The Best Black Friday Deals for Your Mac

Turkey Day 2013 is over, and now it’s time for the biggest savings of the year: Black Friday and its close cousin Cyber Monday. And, as usual, there’s more than enough incredible deals to go around. There’s Apple Store gift cards if you buy a new Mac, steep discounts on App Store apps, and much more. Best of all, the majority of them are open to anyone, anywhere — even if you’re not in the US, there’s plenty of Black Friday offers for everyone!

Here’s the very best deals for apps and gadgets we love and recommend — but hurry, most of the deals are only for today or this weekend!

Hardware Deals

promo_imacThe very best deal today is Apple’s Black Friday sale — which is available today only — which is offering a $150 Apple Store gift card with the purchase of any new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or iMac directly from the Apple Store. That makes a new 11″ Air essentially only cost $849, an especially good deal if you’ve been needing a new laptop with insanely great battery life. There’s also a similar offer for the iPad, with a $75 Apple Store card with any new iPad Air. Do note, though: that’s an Apple Store gift card, not an App Store gift card — you can pick up an iPod, Apple TV, or perhaps a new case with that extra money, but you won’t be able to stock up on apps with it.

And, of course, you may find better deals in local stores — the older iPad Mini and iPad 2 are both seeing quite good deals in many brick-and-mortar stores. Those deals aren’t in every country’s Apple Store, but you’re likely to find a variation of that sale in your local Apple store in most countries.

Then, for some other great hardware deals:

  • Doxie, the scanner company, is offering $50 off their Doxie One (which makes it just $109) and a free case with a new Doxie Flip. That’d make a great gift for yourself or anyone else going paperless next year.
  • Google Chromecast is just $29.99 on Amazon, and it comes with $6 of free Google Play credit. The Chromecast isn’t perfect, as we found in our review, but it’s a pretty nice — and very cheap — way to make any TV a little smarter.
  • The amazing folks at The Wirecutter have rounded up the deals on their favorite hardware products this year, and you’ll find deals there on everything from a Samsung TV to a number of headphones and camera lenses
  • The Paddle team is giving away an iPad Mini Retina Display plus $500 of Paddle store credit — it’s not exactly a deal, but sure is worth entering!
  • I know, I know: it’s Mac.AppStorm here. But if Windows 8.1 has your interest too, or you just want a super-cheap tablet for web browsing and Office, Microsoft has the original Surface on sale for just $199. That’s rather crazily cheap.

App Deals

Software is our forté at AppStorm, and there’s even better deals to be found in the world of apps than you could ever hope for in the world of hardware. Honestly, there’s so many deals, if you’ve been eying an app on the App Store you might as well go check and see if it’s on sale today — it really might be. There’s too much to cover every discounted app, so here’s the best apps on sale of the stuff we really recommend. Seriously: every app listed here is apps our team uses and loves, and we’re certain you’ll love them too. (Note: app names are all in bold and link directly to their purchase page, while the links in the descriptions go to our reviews of the respective apps)

Hat tip to our own Pedro Lobo for rounding up a number of these deals — be sure to check his site for more iOS app deals

And then, there’s the bundles and extended sales for Mac apps and more:

  • The Parallels Bundle is easily the best deal this week: for $69, you can get Parallels Desktop 9, Snagit, CleanMyMac, Boom, mSecure, and more.
  • If you’re a gamer, you can’t miss Steam’s Autumn Sale, which is offering a ton of daily deals on games through December 3rd.
  • Paddle has three bundles: the Mac Freebie Bundle includes Numi, Deal Alert, MacBlu-ray Player and more for the low price of free, the Paddle Holiday Bundle with Dropzone, Throng, iResizer, Moneybag and more for $39.99, and the Productive Macs Bundle with Dayspring, X-Mirage, The Archive Browser, and more for any price you want!
  • Ondesoft is giving away its screen capture app this weekend, and offering 50% off its X-Mirage app
  • If you’re building a new WordPress site, WooThemes is offering 35% off all their themes with the coupon code blackfriday2013
  • Keynotetopia, the set of Keynote and PowerPoint templates for prototyping apps and more, is 50% off.
  • DigitalOcean, the new VPS provider that we’ve recommend for building a new Ghost blog, is offering $50 in credit to new users with the promo code BLACK50
  • The complete A Book Apart Library, some of the very best short books on web development, copywriting, freelance, and more, are 35% off through December 2nd.

There’s more!

That’s far from all of the Black Friday goodness you’ll find out there. There’s tons more discounted apps and hardware — this is just the best stuff that we really recommend and think you’ll definitely want to buy. So why wait? Head to the App Store, pick up some discounted apps — or go get a new Mac from the Apple Store — and then leave a comment below letting us know if there’s more amazing Black Friday deals we should know about!

    



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