Best Buy
Best Buy at Spoot: Spotted Early is a file of 3 stories. The newest of them: “The S26 Ultra hides your screen for $950, and that's the whole pitch”, “The last-gen Kindle Paperwhite is still the smart buy at 30 percent off”, and “The M6 Mac Mini finally stops pretending it costs that much”. The S26 Ultra costs $950 to hide your screen, and honestly, that feels like the right price for the paranoia. Calling something "last-gen" usually means it's the awkward cousin at the family reunion. Spoot: Spotted Early New things, caught while they're still new and a little weird. Spoot finds fresh gadgets, clever inventions, crowdfunding campaigns,… The list below is every Best Buy story on Spoot: Spotted Early, newest first.
The S26 Ultra hides your screen for $950, and that's the whole pitch
The S26 Ultra costs $950 to hide your screen, and honestly, that feels like the right price for the paranoia. Samsung's 6.9-inch flagship drops to $949.99 at Amazon, a solid $450 off its usual tag, and the headline trick is an adjustable privacy display that blanks out the whole screen, or just bits of it, for anyone peeking from a steep angle. The rest of the phone doesn't suffer for it. The camera hardware gets dual telephoto lenses and a 200-megapixel main sensor, which matters more in low light than any spec sheet suggests. It's still a big phone, though slimmer than the S25 Ultra. The S Pen is along for the ride. For a device this size, hiding your business from strangers feels less like a gimmick and more like a survival instinct.
The last-gen Kindle Paperwhite is still the smart buy at 30 percent off
Calling something "last-gen" usually means it's the awkward cousin at the family reunion. But the 2024 Kindle Paperwhite? It's the one you actually want to sit next to. The newer model opens books 30 percent faster and shaves off a millimeter, sure, but it also costs $50 more. Meanwhile, this one keeps the same glorious 300ppi screen, the auto-adjusting front light, and that IPX8 waterproofing that lets you read in the bath without fear. The Signature Edition, down to $169.99 from $249.99, adds wireless charging, 32GB of storage, and no lockscreen ads. The standard Paperwhite at $149.99 cuts too much. If you want the real deal without the premium tax, this is it. (And if you like smart buys that bite back, check out our piece on Gerber's dual-force pocket tool.)
The M6 Mac Mini finally stops pretending it costs that much
The M6 Mac Mini finally stops pretending it costs that much. Apple's latest pint-sized powerhouse debuted at $899, a full $300 jump from the M4's launch price, and for a machine that's mostly unchanged apart from a 20 percent faster chip, that stung. But October Prime Day just clawed $119 off the base model, bringing it to $779.99 at Amazon. That's the first real discount on this thing, and it flips the math completely. Best Buy is still asking $799 for the older M4 version with the same 256GB storage and 16GB RAM, which now feels like a trap. Don't get that one. The M6 is faster, cheaper, and finally priced like the sensible little box it always was. If you've been circling, this is the tab to keep open.