Amazon is running discounts ahead of October Prime Day, and a few of them are actually the best prices we've seen all year.
Prime Big Deal Days officially runs Oct. 6 and 7, but Amazon has already marked down a batch of devices before the sale starts. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with Apple's M5 Max chip, 36GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage is down to $3,499, a $600 cut from its post-price-hike sticker of $4,099. Apple's AirPods 4 are back to $99, their lowest price of 2026 even if not an all-time low. A 42mm Garmin vivoactive 6 smartwatch has hit a new low of $229.99, and Amazon's own Fire TV Stick 4K Plus drops to $24.99 with a checkout code, tying its all-time low.
The timing is the interesting part. Memory chip shortages have been pushing prices up across the industry this year, and Amazon itself raised the cost of its Fire TV sticks and some laptop configurations within the past few months. Undoing those hikes for a sale window shows discounting still works as a marketing lever even in a supply-constrained market, and it puts pressure on Walmart and Target, both of which are readying their own October sales to chase the same holiday-season traffic.
Whether that pressure holds through the actual two-day event on Oct. 6 and 7 is the real test, since pre-sale deals are usually the easy part.