What Not to Buy This Holiday Shopping Season
Let’s avoid bad and outdated technology — even at a good price
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 help you avoid. This guidance also applies to deals you see on Amazon, where you’ll arguably do 80% of your shopping.
Wearables
JC Penny (yes, I was surprised to hear they’re still around, too), has a pair of attractive-looking Apple Watch knock-off brands from iTouch and X-Five. The Apple-brand-name-mashing iTouch Air 3 is the most egregious rip-off, with a look that barely strays from Apple’s wearable IP. At $49.99, these wearables look like an amazing deal but they’re not.
The knock-off digital watches are generally thicker and with lower resolution screens than an Apple Watch. As for the reviews on Amazon, they’re mixed at best. Even though both the X-Five (just $29.99) and the iTouch Air 3 offer many of the same features as a…
