It’s a bit of a slow week for tech deals, if we’re honest, as many of the better offers we’re seeing this Friday are leftovers from last week’s Labor Day sales. Still, there are a few discounts worth checking out: A four-pack of Apple’s diminutive AirTag trackers are $24 off Apple’s list price, for instance, while Keychron’s C3 Pro, our favorite mechanical keyboard for those on a budget, is still at an all-time low of $25. Other picks from our guides to the best microSD cards and affordable wireless earbuds are on sale as well, as is Sonos’ bag-friendly Roam 2 speaker and Elgato’s new Stream Deck Neo control panel. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still buy today.
Apple
A four-pack of Apple’s AirTag trackers is back down to $75 at Amazon. We’ve seen this deal multiple times before — it’s a little above the all-time low, but it’s still $5 to $10 below the bundle’s typical street price over the last few months and $24 less than buying from Apple directly.
Unsurprisingly, we call the AirTag the best Bluetooth tracker for iPhone owners in our buying guide, as they use the giant network of Apple devices out in the wild and ultrawideband wireless tech to locate items with impressive accuracy. A waterproof design and replaceable battery help as well. Their effectiveness has had deeply unfortunately side effects, but if you use them as intended, they can provide a little extra peace of mind. We don’t expect to see a new model announced at next week’s iPhone 16 event either; that should come sometime next year.
Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget
The 9th-generation iPad is still available for an all-time low of $199 at Amazon, Target and Best Buy. That’s $50 below the tablet’s usual street price over the past year, though it’s worth remembering that Apple discontinued this model upon the announcement of the new iPad Air and iPad Pro this past May. And indeed, the newer 10th-gen iPad is still a better buy for most people, as it has a more modern design with a bigger display, a USB-C port, a faster chip, better cameras, louder speakers and superior accessory support.
But that slate costs $100 more at the moment. If you just want a competent Apple tablet for as little money as possible, be it for casual web browsing or just handing off to a kid, the 9th-gen model should remain fast enough for the basics for at least a couple more years, while iPadOS still offers a wider library of tablet-specific apps than Android. You’ll have to put up with bigger bezels and Lightning cables, but that should be easier to accept for less than $200. If you’ve still got wired headphones, this was also the last iPad to come with a 3.5mm jack.
Photo by Jeff Dunn / Engadget
The Keychron C3 Pro is still down to $25 at Amazon, matching the lowest price we’ve seen. Normally, the keyboard retails for $37 (ignore the list price above). The C3 Pro is the top budget pick in our guide to the best mechanical keyboards, as it delivers a delightful typing experience for the money. Its pre-lubed switches, gasket-mounted deck and layers of internal foam give keystrokes a soft, springy feel and a pleasantly clacky tone.
The downsides are that this model only comes with a red backlight, plus its ABS keycaps aren’t as high-quality as the caps on more expensive boards. Keychron sells another version with full RGB and hot-swappable switches for $20 more, but if you’re looking to pay as little as possible for your first decent mechanical keyboard, this variant is a stellar value at this price.
Photo by Jeff Dunn / Engadget
The Anker Soundcore Liberty 4 NC is back on sale for $70, which is a $30 discount and within a dollar of the lowest price we’ve seen. This offer is available at several retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy and Anker’s online store.
The Liberty 4 NC is the runner up in our guide to the best budget wireless earbuds. It has a similarly impressive feature set as our top pick, the Soundcore Space A40, with effective active noise cancellation (ANC), a comfy fit, eight to nine hours of battery life, wireless charging support and the ability to connect to two devices simultaneously. It goes hard on the bass by default, which some might find fatiguing but can be fun with genres like rap and EDM. You can also tweak the sound with EQ tools in Anker’s companion app. Call quality isn’t great, however, and the buds can be slow to auto-pause your music when you remove an earbud.
The Space A40 is cheaper, so you’d mainly get the Liberty 4 NC if you prefer a more AirPods-like design with bulkier but easier-to-grab “stems.” If so, this is a nice value.
Soundcore
If you want a budget-friendly pair of over-ear noise-canceling headphones, meanwhile, the Anker Soundcore Space Q45 is down to $100 at Amazon and Soundcore.com. That’s not the lowest price we’ve ever tracked, but it’s a good $50 off the pair’s typical going rate.
At this price, the Q45’s stronger-than-average ANC, softly padded design, multipoint connectivity and solid battery life make it a good value. Its V-shaped sound isn’t the best at reproducing fine details, but it gives plenty of energy to popular music, and you can customize the EQ in the Soundcore app. Call quality is mediocre, however. If you want to save a little more cash, the superior-sounding Audio-Technica ATH-M20xBT is the budget pick in our wireless headphone buying guide, though that pair lacks ANC and isn’t quite as comfortable.
Photo by Jeff Dunn / Engadget
The 1TB model of Samsung’s Pro Plus microSD card is on sale for $100 at Samsung.com, B&H and Amazon. That’s a $20 discount. This deal has been live since last week, but it’s the lowest price to date for the 1TB variant, which Samsung released a couple months back.
The Pro Plus is the top pick in our guide to the best microSD cards. If you just want add a chunk of storage to a device like the Nintendo Switch, there are cheaper options that should work fine enough. But if you plan on moving files around regularly, recording high-resolution videos or doing other tasks where a performance upgrade could more tangibly save you time, the Pro Plus is the best blend of speed and value we’ve tested. This 1TB model performs the same as the other capacities we’ve benchmarked and comes with a 10-year limited warranty if worse comes to worst.
Photo by Jeff Dunn / Engadget
If you don’t need as much space, the 128GB Kingston Canvas Go Plus is down to $12 at B&H, which is a $5 drop and the lowest price we’ve tracked. We highlight this card as a strong alternative to the Samsung Pro Plus in our buying guide. Its sequential and random read speeds were among the fastest in our benchmark tests, though its sequential reads were a bit slower, so it won’t be as quick to copy files from one location to another. Still, it’s not too far off, so it’s worth grabbing when it’s available for less than Samsung’s model. With the 128GB Pro Plus going for $18 as of this writing, that happens to be the case.
Sonos
The Sonos Roam 2 is still available for $143 in a leftover Labor Day sale, a $36 discount that matches the portable speaker’s all-time low. This deal is available at several stores, including Sonos.com, Amazon, B&H and Best Buy.
While we haven’t formally reviewed the Roam 2, it’s a close follow-up to original Roam speaker, which earned a score of 87 in our write-up a few years back. It still comes in a handsome, IP67-rated design that’s easy to throw in a bag and sounds impressively smooth for its compact size. It works over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, with the main selling point being that it can sync up and play in concert with other Sonos speakers you already own. This newest model separates the Bluetooth and power buttons for a little extra convenience, though it performs similarly otherwise.
To address the elephant in the room: Yes, the Sonos app is currently a bit of a trainwreck after recent updates. This speaker also drops support for the Google Assistant — though it still works with Alexa — and even with this discount, there are cheaper Bluetooth-only speakers that sound fuller and last longer. (Sonos rates the battery life here at roughly 10 hours per charge.) But if you’ve already invested in a Sonos system or just want a super-portable smart speaker with clean audio quality, the Roam 2 is more palatable with this discount.
Apple
If you have an older iPad, plan on keeping it for a while, and want a stylus for drawing or jotting down notes, the original Apple Pencil is still worth a look at its current deal price of $69. We’ve seen this discount for a couple of weeks now, but it’s still $10 below the device’s average street price and $30 below Apple’s MSRP. This offer is available at Amazon and Walmart.
The first-gen Pencil is nearly a decade old, and as such it feels dated in very obvious ways. It uses a Lightning port to charge, it can’t attach to an iPad magnetically and its glossy round design tends to roll away on a flat surface. Most people who just want an iPad stylus for casual doodling are probably better off with newer USB-C Pencil. That model doesn’t support pressure sensitivity, however, so it can’t, say, create darker marks when you press down with more force. The older Pencil does support that feature, so it may be worthwhile if you’ve got a compatible iPad and want a stylus for more involved drawing. Just be prepared to live the dongle life if you want to use it with the current entry-level iPad.
Elgato
The Elgato Stream Deck Neo is back down to an all-time low of $85 at Amazon, Target, Best Buy and Elgato.com. That’s a $15 discount. We’ve long recommended Elgato’s Stream Deck MK.2 in our guide to the best livestreaming gear — the Neo is essentially a smaller and more affordable version of that control center with eight customizable LCD keys instead of 15.
These things are particularly popular with the Twitch and YouTube crowd, but you don’t have to be a streamer to make use of them; if there are esoteric tasks you tend to repeat throughout the day — opening a specific group of websites, for instance, or inputting a certain string of commands — you could assign those to buttons on the Neo and make them accessible with one press. You can also use it to control smart lights. It’s a niche device, no doubt, and Elgato’s software could stand to be a little more streamlined. But if you’ve got a little cash to burn and want to dive into the world of macros, you may find it useful.
Larian Studios
And now, your video game deal of the week: The PC version of Baldur’s Gate 3 is on sale for $48 at GOG and Steam, a $12 discount that ties an all-time low. We sing the praises of BG3 in our guide to the best PC games. It is absolutely mammoth yet unusually flexible for a narrative-heavy CRPG; much of its fun is in seeing how your (many) decisions come to shape the world around you. The charming cast of characters and playful turn-based combat system, meanwhile, are engaging throughout. It’s probably too long, but it comes as close as any game has to replicating the vibe of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It’s also fun in co-op. This offer comes alongside the game’s latest update, which adds official mod support.
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