Black Friday is still weeks away, but the discount season has effectively started. Wired has published two early roundups — a general list of 19 early Black Friday deals already live, and a dedicated guide to the 10 best headphone deals available now.

Audio is where the early action is concentrated. According to Wired's headphone guide, discounts run as deep as 50 percent on headphones and earbuds from Apple, Sony, Bose and other major brands — the kind of cuts that usually don't appear until the main event in late November.

The broader takeaway is the now-annual pattern of Black Friday creep: retailers keep pulling their promotional windows forward, and the "early deals" period increasingly contains genuine lows rather than warm-up markdowns. For shoppers, that changes the calculus — waiting for the actual Friday no longer guarantees a better price on popular gadgets, especially in categories like personal audio where inventory and competition are deep.

The practical play: if a specific pair of earbuds or headphones is on your list and the current cut is substantial, the early window is worth taking seriously. Broader categories — TVs, laptops, smart home — tend to see their deepest cuts closer to the day itself, so the staggered approach still applies.