Episode 103 - The Deals and Don'ts of Black Friday 2024

This week on the Solid State Podcast we try something genuinely novel… to provide actually useful Consumer advice…

No but seriously, please don’t ever take what we have to say that much to heart, but as we sat back to survey the landscape of “deals”  out there for 2024’s Black Friday day… week… month… oh I don’t even know any more… it became exceedingly obvious that there absolutely are dollar-saving opportunities out there to be had, heck some of them are really good! The problem is, they’re surrounded by hoodwinks, half-truths, and the occasional outright Scam…

An example of what I would kindly call an entry in the “half truth” category happened to me just this week… I’ve been without a gaming-capable laptop for a little while (Don’t get me started on my journey with that Minivan-sized Razer Blade a couple years ago…), and decided it was time… so the Deal Research commenced!

What I found was a very good field of laptop options out there in 2024, with the year being pretty quiet for GPU change but a ton happening in the CPU space… which finally lead me to a tried-and-true Asus Zephyrus line… 

You’d think… it’d be that easy… right? I know the make and more-or-less model… now just to find the best deal offered… or so I thought! 

Instead I had to dig into Model sub-numbers, Processor SKU’s, and the occasional bribe (I mostly kid) to finally land on the exact one I wanted… which, as luck would have it… was the only model not on sale this year because, even though is a “2024” model just like the rest, that particular one only came out a couple months ago and was deemed “to new” for a discount… 

So see, you can save, but its probably not on the latest/greatest option… and at the end of the day, is a couple hundred bucks off the top worth getting an inferior experience over years of use? 

You’ve all been listening long enough to know what I did… and oh, by the way, there was an Open Box option that was twice as much off as the Black Friday “Deal”… just sayin…