New Year’s resolution season is in full swing, and you’ve officially made it past Quitter’s Day (the second Friday in January, when many people have given up on their resolutions). Maybe you want to exercise more often, or keep better track of your schedule, or hit a certain step goal, or drink more water. Whatever the habit you’re making or breaking, we’ve found some deals on WIRED-tested gear that can help you on your journey.

For more recommendations, check out our many buying guides, like the Best Reusable Water Bottles, the Best Fitness Trackers, and the Best Paper Planners.

WIRED Featured Deals:

Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 for $200 ($50 off)

The Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 are the best workout earbuds you can buy. This price matches the best deal we’ve seen, and every color (orange, lavender, black, and beige) is discounted. The design is supremely comfortable, they have great noise canceling and a transparency mode, and they last up to 10 hours depending on your noise-cancellation settings. There’s also a built-in heart rate monitor. These sleek buds have punchy sound and are compatible with iOS and Android devices.

Garmin Vivoactive 6 for $250 ($50 off)

The Garmin Vivoactive 6 recently earned the top spot in our fitness tracker buying guide. It looks great on your wrist, and it plays well with both Android and iOS devices. Moreover, it’s accurate, and it has onboard satellite connectivity and a bright, easy-to-read AMOLED display. You’ll get a spate of fitness features, including blood oxygen monitoring, sleep tracking, heart rate and step counts, and fall detection. There’s an optional Connect+ subscription that costs $70 per year, but we don’t think you need it.

Apple Watch Series 11 for $300 ($100 off)

The Apple Watch Series 11 finally has a full 24 hours of battery life, which makes it worth consideration if you’ve been in the market for an upgrade. It is both an excellent fitness tracker and smartwatch. It can track all sorts of stats, from the basics like steps and workouts to sleep, hypertension, and blood oxygen. It has been on sale at this price since the holiday shopping season, but it does tend to fluctuate back and forth, and we haven’t seen it sell for less than it is right now. For more recommendations, check out our Apple Watch Buying Guide.

Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard 100 Percent Whey Protein Powder for $32 ($18 off)

Optimum Nutrition was having a “Quitter’s Day” sale this week, but the powder is also on sale at Amazon. This is the best protein powder overall. It delivers 24 grams of protein per serving, and it’s available in more than 20 flavors, so you should be able to find one that you like. (My favorite is Banana Cream, which tastes like a yellow Laffy Taffy, and WIRED editor Kat Merck’s favorite is Delicious Strawberry, but there are less adventurous options as well.) If you’re working on your gains this year, this is a solid deal worth considering.

Day Designer Daily Planner for $57 ($21 off)

This planner has space for a typical calendar and a daily to-do list. Half of each page has blocks of time from 5 am to 9 pm, and you’ll also get a to-do list section and a “three most important things” section. It’s a bulky planner, but if you’re looking for space to fine-tune the minutiae of your day-to-day life, there’s room.

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Like all open-ear earbuds, the OpenFit Pro have an airy and open soundstage that delivers a more natural listening experience than regular earbuds — it’s closer to the experience of listening to speakers. You can make them sound even more immersive by activating the confusingly named Optimized for Dolby Atmos mode. I say confusing because this mode is neither a replacement for Dolby Atmos nor is it strictly for use with existing Dolby Atmos content. It is essentially Dolby’s best earbud-based audio software, which combines spatial audio processing (for a wider and deeper soundstage) with optional head tracking. Both of these features will work with any content; however, Dolby claims it works best when you’re listening to Dolby Atmos content.

It’s the first time Dolby’s tech has been employed on a set of open-ear earbuds, and it’s a great match. It boosts the perceived width and height of the space, and does so without negatively affecting dynamic range or loudness, something that often plagues similar systems. And yes, the effect is more pronounced when listening to Atmos than when playing stereo content. I’ve used Dolby’s spatial tech on several products, including the LG Tone Free T90Q, Jabra Elite 10, and Technics EAH-Z100, and this is the first time I’ve enjoyed it enough to leave it enabled for music listening.

Still, it’s not as effective as Bose’s Immersive Audio on the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds. Bose’s head tracking is smoother—particularly noticeable when watching movies—and its spatial processing is more convincing and immersive for both music and movies.

Where Shokz enjoys a big leg up on Bose is the OpenFit Pro’s call quality. The OpenFit Pro’s mics do a great job of eliminating noises on your end of the call. You could be walking down a busy street, hanging out in a full coffee shop, or even passing by an active construction site, and your callers probably won’t have a clue you aren’t sitting on a quiet park bench. As with all open-ear earbuds, being able to hear your own voice naturally (without the use of a transparency mode) eliminates the fatigue normally associated with long calls on regular earbuds.

Comfortable Design

Comfort is a key benefit of Shokz’s OpenFit series, and the OpenFit Pro, with ear hooks that are wrapped in soft silicone, are no exception. Unlike previous OpenFit models, which position speakers just outside your ear’s concha, the Pro’s speaker pods project directly into your ears, and in my case, they make contact with the inner part of that cavity. This significantly increases stability, but over time, I became aware of that contact point.

They never became uncomfortable, but it’s not quite the forget-you’re-even-wearing-them experience of the OpenFit/OpenFit 2/+ models. As someone who wears glasses, I tend to prefer clip-style earbuds like the Shokz OpenDots One, and yet the OpenFit Pro’s ear hook shape was never an issue. Shokz includes a set of optional silicone support loops, presumably for folks with smaller ears or who need a more stable fit. They didn’t improve my fit, but then again, I’ve got pretty big ears.

As with all hook-style earbuds, the OpenFit Pro charging case is on the big side. It’s got great build quality thanks to the use of an aluminum frame, and you get wireless charging (not a given with many open-ear models), but it’s still way less pocketable than a set of AirPods Pro.

Easy to Use

Photograph: Simon Cohen

For the OpenFit Pro, Shokz has finally abandoned its hybrid touch/button controls in favor of just physical buttons, and I think it’s the right call. You can now decide exactly which button press combos control actions like play/pause, track skipping, volume, and voice assistant access, a level of freedom that wasn’t available on previous versions.

Ministeri adds that Chinese OEMs, ahead in software compared to Western makers in terms of autonomous driving tech, he believes, weren’t on show because right now they cannot launch any vehicles in the US. CES, therefore, is simply no longer “the right for stage for them.”

Andy Palmer, former COO of Nissan and former CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda, goes further. “CES used to matter to carmakers because the industry was borrowing technological credibility from Silicon Valley. Today that relationship has flipped. Automotive tech is no longer an exciting novelty, it’s to be expected,” he says. “Electrification, software, and ADAS are now industrialized technologies. They are no longer concept-stage theater pieces that need a Las Vegas stage.”

More importantly, Palmer, Nothard, and Ministeri all state that the center of gravity for the auto world has moved—both technologically and geographically—to, of course, China. This makes China’s main auto expo, which alternates each year between Shanghai and Beijing, now the location where carmakers must posture and preen.

Indeed, as WIRED pointed out in May last year, Shanghai 2025 wasn’t just a car show—it was a warning to the West. Having poached some of the best Western auto talent, China’s car industry set about showing how it was going to dominate globally in charging rates, ranges, design, tech, and sheer volumes. Detroit and Munich were put on notice. It was blindingly obvious to all in the industry where the new power lay.

“Shanghai has become more strategically important than CES for many manufacturers,” Palmer says, “because that’s where the fastest innovation cycles, supply chains, and consumer demand now sit. If you want to signal the future of automotive, that’s increasingly where you do it.”

Chinese automakers aren’t merely content with showing off on home turf, though. So with CES out of the question, they’ve been looking for a replacement. Step forward Munich’s IAA Mobility, now Europe’s largest car convention following the death of the Geneva Motor Show. “The Chinese are looking for a platform to show off their products outside of China,” says Ministeri. “When you’re Mercedes or BMW, and you see China investing in the IAA, you have to be there. So they make huge investments. This year, at IAA, was the most beautiful stand for Mercedes I’ve seen in 10 years going around motor shows.”

For CES, and perhaps by extension US auto brands, to get back to a place of dominance in the global car business, another truly seismic change in evolution of vehicles will have to take place. And, what’s more, the rate things are going, an annual event such as a car show will very soon come too late to keep pace with progress in China.

“Look at Chinese manufacturers’ lead time: from R&D to deliveries in two years on average,” Nothard says. “They’re bringing cars to the market very quickly. A traditional manufacturer’s average is seven years. So now you can’t have enough shows to deliver your new product. BYD, they’ve got a whole line of products on the horizon. Masses of new BYD product will be in the market before the next shows are even started to be created.”

“CES was at its peak point when software and interface, and software-defined vehicles became the pinnacle of everything that was happening in the auto sector, alongside EV technology. We’re now past that,” Nothard says. “It’ll take another big shift in the evolution of the car for CES to be put on the radar again.”