Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! Your friendly neighborhood Dealmaster is back and reporting for bargain-hunting duty—and boy, is he going to need some extra coffee. That's because today marks the start of Amazon Prime Day 2019, the increasingly misnamed sales event that sees the nation's largest online retailer discount products beyond number to Black Friday-level prices midsummer. This year's Prime Day lasts 48 hours, from July 15-16, because time is a social construct and trillion-dollar companies can pretty much do whatever they want.
Before we dig in to our deals roundup, a disclaimer: as is often the case with big sales events like this, most of this year's Prime Day deals aren't really deals at all. Amazon will promote thousands of "discounts" over the next two days, but with that much volume, the majority of those offers will naturally have less-than-special prices or apply to less-than-desirable products.
Many "deal prices" are relative to MSRPs that products have not sold at for months, for instance, and some companies artificially raise product prices before the event starts. (As always, price checker sites are a handy tool for verifying good deals.) Prime Day is not a "holiday" for Amazon Prime users—the only people who can take part in the event—so much as a multibillion-dollar business for a retailer looking to gin up sales during a typically slow shopping period. It's also a way for Amazon to convert more shoppers into Prime members, who are estimated to spend twice as much on the site than non-Prime users.

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