When Apple teased us with a four-day shopping event for Black Friday this year, we were intrigued. Not only does Apple historically treat Black Friday as a single-day affair, ignoring the rest of the weekend and Cyber Monday, it also doesn’t offer much in the way of any real savings on its newest products. So we were hopeful that things might be different this year.
But unless Apple plans on surprising us with new sales each day—and we have no reason to believe it will—the current offerings are just as unimpressive as they were last year. Instead of actual savings, your “discount” comes in the form of an Apple Store gift card (so you have to buy more stuff), and Apple has once again excluded any of the new products people want. (At first glance it looks like the new iPads are part of the sale, since Apple has adorned the old models with the new Pro wallpaper, but sadly that’s not the case.) Here’s everything Apple is including as part of the sale:
$25 gift card
Apple TV Apple TV 4K
$50 gift card
iPhone 7/7 Plus iPhone 8/8 Plus 9.7-inch iPad iPad mini 4 HomePod Apple Watch Series 3 GPS/GPS+Cellular Beats Studio3 Beats Solo3 Powerbeats3
$100 gift card
10.5-inch iPad Pro
$200 gift card
MacBook MacBook Pro (all models) MacBook Air (2017 model) iMac (all models) Mac Pro
The best deal here is probably the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar , which brings the effective price down to $1,599. We wrote an extensive comparison of Apple’s smaller notebooks, but that configuration is well worth that discount, with 256GB of storage, an eighth-gen processor, True Tone display, and four USB-C ports. But otherwise, you’ll find better deals on these products elsewhere.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.