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The best back to school tech deals at Best Buy cover just about everything
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Heading back to class for the new school year? Best Buy is offering some incredible deals on must-have tech gadgets just in time for all your back to school needs. Whether you’re in the market for a new laptop or tablet, headphones or smartwatch, now’s the perfect time to go shopping. Best Buy is showcasing tons of back to school-centric tech products on sale right now, so you’ll find a little something for you or the students in your household.
We’ve made things even easier for you by rounding up some of the best deals on back to school tech at Best Buy. They include deep price cuts on everything from Apple products to TVs and beyond. You can easily outfit a dorm room, stock up on productivity-centric gadgets, or even indulge in a new display for the living room. Read on for our picks below and be sure to snag any deal you see that you want – it won’t last long.
The best back to school deals at Best Buy
Apple AirPods Max: $450 ($100 off)
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These status symbol headphones also happen to sound great, so any lectures that come through them will be crystal clear. With super cushy ear cups, booming audio, spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, and absolutely fantastic active noise cancellation, the AirPods Max make a bold statement for school and beyond.
Plus, transparency mode lets you tune into your surroundings when needed. And at 15 hours of playtime, these headphones keep your music flowing all day. Beyond performance, the AirPods Max make a fashion statement with five stylish color options. These are the perfect option for Apple enthusiasts looking for a pair of excellent over-the-ear headphones.
Beats Studio Pro: $180 ($170 off)
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Listening to music can help you study. The sleek and powerful Beats Studio Pro make a great gift for anyone who takes listening to music seriously. Their top-notch audio quality and variety of features, including fantastic noise cancellaiton and lossless audio, make them the perfect choice for anyone who spends much of their time with their cans on.
They offer simple one-touch pairing with Apple devices, spatial audio support, and dynamic head-tracking, so the music can follow you no matter where you turn your head. With lossless audio, adaptive noise canceling, and transparency mode, they’re truly customizable so you can enjoy your audio the way you want to.
And they look great, too: They come in black, deep brown, navy and sandstone, each with a plush headband and ear cushions. Finally, they offer up to 40 hours of battery life, with a 10-minute charge delivering an additional four hours of playtime.
Beats Studio Buds: $100 ($50 off)
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The Beats Studio Buds offers two experiences: one that blocks out external noise and another that lets sounds pass through so you can keep abreast of what’s happening around you. They also sound fantastic, with crisp treble and booming bass. They’re great for helping you stay focused when you need to study, too.
Beats claims that a single charge provides up to eight hours of continuous playtime, while the accompanying charging case extends the total listening time to an impressive 24 hours. Users who prefer tactile controls will appreciate the external tap functionality, which allows for various commands based on the number of taps or the duration of a press.
Numerous reviewers have drawn comparisons between these Bluetooth earbuds and the popular AirPods Pro. The Beats Studio Buds are available in three sleek color options: black, white, and red. This sale price applies to all three.
Apple 12.9″ iPad Pro M2 (256GB): $899 ($300 off)
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The 6th generation iPad Pro, powered by the M2 chip, is still a powerful tablet even though there’s a much more performance-based model with the M4 chip now. The larger touchscreen is perfect for multitasking or running apps that require extra screen space. It also has a gorgeous screen that’s great for playing games, watching movies, or FaceTiming. Okay, and also for homework.
The iPad Pro is ideal for handling tasks that require lots of computing power, like editing 4K video, working with high-resolution photos, doing any sort of graphic arts work, managing advanced spreadsheets and more.
The iPad Pro offers all-day battery life (up to 10 hours) and supports Wi-Fi 6E for wireless connectivity. It’s the perfect portable option for schoolwork, but it’s also a great entertainment center on the go, too.
HP LaserJet Pro MFP wireless black-and-white all-in-one printer: $300 ($240 off)
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Sometimes you need to print things for school, be it a book report or a permission slip. Take care of it all with the HP LaserJet Pro MFP all-in-one printer.
It has blazing fast print speeds and a 50-page auto feeder, so it can power through high-volume jobs effortlessly. It can also perform dual-sided scanning in a single pass to help you finish complex scanning tasks quickly.
But there’s more to this printer than that. HP Smart technology and shortcuts help to make tasks easier so you aren’t stuck navigating an endless maze of menu options. You can also enable print control from anywhere — including your phone or laptop.
Now you can just handle everything you or your kids need for school from home in a snap.
Samsung 83″ Class S90C OLED smart TV: $3,300 ($700 off)
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Treat your favorite student to a new TV with the Samsung S90C. This OLED TV comes in various sizes, including an absolutely huge 83-inch version — perfect for the living room in that first apartment off campus. Thanks to its wide-angle viewing, you don’t need to sit right on top of the screen to get a good picture.
And speaking of clear views, whatever action you’re watching will appear smooth and fluid, with life-like and accurate colors thanks to the TV’s 120Hz refresh rate and support for HDR10+ and HLG. Like all Samsung smart TVs, this one runs using the Tizen operating system, which makes it easy to access any streaming content from the services you subscribe to.
You don’t have to use this TV for educational purposes. But it will absolutely screen documentaries and other enlightening content if that makes it an easier purchase to digest.
Lenovo Yoga Book 9i 2-in-1 laptop: $1,800 ($200 off)
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Sometimes school gets demanding. This laptop has two different displays to help offload some of the demand on your computer when you or your kids have a lot of work to do. The Yoga Book 9i offers two 13.3-inch OLED touchscreens and a detachable keyboard. This gives you more functionality and on-screen real estate than a typical 2-in-1 laptop or a more traditional machine.
With two displays, you can run two apps at the same time; a single app on both screens; or reposition the screens to face in opposite directions — a great option for presentations. What we love most about this laptop is its innovative design that might even make doing group projects fun.
And what’s even more remarkable is the small size and low weight of this laptop. It offers a sleek and ultra-modern appearance. You also get enough computing power for advanced applications. When the Yoga 9i’s displays are positioned like a traditional laptop, the detachable keyboard can be placed over part of the bottom screen, so you can enjoy traditional laptop functionality. The keyboard stays put thanks to magnets. Just remove it if you want to use both screens.
HP 15.6-inch touchscreen laptop, $550 ($250 off)
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This touchscreen laptop is a fantastic choice for everyday browsing, homework, attending Zoom classes and more. It boasts a 15.6-inch screen, a whopping 16GB RAM and 512 GB to store all your documents. It also has a powerful Intel Core i7 processor to power it all.
It includes a great webcam with advanced noise reduction software for Zoom classes or daily meetings, and a battery that’ll last you up to 11 hours and 45 minutes even when you’re playing videos or using Bluetooth.
Most work is usually done on a laptop when it comes to many classes these days, or a computer is at least heavily involved. This is an affordable and capable option that’s good for a variety of use cases, and it can also make the perfect office computer replacement as well.
To learn more about these and other smartphone options, be sure to check out our coverage of the best Android smartphones and best folding smartphones. You can also check out our full review of the popular Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max and OnePlus 12 smartphones. And if you’re looking to switch from an Apple iPhone to an Android phone, or transition from an Android phone to an iPhone, we’ve got you covered.
It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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