From traffic jams to tech deals
Every year, one gadget becomes the thing everyone wants. It sells out, it shows up on every wish list, and it ends up defining that year's shopping season. Look back far enough and those gadgets tell a story: how technology shrank, got smarter and found its way into all our pockets.
But first, where does the name come from? Black Friday started in Philadelphia in the early 1960s. Local police used the phrase to describe the chaos the day after Thanksgiving, when crowds of shoppers and traffic jams packed the city centre and officers had to work 12-hour shifts. The popular story that it's the day shops finally go "into the black" (into profit) came later. It's a nice idea, but it isn't where the name began.
Black Friday crossed the Atlantic and arrived here in Europe much more recently. Amazon brought its first Black Friday deals to the UK in 2010. Asda followed in 2013, and by 2014 the event had well and truly arrived, with scuffles over cut-price TVs making the evening news. Today it's one of the biggest shopping weekends of the British year.
So, grab a cuppa. Here are the gadgets that defined each decade, and the clever electronics hiding inside them.
The 1980s: music on the move and a talking bear
The 1980s were the decade gadgets got personal. Sony's first portable cassette player arrived in 1979, and British shoppers first met it under a different name: the Stowaway. It was soon renamed the Walkman, and suddenly your music could come with you on the bus, the school run or a jog round the park.
At home, the big craze was a storytelling teddy bear. Teddy Ruxpin launched in 1985 and became one of the best-selling toys of 1985 and 1986. Pop a tape in his back and he'd read you a story, rolling his eyes and moving his mouth in time with the words.
What's inside?
Teddy Ruxpin's trick was hidden in the tape itself. A stereo cassette has two tracks, left and right. Teddy used one for the story you could hear, and the other for a stream of control signals you couldn't. Those signals told small motors when to move his eyes and mouth. It's an early, clever example of using a sound signal to control movement, an idea makers still borrow today.
Meanwhile, in British bedrooms, home computers like the ZX Spectrum were turning a whole generation into coders, typing in programs line by line from magazines.
The 1990s: pocket pets and a toy that talked back
If the 80s put music in your pocket, the 90s put a whole world in there. Nintendo's Game Boy reached the UK in 1990, and the grey brick with the green screen became the gadget every kid wanted for the long car journey.
Then came the digital pets. Tamagotchi launched in Japan in 1996 and went on to sell around 70 million units worldwide. You had to feed it, play with it and clean up after it, or it would perish. Some schools banned them because pupils were too busy keeping their pets alive.
And in 1998 came the decade's wildest craze: Furby. This furry, wide-eyed creature spoke its own language, "Furbish", and slowly started using English words. It sold more than 40 million units in about three years, and parents queued round the block to get one.
What's inside?
Furby was packed with sensors. It could feel when you stroked it, hear sound, detect light and sense when it was turned upside down. It even chatted to other Furbys using the same infrared invisible light your TV remote uses. All of it was run by a small, cheap chip called a microcontroller. The Tamagotchi worked the same way: a tiny microcontroller, a simple LCD screen and three buttons. Today you can buy microcontroller boards for a few pounds and build your own sensor-packed gadget at the kitchen table.
The 2000s: 1,000 songs and waving at the telly
Twenty-five years ago today, on 23 October 2001, Apple unveiled the iPod. Its promise was simple: 1,000 songs in your pocket. It held 5GB, ran for up to 10 hours on a charge, and made the humble cassette player look ancient almost overnight. Within a few years, white earphones were everywhere.
Later in the decade, gaming got off the sofa. Nintendo's Wii arrived in time for Christmas 2006 and was famously hard to find. Instead of just pressing buttons, you swung, pointed and bowled. Suddenly grandparents were playing tennis in the living room.
What's inside?
The Wii Remote had two clever bits of kit. The first was an accelerometer, a tiny sensor that measures movement and tilt, so the console knew when you swung your arm. The second was an infrared camera in the tip. The "sensor bar" on your TV wasn't a sensor at all: it was just two clusters of infrared lights. The remote watched those two dots and worked out where you were pointing. Fun fact: two candles work too! Accelerometers like these are now cheap, tiny modules that hobbyists use for motion-controlled projects.
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The 2010s: talking speakers and flying cameras
The 2010s were the decade Black Friday became a British habit, and the deals were dominated by tech. Tablets became the must-have family gadget, and big TVs got cheaper every November.
Then gadgets started listening. Over Black Friday weekend in 2017, the Echo Dot smart speaker was Amazon's best-selling item in the US, and Amazon said it sold millions of Alexa devices between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. "Alexa, play some Christmas music" became a phrase heard in homes everywhere.
The sky got busier too. Camera drones went from expensive kit for professionals to something you could find under the Christmas tree.
What's inside?
A smart speaker is mostly a set of microphones, a speaker and a Wi-Fi chip. The microphones listen for one "wake word", and only then send what you say over the internet to be understood. A drone is a flying lesson in electronics: four motors, a small flight controller, a lithium battery and sensors that keep it level in the wind. Its flight controller uses an accelerometer like the Wii Remote's, plus a gyroscope, and checks them hundreds of times a second.
The 2020s: the year everything sold out
In 2020, with most of us stuck at home, Black Friday moved almost entirely online. The gadget everyone was chasing was the PlayStation 5. It launched in the UK on 19 November 2020, a week before Black Friday, and sold out almost instantly. Retailer websites buckled under online queues, and consoles priced at £449.99 were selling on eBay for £700 or more.
It wasn't just consoles. A worldwide chip shortage hit everything from cars to games machines, and even the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card-sized computer loved by tinkerers, became hard to find from 2021. Demand for the little boards jumped, and supply couldn't keep up.
What's inside?
Why would a chip shortage hit so many different things at once? Because almost every modern gadget relies on the same building blocks: microcontrollers, memory, power chips and sensors. The PS5, your car, your smart doorbell and a Raspberry Pi all share parts like these. Once you know that, gadgets stop looking like magic and start looking like something you could build.
This year's must-have gadget might be one you build for yourself
Look back over 40-odd years of Black Friday tech and a pattern shows up. The Walkman, the Furby, the Wii and the smart speaker all came down to the same simple ingredients: motors, sensors, lights, batteries and a small chip telling them what to do.
Those ingredients used to be locked away inside factory-made gadgets. Now anyone can get hold of them. With a microcontroller board, a few sensors and an afternoon, you could build your own motion-sensing game, a light-up desk buddy, or a weather station for the garden.
So this year, instead of joining the queue for the next big thing, why not make it?
We're putting together our Black Friday deals on the parts, kits and tools to get you started, plus project ideas for every skill level, from first-timers to seasoned tinkerers.