Gone are the days when Samsung’s best wearable devices played nice with the competition’s iPhones, which leaves cash-strapped Apple fans with far fewer budget-friendly smartwatch options right now than just a couple of years back.
If you can’t afford the rugged (and decidedly extravagant) new Apple Watch Ultra, the $400 and up “mainstream” Series 8, or even the second-gen Apple Watch SE, which starts at a surprisingly reasonable 250 bucks, you’re… kind of stuck having to hunt for the top holiday deals on the latter model’s predecessor.
Originally released all the way back in the fall of 2020, the first-gen Apple Watch SE was unsurprisingly officially discontinued on the heels of its sequel’s debut last month. While the low-cost iPhone-compatible smartwatch is still available from a host of major third-party retailers in the US, its advanced age certainly makes it risky to wait until Black Friday in late November for the perfect offer.
That’s because said offer may never come and the decidedly feature-packed device could go out of stock instead, leaving you empty-handed (or empty-wristed) on Christmas when you can beat the rush and claim Amazon’s solid new deal at the time of this writing.
Yes, the Apple Watch SE is cheaper than ever with roughly a month to go until Thanksgiving, fetching a whopping 90 bucks less than usual in a 40mm size and a single gold/starlight color combo with no standalone cellular connectivity on deck.
Because this thing commanded a slightly higher $279 price tag at launch than the 2022 edition, the aforementioned $90 discount still doesn’t make the Apple Watch SE irresistibly affordable. At the same time, there are absolutely no guarantees heftier discounts are anywhere on the horizon, and with multiple models currently unavailable on Amazon, we wouldn’t be surprised to see this entry-level configuration go away for good in the near future.
By no means as sophisticated as the overall best smartwatches money can buy right now, the Apple Watch SE does still come with an expansive health monitoring and fitness tracking arsenal, as well as an unmistakable design (for better and for worse), a high-quality Retina display, and perhaps most importantly, absolutely outstanding software support.
