Google Pixel 5a

52 Last-Minute Christmas Gifts on Sale Now


This year is more challenging than most to get presents for your loved ones on time. Fortunately, even if you’ve waited till the last minute to start shopping, you still have some options. We’ve gathered up some of the best deals we can find that also have a solid chance of making it to your home before Christmas.

Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com and our print magazine (if you’d like). Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. 

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

Table of Contents

Finding a gift at the last minute can be a hassle, especially when you start seeing the dreaded “Arrives after Christmas” label on items online. However, there are a few tricks you can try to make sure you get gifts in on time:

  • Look for in-store pickups: Some sites like Best Buy or Walmart list items for delivery, but also have an item in stock in stores near you. Check to see whether a location in your area has an item you can grab in person sooner than it might get delivered to you.
  • Check alternative retailers: We’ve done our best to find the retailers that have stock and shipping windows that can still get gifts to you in time, but if you find something you really want to get for someone that won’t get delivered before the holidays from one site, try checking others, including the manufacturer.
  • Consider similar versions: The phone you want in space gray might be back-ordered, but there may be more sky blue units that can get there sooner. Or maybe the laptop with a little more or less RAM is in stock. If a timely gift is more important than its exact specs, you can try tweaking some details to get it in sooner.
READ ALSO  Electric Aircraft Start-Up Accuses Rival of Stealing Its Secrets

Google Pixel 5A

Photograph: Google

Be sure to check out our many buying guides, like the Best Android Phones, Best Cheap Phones, Best Phones With an Actual Headphone Jack, and Best iPhone, for more gift ideas.

The Google Pixel 5A (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is our favorite smartphone for most people. This $400 phone has a crisp OLED display, two-day battery life, and 5G antennas. It also comes with Google’s top-tier camera tech like Night Sight for low-light photography. It’s hard to do better at this price.

The Pixel 6 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) was only released in October, but it’s already seen a few minor sales. This is the first Pixel to use Google’s custom Tensor processor architecture, which lets it handle complex machine-learning tasks on the phone itself, without sending your data back to Google. This makes voice dictation super fast, and the new Magic Eraser feature can intelligently remove people or objects from the background of your photos. Our Pixel Phone guide has more details. Availability for this one may depend on which stores near you have it in stock, so check your zip code on the site.

When we reviewed the Galaxy S21 5G (8/10, WIRED Recommends), we liked it for its impressive display and performance, stand-out cameras—though arguably it’s been topped by the Pixel 6 Pro since then—and nice-to-have features like wireless charging and a 120-Hz screen.

The Nokia XR20 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is our favorite rugged phone. It took multiple drops on the pavement in our review without getting scuffed. On top of its durable, grippy texture, this phone comes with wireless charging, IP68 water resistance, and best of all: a headphone jack.

The Galaxy Tab S7 FE has a larger display than its S7 sibling, measuring 12.4-inches. It comes with the S Pen and has 64 gigabytes of storage. Unfortunately, it has pretty mid-range performance, there’s no fingerprint scanner, and the screen can’t hit the 120-Hz refresh rate of the standard S7. But at this price, those trade-offs might be worth it.

If you don’t mind spending a little extra, you can get the Galaxy Tab S7 with a sharp 11-inch LCD display, a 120-Hz refresh rate, and it even includes an S Pen stylus. There aren’t a lot of good tablets that support the Google Play Store, and this is one of the better ones.

Laptop and Home Office Deals

Apple Macbook Air

Photograph: Apple 

We’ve got guides to the Best Laptops, Best Cheap Laptops, Best Chromebooks, Best MacBooks, and plenty more. Our Best Work-From-Home Gear and Best Office Chair roundups might be handy if you’re looking for gift ideas. 

For a high-end laptop, this is a pretty great deal (even if it’s one we’ve seen before). It features a 14-inch, 4K HDR touchscreen with an Intel Evo Core i7 chip, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512-GB SSD. The Yogi comes with Windows 11 Home, and you’ll be able to handle most everyday tasks with it; just don’t expect to do much gaming or heavy video editing.

We’ve seen this this one dip as far down as $850 on Cyber Monday, but this is a good deal on our favorite MacBook. The first-generation M1 chip is a powerful processor that blew away benchmarks when it first came out. The laptop also has a sharp 13-inch screen, all-day battery life, and a fanless design that makes it ultra quiet. Be sure to have a look at our MacBook Buying Guide to see which model is right for you.

This 13-inch laptop from Razer packs a respectable 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and a 512-gigabyte SSD. Better yet, it has a vibrant 4K touchscreen display with ultrathin bezels.

We liked the Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4 (7/10, WIRED Recommends), and this is a solid deal on the AMD version of it. It comes with a nice 3:2-ratio screen that offers extra vertical room for reading and working on documents. A few other configurations and devices are also on sale. so have a look at our Surface Buying Guide.

The Galaxy Chromebook 2 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is our pick for the best luxury Chromebook. It comes with a solid yet lightweight aluminum chassis, a color-rich 1080p display, and all-day battery life. Plus it comes in red—that’s pretty cool.

Razer Kiyo Pro

Photograph: Amazon

The Razer Kiyo Pro is one of our favorite webcams, and our only complaint was its high price. This deal fixes that. This 1080p cam delivers great picture quality with its large, adaptive light sensor. However, you may want to tweak the settings in the Razer Synapse app to make it look even better.

You can save a ton of space on your desk with compact keyboards, like this 60 percent board, the Razer Huntsman Mini. This is one of our favorite mechanical keyboards for gaming, thanks to its compact size, RGB backlighting, and satisfyingly clicky keys.

The Logitech G Pro X is our favorite mechanical keyboard and for good reason. You can customize it with different key kits, with three different switch types: GX Blue Clicky switches (for a crisp click and thicker keystroke), GX Red Linear (for a quieter, smoother, but still satisfying keystroke), or GX Brown Tactile (with a soft stroke and tactile feedback). Pair it with the powerful G Hub software and you can set up your workflow exactly how you like it.

This is our favorite wireless mouse, owing to its clicky buttons and responsiveness. It comes in a variety of hand sizes, and its ultra-stable wireless connection has an impressively long range. In our testing, we used it up to 10 feet away from the computer with no issues.

We haven’t tried this 27-inch monitor, but it’s the little sibling of the same-size G7, which we liked. It has a 1080p display, it supports AMD’s FreeSync, and has a 144-Hz refresh rate. This was already a pretty robust monitor for the price, but now it’s slightly cheaper even than we saw it on Cyber Monday.

Samsung’s T7 portable drives are among the fastest external drives around, and they’re some of our favorites. They’re lightweight, with solid metal enclosures, and I’ve even used them to record 6K footage on professional cinema cameras. If they can handle that, they can handle backing up your files with no problem.

LG C1 OLED

Photograph: LG

LG’s C1 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is the best TV we have tested this year, hands down. It has gorgeous black levels, hyper-fast gaming response times, and one of the best smart TV interfaces on the market. You could use this as a gaming monitor for your PS5 or Xbox Series X, or just enjoy the rich colors of the latest blockbuster movie.

This HiSense ULED TV (8/10, WIRED Recommends) almost clinched our top pick for televisions we tested this year. The price-to-performance ratio on this is matched only by our favorite TCL TVs. However, this model comes with Google’s smart TV software, which might be enough to push it over the edge if you’re committed to that ecosystem.

The TCL 4-Series used to be a bit underpowered, but these days it packs the same punch that older 5- and 6-Series models used to. That makes this 43-inch version a great buy as a secondary TV for, say, a guest room or your bedroom.

LG’s NanoCell LED technology makes colors look great, and it comes with the Magic Remote, a point-and-click-style remote from LG that works a bit like Nintendo’s old Wii remotes. It makes picking items from a menu or typing in a password a breeze. Now, it’s even cheaper than we saw it on Cyber Monday.

This smaller display from LG is a great option if you want to fill out a guest room, or want a really big computer monitor. For an entry-level OLED from LG, it has gorgeous colors with deep blacks and astonishing highlights.

Chromecast

Photograph: Google

The Google Chromecast With Google TV (8/10, WIRED Review) remains one of our favorite 4K streaming devices. It’s the best version of Google TV, it finally comes with a remote in the box (unlike most previous Chromecast devices), and it naturally has Google Assistant built-in. You can search for a show or movie to find out which of the numerous streaming services has the content you want to watch, and even add movies to your watch list from Google searches on your phone or computer.

If you’re more of an Amazon household, the Fire TV Cube (6/10, WIRED Recommends) may be more your speed. It’s designed for “hands-free” streaming via Alexa voice search. In our experience, it didn’t handle this task super well, but thankfully, it also comes with a remote. Right now it’s just slightly cheaper than we saw it on Cyber Monday.

This Roku Streaming Stick supports 4K and HDR streaming and even Dolby Vision audio in one little package. The included remote comes with dedicated buttons for the popular streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, and Hulu.

Roku’s Streambar is a simple device that does its job well. On top of being a solid soundbar, it comes with Roku OS on board. You can plug it into your TV and stream movies and TV shows from it, rather than relying on a separate streaming stick.

iRobot Roomba 694

Photograph: iRobot

We’ve also got guides on How to Set Up a Smart Home and How to Keep a Smart Home Private that you might want to check out after you pick up any of these deals. 

This mid-range Roomba from iRobot is a good place to get started if you’ve never owned a robot vacuum before. It’s quiet and powerful, and the app is easy to use to set up and program your vacuum. You can even command it with either Alexa or Google Assistant. 

This is our favorite cheap robot vacuum, and it’s not hard to see why. It runs for more than 100 minutes at a time, and it can dodge cords, laundry, and other obstacles it happens to come across. With the clickable coupon, it’s even cheaper than we saw it on Cyber Monday.

For pet owners, this is one of our favorite robot vacuums. The Roborock S6 MaxV (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a powerful, fast vacuum with long battery life, and it can even avoid messes your pets left behind. 

Nest Cam

Photograph: Nest

The battery-operated Nest Cam is one of our favorite outdoor security cameras, but it also works well indoors. You can take it off its magnetic mount when you need to recharge it (usually around once a month). It records 1080p video and can detect motion to alert you when something’s happening in or outside your home.

While we haven’t tested this new battery-powered Nest Doorbell, it adds HDR and night vision to the previous version. That should cut down on how much bright lights blow out your footage. It can also send you customized alerts for people, packages, animals, or cars.

We’ve tested previous Nest Thermostats and liked them. While we haven’t tried this one yet, it can set schedules for your home’s heating and cooling system, and you can even control the temperature from your phone. You can also set it to give you reminders when your filters need changing.

The Philips Hue smart lights aren’t cheap, but it’s hard to get better for your money. With full-color bulbs, you can set color temperatures for white lights, or tweak scenes to add a splash of color to your home. This kit includes three bulbs, a wireless remote you can stick to the wall, and the bridge you’ll need to connect it all up.

Panasonic Lumix S5

Photograph: Lumix

Be sure to check out our Best Mirrorless Cameras guide, Best Action Cameras guide, and Best Camera Bags, Straps, Inserts, and Backpacks guide before you dive in here, if you’re not already sure what to buy. Our guide to the Gear and Tips You Need to Make Studio-Grade Home Videos has more useful tips and tricks.

This Sony A7RIII is at the lowest price we’ve ever seen, and it’s one of the better investments you can make for the money. It comes with a 42-megapixel full-frame sensor, excellent dynamic range, and robust image stabilization. It can even shoot 4K HDR footage, and up to 10 fps of continuous photos, so you don’t miss a shot.

The Lumix S5 is our favorite mirrorless camera for those who want to shoot video with a full-frame sensor. It supports V-Log recording, anamorphic 4K, and uncropped 4K at 30 frames per second. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this camera at a price this low, but it’s still a great model to grab for filmmakers.

The Panasonic GH5 can capture 4K HDR footage with its 20-megapixel sensor. It doesn’t suffer from the rolling shutter effect that plagues most CMOS-sensor cameras, and it can even wirelessly livestream directly from the camera itself. This is the lowest price we’ve ever seen this beast at. 

This camera is lightweight and compact, and it can shoot some really nice 4K video for its price. It doesn’t feature the interchangeable lenses or total control over the picture that larger DSLR or mirrorless cameras do, but for vloggers and independent content creators who want something that looks good without as much fuss, it’s an excellent choice.

Insta360 One R Twin

Photograph: Insta360

The Insta360 One R Twin Edition (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is  an action cam that  can double as a 360-degree camera. Its interchangeable lens blocks let you attach a 4K camera, a dual-lens 360-degree camera, and a wide-angle Leica lens paired with a 1-inch sensor for 5K video. It’s one of the more versatile systems you can get in such a compact package.

Every young filmmaker neglects their audio at first, but fortunately it’s easier than ever to upgrade yours. This shoe-mounted shotgun mic from Røde is compact, runs off a single 9-volt battery, and does a pretty good job of focusing on just the sounds coming from in front of it. I’ve shot with it, and while it’s not a miracle worker, you’ll be happier with it than your camera’s onboard mic.

Another shoe-mounted shotgun option, this mic from Deity is similar to the Røde mic above, but it has +20 dB gain stepless gain knob. This lets you dial in just the right amount of gain, so you can get the best audio you can without peaking. For comparison, the Røde mic only has a switch between -10 dB, 0, and +20 dB. Both are good options, but if you like a little more control, this mic might be better for you.

Nintendo Switch

Photograph: Nintendo

It might be a crapshoot to get your hands on a console, but whether you succeeded this year, or you just want some games for your old console, there are still a few good options. Also check out our guides to Best Nintendo Switch Games for Everyone and next-gen games you can play for the PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Switch Game Deals

PS5/PS4 Game Deals

Xbox X/S/One Game Deals


More Great WIRED Stories



Source link

?
WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com