Prime Day Revisited: Deals on Amazon Hardware, Sticks, and Kindles (including Kindle Paperback and Scribe)
That’s the time again. Amazon Prime Day is back. Among thousands of discounted items, from the necessary to the wacky, are the steep discounts on Amazon’s own broad lineup of hardware, including Prime Day Kindle deals you won’t see surpassed the rest of the year. Savvy shoppers know Amazon Prime Day is usually the best time to get a deal on a new Fire tablet or streaming stick. We’ve rounded up the top deals on our favorite Kindles, streaming sticks, and tablets. Don’t see anything you like? Don’t forget to check out our nonstop Prime Day coverage on our liveblog, as well as our rundown on the very best Amazon Prime Day deals.
I was Team Paperback until I tried my first Kindle, and now you can’t pry it from my fingers. The Paperwhite is the best of the Kindle lineup and our favorite e-reader overall. You have to pay $20 more to get rid of lockscreen ads, but they don’t interfere with reading if you don’t want to spend more. There are two main versions, which each come with 32 gig of storage, wireless charging and an auto-adjusting backlight. There is a kids’ version, a case, and a one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+. The Paperwhite hasn’t been updated since 2021 and we aren’t sure when a new one might be coming, but mine is still performing as it did on day one. We think it’s still safe to buy one.
The Paperwhite is good for reading. The Scribe is meant for writing and drawing, with its 10.2-inch screen. There’s no lag while writing, and reading is seamless because it’s a E-ink device. It was natural for professional artists to want something better. The Scribe is very pricey though, and the premium pen version, with its eraser on one end, costs another $30. You can’t write directly on book pages, since Kindle opts for sticky notes, and it isn’t waterproof.
Generally, we prefer Roku streaming devices, but if you tend to watch a ton of Amazon Prime content, get the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. Anyone can use it, of course, but it obviously heavily promotes Prime content. The 16 gigabytes of storage should suffice for all of your streaming and games. You can pull up your security camera feed and ask Alexa to do things, like order you pizza.
We recommend against buying Amazon’s tablets unless it’s Prime Day, as they have their own line of tablets. Fire tablets are terrible, but if you only plan to watch Amazon and do basic work tasks like email, they are affordable and capable. The Fire HD 10 is our favorite of the bunch, it has a 3 gigabyte of RAM and has a1080p screen, so it can do a lot of things. To get rid of lockscreen ads, you have to pay an extra fifteen dollars. There are 32- and 64-GB models available.
This 16-inch machine doesn’t scream gaming laptop if you prefer a more stealthy PC that can double as a work laptop. The m16 R2 IPS (8/10, WIRED Recommends) has an LCD with a 240-Hz screen refresh rate, making fast-paced content appear super smooth. It packs Nvidia’s RTX 4070 graphics card so it can handle nearly any game at medium or high graphical settings, and while the battery life is not great while gaming, it’s surprisingly long-lasting when you’re on the clock.
The price we’ve ever seen on a gaming laptop is the lowest it has ever been. The Razer Blade 18 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) packs Nvidia’s RTX 4070 graphics card, though you can choose a more powerful card for more cash. You get so much raw power in a gorgeous build with a massive 18-inch Mini LED display with a 300-Hz screen refresh rate and G-Sync compatibility. It’s also one of the first laptops ever with a Thunderbolt 5 port for faster data transfer speeds. Want a machine that is even smaller? The Blade 14 is on sale at a discounted price. Julian Chokkattu is a person.
Acer’s laptop names get confusing. The model number here is the A315-24PT-R0UX, which is no less confusing but can at least be used to compare to other models. It’s an upgrade to our budget laptop. It offers the best value of the 15-inch laptops we’ve tested, with an AMD Ryzen 5 7520U processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512-GB NVMe SSD. It’s big, and the display is not the sharpest, but it won’t strain your eyes. Interestingly, the title here says 16 GB RAM, as does one of the spec listings, but another says 8 GB of RAM, and it’s Amazon, so who knows what you’re going to get. If you get 8 gigabytes, return it.
Acer’s Chromebook Plus 514 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is one of our favorites out of the recent crop of new, more powerful Chromebooks. It’s all you need to do everyday tasks, like browsing the internet, editing documents and chatting with friends. The keyboard and trackpad are excellent, which is unusual for a Chromebook, and the touch display feels great. It’s not going to win any design awards, and there’s no backlit keyboard, but this is a lot of laptop for the price. It was on sale for a few months at $320 and is now only on sale for the lowest we’ve seen it. The Acer Chromebooks Plus 515 is on sale for $319, which is80 off the regular price.
Clip the $50 coupon on Amazon to get an even better discount of $1,049 ($200 off). The first big screen option in the Air lineup is the 15-inch MacBook Air. It’s a great choice if all you want is a bigger screen, but don’t want to splurge on a MacBook Pro. It has all the same features as the 13-inch MacBook Air, including a modern design and a 1,080p webcam, not to mention the latest M3 chip. The base model comes equipped with an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU and, in my testing, handled 41 Chrome tabs, multiple apps, and three separate windows with ease. To ensure that it can deal with dozens of tabs and apps running concurrently, I recommend upgrading to at least 16GB of unified memory. —Brenda Stolyar
