Tech / Technology

Best Black Friday robot vacuum deals 2023

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Many of the best robot vacuums will be on sale for Black Friday, and several mopping and self-emptying deals are already live. Get the 2023 Shark Matrix for $199 at Walmart or the Roomba Combo j5+ with obstacle avoidance for $499.99.
Shark robot vacuum and dark, iRobot Roomba, and Roborock robot vacuum, dock, and smartphone on white background with colorful graphics

UPDATE: Nov. 3, 2023, 3:00 a.m. EDT This post has been updated with the best early Black Friday robot vacuum deals including self-emptying robot vacuums, hybrid robot vacuums, and cheap standalone robot vacuums from iRobot, Shark, Roborock, and more.

An overview of the best early Black Friday robot vacuum deals:
Best standalone robot vacuum deal

Shark Matrix RV2300

$199 at Walmart
(save $100.99)

Gray Shark robot vacuum and smartphone with map of home on screen

Best self-emptying robot vacuum deal

Shark Matrix RV2310AE

$299.99 at Amazon
(save $200)

Black Shark robot vacuum with dock and smartphone with home map on screen

Best robot vacuum/mop hybrid deal

iRobot Roomba Combo j5+

$499.99 at iRobot
(save $300)

iRobot Roomba robot vacuum on auto empty dock beside separate water tank

Robot vacuums feel like they’re everywhere and nowhere all at once in the good year of 2023. Shopping holidays have gone hard in this category for years, but you still may not know anyone who actually has one. If you’re wondering if robot vacuums are actually worth it, your best bet is to scope out Black Friday robot vacuum deals to try one yourself, already.

SEE ALSO:

Roomba models, explained: The 2023 guide to deciding which Roomba you should buy

By Black Friday, we mean the entire month of November. Retailers like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy have all already cut the virtual ribbon on their Black Friday sales, so unless you’re waiting for a very specific premium robot vacuum deal (like the Roomba Combo j9+‘s first discount, if that even happens), there’s no real point in waiting until Black Friday — and denying yourself several weeks of one less chore — to buy a robot vacuum.

Below, we’re tracking the robot vacuum deals live ahead of Black Friday. Early deals are organized into three sections — standalone robot vacuums, self-emptying robot vacuums (that don’t mop), and robot vacuum/mop hybrids — and listed in order of price. We’ll update this list with more models as they go on sale ahead of Black Friday.

Early Black Friday standalone robot vacuum deals under $300


Gray Shark robot vacuum and smartphone with map of home on screen

Credit: Shark


Our pick: Shark Matrix RV2300

$199 at Walmart (save $100.99)

Why we like it

The limbo period between Amazon’s second Prime Day of the year and Black Friday is Shark’s time to shine, apparently. For a solid cheap Shark option, skip the outdated $129 Shark ION and opt for one from the newer Matrix line instead. For less than $200, the RV2300 model (without an auto-empty dock) secures LiDAR-powered smart home mapping and virtual boundaries, plus Shark’s Matrix technology, which tackles debris from multiple angles in a crosshatch pattern to grab anything that was missed on the first pass.

Shark itself claims that the Matrix dishes out 50% more suction power than the Roomba i3 — and when the Roomba i3 costs $100 more even on sale, we’d understand if that’s an experiment you’re willing to test.

More robot vacuums on sale for under $300

Early Black Friday self-emptying robot vacuum deals under $500


Black Shark robot vacuum with dock and smartphone with home map on screen

Credit: Shark


Our pick: Shark Matrix RV2310AE

$299.99 at Amazon (save $200)

Why we like it

Shark released several iterations of its flagship robot vacuum in 2023. This chic black and silver RV2310AE model is on sale at Amazon for less than $300 — a 40% price cut and a record-low price (according to camelcamelcamel) by far. Home mapping and virtual boundaries guided by 360-degree LiDAR are present here, plus Shark’s newest claim to fame: its Matrix cleaning technique that vacuums in a crosshatch pattern to grab any debris missed from the first angle.

More self-emptying robot vacuums on sale for under $500

  • Roborock Q5+ — $449.99 $699.99 (save $250 with on-page coupon)

Early Black Friday self-emptying robot vacuum deals under $700


Roomba with flat edge on auto empty dock and smartphone with green iRobot logo screen

Credit: iRobot


Our pick: iRobot Roomba s9+

$599.99 at iRobot (save $400)

Why we like it

The s9+ hasn’t been the latest or greatest Roomba since iRobot started rolling out its j Series robot vacs in 2021. But it should still be a serious contender if you have pets or lots of thick carpeting in your home — especially when on sale for $599.99, which is just $100 away from the $499.99 it hit during Prime Big Deal Days. For reference, the only Roombas with stronger suction power than the s9+ are the j9+ and Combo j9+, which go for $899.99 and $1,399.99, respectively.

More self-emptying robot vacuums on sale for under $700

Early Black Friday robot vacuum/mop hybrid deals


iRobot Roomba robot vacuum on auto empty dock beside separate water tank

Credit: iRobot


Our pick: iRobot Roomba Combo j5+

$499.99 at iRobot (save $300)

Why we like it

iRobot has also started pushing out Black Friday deals, but more quietly than the big retailers. One discount flying under the radar that needs to be called out is on the Roomba Combo j5+, which is one of five new Roombas just launched in September. At nearly 40% off, the Roomba Combo j5+ is sitting at $499.99 — the same sale price that the less-fancy Roomba Combo i5+ is currently seeing.

Both models mop and require you to be home to manually click the water tank on, and both can map your home and avoid (or tackle) carpeted rooms on command. But there’s one huge difference between the Combo i5 and Combo j5: The j5 Series are the cheapest Roombas that use iRobot’s obstacle avoidance tech to avoid eating phone chargers or smearing pet waste if the vacuum finds an accident before you do. This capability, which we first experienced when testing the Combo j7+, is an absolute game changer if your previous gripe with robot vacuums was that you had to clean up before sending them out to clean.

More robot vacuum/mop hybrids on sale

Tech / Technology

Apple’s M3 Max MacBook Pro is as fast as expensive M2 Ultra Mac desktops

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The M3 Max is faster than its most powerful predecessor, and it’s inside the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros.
Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max

We suspected the M3 Max inside the new MacBook Pro models was fast — but maybe not quite this fast.

Apple unveiled its new silicon chipset, M3, earlier this week with its new line of MacBook Pros. Every year, the company zeroes in on its new chips’ zippier performance compared to previous generations. However, early third-party tests discovered that the company really seems to have delivered this time.

Woman using the new MacBook Pro

The new MacBook Pro announced at the “Scary Fast” event.
Credit: Apple

A database entry for Geekbench, a test that inspects CPU performance, clocked that the 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro delivers a multi-core score of 21,084.

This test result was first noticed by MacRumors, which pointed out that this figure puts the new M3 Max within the same performance tier as the M2 Ultra, which can be found inside powerful Apple desktops such as the Mac Pro and Mac Studio. The average multi-core score for those models are 21,182 and 21,316 respectively.

The M3 Max MacBook Pro with a 16-core CPU has a starting price of $3,999, so it’s certainly not cheap. However, the Mac Pro M2 Ultra starts at $6,999, so the fact that it’s delivering similar CPU performance scores is impressive.

While the Mac Studio M2 Ultra starts at the same price as the MacBook Pro M3 Max (16-core CPU), the Mac Studio comes with a 24-core CPU in comparison, with very little difference in performance.

When compared to the M2 Max, the M3 Max is around 45 percent faster than its predecessor, according to tests. That’s right around the 50 percent number that Apple claimed during the “Scary Fast” Mac event.

The M3 Max chip is certainly impressive from what we can see so far. But will the performance hold up to the everyday usage of pro-level consumers that make up its targeted audience? We’ll soon find out.

Apple’s new M3 line of MacBook Pros launch on Nov. 7.

Tech / Technology

OpenAI’s response to the AI executive order? Silence.

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Many leading AI companies issued statements in response to President Biden’s executive order, but OpenAI has yet to say anything.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman making a grimace in front of a microphone

In the wake of President Biden’s executive order on Monday, AI companies and industry leaders have weighed in on this watershed moment in AI regulation. But the biggest player in the AI space, OpenAI, has been conspicuously quiet.

The Biden-Harris administration’s far-ranging executive order addressing the risks of AI builds upon voluntary commitments secured by 15 leading AI companies. OpenAI was among the first batch of companies to promise the White House safe, secure, and trustworthy development of its AI tools. Yet the company hasn’t issued any statement on its website or X (formerly known as Twitter). CEO Sam Altman, who regularly shares OpenAI news on X, hasn’t posted anything either.

OpenAI has not responded to Mashable’s request for comment.

SEE ALSO:

White House announces new AI initiatives at Global Summit on AI Safety

Of the 15 companies that made a voluntary commitment to the Biden Administration, the following have made public statements, and all of which expressed support for the executive order: Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Scale AI. Nvidia decline to comment.

In addition to crickets from OpenAI, Mashable has yet to hear from Cohere, Inflection, Meta, Palantir, and Stability AI. But OpenAI and Altman’s publicity tour proclaiming the urgent risks of AI and the need for regulation makes the company’s silence all the more noticeable.

Altman has been vocal about the threat that generative AI made by his own company poses. In May, Altman, along with technology pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Bill Gates signed an open letter, stating, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

At a senate hearing in May, Altman expressed the need for AI regulation: “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that,” said Altman in response to inquiry from Sen. Blumenthal, D-CT about the threat of superhuman machine intelligence.

So far, cooperation with lawmakers and world leaders has worked in OpenAI’s favor. Altman participated in the Senate’s bipartisan closed-door AI summit, giving OpenAI a seat at the table for formulating AI legislation. Shortly after Altman’s testimony, leaked documents from OpenAI showed the company lobbying for weaker regulation in the European Union.

It’s unclear where OpenAI stands on the executive order, but open-source advocates say the company already has too much lobbying influence. On Wednesday, the same day as the AI Safety Summit in the U.K., more than 70 AI leaders issued a joint statement calling for a more transparent approach to AI regulation. “The idea that tight and proprietary control of foundational AI models is the only path to protecting us from society-scale harm is naive at best, dangerous at worst,” said the statement.

Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, one of the signatories, doubled down on this sentiment on X (formerly known as Twitter) by calling out OpenAI, DeepMind (a subsidiary of Google), and Anthropic for using fear-mongering to ensure favorable outcomes. “[Sam] Altman, [Demis] Hassabis, and [Dario] Amodei are the ones doing massive corporate lobbying at the moment. They are the ones who are attempting to perform a regulatory capture of the AI industry,” he posted.

Anthropic and Google leadership have both provided statements supporting the executive order, leaving OpenAI the lone company accused of regulatory capture yet to issue any comment.

What could the executive order mean for OpenAI?

Many of the testing provisions in the EO relate to huge foundation models not yet on the market and future development of AI systems, suggesting consumer-facing tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT won’t be impacted much.

“I don’t think we’re likely to see any immediate changes to any of the generative AI tools available to consumers,” said Jake Williams, former US National Security Agency (NSA) hacker and Faculty member at IANS Research. “OpenAI, Google, and others are definitely training foundation models and those are specifically called out in the EO if they might impact national security.”

So, whatever OpenAI is working on might be subjected to government testing.

In terms of how the executive order might impact directly OpenAI, Beth Simone Noveck, director of the Burnes Center for Social Change, said it could slow down the pace of new products and updates being released and companies will have to invest more in research and development and compliance.

“Companies developing large-scale language models (e.g. ChatGPT, Bard and those trained on billions of parameters of data) will be required to provide ongoing information to the federal government, including details of how they test their platforms,” said Noveck, who previously served as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama.

More than anything, the executive order signals an alignment with growing consumer expectations for greater control and protection of their personal data, said Avani Desai, CEO of Schellman, a top CPA firm that specializes in IT audit and cybersecurity.

“This is a huge win for privacy advocates as the transparency and data privacy measures can boost user confidence in AI-powered products and services,” Desai said.

So while the consequences of the executive order may not be immediate, it squarely applies to OpenAI’s tools and practices. You’d think OpenAI might have something to say about that.

Tech / Technology

Best Beats deals: Score savings of up to 43% off on headphones like the Studio Pros, Studio Buds +, and Fit Pros

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Beats headphones models like the Studio Pros, Studio Buds +, and Fit Pros are all on sale for up to 43% off at Amazon. Grab these deals while they’re still hot.
Woman looking directly into the camera while wearing a white-ish pair of Beats headphones

The holiday spirit is (dare we say) already in the air, and so are some sweet, sweet savings on Beats headphones at Amazon. If you’ve already started your holiday shopping and some people on your list are tech-lovers/audiophiles, they’re sure to appreciate a brand-new pair of Beats. Here are all the best Beats deals available right now.

Our top picks:
Best noise cancelling headphones deal

Beats Studio Pro

$199.95 at Amazon
(save $150.04)

The Beats Studio Pro headphones in a black color, over a white background

Best noise cancelling earbuds deal

Beats Studio Buds +

$129.95 at Amazon
(save $40)

The Beats Studio Buds + in a transparent color, next to their case

Best earbuds for sports deal

Beats Fit Pro

$159.95 at Amazon
(save $40)

The Beats Fit Pro in a coral color, laying in their case

Beats are kind of the kings of audio right now — everybody wants ’em, but, oftentimes, headphones from the brand are too expensive to justify actually investing in them. Fortunately, the start of a new month and the impending holiday season mean that tons of items are seeing huge, pre-Black Friday discounts. The Beats models below are certainly more affordable now than ever before.

Best noise-cancelling headphones deal


The Beats Studio Pro headphones in a black color, over a white background

Credit: Beats


Beats Studio Pro

$199.95 at Amazon (save $150.04)

Why we like it

The Beats Studio Pro headphones are proof that we’re living in the future — what with their Personalized Spatial Audio (powered by head tracking), active noise cancellation, impressive and distortion-free audio fidelity, and Transparency Mode should you need it. What’s even cooler is that if you choose to connect these babies to a device via USB-C, you can choose between the Beats Signature profile (for music), Entertainment profile (designed just for movies/gaming), or Conversation profile (which provides clarified dialogue during calls). The Studio Pro headphones have you in mind; both their 40-hour battery life and UltraPlush ear cushions are proof.

Best noise cancelling earbuds deal


The Beats Studio Buds + in a transparent color, next to their case

Credit: Beats


Beats Studio Buds +

$129.95 at Amazon (save $40)

Why we like it

Beats’ Studio Buds + essentially pack just as strong a punch as the aforementioned Studio Pros, but are way more low-profile and lightweight (they’re earbuds, after all!). You will surely be impressed with their venting system (for your all-day comfort), surround sound, and Fast Fuel capabilities (just five minutes of charging gives you one full hour of juice). Whether you’re an Apple or Android user, these buds will seamlessly fit into your “tech routine.” Apple users can even buy them with accompanying AppleCare+ protection.

Best earbuds for sports deal


The Beats Fit Pro in a coral color, laying in their case

Credit: Beats


Beats Fit Pro

$159.95 at Amazon (save $40)

Why we like it

The Beats Fit Pro are your solution to achieving powerful sound while on the go. These earbuds are made for the athletes among us: They’re sweat and water-resistant, have secure-fit wingtips that will prevent them from falling out on jogs, and have easy-to-navigate controls that will make stopping/starting music (as well as taking calls or activating the voice assistant) a breeze. If you’re an iOS user, you’ll love these Beats even more. After all, they’re equipped with an Apple H1 chip, which means you can automatically pair them with your Apple devices and even audio share. Great things do come in small (and bright!) packages.