Think the holiday deals are done? Think again
It's not too late to get great prices on gifts for yourself.
Most shoppers go into Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the pre-holiday shopping frenzies with the concern that their most-desired bargains will sell out. But the truth is many manufacturer discounts, which make up the bulk of those "great" seasonal prices, run until at least the end of the year and sometimes well into January.
For tech, that's partly because the hot new models are going to be announced at CES in January and the big shopping season is as good a time as any to get rid of extra inventory. Sometimes retailers will drop the prices just a little bit more to move products that didn't sell as well as they'd hoped. (B&H Photo, for example, is offering $200 off some new MacBook Pro models with the Touch Bar.) And because some colors sell better than others, you can sometimes pick up a deal on a great product that no one's brave enough to wear in pink (Be brave!).
It's also the time of year when people return gifts in droves. If someone returned a gift laptop because the right-shift key is too small and in an awful spot, which is bound to make you crazy (I'm looking at you, Yoga), that might be sold at a discount as refurbished or "open box" as some places call it. But for all intents and purposes, it's new.
Of course, you have to be just as wary of faux bargains now as ever, especially for refurbished or open-box items. Case in point: Best Buy wants $180 for a refurbished 64GB Apple TV that you can buy new via Walmart (from one of its partners) for as low as $170 (for today, at least).
