[Arthur Geese]: We have built a world that makes people need this stuff and increasingly it's going to be very difficult for a broad category of people to afford.

[Rosie Garin]: I'm Rosie Garin and you're listening to the Wire Cutter Show.

[Rosie Garin]: Hey, it's Rosie. Several months ago, my colleagues on the tech team here at Wire Cutter began reporting on the rising costs of consumer tech products like laptops, phones, and gaming consoles. By January, we had published an article on the Wire Cutter site called The Death of the Cheap Laptop is coming. Well, we're just a few months later and the tech team is confidently ringing the alarm and saying that the death of the cheap laptop isn't coming. It's here. It's about to get worse. And the reason behind it has a lot to do with AI. I want to get a better understanding of what factors are at play, whether there's hope on the horizon, and if not, whether we all need to rush out to buy the devices we need or think we may need now before prices climb higher and higher. How bad is it and what can we do about it? After the break, I'll put those questions and more to my colleagues who've been closely tracking this. Some members of Wire Cutters tech team, Caitlyn McGary, Arthur Geese, and Kimber streams. I hope you'll stick around. We'll be right back.

[Rosie Garin]: Welcome back. Today we're talking about the end of the era of affordable consumer tech products. Are we there? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Now, as you'll hear, part of the answer is about AI. And because of that, we should note that we work for the New York Times company, which is suing several companies, Open AI, Microsoft, and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations. With that said, joining me to break it down are three of my colleagues who have written and reported extensively on the subject. Caitlyn McGary, senior editor on our tech team.

[Caitlyn McGary]: Hi, thanks for having us.

[Rosie Garin]: Arthur Geese, supervising editor on the tech team, who also covers video games and hardware.

[Arthur Geese]: Nice to be back.

[Rosie Garin]: and Kimber streams, senior staff writer covering laptops. Welcome.

[Kimber Streams]: Hello. Hello. This might be a slightly sad a conversation tinged with sadness might be fair to say, but let's just jump right in. What we try and do on the show is service. And so I want to make sure that there in addition to sort of talking about what's happening, we're also talking about what if any recourse there is for folks listening.

[Rosie Garin]: So, Caitlyn, I want to start with you. What's the headline and how should the average person be thinking about these price increases that you're already seeing?

[Caitlyn McGary]: Um, the headline is bad. Everything is pretty bad. I wish I could be more optimistic about it, honestly, but if I needed a new computer right now, I would be pretty stressed out. I just bought a new computer about a year and a half ago and I'm planning to use it forever if I can. It's not good.

[Rosie Garin]: So, prices are increasing. What are the components that are contributing to these hefty price tags? Before we talk about where we're headed, let's talk about where we are and where we've been.

[Caitlyn McGary]: Yeah. I mean, technology has never been affordable or even cheap really. Like, this is probably the cheapest technology has ever been. I mean, if you think about the earliest personal computers or portable telephones, incredibly expensive. And that's because there's a lot that goes into them. I mean, you have the chipsets, the screens, cameras, RAM, storage, the research and development that goes into all of that. Like, that's just crazy expensive. But prices have been coming down a lot in recent years. And now we are seeing a reversal of that trend. And I think that's where we're getting concerned because we were hopeful that they would decrease forever.

[Arthur Geese]: I think the sort of decrease in price over time towards tech has corresponded with this idea of indispensability for technology that there was a time where cell phones were luxury and then cell phones felt important. And now cell phones are an absolute necessity. Like we can't function in most of our modern lives without them. And so the democratization of tech has made them a bigger part of our lives. And I think one of the things we're most concerned about with the direction and trajectory that we're seeing on prices is that we have built a world that makes people need this stuff and increasingly it's going to be very difficult for a broad category of people to afford.

[Rosie Garin]: Arthur, you wrote this great piece that folks should check out on the Wire Cutter site called The Death of the Cheap Laptop is Coming. I'm curious when this story started to peique your interest. This is a question for you in regards to the show, but I'm also curious, Caitlyn and Kimber, when you started to see here signs that made you concerned.

[Arthur Geese]: I got a little worried last October as the prices of memory for PCs started to jump up and that happened concurrently with this sort of agreement that was signed between OpenAI and two of the largest manufacturers of RAM and storage that they were essentially committing up to 40% of all RAM output for the foreseeable future. As that happened, we saw just this two then three then four alarm fire in the price of certain kinds of components specifically with RAM at first and then by the end of the year storage prices had started to jump. I was concerned and then analysts started predicting that this would have a sort of cascading effect through the entire electronics chain. By the end of the year as we were starting to get briefed on things that would happen in 2026. Companies like Dell, Lenovo, and HP were pointing very explicitly to memory pricing in a way that I'd never seen before and being more forthright than I'd ever seen that everything was going to be more expensive and by a lot more than I'd ever seen them discuss. And I think Kimber probably has a lot more transparency on that given how much they focus on laptops.

[Kimber Streams]: Yeah, watching the same things that Arthur was watching last year, I bought myself a new hard drive SSD for my computer because I saw that those prices were going in that direction and I was like, okay, I'm going to get ahead of that for myself. And then during CES in January, we started asking companies like, "What does the year look like? What does pricing look like? What are you how are you thinking about, for example, $500 laptops?"

[Rosie Garin]: And Kimber CES is the consumer electronic show. It happens every year in Vegas. I know you and your team are always in attendance looking at Well, you tell me what what are you looking for when you all go to the conference every year?

[Kimber Streams]: Yes. It's one of the biggest waves of tech announcements in the year where companies are announcing a bunch of products that will come out throughout the whole year. It's also a good spot to talk to companies directly and kind of find out what the trends are in tech for the year. And I spoke to some laptop makers there and I was like, "What are budget laptops going to look like this year?" And they effectively told me that they're not going to look this year. They were not planning to launch many if any of them. And then since then, we've actually started seeing significant price increases on specific laptop models across whole laptop lines. For example, our former upgrade pick for Chromebooks, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 was $750, which sounds like a lot for a Chromebook, but it's actually a pretty decent price for something that's about as nice as a MacBook Air. But then Lenovo raised the price on that to $1,000, and now we're demoting it from being a pick because $1,000 is a lot of money to spend on a Chromebook. We've also seen prices across the board from all of the laptop makers. HP increased the price of our budget Windows laptop pick from $850 to $950, which makes it not really something I would consider a budget option anymore at that price. Microsoft increased the prices on their Surface laptops. Samsung increased the prices on their Galaxy Books. Asus launched their whole Zenbook lineup and then immediately changed the prices upward on all of them by several hundred.

[Arthur Geese]: That was wild.

[Caitlyn McGary]: I have never seen anything like that in my career.

[Kimber Streams]: Unheard of. Yeah. late last year like the component prices started going up and from there it was like okay this will affect everything that we buy this year.

[Rosie Garin]: So when you say everything what are we talking about cuz obviously we're talking about laptops what else is going to be under the umbrella of things that are going to be affected by these price increases.

[Arthur Geese]: We've already seen it start to happen with phones like Samsung has raised the prices on several of their flagship phones. Video game consoles are being hit especially hard right now. Every video game console costs significantly more than it did when it launched. Last time we spoke, we talked about the Switch 2 and how the price could probably go up. And there was some concern that I might look stupid if it didn't. And then almost immediately after that episode went live, they announced that it would.

[Rosie Garin]: Yeah.

[Caitlyn McGary]: You know, it's nice to not feel like Chicken Little before the sky actually falls.

[Arthur Geese]: Yeah. Basically, anything that has RAM in it, the price is going up.

[Kimber Streams]: And storage as well. Storage is

[Caitlyn McGary]: Yeah, we're seeing like micro SD card, like little cards you put in your devices for storage. Those are increasing significantly.

[Rosie Garin]: Oh, I just bought a new camera as well, and I need a micro SD card for that. And I went to buy one, and I was like, I guess I'm just not buying one right now. I'm just going to rely on the internal storage because I think it was like 40 bucks a couple of months ago, and now it's like 150. And I was like, "Well, I'm I'm not buying that."

[Kimber Streams]: Yeah, these are like wild price increases. It's not just like 10 or 20 bucks.

[Rosie Garin]: Storage and RAM. These are important terms that I want to just take a quick pause and make sure we explain. Define what RAM is. How is it increasing? Why is it increasing in price? And why is that significant specifically?

[Kimber Streams]: So, RAM stands for random excess memory, which is an album that was released by Defunk in 2013. Um, just kidding. It does uh stand for that, though. So, think of it like the short-term memory of your computer, whereas the hard drive or the SSD is kind of the long-term memory where you keep documents and screenshots and videos and all of that. So, all of the programs and tabs you have open at a given time are using that RAM. kind of like, you know, just in your everyday life when you're on the phone, you're also reading a text and then your kid comes into the room because they need something and then you're also trying to plan what's for dinner, but you're also daydreaming about a beach vacation all at once. The more you're multitasking on your computer, the more RAM you need to do that effectively. So 8 gigs is about enough to get by for simple everyday tasks like maybe you're doing half of those things in that list of many brain activities, but typically we recommend 16 to be able to do all of that stuff comfortably. And also whenever you buy a new computer, you want it to last at least 5 years, especially right now.

[Rosie Garin]: So 8 gigs, 16 gigs. This is for computers specifically or this is also phones. Like how do you think about RAM in relationship to different items?

[Kimber Streams]: So this is for like everyday computers specifically. If you're doing heavier tasks like gaming or like video editing and stuff, even on a laptop, you will want more than that. And then phones we have different recommendations for.

[Caitlyn McGary]: Yeah, you don't need quite as much RAM on a phone.

[Rosie Garin]: Kimber RAM is getting more expensive. Why?

[Kimber Streams]: Because the companies that make that and also storage are prioritizing selling the stuff that they're making to companies that are setting up AI servers instead of the companies who are making personal computers and phones for regular people. It's a prioritization thing where the focus is on AI not just in this country but globally. And so that's sort of where the the energy and the money is going right now versus to personal consumer tech.

[Caitlyn McGary]: Yes.

[Rosie Garin]: So what does it mean? What's the ramification here beyond prices are going up?

[Kimber Streams]: Yeah. So for regular people it kind of means that laptops specifically but kind of tech generally is going backwards. So, talking about laptops specifically, in the past couple years, it was possible to find a passable Windows laptop under $500 with 16 gigs of RAM. So, like fast enough, comfortable enough to be doing all of the things you need to be doing on it. It wasn't likely. Most of the laptops in that price range were still awful, but it was technically possible with a lot of time and effort to find decent laptops there. Now, in 2026, I'm seeing companies announce laptops with 8 gigs of RAM that are starting at $700. that means that's the lowest price they're selling it for and then it will be more expensive from there. So decent laptops on a budget are getting real scarce.

[Rosie Garin]: Moving to storage, what is there to say about why we're seeing price increases there specifically?

[Arthur Geese]: Yeah, so RAM and storage are essentially made by the same companies and the entire market of RAM and storage is owned primarily by three companies. There's Samsung which many people know and SKH Highix which are both located in South Korea and then there's Micron which is located here in America and that accounts for about 90% of both RAM and storage.

[Rosie Garin]: How how how is it that so few companies control the manufacturing of these requisite components?

[Arthur Geese]: It's really hard and really expensive to make modern storage and RAM. Like when we're talking about modern manufacturing for things like phones and computers, we're on the nanometer scale of transistor. Like every chip has millions of transistors and they're nanometers wide.

[Rosie Garin]: So essentially

[Arthur Geese]: that's real small.

[Rosie Garin]: That's it's really pretty small.

[Arthur Geese]: It's so small. It's just really really expensive to build these factories and it's really expensive to maintain them. They take a lot of power. They take a lot of water and they take a lot of access to resources that are not necessarily in ready supply. And the companies that make this stuff were making it at a relatively affordable pace. And honestly, RAM and storage until late last year were about as affordable as we'd ever seen it. And in October when OpenAI signed this agreement with Samsung and SKH heinix, it created a sort of arms race between these huge companies to also secure their source of storage and memory. And that has led to more demand than there is the ability to manufacture. And responding to that is something that people are trying to do to a degree, but it takes a lot of time. It's just an unprecedented change in the demand structure for this kind of stuff.

[Rosie Garin]: So, I imagine supply chain is an issue here. Tariffs, we talked a lot about tariffs last year, another issue. So, I'm curious, Caitlyn, how do you think about tariffs playing into these across the board price increases for these tech products?

[Caitlyn McGary]: I mean, last year we saw companies largely avoid raising prices the way that we have seen them raise prices this year because they had stockpiles of stuff that they had already imported. The tariffs were telegraphed months and months in advance. We basically knew they were going to happen. I personally bought a laptop because I was expecting them to happen and they just had a bunch of stuff sitting around like to be sold at current prices. So that's not actually what we're seeing here. Like this is entirely because of this explosion in demand for components that companies just weren't prepared for.

[Rosie Garin]: Are there still stock piles that people can take advantage of or we're running low here?

[Caitlyn McGary]: Yeah, we're pretty much out. Um, so every year, you know, products are refreshed, they get new features, they become more powerful. Tech doesn't have a long shelf life. You can obviously buy like an older device that might be kicking around at Best Buy or on Amazon, but those devices aren't supported with software for as long as new ones.

[Arthur Geese]: Yeah. In some ways, tariffs actually cushioned us more this year than we had hoped. When I wrote the piece back in February and March, the name of the article was that the death of the cheap laptop is coming because it wasn't quite here yet because people were selling the tariff stock that they had amassed last year. But that stock is mostly gone. And now what we're left with is what Kimber is describing, which are these things that started off more expensive than they were last year and now are more expensive than they were like 3 months ago. And it's because the AI uptake of components is increasing. It's not reducing, it's going up.

[Rosie Garin]: All right, prices are definitely rising by concerning amounts and the reason has to do with competition for the RAM and storage being manufactured now and in the future. We're going to take just a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about the elephant in the room, the factor that's most aggressively driving up the prices of our devices, AI. You're listening to the Wire Cutter Show. Stick around. Welcome back. Reading your piece, Arthur, AI is obviously a huge factor here. Let's zoom in on AI. What role is AI playing in this issue?

[Arthur Geese]: The way that AI is responsible for this is that all memory, all storage is basically made from the same same bits in the same places. And every piece of AI storage and RAM that's made is a piece of consumer AI and storage that is not made. Until these companies are able to make more, AI companies are just willing to pay a lot more. Like they have these almost infinite wallets. They're spending hundreds of billions of dollars. They're approaching more than that in some cases on buying up this stuff. And not just buying it up, but buying up agreements in the future for things that aren't even manufactured yet. And that creates a really dangerous and difficult to predict supply chain situation for companies that are making stuff to sell to us. I'm thinking of the greater than less than sign, you know, when you're learning algebra or whatever in in in elementary school where what these AI companies are able to offer the manufacturers is is greater than even our combined wallets in terms of how much money we as consumers are able to spend on the products. You know, I would almost compare it to like the housing market of the last several years where people would talk about trying to find a house and someone would come in and offer double asking price in cash and how do you compete with that?

[Kimber Streams]: Now imagine someone offering like triple

[Arthur Geese]: that asking price and then saying in every house you build for the next 2 years we want that too. It's extremely difficult for these companies to compete and also to plan. planning is how companies like Apple, how companies like Dell are able to be competitive, how they've been able to lower prices is by leveraging these supply chain relationships with the companies that make memory, with the companies that make storage to buy a lot of their stuff for less money than they would if they were buying less of it. And those relationships don't mean anything when companies are offering as much money as they are for their AI purposes. And so it's driven prices up. And the thing that worries me is that we really haven't seen how bad this is going to get yet. I think that we are staring down a very long tunnel before we see the end of it.

[Rosie Garin]: Who are some of the players in terms of companies on the AI side who are coming in and infusing all of this capital into these manufacturing companies?

[Arthur Geese]: There's Nvidia with the most valuable company on earth. They are buying an enormous amount of RAM for their server hardware. Open AAI obviously is spending an enormous amount of money. Anthropic is another company. And then you have the more traditional tech players like Google is spending a fortune. Microsoft, Meta. These companies are are what are referred to as hyperscalers, which means that they are becoming much bigger than everyone else could ever conceivably try to be in order to get to a place where they can't fail. Meanwhile, companies like Apple, who are a very powerful company, are honestly kind of being left behind in this conversation because they're just not trying to compete in the same space. and Dell, HP, all these companies that are big consumer laptop companies and consumer electronics companies just can't compete with the amounts of money that these other hyperscalers are spending. the companies that make the tech that we use are kind of making do with a much smaller slice of the pie as far as like supply of RAM and storage than they have in the past, which is why we're seeing them launch devices with less cuz they're trying to make do with less in more devices in a way that people can still have any kind of computer. For phones, we're seeing actually companies discontinue the lowest starting storage option. So that effectively raises the price. You know, if the phone used to be $9.99 for the entry level storage, now it's, you know, closer to $1,100 with more storage, which isn't actually quite as good of a deal as it sounds when it's just the price has gone up. Soon there will be no computers. Soon there will be no computers and we'll be free and we'll just all go outside and touch.

[Kimber Streams]: Sounds a little bit liberating

[Rosie Garin]: on this show. The irony is that we're often telling folks not to buy things and if you do need to buy things, wait for a sale. And so I'm curious, there are these sales events, Labor Day, Prime Day for Amazon, I think, is coming up. Should people expect to see tech sales or deals that we can take advantage of?

[Kimber Streams]: I hope so. I mean, frankly, we don't know in advance what the sales are going to be, but I would love to see some. Over Memorial Day, we did see a few sales on the MacBook Air. So, those are kind of good everyday laptops if people need them. Our deals experts did not see any significant sales during that event for Windows laptops or Chromebooks, though. So, we're hoping to see some more of those.

[Rosie Garin]: And is that unusual? Ordinarily, we would see deals on PCs.

[Arthur Geese]: Yes. Yes. Historically, we've seen lots of price dips there and usually more aggressive ones actually than the MacBook sales. We've seen Lenovo get really aggressive with sales around holiday periods in particular, but they've also been some of the most aggressive price increases we've seen this year. So, I wouldn't necessarily hold my breath on that.

[Caitlyn McGary]: But, we are seeing companies like announce products and not announce the prices that will go along with them

[Kimber Streams]: because they don't know.

[Caitlyn McGary]: Because they don't know. Kimber's been dealing with this a lot.

[Rosie Garin]: Yeah, Kimber, what does that look like in practice?

[Kimber Streams]: It's uh super super frustrating in practice. Uh for example, I'm trying to research laptops that are inexpensive for back to school season right now. So, I'm trying to figure out what laptops are going to be around for back to school season. And so far, I don't have a lot of information on that front. Dell says uh that it's launching a new budget focused XPS13 and that that's launching in June. It's starting at $700, which is not as budget focused as I want it to be. And then Qualcomm has also announced new Snapdragon C processors that the company claims is going to be in the $300 range. So I'm very interested in what those are going to feel like to use. We have no information on when they're going to be available right now.

[Rosie Garin]: Right. So, it's you don't know when they're going to be available. You don't know the cost of them. You don't know performance cuz you aren't able to get your hands on them. So, there's a lot of fog around this, it seems.

[Kimber Streams]: Yes. A lot of companies, I think, are afraid to have to announce one thing right now and then have to raise prices again given how the first half of this year has gone where they announced some prices at the Consumer Electronic Show in January and then they've had to change them in the intervening months as everything has shifted. So, I think that they're just choosing to be very koi and not tell anybody anything until they have to, which makes it kind of difficult um as a person who's shopping for a laptop or a person who's trying to help people shop for laptops, figure out what the heck is going on

[Rosie Garin]: and whether you're going to be able to use the word affordable in these guides or not. What are we calling affordable?

[Kimber Streams]: Yes. So, we used to recommend laptops under $500 as budget because that's what people were looking for. I don't think that exists anymore. So, we've talked about shifting the kind of cap on that guide to match the MacBook Neo at $600 because that's a great budget laptop at a price point that we're kind of comparing everything else to. I'm just not sure what's going to exist even at $600 and below if all of these PC makers are launching things that are starting at 700.

[Rosie Garin]: Kimber, thinking about laptops specifically, you know, back to school is a huge moment given our conversation today. Would you recommend folks do their back to school tech shopping now rather than waiting? Do we have recourse at all as consumers, people wanting needing to buy tech products? Can we push back against these increases or is it really is is it the cisphus thing where we're trying to push against the the boulder of of AI and we're always going to be smaller and weaker.

[Kimber Streams]: Kind of depends on what you need. So if you need like a cheap MacBook, then yes, like grab the MacBook Neo right now. stock is pretty good, the price is solid, and there's not like huge shipping delays on it, but we also don't know if that's going to change going forward. And then if you need like a higherend thing for college and you want to spend like $1,000 for something like Thin and Light or the MacBook Air, now is also a pretty decent time to buy something in that like $1,000 like great battery life price range. But if you need something super cheap that's like a Chromebook or a Windows laptop under $500, there's actually not a lot of options available right now. So, you might be stuck looking for something used, trying to find like a good refurb or just having to wait it out and hope that something changes between now and August. Unfortunately, that thing the only options you really have as a consumer are if you need a computer, buy one now. Especially if you can find it on sale. If there's any way that you can squeeze more life out of the thing you already have, do that. Update all of your operating system and apps. Clean up your storage. Uninstall apps you're not using. Try and make your computer that you have last as long as humanly possible. Uh you might be able to find something used.

[Rosie Garin]: Yeah. What are your recommendations for buying used?

[Kimber Streams]: If you need a used computer, I would say avoid Craigslist, eBay, or Reddit. I would kind of be a little bit softer on that stance now given that it's kind of a get what you can get situation out there. It is possible to get a good deal on those sites if you know what you're doing, but there are a lot of ways to get scammed or tripped up by misleading listings or end up with like a PC that's just preloaded with malware if you're shopping on those sites. The best options are actually manufacturer refurbished computers. The computer maker themselves takes the laptop that someone has returned to them or is used in some kind of way. They make sure that it's up to snuff. They do all of the repairs on it and then they'll sell it to you. Apple offers the same warranties that they offer on new computers, so those are going to be your best bets. Lenovo and HP also offer refurbs, but they have a shorter one-year warranty. And then if you can't find anything in those places, you can also shop for refurbished PCs on retailers like Best Buy, Newegg, or OWC. But in this case, refurbished is more just a fancy word for used because it's not the maker itself doing the refurb. If you're shopping on one of those sites, you want to look for the longest warranty you can find. And you should stick to items that are in excellent, like new, or very good condition. Definitely double check to make sure that you're avoiding any sketchy third party sellers on those sites and that you're purchasing directly from the retailer. So, it'll say like ships from and sold by Best Buy or ships from and sold by Newegg rather than having another third party in there.

[Rosie Garin]: Okay, last words. And ideally, they will only be accepted if they are optimistic. Arthur, you go first.

[Arthur Geese]: Oh, that's mean.

[Arthur Geese]: I grew up in California, which, you know, went through like a lot of droughts and a sort of common conversation in California was sort of drought prevention and drought preparedness. And that was a discussion about how do you modify your habits and behavior to account for something that people take for granted being in short supply. And in a lot of ways, I think that that is kind of what we're looking at. And I and I do think that that will have plenty of negatives, but it is also an opportunity to sort of re-evaluate your relationship to technology and how you use it and how you spend your time on it and like whether or not there are better ways for you to spend your time or more sort of efficient ways to use tech and make it last longer. And so I think if ever there was a time to look at how you spend your time on technology, how you spend your money on it, what its connection is to your life, it would be now because we're not in a situation where you can expect that if something fails or you need something, you're going to be able to afford it. So I think that it is a chance to make changes now before theyre made for you.

[Kimber Streams]: I I guess the MacBook Neo to me is like a ray of sunshine in this bleak bleak computing landscape right now. Whenever it first launched, I was wary of its specs since it only has 8 gigs of RAM. I was not super impressed with its $600 price tag because you could get a Windows laptop or a Chromebook for 380. That was like pretty good at the time. But now that I've used the Neo for a couple of months, I have been very impressed with how much better it feels to use than Windows laptops with similar specs and that similar RAM limitation, both from a build quality perspective and performance-wise. And then since the stock of cheap laptops and Windows laptops has almost entirely dried up since the Neo's launch, and it's only been replaced with more expensive options, the Neo only looks better comparatively.

[Rosie Garin]: I literally bought one today for my niece for her 13th birthday.

[Kimber Streams]: Wow.

[Rosie Garin]: All right, Caitlyn, last word.

[Caitlyn McGary]: I mean, this stuff is cyclical. I think in a couple years things will change. Um, and in the meantime, you can buy something right now that's extremely high quality that will last you for a long time. You know, laptops that are made now, they do tend to last for years and years, especially if you are following our recommendations and getting the best possible thing. And we're always evaluating warranties, but also how long will these products be supported with software updates and security updates. So, whatever you buy now will last you a long time. and when you need to buy something again. Hopefully the tides will have changed. But yeah, in the meantime, just focus on what you need and don't worry too much about the rest of it.

[Rosie Garin]: Thank you all so so much. This was really informative and really very helpful. As ever, we will link all of your brilliant writing and reporting in our show notes and I encourage folks to check that out and I really appreciate you guys.

[Caitlyn McGary]: Thanks.

[Kimber Streams]: Thanks so much for having

[Rosie Garin]: the Wire Cutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Garin, and produced by Abigail Keiel. Engineering support from Mattie Maziello and Nick Pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Losano, Alicia Eup, Rowan Nisto, Katherine Anderson, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wire Cutter's deputy publisher and general manager. Ben Fman is Wire Cutters editor and chief. And I'm Rosie Garin. Thank you for listening.

[Caitlyn McGary]: Basically, how to buy a great laptop at a price point that would work for you. Your guide got shortened to you can't.

[Kimber Streams]: You can't.