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Last week, a sad-eyed young man in an Apple Genius t-shirt said the six words no Apple aficionado wants to hear. "Your AirPods Pro 2," he said, "are borked".He probably didn't use the word "borked", but that's what he meant: the right earbud was completely gone, and the left was on its way out too; my buds were out of warranty and I didn't have AppleCare on them either so I'd have had to replace both buds at full price. So you'd think I'd be rushing to Walmart or Amazon to take advantage of their $199 AirPods Pro 2 deals.But I'm not, and I don't think you should either.• See all of today's best Amazon dealsWhy I'm keeping my AirPods Pro 2 powder dryI'm hanging on for a few more days because while $50 off a pair of AirPods Pro 2 is a nice discount, it's not an amazing discount – and we've seen amazing AirPods Pro 2 discounts before.Last summer, Amazon dropped the price of AirPods Pro 2 down to a very low $169. And last Black Friday it went lower still: AirPods Pro 2 were down to just $153.99 – and those were the USB-C ones, not the older Lightning ones.Are you willing to hang on until next week in the hope that Amazon Prime Day will offer a bigger discount than $50 off the official price? I am.The $153.99 price of Black Friday was an outlier, but they'd fallen to $159 on multiple occasions before that, and within in the last year their price has dropped below $175 on 10 occasions.UK AirPods Pro 2 deals haven't been so spectacular, sadly: the AirPods Pro 2 dropped from the usual £229 to £179 just once, in December 2024, and they've only dipped below the £190 mark a handful of times. But today they're back up at £229, so I'd expect them to drop back down a bit next week, and for other places to match or exceed Amazon's discounting.I'm not completely headphone-free, so while I do need to replace my AirPods Pro 2 pretty soon (I use them a lot for work, and for checking music mixes) I think the smart move is to wait for Prime Day next week to see how low they're going to go.If they don't drop below the $199 mark then I haven't lost anything, but if they go much lower then buying a new pair is going to be a lot less painful.Prime Day starts next week on Tuesday 8 July.Amazon's early Prime Day sale - quick linksAmazon Prime membership: free 30-day trialAmazon Devices: 50% off TVs, Echo & Fire SticksApple: AirPods + iPads from $99Back to school: deals from $5.99Beauty: 80% off toothbrushes & skincareHeadphones: $120 off Bose, Apple & SonyHealth: electric toothbrushes from $24.99Kitchen: 54% off Ninja, Nespresso & KeurigLaptops: record-low prices from $175Tablets: iPads and Samsung from $54.99Toys: 40% off Lego, scooters & TonieboxTVs: cheap TVs from $59.99Vacuums: Shark, Bissell & Dyson from $49.99

MicroSD card survey tested 200 models to uncover fakes, performance gaps, and endurance failuresFake flash was common in cheap high-capacity cards, discarding data past true limitsName-brand cards generally outperformed off-brand models in speed, reliability, and total write enduranceOne man has taken the task of testing microSD cards to a level most users would never entertain.Over the course of a year, tech enthusiast Matt Cole bought and tested 200 different models, ranging from 8GB to 1TB, with a particular focus on identifying fakes, testing performance, and measuring durability.Fifty-one of those cards failed during testing.Writing over 100TB of data per dayCole is the creator of The Great microSD Card Survey, a deep, evolving benchmark report (and a serious labor of love), that began in July 2023.He built a testing rig with eight machines and nearly 70 card readers running continuously, writing over 100TB of data per day.To date, the setup has written more than 18 petabytes of data to the cards under test conditions. Impressively, his entire effort is self-funded, although he does have an Amazon wishlist should anyone wish to buy him further cards to test.Cole’s goal was to understand how these tiny storage devices differ across brand, price, and origin.One of his main goals is to identify “fake flash,” where a card tells the host device it has more storage than it really does.A 1TB card might really only store 8GB. Once that real limit is reached, new data is silently lost. He also highlights “skimpy flash,” where a card is technically real, but provides less usable space than advertised, a common issue even among name-brand cards.His survey doesn’t stop at capacity. Cole also tested whether cards live up to their advertised speed class ratings, such as U1, U3, or V30.He ran sequential and random I/O tests, then tracked endurance through repeated write and read cycles.Some cards survived over 20,000 cycles, while others failed before reaching 500. Temperature monitoring was also part of the process, though it’s still unclear how much heat affects long-term performance.Among the best microSD cards were the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus 64GB, PNY PRO Elite Prime 64GB, SanDisk Extreme 64GB, Delkin Devices HYPERSPEED 128GB, and Samsung EVO Plus 64GB.These models performed well across multiple metrics and came close to advertised specs.Cole’s blog includes charts and summaries to help buyers quickly find reliable options and it’s frankly a stunning piece of work. He’s not done yet either. Testing continues unabated, with more cards in queue, hopefully including some of the largest capacity models.(Image credit: Matt Cole)More from TechRadar ProWe've rounded up the best microSD cards aroundAnd these are the largest microSD cardsFirst 2TB MicroSD card is now on sale and no, it is not expensive at all