Prime Day ends tonight! This is your last chance to shop 60% off the best Amazon device deals
Whether you want to upgrade your streaming set up, go paperless when reading your favorite books or add some extra security to your space, Amazon is offering unbeatable deals on its best-selling devices with up to 60% off. We're talking deals on Blink security cameras, Fire TV Sticks, Echo speakers, Kindles and more starting at just $8.
So don't wait! Keep scrolling to check out all my favorite smart home picks from Amazon. Plus, don't miss our Amazon promo codes page for more ways to save.
The Blink Mini 2 is the 2nd generation of home security cameras that offer Day and Night HD views of your home, alongside two audio and motion detection. On top of that, the Blink Mini 2 offers enhanced motion detection and an LED spotlight.
The second-generation Blink video doorbell offers a two-year battery life, HD picture and infrared night vision. The Blink video doorbell is also wireless, making it easy to set up and start protecting your home.
This bundle gets you a Blink Outdoor 4 Camera and a Blink Floodlight Mount for just $39. This wireless setup runs entirely on battery so it can be placed on virtually any surface without existing floodlight wiring. It's perfect for use in dark areas like on a shed or the side of your home.
The Blink Outdoor 4 is one of the most popular models for keeping tabs on what's happening outside of the home. With this bundle, you'll get four fully wireless security cameras that shoot crisp 1080p video both inside and outdoors for up to two years straight. The security camera earned our Editor's Choice award and is one of the best home security cameras we've tested.
Amazon's compact smart speaker packs Alexa features into a space-saving design. The Echo Pop delivers clear audio for music and podcasts, while still handling all your usual voice commands. Good for nightstands or desks where space is tight, and the semi-sphere design looks cleaner than typical smart speakers.
The Echo Spot offers a different take on the smart screen format. As well as playing your music and podcasts hands-free, it's also great for quick glances at weather, time and notifications, with a design that fits nicely on any surface.
The Amazon Echo Show 5 combines Alexa's voice assistant with a 5.5-inch screen for video calls, streaming and smart home control. With its compact design, it's a great fit for any room — and now available at $59, it's an affordable addition to your smart home setup.
The Kids edition of the Echo Show 5 includes 1 year of Amazon Kids Plus, a subscription service that provides access to kid-friendly shows, books, music and more. You can also use parental controls to manage how your children use the device. Otherwise, the Echo Show 5 Kids is a great smart display that lets you make video calls to approved contacts, get help with homework, watch videos and more.
Taking the top spot in our best smart displays guide, the Echo Show 8 nails the Goldilocks principle of smart displays: not too big, not too small, just right. The 8-inch screen balances viewing comfort with counter space perfectly. The camera tracks you during calls, and speakers deliver solid audio for music or podcasts.
The standard Fire TV Stick is no more. It's now the Fire TV Stick HD and at just $17 it's a bargain. If you don't have a 4K television, it's the ideal choice offering access to all your favorite streaming services and a voice-controlled remote. We'd still advise most people to opt for the 4K Max model, but if you don't have a 4K TV this is the streaming stick for you.
The new Fire TV Stick 4K (2024) sports an upgraded 1.7GHz quad-core processor that's 30% more powerful than the previous model. In our Amazon Fire TV stick 4K review, we praised its 4K video quality for a budget price. Features include Dolby Vision/HDR10/HDR10+/HLG support, Wi-Fi 6 support and a Live TV guide button on the remote. You also get Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby Atmos support to improve your streaming audio.
This is one of the best streaming devices available. In our Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max review, we praised its snappy performance, 4K Ultra HD streaming at 60fps with HDR, WiFi 6 support and the included Alexa Voice Remote. Don't pass up the chance to get it at this price.
The Amazon Fire HD 8 represents the sweet spot in terms of price, power and functionality. This 2024 model packs AI features, such as AI summaries in the Amazon Silk web browser and AI image generation for wallpapers. On the hardware front, you'll find an 8-inch 1280 x 800 (189 ppi) touchscreen, hexa-core CPU, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. You also get 2MP front camera, 5MP rear camera and up to 13 hours of battery life
The Fire HD 10 offers a good-looking 10-inch screen that's perfect for watching movies and videos thanks to its 1080p display. We called the tablet a "white-hot deal" in our Fire HD 10 review at the $139 price. At $69, it's a deal not to be missed.
The Fire TV Soundbar is a great cheap option to boost your Fire TV's audio. It supports DTS Virtual:X and Dolby Audio, plus Bluetooth connectivity so it won't hog a valuable HDMI port. There's no Dolby Atmos, but that's understandable at this low price.
In our Amazon Fire TV Cube review, we loved this Fire TV device for its speedy performance and easy-to-use interface. It also comes with an Ethernet port, USB-A, and HDMI-in. It's the best Fire TV device yet, combining best-in-class speed with a new remote and an extra HDMI port for device jugglers. It's just tough to justify the extra cost versus the Fire TV Stick 4K Max for less than half the price.
The Fire Max 11 tablet is the best Fire tablet you can buy. It has a bright 11-inch 2K (2000 x 1200) display, 2.2GHz octa-core Mediatek MT8188J CPU, 4GB RAM, and 8MP cameras on the front and back. USB-C charging and a MicroSD card slot are also included. In our Fire Max 11 review we called it Amazon's new top-tier Fire tablet.
This Kindle bundle includes the 16GB version of the excellent Kindle Paperwhite alongside a fabric protective cover and a power adapter. The 16GB space will hold enough books to keep you reading for a long time yet.
This is the Kids edition of our favorite Kindle. This excellent device has a 7-inch glare free device with an adjustable backlight, for the most comfortable reading experience possible. You also get a 6 month subscription to Amazon Kids Plus, providing access to a huge library of kid-friendly books, and a worry-free guarantee that means Amazon will replace it if it breaks. It's even waterproof, so there's no need to worry if it gets splashed.
The new Kindle Colorsoft features all the benefits of a Kindle, only in glorious color. If you want to see books or read comics in color, this is the Kindle you've been waiting for. While it's decidedly expensive, it delivers on the promise of providing the Kindle experience in color. In our Kindle Colorsoft review, we called it a winner thanks to its sharp and vibrant color display, lightweight design, long battery life, and enormous Kindle library.
The all-new Kindle Colorsoft is available in a bundle that includes the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition (32GB), a plant-based leather cover, and a wireless charging dock. By bundling these items together, you'll save $40 more when compared to buying each item separately.
This is a great discount on the updated Kindle Scribe. This e-reader comes with a Premium Pen that lets you annotate, write notes and draw on your e-books. You can also create digital notebooks and convert your handwritten notes into text. In our Kindle Scribe (2024) review we loved this device's large 10.2-inch 300 ppi display and found the stylus comfortable to use.
At just $49, the best value Ring Video Doorbell got even better. The newest of Ring's doorbells has head-to-toe video and package detection. You can't replace its battery, but it's a fantastic option at this price.
If you don't need a spotlight or a floodlight, the Stick Up Cam is a cheaper way to monitor the outside of your house. It features 1080p video and two-way talk. This deal is available for both the plug-in and the battery-powered model.
The Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro is the company top-end model, so in addition to 2K video, you're also getting 3D and Bird's Eye view, which better helps you see where someone is in your yard. I've had this camera set up for a year at my house, and it's still going strong.
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In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had a blunt message for his 350,000 corporate employees: There were going to be fewer of them in the near future, thanks to the "efficiency gains" he expected from AI. The proclamation generated big headlines and an uproar from staff. But it struck me as merely honest. He was acknowledging something that pretty much every CEO who sits atop a large white-collar workforce is quietly hoping to achieve sooner or later. After all, Jassy hasn't been the only executive to hint at a future of lower headcount. The head of JPMorgan's consumer and community business predicted in May that AI will reduce the number of employees in its operations division by 10%. That same month, the CEO of Klarna said that the company's investments in AI has already driven the company's headcount to shrink by 40%. And the CEO of Ford — a company that employs tens of thousands of white-collar professionals — declared that AI will wipe out "literally half" of all white-collar jobs. 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And executives are talking about their large workforces — once their greatest competitive advantage — as if they're an unfortunate holdover from a bygone, bloated era. If today's corporate giants shrink their ranks, and if tomorrow's giants never need to bulk up in the first place, we may well be witnessing the end of a defining feature of corporate America: the mega-employer. That could give rise to a whole new generation of nimble companies that innovate faster — but also leave workers navigating a world of diminished career paths and fewer jobs. Before the Industrial Revolution, most Americans worked for themselves as farmers or craftsmen. And those who didn't worked for very small operations — say, a few journeymen training under a master shoemaker. The resulting economy was a patchwork of all these tiny businesses. That started to change with the advent of capital-intensive industries like textile manufacturing, which required organizing larger groups of people under a single employer. Then came railroads in the late 19th century. With projects that took many years to realize and stretched over thousands of miles, vast numbers of workers needed to be on the same page. "If you mess it up, there's a big explosion," says Louis Hyman, a historian of work and business at Cornell. "You needed to really coordinate your mechanisms and make sure that people are doing things exactly the same way." As mass production developed, Hyman says, many of the most consequential innovations during this time weren't so much technical breakthroughs: They were social inventions to coordinate the labor of all the people it took to get the most out of the new machines. 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Even the most tech-forward companies saw their people — especially their coders — as mission-critical to their success. "Hiring great people — especially engineers — is one of the biggest challenges that any technology company has," Mark Zuckerberg lamented in 2013. "Our country doesn't produce the volume of engineers that the companies would want to hire." Tech giants often hired more than they needed to make sure they had a steady supply of talent, and to attract and retain the best of the best, they treated their employees like gods. If you were to pinpoint one moment the gods turned mortal, it would probably be November 9, 2022 — the day Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees. From there, virtually every tech company followed suit, with employers across other industries close behind. At first, the cuts were chalked up to overhiring in the pandemic. But two and a half years later, the layoffs haven't stopped and hiring is still down. More and more, AI appears to be driving those austerity measures. In an industry that once hoarded talent like gold, the shift is striking. CEOs no longer seem to view the bulk of their workforce as indispensable, and they say as much: A common refrain among tech leaders from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk to Dara Khosrowshahi now is some version of "If you don't like it here, you should leave." Companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Salesforce had reliably increased their headcounts year after year. Now, according to the workforce analytics provider Live Data, all of them employ fewer people than they did at their 2022 peak. J. Scott Hamilton, Live Data's CEO, says this is probably just the beginning. To gauge how much deeper the cuts could go, his team recently analyzed the detailed responsibilities of most roles at Microsoft to estimate the share of tasks that could, in theory, be done by AI. 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