What Not to Buy This Holiday Shopping Season

Let’s avoid bad and outdated technology — even at a good price

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

I have some good news for you. This story, which I’ve been writing for more than a decade, is getting harder to compile every year.

Leaving aside the supply chain and chip-shortage anomaly, component and innovation prices have dropped every year, making it harder for retailers to substitute under-performing, last generation, and close-to-counterfeit technology in favor of the real and now more affordable real thing.

Take big-screen TVs, for example. For years, stores would roll out amazing Black Friday and holiday shopping deals for 40-inch-plus TVs that weren’t even full HD quality. 4K TVs are now the standard at virtually every size and the prices are excellent. Plus, I think manufacturers finally emptied their vaults of 1080p HDTVs and now only sell 4K (and some 8K, which you still don’t need) models. As a result, I have no warnings for you in the TV space.

In other categories, the choices are not so simple.

To compile this list, I perused almost a dozen digital versions of Black Friday flyers, circulars that will soon show up at your front door in paper versions. Even here, the pickings are so much better than they used to be, but there are pitfalls I want to…