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Thanksgiving is behind us, which means the holiday shopping season has officially begun. And that means that both companies and third-party retailers will spend every day between now and Christmas morning trying to get you to spend your consumer dollars with them. As in years past, one of the most sought-after gifts will be the smartphone. According to an analysis last month by global marketing research firm NielsenIQ, 37% of shoppers buying tech this season have smartphones on their list. And when it comes to smartphone brands, Apple tops tech buyer preferences, with 54% of those surveyed looking to buy an iPhone. But as anyone who knows Apple well knows, the company rarely offers sales on its iconic smartphoneeven during the holidays. Yet that doesnt mean iPhone deals cant be had this festive season. You just need to know where to look. Here are three shopping hacks you can use to find the best deals on iPhones this holiday season. Use price tracking websites to keep tabs on iPhone sales Theres no shortage of places to buy an iPhone. Besides purchasing one directly from Apple, you can pick one up at nearly anywhere where electronics are sold, including Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, carrier stores like AT&T and Verizon, eBay, and more. Yet manually checking to see if any of these third-party resellers offer iPhone deals during the holidays (which they often do) can be time-consuming. But thats where price tracking websites come in. They let you quickly check whether an iPhone is on sale and often provide the direct link to buy it before the sale price disappears. There are numerous price tracking websites and apps you can use to find the best sales on an iPhone. These include sites like CamelCamelCamel, which tracks the prices of products available on Amazon. Just type in the iPhone model you are looking for in CamelCamelCamels search bar, and youll see Amazons current price of the model, along with new and used prices from third-party resellers on the site. You can also add your desired iPhone to a price watch list, and CamelCamelCamel will notify you as soon as it detects a sale. There are also plenty of tech sites that offer dedicated price trackers for Apple products, including iPhones. Some of the better ones include AppleInsiders iPhone Price Guide and 9to5Toys’ Apple tracker. The advantage of checking these sites is that they tend to show iPhone deals from across the web, not just on Amazon. MacPrices.net also keeps a good running list of iPhone deals. Use Google Chromes Shopping Insights and price tracking Yes, its somewhat ironic that Apple’s competitor, Google, can help you find a good deal on the iPhone. But it can. Google’s Chrome browser offers a feature called Shopping Insights that lets you view the price of a product over time, track its price, and receive notifications when the price drops. The tool is great for those looking for a deal on an iPhone (or any other product) but don’t want to check dedicated price-tracking websites multiple times a day. Shopping Insights is built into Chrome on PC, Mac, Android, and iOS and is simple to use. Just go to a retailers website and look up the iPhone you want to buy. In Chromes URL bar, youll see a shopping bag icon. Tap it to get shipping insights for your desired iPhone, click Save and Track Price, then turn on price notifications to be alerted when the iPhone you want goes on sale. (Full details about how to use Chromes Shopping Insights and price tracking tools can be found here.) Use ChatGPT to find the best holiday deals on iPhone The holidays are a busy time, so maybe you dont want to spend your time browsing price tracking websites or clicking around in Chrome to find iPhone deals. In that case, this final shopping hack to help you find a deal on an iPhone is probably for you: Just ask ChatGPT. Given that you can use ChatGPT to find deals on flights, it should be no surprise that you can also use OpenAIs chatbot to assist you in finding the best holiday shopping deals for an iPhone. I asked ChatGPT where I could buy an iPhone 16 with at least 256 GB of storage for the best deal right now, and the chatbot instantly returned a list of results showing a range of prices for the model, both new and used, along with direct links to where I could buy them. It was by far the easiest and fastest way to find iPhone deals out of all the methods above.
Category:
E-Commerce
Theres an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that peoples perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess thats why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a different culture knows, peoples perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvards Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be. So if the Inuit snow myth highlights an important concept, many would argue that theres no real harm in repeating it, in much the same way we continue to tell the apocryphal story of George Washington cutting down his fathers cherry tree. Yet truth matters. Once we start degrading it, we lose our ability to understand what is often a messy and nuanced world. What do you call a square? What makes the Inuit snow myth compelling is that it so viscerally illustrates how language can reveal deeper truths. For example, in German the word for square is Platz and in neighboring Poland, it is Plac, a word that is pronounced very similarly. In Russian, the word is Ploshchad, so again, you can see the family resemblance. In Ukraine, however, which is geographically and linguistically in the middle of all those countries, the word for square is completely different. It is Maidan and comes from Turkish, which gives you hints about Ukraines history with the Crimean Khanate, its historical ties to Byzantium, and lots of other interesting things. Slavic languages are filled with these fascinating historical remnants. The word slav comes from the same root as word (slov). So Slavs considered themselves people of the word. The word for German in slavic languages is Niemiec, which roughly translates to doesnt speak, and shows how the Slavs considered the Germanic tribes Barbarians. Languages, of course, continue to evolve. Since the early 1990s, the Independence Square in the center of Kyiv, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, has been the place where people go to protest, especially during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. So today, when Ukrainians say that its time to go to the Maidan, they mean its time to revolt. The Inuit snow myth alerts us to the possibility of examining languages in this way and many would argue that we shouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. Still, once we abandon truth, we start down a troubled path. The myths of Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox PARC We tell stories because specific narratives can often point to more general principles. For example, when pundits want to show the dangers of complacent corporate giants getting caught sleeping, they often point to Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox. Yet, much like the Inuit snow myth, these stories arent really true. Lets look at each one in turn. Blockbuster is supposedly a cautionary tale because it ignored Netflix until it was too late. Yet as Gina Keating, who covered the story for years at Reuters, explains in her book Netflixed, the video giant moved relatively quickly and came up with a successful strategy. The real problem was that those changes tanked the stock price and the strategy was reversed when CEO John Antioco left after a compensation dispute with investor Carl Icahn. In a similar vein, were often told that, after inventing digital photography, Kodak ignored the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, its EasyShare line of cameras were top sellers. It also made big investments in quality printing for digital photos. The problem was that it made most of its money on developing film, a business that completely disappeared. Another popular fable is that Xerox failed to commercialize the technology developed at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), when in fact the laser printer developed there saved the company. What also conveniently gets left out is that Steve Jobs was able to get access to the companys technology to build the Macintosh because Xerox had invested in Apple and then profited handsomely from that investment. I recently got the chance to discuss each of these with Paul Nunes, who for years headed up thought leadership at Accenture, on Aidan McCullins Innovation Show and what we noticed was that, in each case, the pundit version would lead you exactly the wrong way. Blockbusters problem wasnt that they ignored external threats, but failed to account for internal resistance. Digital photography would never have replaced Kodaks film developing business and Xerox PARC is actually a success story that other firms would do well to emulate. Feynmans Law History is full of brave souls who defied the status quo. In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered handwashing in hospitals, only to be rebuked by the medical establishment. In the early 20th century, William Coley pioneered cancer immunotherapy, only to be ignored. Barry Marshall was pilloried for his work that showed peptic ulcers were caused not by stress, but by the bacterium H. pylori. Yet being contrarian doesnt make you right. During Soviet times, Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscientific agricultural theories led to crop failures and contributed to famines that killed millions. More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s vaccine skepticism has coincided with a resurgence of measles. So how do we engage in healthy skepticism of the zeitgeist without descending into quackery? The physicist Richard Feynman, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, offers helpful guidance. He said that science begins with a guess. Thats not only allowable, but necessary. To discover something new, you need to let your mind roam free. Impossible, even ridiculous ideas, are how we break new ground. Yet the second step is crucial: you have to test your ideas. Or, as Feynman put it, If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesnt make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesnt matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. Thats all there is to it. The Narrative Fallacy The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains arent aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, reached similar conclusions. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, such as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive, and fast. The second is rational, deliberative, and slow. Our bodies evolved to make decisions quickly in life-or-death situations. Our rational minds came much later and dont automatically engage. It takes conscious effort to activate the second system. The problem is that when something feels right, humans have a tendency to build stories around them. False fables like those about Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox, purport to teach us important lessons, but the truth is that they rob us of the opportunity to unlock deeper insights. Thats why Ive learned to be suspicious of good stories, especially those that I want to be true because they just feel right. We need to constantly interrogate our feelings, especially in areas for which we do not have specific training or relevant expertise. We need to understand what exactly our emotions are alerting us to, and that requires us to engage our rational mind. Thats why, sometimes, you need to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Category:
E-Commerce
A growing number of Amazon employees have signed onto an open letter issuing some dire warnings about the companys sprint toward AI. The letter, signed by more than 1,000 workers and published this week, calls out Amazon for pushing its AI investments at the expense of the climate and its human workforce. The letters supporters come from a wide array of roles at the company, including many software engineers, and even employees focused on building AI systems. We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth, the letters authors wrote. Were the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene. In the letter obtained by The Guardian, the Amazon employees argue that their employer is throwing out its climate promises in the scramble to win the AI race. Amazon has pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, pointing to efficiencies from electric delivery vehicles and reduced plastic packaging in its climate commitment. In spite of its stated promise to reduce its carbon footprint, Amazons carbon emissions rose last year, a trend tied to pollution from its ubiquitous fleet of delivery vehicles and its major push into data center construction.Resource intensive data centers like the ones Amazon is pouring billions into building out are a hot topic in 2025. The buildings, built to power tech giants AI ambitions, pump in loads of electricity to keep servers humming and suck up water to cool off all of that energy use. Data centers, usually placed well beyond urban hubs, promise rural communities a boom of steady local jobs for many of the worlds most valuable companies, but the reality is often less inspiring. In spite of their massive footprint and a short term burst of work during construction, very few people are actually necessary to keep things up and running. In light of the downsides, rural communities around the country are beginning to reject big techs big AI buildout. AI at all costs Climate isnt the only concern among the Amazon workers who signed onto the open letter. The group of anonymous employees accuses the company of forcing AI on its workforce while openly plotting to get rid of human workers as soon as technologically possible. In the meantime, the letters authors say that timelines are getting shorter and output demands are on the rise as the company tries to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of its employees. Last month, Amazon announced that it would lay off 14,000 employees, a massive round of cuts focused on its corporate workforce. In a memo to employees, Amazons Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti said that the cuts were aimed at reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure were investing in our biggest bets namely the companys enormous spending on AI. The world is changing quickly, Galetti wrote. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology weve seen since the Internet, and its enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). Amazons AI spending this year has topped $125 billion and the company plans to invest that much and more into artificial intelligence in 2026. A call for guardrails The letter also points to Amazons major lobbying push against AI regulation and its role in spreading surveillance and military technology as major areas of concern. To address the worries it raises, the letter calls on Amazon to abandon dirty energy in order to recommit to its climate goals, loop non-manager employee voices into AI decision making and reject surveillance and deportation applications of its technology. The letter only represents a tiny sliver of Amazons more than 1.55 million employees, but that hasnt deterred a thousand people at the company from voicing their concerns, and potentially risking their jobs. Beyond Amazons own workforce, around 2,400 people including students and workers at other major tech companies issued their own letter of support. All of this is daunting, but none of it is inevitable, the Amazon letters authors wrote. A better future is still very much within reach, but it requires us to get real about the costs of AI and the guardrails we need.
Category:
E-Commerce
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