Black Friday is the one week a year when the gear on our money pages moves in price by more than the usual drift, and it’s also the week when every deals aggregator on the internet calls a $20 markdown on last year’s laptop a “record low.” This page is our answer to both. It’s the watch list for the equipment a video editor buys, with the real September price next to every item so you can tell a discount from a rebrand, and from November 20 through Cyber Monday we re-verify every line on the live retailer page and update it here.
Two rules run this page. First, every link goes to a listing sold by the retailer itself, Amazon or Best Buy, because a marketplace seller’s “deal” is usually a marked-up unit with a warranty question attached. Second, we only list gear that’s on one of our own guides, which means someone here has already argued for it at full price. A deal on a bad monitor is a bad monitor.
Last updated: October 2026. Some links below are affiliate links. Buy through them and it helps keep the site running, at no extra cost to you. Baseline prices were read on the live Amazon and Best Buy listings between September 2 and September 29, 2026, and are the number to beat. Deal prices land here the week of November 20.
TLDR
Six categories on this page have their own watch list with a target price per item: monitor deals, headphones deals, Mac deals, GPU deals, SSD deals and wireless mic deals. Monitors and headphones take the deepest, most predictable cuts. Mac discounts come from Amazon and Best Buy, never from Apple. SSD prices have moved in both directions through the NAND shortage, so those targets are set against the September baseline, not the sticker. GPUs and RAM get almost no holiday cut in a shortage year; the GPU page sets targets anyway, mostly on last-generation clearance. Camera bodies move on manufacturer rebates, not on the day. Laptops, NAS, audio and docks are below, category by category.
Laptops
Gaming laptops are the single most discounted category at Best Buy on Black Friday, and every Windows pick in our best laptop for video editing guide is a gaming chassis with a creator-grade panel, so this is the section to watch hardest. Every baseline below was sold by Best Buy on September 13.
The ASUS ProArt P16 64GB was $3,999.99. The ProArt has never gone on a deep sale and probably won’t.
The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI with the RTX 5070 Ti and 32GB was $2,099.99.
The ASUS ROG Strix G18 with the RTX 5080 was $3,299.99, on sale at $2,699.99 by that evening, and the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 with the same card was $3,399.99. The 2025 RTX 50 machines are already selling through, so a Black Friday cut of $300 to $500 on the Acer or the Strix is plausible and worth taking.
The HP OMEN 16 OLED was $1,624.99 on a flash sale that day against a $2,299.99 list. Under $1,500 it would be the cheapest OLED editing laptop we’ve ever listed.
On the Mac side, the MacBook Pro 14 with the M5 Pro was $2,351.99 at Amazon on September 29 against Apple’s $2,499 list. Apple’s own store won’t budge; Amazon and Best Buy are where the MacBook Pro discounts show up, and if a base M6 MacBook Pro has launched by then, the M5 Pro is the one that gets cut. The best Mac for video editing guide has the configs to hold out for. The Mac-only watch list, with targets per machine, is Black Friday Mac deals for video editors.
Monitors
Monitors are the most reliable Black Friday category for an editor because the same handful of panels goes on sale every year and the cuts on the Dell UltraSharps and the ASUS ProArts are real money, not rounding. Our picks and their September prices are in the best monitor for video editing guide, and the deal tracking lives on the dedicated monitor deals page. The short version: the Dell U2725QE under $550 and the ASUS ProArt PA279CRV under $350 are the two prices that should make you buy on the spot.
Headphones
Headphones are the other category where Black Friday behaves, and Best Buy and Amazon trade blows on the same three Sony and Beyerdynamic models every year. The picks from the best headphones for video editing guide, the Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro, the Sony MDR-7506, and the Sony MDR-M1, all have a Black Friday history, and the tracking is on the headphones deals page.
Portable and internal SSDs
Storage is the category with an asterisk this year. The NAND shortage has repriced SSDs monthly, in both directions, so a Black Friday “deal” may just be the price from last spring. The rule: compare against the September baseline here, not against the sticker on the listing.
For portables, the Corsair EX400U Survivor 2TB, the USB4 pick from our portable SSD guide, was $429.99 sold by Amazon, and the Kingston XS1000 1TB was $189.95 on September 2.
For internal drives, the Samsung 990 Pro 2TB was $389.99 and the 9100 Pro 2TB was $399.99, ten dollars apart, which our 990 Pro vs 9100 Pro comparison explains. The 990 Pro 2TB under $330 or the 9100 Pro 2TB under $340 would be a real Black Friday number; anything above that is the shortage, not a sale. Per-drive targets are on Black Friday SSD deals for video editors.
NAS and drives
NAS enclosures get modest Black Friday cuts, usually $100 to $200 on the mid-range boxes, and the drives inside them get the better deals. The picks from the NAS guide: the UGREEN DXP8800 Plus at $1,509.99, the QNAP TS-473A at $887.85, and the Synology DS925+ at $751.21, all sold by Amazon. UGREEN is the newest brand of the three and the one with the most room to move. For drives, the Seagate IronWolf 8TB at $347 is the one to watch; NAS drives are a regular Black Friday item, and the NAS hard drive guide covers which capacities are worth filling bays with.
Audio
Microphones discount less than headphones but more than you’d think, and the podcast and wireless categories both have Black Friday form. From the best podcast microphone guide: the Shure SM7dB at $549 and the Rode PodMic USB at $189. From the wireless mic guide: the DJI Mic 3 at $259 and the Rode Wireless Pro at $260, a dollar apart in September. DJI and Rode both run their own holiday pricing through Amazon, and the Mic 3 under $200 is the number that matters.
Docks and desk gear
Thunderbolt docks rarely go on sale from the makers, but Amazon discounts them in the general electronics wave. From the dock guide: the CalDigit TS5 at $399.95 and the OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock at $319.99. Keyboards, mice, and the rest of the desk are in the keyboard guide and the chair and desk guide; a chair is the piece of desk gear you’ll keep the longest, so a real cut on one of that guide’s picks is worth more than it looks.
How to tell a real deal from a fake one
Compare to the baseline, not the sticker: retailers show a “comp value” or a struck-through list price that the product has not sold at in months. The September number on this page is what it cost; a deal is a number below that.
Read the seller line before the price. On Amazon it should say “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com,” and on Best Buy, “Sold by Best Buy.” A marketplace listing at a great price is often a gray-market import with no US warranty, and it can change price between the click and the cart.
Last year’s model at this year’s price is not a deal, and laptops are where it happens most: a 2024 RTX 40 machine at $1,299 is not a bargain next to a 2025 RTX 50 machine at $1,500 with a better panel. Check the GPU generation before the discount percentage.
Storage prices are a shortage story, so any SSD or RAM “deal” this year needs to be checked against a price history, because the listing’s own list price has been reset upward twice since spring.
What we’d skip
Graphics cards and RAM. The GPU page, Black Friday GPU deals for video editors, sets the targets anyway and tracks the last-generation clearance that is the real deal. The GPU guide explains why 2026 pricing is what it is, and no retailer is going to eat that margin for a holiday. Camera bodies, mostly: the manufacturers set holiday instant rebates in early November and the retailers all match them, so the Black Friday price on a camera is the same everywhere and usually the same as the week before. Buy a camera on the rebate, not on the day. And anything marked “open-box” as a headline deal, which is a return with a shorter warranty.
FAQ
When do Black Friday deals start in 2026?
Black Friday is November 27, 2026. Amazon and Best Buy start their sale pricing about a week earlier, and the monitor and laptop prices that matter here are usually live by November 20. Cyber Monday, November 30, repeats most of them and adds a few more on software and storage.
Does editing software go on sale for Black Friday?
Adobe has run Creative Cloud promotions in this window in past years, plugin makers discount heavily, and DaVinci Resolve Studio is $295 and Blackmagic doesn’t discount it. Our editing software guide and plugins guide cover the tools; we’ll add the live promotions here when they post.
Is it better to buy on Black Friday or wait for Cyber Monday?
For hardware, buy when the price hits the target on this page; the popular monitors and laptops sell out before Monday. Cyber Monday is the better day for software, storage, and anything that ships from a warehouse rather than a shelf.
And that’s it. This page stays live through Cyber Monday and gets a fresh read every morning of deal week; the baseline prices are what we read between September 2 and September 29, 2026. If you spot a real deal on a pick from one of our guides before we do, leave a comment and we’ll verify it. The full set of buyer’s guides lives on the Gear Guides page.
