Google’s smart speakers and displays have steadily improved over the years, and luckily for us, a few of them are on sale for Black Friday. The biggest discount by far is the Google Home Max, which is now selling for $149.99, a whopping 50 percent off its regular price of $299.99) Sure, it’s a few years old now — we gave it a review score of 88 in 2017 — but it’s still a very good device, with stellar audio that outclasses most other Google-powered smart speakers, especially in terms of volume and bass. Our main complaint about the Home Max at the time was its high price tag, but since it’s half off now, the Home Max is looking like quite a bargain.
The Google-powered Nest Hub Max is on sale for $179.99 this week as well, which is $50 less than its usual price of $229.99. The Nest Hub Max is one of our favorite smart displays, with a score of 86 when we reviewed it. The 10-inch screen works great for watching videos and viewing photos, and the built-in camera works great for video calls. You can even use it as a security camera for your home.
What’s especially unique with the Nest Hub Max is that it has face recognition to recognize specific members of the household, along with gesture recognition, so you can do things like hold your palm up to pause a video or a song. Its speakers aren’t too bad either, thanks to two front-facing tweeters and one rear-facing woofer.
A 2-pack of the new Nest Audio, which debuted only a month ago, is already on sale for $169.99. That’s $30 less than if you bought each speaker separately. To be clear, you could already buy a pair of Nest Audio speakers for $20 off, so this is $10 more on top of that.
In our review (we gave it a score of 87), we noted that the Nest Audio is not necessarily the best-sounding smart speaker on the market, but the audio quality is good enough compared to other speakers of the same price range. The sound especially shines when two of them are paired in stereo, which is why the 2-pack discount here is a decent deal.
