Black Friday may technically just be one day, but it’s evolved to consume the entire month of November in the US at this point. For the past few years, retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Target have ushered in the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier, and this year is no different.

Early Black Friday deals are already here, bringing discounts to some of our favorite tech we’ve tested this year. While it’s still advisable to wait until the week before Thanksgiving to ensure you’re getting the best of the best deals, you have plenty of opportunities to save right now if you’re eager to get a jump on your gift list this year. These are the best early Black Friday deals we could find; we’ll be updating this post regularly throughout November, so check back for the latest discounts.

The best early Black Friday deals

• Apple iPad mini (7th gen) for $400 ($100 off): The latest iPad mini only just arrived this month, but it’s already $100 off with an on-page coupon at Amazon. Only the purple colorway is on sale, but this is a giant discount for a new Apple release, so we wouldn’t expect it to last long. We gave the new mini a review score of 83: It’s a minor refresh, but it continues to provide most of the iPad Air’s strengths in a form factor that’s easier to tuck in a bag and hold with one hand. This deal is available in additional colors at Costco, but only to store members.

• Apple Pencil Pro for $92 ($36 off): While this deal is a couple bucks higher than the lowest price we’ve ever seen for Apple’s top-of-the-line iPad stylus, it’s still a sizable drop compared to buying from Apple directly. Just be aware that Pencil Pro is only compatible with the most recent iPad Airs and iPad Pros. Also at Walmart.

• Anker MagGo 3-in-1 foldable charging station for $82.50 ($27.50 off): This Qi2 charging station supports up to 15W of power output and can charge an iPhone, Apple Watch and a pair of AirPods all at once. It also comes with a 40W USB-C charger and connecting cable, so you get everything you need to use it in the box.

• Anker 3-in-1 10K portable charger for $36 ($9 off, Prime members only): A top pick in our best power banks guide, this 10K brick has a built-in USB-C cable so you don’t need to remember to bring one with you, plus it has an extra USB-C port for charging other devices.

• Anker Soundcore Space A40 for $45 ($35 off, Prime only): The Space A40 is the longtime top pick in our guide to the best budget earbuds, as it delivers the kind of robust feature set we expect from pairs that cost three times as much. Call quality isn’t the best, and it won’t auto-pause when you take out an earbud, but its warm sound, powerful ANC, eight-ish hours of battery life and comfy design all impress for the money. This deal ties the lowest price we’ve seen — it’s only available to Prime subscribers at Amazon, but you can also grab it at Anker’s online store with an on-page coupon.

• Amazon Echo Pop for $18 ($22 off): Amazon’s smallest smart speaker has dropped to a record-low price. It’s part of a larger sale that includes the Echo Dot for $28 and the new Echo Spot for $50.

• Amazon Fire HD 10 for $75 ($65 off): No Fire HD tablet comes close to matching the performance, build quality and app support of an iPad, but they’re significantly more affordable, and they still work well enough if all you need is something for casual streaming, e-reading and web browsing. At this price, the 10.1-inch Fire HD 10 is likely a better value than the smaller Fire HD 8, as it has a sharper display, it’s a tick faster and it can last slightly longer on a charge. Just be ready to deal with a bunch of ads for Amazon’s own apps and services. This discount ties an all-time low, and it’s also available at Best Buy and Target.

• Amazon Echo Show 5 for $50 ($40 off): We highlight the Echo Show 5 in our guide to the best smart displays. While the Echo Show 8 — which isn’t majorly discounted yet — has a roomier display, louder speakers and sharper cameras, this 5.5-inch model provides most of the same functionality in a design that’s easier to fit on a nightstand. If you’re already onboard the Alexa train, it’ll work nicely as a smart alarm clock. This deal is $10 more than the all-time low we saw last Black Friday, so it may drop further in the weeks ahead, but for now it matches the best price we’ve seen in 2024. Also at Target, Kohl’s and Best Buy.

• Blink Outdoor 4 (6-pack) for $180 ($300 off): The Outdoor 4 is a wireless, IP65-rated outdoor security camera we highlight in our guide to the best smart home gadgets. It captures decent (if not class-leading) 1080p video, it’s relatively painless to install and it supports features like night vision, motion alerts, local storage and two-way talking. The catch is that it locks things like person detection and cloud storage behind a subscription plan. Still, it’s a solid value on balance, and this deal furthers that. We’ve seen this price on a six-camera bundle for a few weeks, but it’s still an all-time low. An eight-camera pack is also on sale for $250, another low.

• Audible Premium Plus (3-month) for $1 ($29 off): Those who don’t currently subscribe to Audible can get three months of the audiobook service’s Premium Plus plan for $1. Normally, the service costs $15 per month after a 30-day free trial. As a refresher, Premium Plus is Audible’s upper tier: In addition to giving access the full Audible Plus library, it lets you keep one title from a curated selection of audiobooks each month. We wouldn’t call it essential, but if you’ve been on the fence, this is a good way to see if it’d work for you. Just note that the plan will auto-renew until you cancel.

• Beats Solo 4 for $100 ($100 off): The Solo 4 is light on features and may be uncomfortable on larger heads, but its even-handed sound and 50+-hour battery life make it worth considering if you prefer a more compact on-ear design instead of traditional over-ears. We gave it a score of 79 in our review. This discount ties an all-time low and is also available at Walmart, Target and Best Buy. The full-size Beats Studio Pro is discounted as well, but that pair is a bit harder to recommend over the top picks in our wireless headphone buying guide.

• Bose QuietComfort Headphones for $199 ($150 off): This ties the lowest price we’ve seen for Bose’s mid-tier noise-canceling headphones. At this price, their effective ANC and light fit make them a worthy alternative to higher-end pairs like the Sony WH-1000XM5 (our favorite pair overall). That said, their bass-heavy sound won’t be for everyone, and the XM5 has a more comprehensive feature set. Also at Bose.com, Target and Best Buy. The higher-end QuietComfort Ultra, meanwhile, are $100 off and put out even stronger ANC, though we still prefer the XM5 for around the same price.

• Samsung Music Frame for $248 ($150 off): This unique smart speaker can show art or your own photos while it plays music, and it can sync with your Samsung TV speakers. Also available at Samsung.

• JBL Clip 5 speaker for $50 ($30 off): This tiny speaker has a built-in clip so you can hang it from a backpack or bag easily, plus it packs good sound with punchy base. You can expect 12 hours of battery life on it as well.

• Hisense U8N 4K TV (55-inch) for $728 ($371 off): The U8N is the next step up from the U7N in Hisense’s TV lineup, so it should provide better colors, contrast and brightness across the board. If you don’t mind buying a smaller panel for around the same price, this is another new low. Also at Best Buy.

• Backbone One (PlayStation Edition) for $60: The Backbone One is an comfy gamepad that snaps around your phone and lets you play mobile or cloud-based games without having to rely on touch controls. We’ve recommended it before. This deal on the PlayStation-themed version isn’t an all-time low, but it’s $10 to $20 less than the usual discounts we’ve seen over the past year. Sony’s listing doesn’t specify whether this is the first- or second-gen model — the latter can fit a wider range of phones and cases — but that shouldn’t be a major hindrance if you use an older iPhone or Android device. Both the USB-C and Lightning variants are on sale.

• Samsung T9 portable SSD (4TB) for $300 ($250 off): The latest model in the T-series of Samsung’s portable drives supports read and write speeds of up to 2,000MB/s, and it has dynamic thermal guard to keep it cool even when you’re pushing it to its limits. Also available at Samsung.

Expired Black Friday deals

• Apple iPad Air (13-inch, M2) for $691 ($107 off): If you’d prefer more screen space, the 13-inch iPad Air is also down to an all-time low at Amazon. This model can get slightly brighter than its smaller counterpart, but the two slates are virtually identical otherwise.

• Apple iPad Air (11-inch, M2) for $497 at Amazon ($102 off MSRP): This is a new low for the latest iPad Air, which we consider to be the best Apple tablet for most people. While it lacks the top-end performance and 120Hz OLED panel of the iPad Pro, it’s much less expensive, and it still gets you a more futureproof M2 chip, a superior display and better accessory support than the base-model iPad. Also at Best Buy.

• Apple AirTag (4-pack) for $74 at Amazon ($25 off): The AirTag is, unsurprisingly, the top pick for iPhone users in our guide to the best Bluetooth trackers, as it uses Apple’s giant network of Apple devices and ultrawideband tech to locate items accurately. Its effectiveness has had deeply unfortunate side effects, but if you use it as intended, it can provide a little extra peace of mind. While not an all-time low, this deal is a welcome drop from the usual $80 street price we’ve seen for a four-pack in recent months. Also at Best Buy.

• Apple MacBook Air (13.6-inch, M2) for $700 at Amazon ($300 off): This matches the all-time low for Apple’s last-gen MacBook Air, which remains a perfectly competent notebook for everyday use. The caveat is that this model only comes with 8GB of RAM, so it’s really only meant for lower-power tasks. Apple (finally) made 16GB of memory the standard across its MacBook lineup earlier this week, so this might be an instance of Apple trying to clear out old inventory. Still, this is a great value if you only need a laptop for basic web browsing, emailing and word processing. Clip the on-page coupon to see the full discount.

• Anker Soundcore Motion+ for $69 at Amazon ($31 off): We recommend the Soundcore Motion+ in our guide to the best portable Bluetooth speakers. While it isn’t especially light or compact, it pumps out a more spacious sound than most speakers in its price range, it’s waterproof and it lasts a decent 12 to 15 hours per charge. We’ve seen this discount a few times before, but it comes within a few bucks of the lowest price we’ve tracked. Also at Anker’s online store with an on-page coupon.

• Hisense U7N 4K TV (65-inch) for $700 at Amazon ($300 off): Various reviews around the web suggest that the U7N is one of the year’s better TV values, with impressive brightness and contrast for the money. It supports up to a fast 144Hz refresh rate in 4K, which is great for gaming, and it runs on the easy-to-grok Google TV platform. Its image can wash out when viewed at an angle, though, and it’s limited to two HDMI 2.1 ports. This discount is a new low for the 65-inch model. Also at Best Buy.

• Dyson Digital Slim cordless vacuum for $250 ($250 off): It’s hard to beat a Dyson for less than $300, but we do expect even more Dyson Black Friday deals to pop up as we get closer to the big day. This model is 33 percent lighter than the Dyson V11, which could make it a good pick for someone who loathes their current, heavy-duty upright vac. The LED screen shows power mode, maintenance alerts and remaining run time, and you should get up to 40 minutes of battery life here. Also available at Dyson.

Black Friday FAQs

When is Black Friday 2024?

Black Friday 2024 lands on November 29 this year.

When do Black Friday deals start?

We expect some Black Friday tech deals to start as early as November 1. Over the past few years, retailers have been kicking off the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier. This trend will continue in 2024, and you’ll likely find early Black Friday deals available online and in stores in the weeks before the actual shopping event.

When do Black Friday deals end?

Some Black Friday tech deals will end immediately on Saturday, November 30. But those will likely be few and far between. Along with starting deals earlier and earlier, retailers have also extended Black Friday deals past the day for a while now, too. In the tech space, we’ve seen many Black Friday deals in the past run through Cyber Monday.

Where are the best Black Friday deals?

There is no one place to buy all of the best Black Friday deals, but you can expect the big retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Target to have many of the same Black Friday deals available — both in the lead up and on the day itself. We also recommend checking direct-to-consumer sites like Apple, Samsung, Sonos and others to make sure you’re getting the best deal before you cross things off your list.

Does Apple have Black Friday deals?

You typically will not find cash discounts on Apple’s website for Black Friday, though it has offered various gift card bundles during Black Friday in recent years. You may be able to find local Apple store discounts on accessories, but Apple isn’t a retailer known for slashing prices on its products. However, you can find more traditional Apple Black Friday tech deals at other retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Target and Best Buy.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

Nvidia revealed new AI and simulation tools that will advance robot learning and humanoid development.

The world’s biggest tech company by valuation (worth $3.432 trillion) said that the tools will enable robotics developers to greatly accelerate their work on AI-enabled robots, with tools revealed this week at the Conference for Robot Learning (CoRL) in Munich, Germany.

The lineup includes the general availability of the Nvidia Isaac Lab robot learning framework; six new humanoid robot learning workflows for Project GR00T, an initiative to accelerate humanoid robot development; and new world-model development tools for video data curation and processing, including the Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer and Nvidia NeMo Curator for video processing.

The open-source Cosmos tokenizer provides robotics developers superior visual tokenization by breaking down images and videos into high-quality tokens with exceptionally high compression rates. It runs up to 12 times faster than current tokenizers, while NeMo Curator provides video processing curation up to seven times faster than unoptimized pipelines.

Also timed with CoRL, Nvidia released 23 papers and presented nine workshops related to robot learning, and also released training and workflow guides for developers. Further, Hugging Face and Nvidia announced they’re collaborating to accelerate open-source robotics research with LeRobot, Nvidia Isaac Lab and Nvidia Jetson for the developer community.

Accelerating robot development with Isaac Lab

Nvidia Isaac Lab is an open-source, robot learning framework built on Nvidia Omniverse, a platform for developing OpenUSD applications for industrial digitalization and physical AI simulation.

Developers can use Isaac Lab to train robot policies at scale. This open-source unified robot learning framework applies to any embodiment — from humanoids to quadrupeds and collaborative robots — to handle increasingly complex movements and interactions.

Leading commercial robot makers, robotics application developers, and robotics research entities around the world are adopting Isaac Lab, including 1X, Agility Robotics, The AI Institute, Berkeley Humanoid, Boston Dynamics, Field AI, Fourier, Galbot, Mentee Robotics, Skild AI, Swiss-Mile, Unitree Robotics, and Xpeng Robotics.

Project GR00T: Foundations for general-purpose humanoid robots

The humanoids are coming. Building advanced humanoids is extremely difficult, demanding multilayer
technological and interdisciplinary approaches to make the robots perceive, move and learn skills effectively for human-robot and robot-environment interactions.

Project GR00T is an initiative to develop accelerated libraries, foundation models and data pipelines to accelerate the global humanoid robot developer ecosystem.

Six new Project GR00T workflows provide humanoid developers with blueprints to realize the most challenging humanoid robot capabilities. They include things such as GR00T-Gen for building generative AI-powered, OpenUSD-based 3D environments and more.

“Humanoid robots are the next wave of embodied AI,” said Jim Fan, senior research manager of embodied AI at Nvidia, in a statement. “Nvidia research and engineering teams are collaborating across the company and our developer ecosystem to build Project GR00T to help advance the progress and development of global humanoid robot developers.”

Today, robot developers are building world models — AI representations of the world that can predict how objects and environments respond to a robot’s actions. Building these world models is incredibly compute- and data-intensive with models requiring thousands of hours of real-world, curated image or video data.

Nvidia Cosmos tokenizers provide efficient, high-quality encoding and decoding to simplify the development of these world models. They set a new standard of minimal distortion and temporal instability, enabling high-quality video and image reconstructions.

Providing high-quality compression and up to 12 times faster visual reconstruction, the Cosmos tokenizer paves the path for scalable, robust and efficient development of generative applications across a broad spectrum of visual domains.

1X, a humanoid robot company, has updated the 1X World Model Challenge dataset to use the Cosmos tokenizer.

“Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer achieves really high temporal and spatial compression of our data while still retaining visual fidelity,” said Eric Jang, vice president of AI at 1X Technologies, in a statement. “This allows us to train world models with long horizon video generation in an even more compute-efficient manner.”

Other humanoid and general purpose robot developers including Xpeng Robotics and Hillbot are developing with the Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer to manage high-resolution images and videos.

NeMo Curator

NeMo Curator now includes a video processing pipeline. This enables robot developers to improve their world-model accuracy processing large-scale text, image and video data.

Curating video data poses challenges due to its massive size, requiring scalable pipelines and efficient orchestration for load balancing across GPUs. Additionally, models for filtering, captioning and embedding need optimization to maximize throughput.

NeMo Curator overcomes these challenges by streamlining data curation with automatic pipeline orchestration, reducing processing time significantly. It supports linear scaling across multi-node multi-GPU systems, efficiently handling over 100 petabytes of data. This simplifies AI development, reduces costs and accelerates time to market.

Availability

Nvidia Isaac Lab 1.2 is available now and is open source on GitHub. Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer is available now on GitHub and Hugging Face. NeMo Curator for video processing will be available at the end of the month.

The new Nvidia Project GR00T workflows are coming soon to help robot companies build humanoid robot capabilities with greater ease.

For researchers and developers learning to use Isaac Lab, new getting started developer guides and tutorials are now available, including an Isaac Gym to Isaac Lab migration guide.

By now, there’s hardly a coder in the world who isn’t using an AI copilot in some way. But using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could be just the beginning. AI coding may one day involve agents that can write the programs themselves based on a natural language prompt. Such programs may even replace human engineers.

AI coding startups that can generate code from a natural language prompt include Replit and Bubble, among many others.

Eventually, some VCs believe, companies will hire fewer human engineers and have each human manage AI coding agents. “It’s not pie in the sky. It’s in the near future, but it’s not today,” VC Corinne Riley, partner at Greylock, said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week.

Coding assistants are already commonly allowed during the coding technical interview for prospective hires at many of Greylock’s portfolio companies, she added.

However, she doesn’t believe that AI agents should ever be used to replace human engineers in really young companies, to save cash. At the seed stage, “what you’re doing is you’re building the foundations of the company, right? And so if you’re making major engineering trade-offs at that stage, it’s probably not the right decision. Those are decisions that you can make in the future,” she said.

If you thought you needed to wait until Black Friday to score a steep discount on the new Google Pixel Watch 3, we’ve got some good news: right now, Wellbots is giving readers of The Verge an exclusive $75 discount, dropping the wearable down to a new all-time low price until November 12th. The 41mm, Wi-Fi-enabled configuration starts at $274 ($75 off) from Wellbots when you apply code VERGEBF75, while the same code drops the price of the 45mm Pixel Watch 3 with Wi-Fi down to $324 ($75 off).

Google managed to pack an impressive number of noteworthy features into its latest wearable, which is why it’s our favorite fitness smartwatch for Android users. It’s an even better fitness and health tracker than before, with custom running workouts, AI-generated workout suggestions, and a Cardio Load metric that takes into consideration how hard your heart is working during a training session. European users can even take advantage of a new Loss of Pulse Detection feature, which connects you emergency services if a lack of pulse is detected. Sadly, though, the feature has yet to receive FDA clearance in the U.S.

Along with offering even more advanced fitness features, the Pixel Watch 3 is also an even more capable smartwatch with offline Google Maps and better integration with other Google services. It can even now double as Google TV remote, while you also now view your Nest Doorbell or Camera feed straight from your smartwatch. As if that’s not impressive enough, the wearable also now sports an ultra wideband chip that enables remote unlocking for Pixel devices and even some BMWs.

The new generation of advanced bots is now on everyone’s radar. The rise of high-quality IPs and generative AI has led to the emergence of today’s ‘super bots’. These bots can forge fingerprints, enact distributed attacks at scale, mimic human behavior using machine learning, and fool traditional CAPTCHAs up to 100% of the time.

There’s a lot of discussion about how organizations’ cybersecurity strategies must now rapidly evolve to keep up with these increasingly advanced bots. But beneath this narrative lies another truth: most organizations still haven’t even nailed down simple bot protection yet.