With a couple days still to go until one of the biggest shopping days of the year, a mixture of leaks and early announcements have revealed the best product deals at some of the biggest retail chains!
DealNews performed a study from Black Friday Season 2014 to help you score the best deals for anything you are looking to buy!
Because of the Blue law in Maine, almost all businesses must be closed on Thanksgiving Day, particularly the big department stores.
This means that the DealNews Editors’ Choices that vote in favor of deals on Thanksgiving Day won’t apply to us Mainers.
As of now, not very many sales have been advertised for Cyber Monday. But as a general rule, Cyber Monday is a tech-holiday for tech-minded people.
Fortunately, Amazon has announced some of its deals for Cyber Monday. The announced deals are primarily Amazon-exclusive products, such as various Kindle models and a year of the Amazon Cloud Drive storage.
The official Amazon Cyber Monday Deals hub has some limited-time offers that are going on right now which is definitely something to check out if you’re hunting for the best deal on a specific product!
A lot of deals on Cyber Monday will already have a certain percentage taken off of the full retail price, but I have found that most websites will also accept additional coupon codes for you to get an even better deal.
Here are some Apple coupon codes to redeem on the Apple store website, while RetailMeNot is my personal favorite website for finding more coupon codes to redeem on nearly any retail website.
To get the best deal for Apple products, try not to purchase them directly from the Apple Store, even if you use a coupon code. Purchasing from a department store will actually save you an average of $36 on any given iPad on any given day– not even including Black Friday or Cyber Monday! The same can be said for other Apple products as well, but this site has presented the savings data for iPads as of April 2015.
There are a few ways you can get the best deal for the Apple product you are looking to buy, and that usually means taking the time to research when and where you need to be to get it! Here is a basic breakdown of Apple deals this coming Friday.
Best Deals for iPads this Black Friday 2015:
iPad Air 2: The 16 GB is $399 at Best Buy and Walmart or $374 at Staples.
The 64 GB is $499 at Best Buy or $449 at Staples.
If either size is bought at Target, you will receive a $150 gift card with the full purchase price.
iPad Air: At Staples, the 16 GB is $319 and the 32 GB is $359.
If either size is bought at Target, you will receive a $100 gift card with the full purchase price.
iPad Mini 4: The 16 GB is $299 at Staples. At Best Buy, the 64 GB is $399 and the 128 GB is $499.
If any size is bought at Target, you will receive a $100 gift card with the full purchase price.
iPad Mini 2: The 16 GB is $239 at Staples or $199 at Walmart. If bought at Target, you will receive an $80 gift card with the full purchase price.
Best Deals for Apple Watches this Black Friday 2015:
Best Buy claims you can save up to $100 on Apple Watches, with the regular price $349-$699.
Target will give you a $100 gift card with any Apple Watch purchase.
Best Deals for iPhones this Black Friday 2015:
At Target, you will receive a $250 gift card with $0 down for an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus installment plan.
Or, for those that are eligible for 2 year contracts with Verizon or Sprint, you get $50 off the 16 GB iPhone 6s or 6s Plus (now $150 and $250 respectively).
At Walmart, you get $100 off any iPhone as well as a $100 Black Friday Gift Card.
Apple Macbook and iMac deals are a bit harder to come by. Best Buy’s Black Friday ad claims you can save $200 on a brand-new Macbook Pro or an iMac, making them $900 each. However, to get an even better deal on an iMac, stop by the Computer Doctor at 50 Main Rd N in Hampden to check out our $650 21-inch iMac.
Our technician refurbished iMac in the store has similar specifications to the advertised Best Buy one– with 1 huge exception: our iMac has a blazing fast Solid State Hard Drive. In addition to the obvious computer speed difference, our iMac will also have a full 6-month warranty following the purchase and you can expect nothing but the best technical support from the Computer Doctor for the entire computer’s lifetime.
Call us at 862-7019 or stop by our store to get the best deal on computers this holiday season. Even receive 25% off any purchase if you mention this article before December 25!
Although Macs are well known for their dependability and relative long life, they can still get bogged down and benefit from . Here are some services we can do for your iMac, MacBook, or even Mac Mini to prolong it’s useful life.
Memory Upgrade
It is very common for a laptop or computer to only have 4GB of RAM. If you upgrade to 8GB of RAM, that would be comfortable for most people’s computers and would noticeably speed up your Mac. If you need storage for huge amounts of data, such as video editing or graphic design, then 16GB would be ideal— but that would be too much unnecessary space for your thousands of pictures from vacation or a few videos of your children blowing out candles on their birthdays!
Hard Drive Replacement
A Solid State Hard Drive will revolutionize your experience on your Mac. It will feel much more responsive, and even if you have a small amount of memory, swapping to a Solid State Hard Drive will also help because an SSD is especially fast at the transfer of data from the memory to the hard drive— much faster than an ordinary hard drive. An SSD is nearly 100x faster than an ordinary hard drive, and can even extend the battery life in a laptop as well!
Solid State Hard Drives have no moving parts, so they are much more reliable because over time the ordinary hard drive parts will wear down and fail with use. SSDs also generate no noise and significantly less heat than an ordinary hard drive does.
Utilize Your Additional Storage Options
Computers perform badly when their main storage drive is full. A common rule is to leave at least 10 % of your drive free—so consider adding additional storage and offloading files you don’t use often to it. This might be external storage, such as a USB flash drive or external hard drive. Getting those extra files that you don’t need on-hand off of your hard drive will free up some extra space and make your computer run more efficiently.
Update your Operating System
It is highly recommended to install the latest Operating System on your Mac for the increased security and features. Technologies such as App Nap— a feature that pauses apps not being used and reduces power usage— and compressed memory in OS X 10.10 Yosemite can actually improve performance on weaker hardware, such as your original hard drive.
Updating your Operating System can be tricky. The newest version of OS X for Mac is El Capitan, but we have seen some issues with completing the upgrade and computers not rebooting quickly afterward. If you tried to update your operating system and there was a problem with the install, then we encourage you to bring your Mac to us to get it back on track. If you bring your computer in to the Computer Doctor in Hampden for us to update your operating system, then you will receive $10 off if you mention this article!
The benefits to updating your OS X definitely outweigh the drawbacks— that is, if you have a newer Mac. If your Mac model is older than 2008, then it might not be the best idea to update it to the newest operating system. We’ve heard horror stories of older Macs completely grinding to a halt under the strain of the new OS X, and there’s definitely a danger with older Macs that newer operating systems will demand too much. At the Computer Doctor, we have every Mac operating system since Snow Leopard came out in 2009. We can install any of the operating systems that have come out in the past 6 years directly onto your Mac, and we will advise you which one would be the most efficient for your computer.
Apple has produced a line of outstanding products, and at the Computer Doctor we have found Macs to run better, quicker, and be more dependable than other brands of computers. If you bring in any Mac computer, laptop, or mini on or before November 28, 2015, then you will receive 10% off any service if you mention this article!
Come see us at 50 Main Road North in Hampden, Maine; across the street from the Circle K in the same building as Rivertown Family Eye Care. You can also call us anytime at (207) 862-7019.
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Memory Upgrade
A Solid State Hard Drive will revolutionize your experience on your Mac. It will feel much more responsive, and even if you have a small amount of memory, swapping to a Solid State Hard Drive will also help because an SSD is especially fast at the transfer of data from the memory to the hard drive— much faster than an ordinary hard drive. An SSD is nearly 100x faster than an ordinary hard drive, and can even extend the battery life in a laptop as well!
