Are gadgets sold on Black Friday really good value?

Is there something to the rumours that cut-price products are made from inferior materials?

Every November, websites the world over are plastered with the same brash ads: 65-inch 4K TV, half price. Laptops “slashed” for one day only. Smartwatches, soundbars, and robot vacuums are apparently going for a song.

The deals seem too good to be true – which leaves some wondering whether they actually are. Are the biggest Black Friday and Cyber Monday gadget “bargains” really bargains? Or are you buying a cheaper device, because it’s a cheaper version of it, made from inferior materials, and at a lower spec?

Consumer advocates have been warning for years about a tactic used by some major brands: the “derivative model” – a TV or other device made specifically for big sales events. On the shelf, it looks almost identical to a regular model. The box carries a familiar brand name and a reassuringly long model code. But it’s actually a cut-price product designed specifically for sales events.

Big box bargains in smaller boxes

Finance websites have previously described how major manufacturers create scaled-down TV models specifically for Black Friday, often with fewer features and, in some cases, “inferior materials” compared to their main product lines. The models share similar names and designs with better-reviewed sets sold year-round, but cut costs with fewer HDMI ports or downgraded components.

The idea isn’t new. Consumer Reports has long warned about “derivatives and new-for-the-holidays models” of TV that make it hard for shoppers to judge the quality of heavily advertised sets, because they’re unique to one retailer and have no review or price history to compare against. It’s something that Cybernews has also previously recognized and reported on.

Shoppers on Reddit and review sites also complain about big-name Black Friday specials that turn out to have fewer ports, weaker picture quality, or early failures.

Cheaper parts or fewer features?

Whether these devices are systematically built from worse materials is harder to prove. The bits customers can see, such as port counts, panel types, or refresh rates, are much easier to document than the exact plastics in the casing or the quality of the power supply.

One analysis of more than 200 Black Friday products found that 73% of the “derivative” models it examined used cheaper components, 61% removed key features, and 45% had shorter warranties than their closest mainstream equivalents – meaning that you might pay more in the long run. It dubbed these differences “component downgrades,” aimed at keeping margins intact while advertising eye-catching discounts.

Skeptics of the idea of “component downgrades” argue that firm evidence of systematically poorer materials isn’t clear, and that many derivative items strip out features to hit a specific price point.

Deal or no deal?

But the bigger problem than poorer quality components or design is that the bargains might not actually be good. In 2023, UK consumer group Which? analyzed more than 66,000 prices across major retailers and found that only 2% of products in the 2022 Black Friday sales were at their lowest price of the year.

Using price-tracking tools like CamelCamelCamel is a must-do for checking the validity of Black Friday deals. However, the data that would settle the build-quality question is still locked away.

Retailers and warranty providers know which model numbers fail early and get returned, and when they were bought. Teardown labs could systematically compare the internals of sale-only gadgets with their mainstream alternatives, but they don’t, at least at a scale that’s clear.

So with that in mind, the biggest risk for buyers may be less about what their TV is made of, and more about whether the “deal of the year” was ever really a deal at all.

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