So Amazon finally ran Prime Day this week, except it wasn't in July like it's supposed to be, it was October 13th and 14th, because 2020 apparently couldn't let one single normal thing happen on schedule. I kept calling it "October Prime Day" out loud to my wife like that was going to make it feel less weird and it did not.
And then, because someone at Amazon and someone at Apple clearly do not talk to each other, Apple picked literally the same Tuesday to hold its iPhone 12 event. Same day. Two of the biggest consumer tech spending events of the year, stacked on top of each other, competing for the same eyeballs and the same credit cards. I don't know if that's a coincidence or if it's some kind of cold war I'm not smart enough to understand, but sitting there with the Apple keynote open in one tab and the Amazon deals page open in another felt like a very specific flavor of 2020 chaos.
I'll get the obvious part out of the way fast because everyone else on the internet has already written six thousand words about it: new iPhones, four of them this time (12 mini, 12, 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max), all with 5G, all with the flat-edge design that makes them look like tiny iPhone 4s again, which I actually like. Preorders for the 12 and 12 mini opened yesterday morning. No charger, no earbuds in the box anymore, which Apple is framing as an environmental win and which is also, conveniently, a box that now costs them less to ship. I'm not mad about it, I just think we should be allowed to say both things are true at once without one side acting like the other side has lost their minds.
Anyway. Prime Day. Here's what I actually did, because I think the "here's what's on sale" posts are useless by the time anyone reads them.
I bought a pack of the AmazonBasics HDMI cables for something like nine bucks because I somehow only own one good HDMI cable in this entire house, which is insane given how many devices are hooked up to the TV. I grabbed a Fire TV Stick for a relative who still doesn't have a streaming device and has been watching Netflix through some ancient smart TV app that crashes every twenty minutes. And I almost bought an Instant Pot, sat there with it in my cart for a solid four minutes, then closed the tab, because I already own a slow cooker I use twice a year and I know myself.
The thing that actually annoyed me about this Prime Day, and I don't think I've seen anyone else say it quite this way, is how much of it wasn't actually a deal at all. Half the "lightning deals" I clicked into were the exact same price the item had been sitting at for a month, sometimes higher than a price I remembered from September. I started keeping CamelCamelCamel open in a second tab just to spot check things before buying, which feels like a sad thing to have to do during the event that's supposed to be about deals. If you've never used it, it's a free price-history tracker for Amazon listings, and honestly at this point I trust it more than the little red "limited time deal" banner.
The pandemic timing thing is worth sitting with for a second too. Amazon pushed this whole event back from July because their warehouses were slammed with a surge in online ordering that nobody planned for back in March. So now we've got a shopping event built around competing for deals landing right as we head into an actual holiday shopping season that's going to be just as strained, maybe worse, with everyone stuck at home ordering everything online instead of going to a mall. I don't envy whoever's doing capacity planning for Amazon logistics right now. That job sounds like a nightmare I wouldn't wish on anyone.
My HDMI cables show up Sunday, apparently. I'll believe it when I see it.