 2.

There are some great Apple hardware deals available for Prime Day, including:

Wi-Fi 7 Mesh Routers

Earlier this year, I upgraded my Wi-Fi to a TP-Link Wi-Fi 7 Mesh system. I came from a Wi-Fi 6E system and was pleasantly surprised to find that TP-Link’s Deco BE95 Wi-Fi 7 BE22000 routers are substantially faster. I’ve had the setup for about three months, and I love it. During Prime Day, you can get the routers individually or in a three-pack for 30% off.

Lighting

The Philips Hue Festavia string lights.

The Philips Hue Festavia string lights.

The 65-foot-long Philips Hue Festavia Lights that decorate my balcony are 30% off for Prime Day, as is the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K, which Federico swears by for mood lighting behind his TV. A four-pack of Hue 60W equivalent A19 color-changing smart bulbs is 41% off, too. It’s a great deal, and so is the 33% you can save on a four-pack of the recessed Hue lights that Federico added to his setup today.

Logitech Peripherals

Logitech's Keys-to-Go 2.

Logitech’s Keys-to-Go 2.

I’ve used Logitech keyboards and mice for a long time. For Prime Day, the company is offering its Keys-to-Go 2 keyboard, the slimmest and most usable small keyboard I’ve ever tried, for 25% off. The POP Mouse, which I use with a variety of handheld gaming devices and the Mac mini, is also on sale for 37% off. Finally, the Logitech C922x HD webcam is 37% off. I haven’t used mine since I went 4K, but if you’re looking for a 1080p webcam, the C922x is my personal favorite.

Elgato Gear and Gaming

Elgato's Prompter.

Elgato’s Prompter.

Earlier this year, I purchased an Elgato Prompter that uses mirrors to reflect a second Mac screen in front of a camera for recording videos. It’s a clever setup that works not only with Elgato’s webcams, but also with DSLRs and even iPhones, which is how I use it. During Prime Day, the Prompter is 33% off.

Two other handy podcasting tools I use every week are on sale too. The Elgato Key Light is 22% off during Prime Day, and the Wave Mic Arm is 30% off.

Elgato’s 4K capture card, which is compatible with HDMI 2.1, is on sale during Prime Day for 20% off. It’s one of the best ways I’ve found for capturing videogame footage or anything else that connects via HDMI.

Razer Kishi Ultra.

Razer Kishi Ultra.

Speaking of games, Razer’s Kishi Ultra controller for the iPhone is also available at a deep 33% discount during Prime Day. The Kishi Ultra is on the large size of iPhone controllers, but as long as that isn’t an issue, you can’t find a better controller to drop your phone into.