13 product pages have stayed open in my browser since spring, and none of them lost my interest along the way. My bank balance closed some of the tabs. My work calendar waved goodbye to others. One was closed by the voltage coming out of a wall socket in Yerevan, a story I’ll get to below.
So read the following as a wishlist with the receipts stapled on. Every product below is one I’d own without hesitation, and I’ve written down the moment each stopped making sense for me.
BOOX Tablet Go Color 7 (Gen II)
Amazon replaces my Kindle Kids 16 GB if it breaks. That promise, more than any price tag, is what keeps me from ordering the BOOX.
Color e-ink would do far more for comic pages and my scribbled margins than a black-and-white panel ever can, and the page-turn buttons look like a pleasure to press. Then I pick up the Ocean Explorer cover at midnight, turn a page, and Karl Ove Knausgård’s words pull me straight back into the book, not the device.
Sony PlayStation 5 Pro
$899.00 buys the console built to run GTA VI, ray-traced reflections and AI-sharpened 4K included, and I’ve been chasing that game since I was a kid tearing around a pixelated city on my uncle’s computer.
My trouble arrives when the install bar fills. A Tuesday deadline has no interest in Vice City, and neither does my head of content, Madhurima, when I’m supposed to be writing.
Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 (8.8-inch Snapdragon)
A few Call of Duty Mobile battle royale matches on my iPhone cover my entire appetite for mobile gaming. Work and films live on the MacBook Air. Nothing remains for an 8.8-inch gaming tablet except the afternoons I’ve spent years learning to defend, and $679.99 is a steep entry fee for losing them.
Beats Powerbeats Pro 2
A peer-reviewed research article I came across on Jeff Nippard’s Instagram puts the gain from your preferred music at one or two extra reps per set, with no matching lift to maximal strength. Earhooks that stay put through a heavy set are worth paying for. But $199.95 after a 20% discount for one or two extra reps isn’t the trade I want, so the $25 JLab Go Sport+ moved a step ahead in my ranking.
Oura Ring 5
Titanium, 40% smaller than the fourth-generation ring, slim enough that I’d forget it overnight. The hardware has never been my objection.
Buying a device and then paying every month to read what the device already knows about me is where I stop, and the membership alone has kept the ring out of my cart since launch.
Hydrow Origin
Filmed rows through Alaska and Portugal with a coach counting me down are a good excuse to get out of bed. I walk past a rack of rowing machines several days a week, in a gym seven minutes away from my door that I’ve already paid for. Buying my own at $1,895 duplicates equipment I have access to on demand, and my house has nowhere to put it anyway.
Ninja BlendBOSS
Last month, I ordered the $129.99 BlendBOSS from the US and had it shipped to Armenia, only to discover that I had paid to import a 120 V blender into a 230 V kitchen. The fix was a step-down transformer, which meant adding another brick to the counter before I could make a protein shake.
At that point, the $43.25 difference between the BlendBOSS and my Ninja Blast felt more like an exit fee from my own bad decision. I took the cheaper blender, charged it, and never looked back.
PETKIT Purobot Max Pro 2
Scooping is the least charming part of living with cats, and I resent the job every afternoon. A sealed bin holding 17 days of waste would hand that chore back to me, and a camera weighing each cat would flag a health problem before a vet appointment does.
My Molly and her children are getting neither yet. I’m not paying $499.99 to skip two minutes with a scoop, no matter how much I dislike those two minutes.
CudaJet Underwater Jetpack
Flying under the surface at three meters per second looks like the most fun anyone has managed with a battery pack. I’ve replayed the footage more times than I’d admit to a stranger.
My swimming is where the fantasy falls apart, since I was the man who took a bus from Saranda to Ksamil to experience the more turquoise water… and ended up watching my friend swim farther out while I stayed where my feet could still find the bottom.
Strapping 14 kilograms of propulsion to my back before mastering a front crawl has one obvious ending. The price is far out of reach as well, though my technique already disqualified me.
Dreame X60 Max Ultra Complete
Dual retractable legs climb an 8.8 cm double-layer threshold. My house has nothing taller than a doormat between the front door and the balcony, so the cleverest part of the machine would spend its whole life waiting for a step that never arrives. Put a $1,699.99 price beside a floor plan a far simpler robot covers, and the investment doesn’t make sense.
LG OLED evo AI C5
The 65-inch C5 at $1,499.99 would put perfect blacks and 144 Hz gaming between me and GTA VI. My reason for skipping the console applies twice as hard to the screen that would make the console worth owning. Great gaming televisions are how a productive week quietly disappears, and I’ve watched that happen with far worse hardware.
Cinch Air Cruiser
I picture the Cinch Air Cruiser strapped to the roof as I leave Yerevan on a Friday afternoon. Lake Sevan is ahead, and I have just enough daylight left to find a decent spot. Four minutes later, the frame is up, and I’m off the back seat and onto a foam mattress.
The problem is the $2,999 price. I have savings, but they already have names attached to them this year.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra
Out of everything above, the Fold8 Ultra is the one I’d carry home today. An eight-inch main screen folding into a pocket would cover my gaming and let me answer work messages beside an open calendar while the MacBook stays at home.
Starting at $2,099.99 before trade-in, Samsung’s foldable asks for more than my phone budget has ever held.
