Best Black Friday Deals

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23 thoughts on “Best Black Friday Deals”

  1. Picked up 3 Amazon Dots last night at $40 (2 black and 1 white) for upstairs – nightstand and maybe hallway linen closet and office. Kitchen/family room has the big one already. Have been wanting some at discount but didn’t want to get the 5 +1 offer. None of the other offers are tempting me. Happy Thanksgiving to you and the fam.

  2. I’ve owned the Amazon Echo since last year’s Black Friday (bought @ $149) Got it to primarily control my Insteon HA system. The fidelity of the speaker SUCKS & I’m not happy with the search capabilities. The tie-in with Google calendar & time /weather is ok.
    I like the Alexa app tie-in on the cheap Kindle & the Amazon Prime ecosystem. Free Pandora’s good too.

    But I’m going to buy Google Home @ $99 and dip my toe into that. I want to see if they get 3rd party Home Automation/IoT API as well done as Amazon.

    I think I’ll have BOTH going. “Alexa, brighten Bedroom” “OK Google, Play some Chilling on the Couch, but not so loud, right?”

  3. Echo audio is largely dependent on placement. It does better in an open area. We originally had one in a corner of our kitchen counter and the sound was awful. It won’t replace my Sonos or Bose, but it performs much better when the sound doesn’t bounce our nearby surfaces. The voice interface could use some work – they’ve added so many partners and skills that it has become a bit cumbersome. But it ties into things the Google doesn’t (yet?) and the Amazon ecosystem is a strong draw. I do prefer the looks of Google and think “OK Google” would prevent fewer misreads of “Alexa” – it creepily interjects when we’re not talking to it. Although, it’s been much better since changing the wake word to “Echo.”

  4. Spotify integration is great… until it’s not.

    If there are multiple versions of the same song on Spotify (as there often are, e.g. live vs original vs cover) it’s hard to find the version you want without opening up Spotify somewhere else and finding the actual name of it.

    But agree that having speaker in the open delivers very good sound.

  5. We have Echo and Google Home. Echo has more integrations right now, but Google Home can do more with the likes of Philips Hue, for example. You can change Hue colors and set light percentages. If they can do that with more integrations I’ll be sold. But for now Amazon is ahead with overall functionality because of the number of choices.

  6. Joel, I’ve been able to set Hue percents from Alexa forever. They also added scene support in September. Have you tried recently?

  7. “Joel, I’ve been able to set Hue percents from Alexa forever.”

    FACTCHECK: Pants on Fire.

    Alexa has only been around for 2 years. This is not even in the vague realm of “forever”.

  9. “But new Secretary of Education indicates the humans were created only 2 years ago…?”

    Fair point. The election results have made factchecking much more difficult.

  10. Good point about Alexa percent and scene support.

    Also glad to see Chucky here. I haven’t seen him in forever. That’s a fact.

  11. “Also glad to see Chucky here.”

    FACTCHECK: True.

    “I haven’t seen him in forever. That’s a fact.”

    FACTCHECK: Hmmm… If you want to keep our long romantic relationship secret, Alan, I’m willing to play along and not reveal it.

  12. Dave, your tip about speaker placement is excellent advice that applies to all speakers, not just the Echo. But that’s not my situation. My Echo is 2′ from the wall in the center of the room, next to an open doorway, so it covers my bedroom and living room. Corner placement reinforces bass, moving it out won’t correct the harsh distorted treble of the Echo. I get serious ear fatigue from it. I just broke down & ordered the Dot @ $40. I’ll hook it up for music to my living room receiver via hardwire, not a Bluetooth connection. We’ll see how the G-Home does on music fidelity, I sure hope it’s a big improvement. Do you think they’ll ever add Music Prime in the future? Nahhh.

  13. I’m sure you all know by now, it if you ordered the Amazon device (or select other products) using voice ordering through Alexa, you also got a $10 gift card… That is what I did last night to get my parents an Echo, as they loved mine when they saw it over Thanksgiving.

  14. Thanks for the tip on the Echo, Dave. I showed it to Eileen and she instantly said “Get one.”

    …so I bought 2. She’s not the boss of me!!! ;-)

  16. Weird and thanks for the heads up – I will research. Was this from a computer or from a mobile? My advertisers are generally more benign than most and I have very little going on. Hm.

  17. Using a desktop computer. I click cancel and then can browse this site with no issues. My initial thought was something bad was on my computer, but it only happens on this site.

  19. I cannot replicate David’s experience and haven’t found a smoking gun, but I did remove one advertiser behaving badly in other (minor, subtle) ways. Please let me know if anything appears amiss, always trying to find the correct balance in providing a pleasant experience while being compensated for my efforts.

  20. “always trying to find the correct balance in providing a pleasant experience while being compensated for my efforts”

    Bring back your Amazon affiliate link for folks surfing w/out JS! I used to use that to compensate you before it disappeared…

    (I mean, I know your affiliate links are on this page, and I could go searching your site for such before buying, or I could even parse the URL and save your link to a text file. But c’mon. When I need to buy something, I’m not going to bother with anything like that. However, if I can just pop up your homepage and click, that’s something I’ve actually done in the past.)

  22. “Thank you for your support. But, shoot, that’s easy. Just set your home page here”

    Well, that certainly does have the advantage of simplicity, Dave…

    (You’re not the only one, FWIW. A political site I like to support also ditched their non-JS affiliate link. So they lost free Bezos bucks too. But then it miraculously reappeared without my intervention, so they get free Bezos bucks through me again.)

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