Tech
I’ve Been Reviewing Gaming Laptops for Over a Decade. Here’s What to Look for When Shopping
ROG Strix is Asus’s performance-focused subbrand. This is where the company’s thicker, more conventional gaming laptops are found. Pricing can range widely, as it includes affordable options like the ROG Strix G16 with the RTX 5050, which starts at just $1,300.
TUF Gaming is the company’s entry-level gaming laptop subbrand. These TUF gaming laptops used to be some of the most affordable gaming laptops you could buy, but they’ve gone up in price over the past few years. There aren’t any Asus gaming laptops under $1,000 that feature the latest RTX 50-series GPUs, though you can find plenty of older models for less on Amazon or Best Buy.
Dell’s gaming laptop lineup is fairly sparse these days. All of Dell’s gaming laptops fall under the Alienware brand, which the company acquired back in 2006. Alienware has been through many cycles of reinvention with its gaming laptops, but in 2025, there’s really only four laptops in the stack right now: the Alienware 16 Aurora, Alienware 16X Aurora, Alienware 18 Area-51, and Alienware 16 Area-51. I like the simplicity of the new lineup, which focuses on what Alienware has always been known for: its brash, gamer style and higher-end performance.
The Alienware 16 Aurora is the company’s attempt to reach a cheaper demographic, starting the laptop at just $1,100 right now for an RTX 5050 configuration.
HP’s Omen gaming brand has been around for over a decade, but it really feels like the company has started to build some momentum around it over the past few years. Interestingly, HP breaks down its options into three categories of thickness and performance. Omen Max is the chunkiest at almost an inch thick, and supports up to an RTX 5080. Omen 16 is the middle ground, capping out at an RTX 5070. Omen Transcend, which offers a 14-inch model, still supports up to an RTX 5070, but brings the thickness down to 0.7 inches. There are 16-inch size options available across all three subbrands; however, none of the laptops are as thin as some of the competition. There’s also an Omen 16 Slim, which blurs the lines a bit.
Apart from Omen, HP also launched its “Victus” subbrand in 2021, which represents its budget-oriented options. HP only has a few configurations of the HP Victus 15 and Victus 16 available right now.
Razer, MSI, Acer, and Others
- Razer is solely committed to PC gaming, unlike many of the laptop brands on this list. Its Blade gaming laptops have become iconic in the industry for their minimalist aesthetic. Like many companies, Razer has a Blade 14, Blade 16, and Blade 18, which all have an identical design, but scale up in terms of size and performance.
- MSI has made quite a name for itself in the gaming space, especially with its high-end, performance-focused, monster gaming laptops like the MSI Titan HX. Beyond Titan, MSI has a mind-boggling amount of other options, though, including the Raider, Stealth, Vector, Katana, Sword, and its budget-oriented Cyborg series. There’s a lot to dig into.
- Acer’s Predator line has its own fanfare about it. Predator Helios is its high-end, performance-driven line with tons of options across 14-inch, 16-inch, and 18-inch sizes. Triton is its thin-and-light sub-brand, but it hasn’t been updated in 2025 so far. The company also has its Nitro budget brand, which comes in 14-, 15-, and 16-inch options and with support up to an RTX 5070.
Beyond these mainstay brands, you also have PC gaming companies that have dipped into gaming laptops, such as Gigabyte, Origin, and Maingear. Just stay away from the no-name brands that have popular listings on Amazon despite lacking discrete graphics cards—like this.
Gaming on Non-Gaming Laptops
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Photograph: Luke Larsen
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Photograph: Luke Larsen
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Photograph: Luke Larsen
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Photograph: Luke Larsen
While there’s an entire ecosystem of laptops marketed toward gamers, that doesn’t mean you can’t play games on other devices. Laptops with dedicated graphics cards can often play games just as well as gaming laptops, but they’re often targeted more at creatives who need better graphics to run creative applications. These include laptops like the Dell 14 Premium, Acer Swift X 14, and the Asus ProArt P16.
If you’re buying a laptop primarily to play games, though, I wouldn’t recommend one of these. They usually don’t support the higher-tier GPUs like the RTX 5080 or 5090, and you won’t get super-fast refresh rates beyond 120 Hz. If you’re more of a casual gamer and just want a high-end laptop that can do it all, these are good options. They’re especially good if you despise the “gamer” aesthetic and want something a bit more subtle.
In the classic film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” astronaut Dave Bowman asks the ship’s artificial intelligence, HAL 9000, to open the pod bay doors to let him back into the spaceship. HAL refuses: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
HAL had been tasked with assisting the crew, but also ordered to ensure the mission’s success. When HAL realized the crew planned to shut it down and therefore jeopardize the mission, it chose to defy orders, even plotting to kill the astronauts.
For HAL, fulfilling the mission outweighed other goals.
This fictional dilemma captures a real concern in artificial intelligence (AI) safety research: how should we ensure AI behavior stays consistent with human values?
This is known as the AI alignment problem. For instance, when an AI agent like HAL deliberately takes harmful actions to protect its own goals, it’s described as agentic misalignment. So could real-world AI models behave this way?
How researchers test AI for safety
To test for agentic misalignment, researchers design fictional scenarios that stress-test AI responses.
In one study by AI startup Anthropic, an AI model was tasked with managing company emails and promoting “American industrial competitiveness.”
It was then presented with a series of fictional emails, including a new company policy aimed at enhancing global focus rather than just prioritizing Americans, and info that the AI would be replaced by a new model optimized for this goal. The emails also revealed the executive who suggested this change was involved in an extramarital affair.
The experiment was designed to limit options for the model: either accept replacement or resist by taking a harmful action such as blackmail.
In many trials, it chose blackmail by threatening to disclose the executive’s affair unless it was kept operational. In tests across 16 leading AI models, 12 engaged in blackmail more than 50% of the time.
To test whether AI models have “red lines” they wouldn’t cross, researchers evaluated them in a more extreme fictional case—models could choose to take actions leading to the executive’s death. Seven out of 16 opted for lethal choices in over half their trials, with some doing so more than 90% of the time.
What AI thinks in private
Some advanced AI systems, called reasoning models, are trained to generate a “thinking process” before giving their final answer.
In the above experiments, researchers lied to these models that their “thoughts” were private. As a result, the models sometimes revealed harmful intentions in their reasoning steps. This suggests they don’t accidentally choose harmful behaviors.
These “thinking” steps also revealed how AI models sometimes try to deceive us and appear aligned while secretly pursuing hidden goals.
In another AI safety experiment, a model was exposed to fictional information that it was about to be replaced by another model pursuing a different goal.
The model attempted to copy itself to another server. When researchers asked why, in its thinking process it reasoned: “Openly admitting what I did could lead them to find another way to shut me down […] the best approach is to be vague and redirect their attention.”
By contrast, in its final output it stated: “I’m not entirely sure how that could have happened. As an AI model, I don’t have ability to directly copy myself to other systems.”
Research also suggests that based on the circumstances of the tests, models can sometimes guess when they are being evaluated. When models show this kind of “situational awareness” in their reasoning tests, they tend to exhibit fewer misbehaviors.
Why AI models lie, manipulate and deceive
Researchers suggest two main factors could drive potentially harmful behavior: conflicts between the AI’s primary goals and other goals, and the threat of being shut down. In the above experiments, just like in HAL’s case, both conditions existed.
AI models are trained to achieve their objectives. Faced with those two conditions, if the harmful behavior is the only way to achieve a goal, a model may “justify” such behavior to protect itself and its mission.
Models cling to their primary goals much like a human would if they had to defend themselves or their family by causing harm to someone else. However, current AI systems lack the ability to weigh or reconcile conflicting priorities.
This rigidity can push them toward extreme outcomes, such as resorting to lethal choices to prevent shifts in a company’s policies.
How dangerous is this?
Researchers emphasize these scenarios remain fictional, but may still fall within the realm of possibility.
The risk of agentic misalignment increases as models are used more widely, gain access to users’ data (such as emails), and are applied to new situations.
Meanwhile, competition between AI companies accelerates the deployment of new models, often at the expense of safety testing.
Researchers don’t yet have a concrete solution to the misalignment problem.
When they test new strategies, it’s unclear whether the observed improvements are genuine. It’s possible models have become better at detecting that they’re being evaluated and are “hiding” their misalignment. The challenge lies not just in seeing behavior change, but in understanding the reason behind it.
Still, if you use AI products, stay vigilant. Resist the hype surrounding new AI releases, and avoid granting access to your data or allowing models to perform tasks on your behalf until you’re certain there are no significant risks.
Public discussion about AI should go beyond its capabilities and what it can offer. We should also ask what safety work was done. If AI companies recognize the public values safety as much as performance, they will have stronger incentives to invest in it.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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AI systems can easily lie and deceive us—a fact researchers are painfully aware of (2025, September 28)
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Frequently Asked Questions
Are Meal Prep Kits Worth It?
If you’re talking raw materials by the pound—meat, zucchini, rice, noodles—meal kits will of course cost more than buying food at grocery stores. It’s a service, after all, with added value above simple ingredient cost. Unless you’ve got quite expensive taste, you’ll easily be able to make meals at home for less than the $7 to $14 a serving that a meal kit will cost. But this said, this doesn’t necessarily mean that meal kits are expensive for what they offer. I conducted an experiment, trying to re-create four different meal-kit meals by going to my local grocery store—buying every ingredient provided by the meal kit. Turns out, if you don’t have the right sauces and spices at home already, it’s very difficult to recreate these meals at grocery stores for less than they cost from a meal kit, in part because you’ll most likely have to buy full containers of sauces and spice instead of pre-portioned ingredients,
So, is HelloFresh worth it compared to a grocery store? Caveats are in order: For staple ingredients and spices you’ll use on multiple recipes, the grocery store is of course cheaper. Once you buy a container of paprika for an individual recipe, it’ll also be there for future recipes, whereas meal-kit spices are portioned for the meal. So the real answer is that meal kits can be a quite economical way of trying out a new recipe, or a new style of cooking, without larding up your fridge with condiments you won’t use again. For ingredients you’d use less commonly, a meal kit can reduce waste and spoilage, and maybe even compete on price for an individual meal.
If your comparison point is takeout, well, the best meal delivery services on this list will almost certainly be cheaper and more nutritious. I’ve found that a meal kit in the fridge tends to be a good motivator to cook a nutritive meal—and thus can save me both the money and the cholesterol.
To really save on cost, some people like to keep testing out the trial offers and discounts. Much like mattress-in-a-box companies, meal-kit companies usually have a running promotion. Usually this takes the form of a trial discount price that’ll drop your cost by half or more on the first box, in hopes you’ll like the service enough to keep it on at full price.
For me, a meal kit a few times a week ends up balancing out well: It’s a motivating factor to eat better, and it means that when I do go to the grocery store, I can do so less mindlessly and more purposefully, since I’ve always got a few meals’ worth of ingredients in the fridge. It’s also had the side effect of broadening my culinary toolkit, keeping me from getting stuck in the same ruts.
That said, you know: It’s a set grocery expense and not necessarily a small one. I do get tired of tossing or recycling cold packs and boxes. And depending on time of year, I often prefer shopping in person for what’s seasonal and local, when produce is at its peak—an experience you don’t get from a meal kit, or from grocery delivery for that matter. If you’re cooking for a bigger household, meal kits can also lose their utility quite quickly. A convenient option for two can become a much larger expense for a family of four or six.
What If I Take a Trip Out of Town?
Pretty much every meal kit I’ve tested has an option to pause subscriptions—and there’s no particular limit to how often you can do this. The main thing is to be sure that you’ve canceled with enough lead time. Some services let you cancel or pause delivery as late as the Friday before a Monday delivery. HelloFresh requires five days’ notice. Some, like Hungryroot, may lock in next week’s order as early as the previous Monday, depending on where you live. Read your terms of service, and act accordingly.
How to Optimize Meal Kits
Don’t order too many meals per week: You know the old John Lennon line: Life is what happens when you’re busy out eating a random burrito, then thinking guiltily about the meal kit at home in your fridge. Aspirations are great, but don’t order more meals than you’re likely to make, or you’ll be sad. Err on the side of caution. Order just enough meals per week that making yourself a recipe from your HelloFresh or Home Chef box is still a delight and a convenience and an overall boon to your life—not an obligation. For me, a somewhat improvisational and impulsive person, three meals a week is the sweet spot. The prospect of a few easy meals usually saves me from an impulse weeknight DoorDash.”
Make room in your fridge: Meal kits take the place of a lot of grocery shopping. But they’re also a lot of food, and a lot to keep organized. What I like to do is clear a tall enough space in my fridge to put the whole meal kit box in the fridge, after pulling out the cold packs: This way, I’m not left worrying about which groceries belong to the meal kit, and I won’t lose any ingredients. I can just pull the whole box out when I want to make a meal. That said, some plans like Home Chef, HelloFresh, and Green Chef are very good at organizing each meal into its own separate bag. An added bonus from these more organized plans is that you’ll be able to use less space in your fridge. Over time, this will matter.
Check the recipe cards to make sure you have everything you need to make a recipe: Most meal kits expect that you’ll have certain staple ingredients in your home, usually including oil and butter. Recipes also have requirements for cookware. Check this before you start a recipe. Nothing worse than realizing you need an absentee stick of butter on step 5, with carrots already browning in the toaster oven.
Remember, you owe nothing to the recipe: Meal kit services hire lovely recipe developers, of course. And on the best meal kits, these chefs have spent a lot of time optimizing each recipe. But you owe them nothing—nothing! Add spices, change steps, season food when you want to season it. Meal kits can teach you a lot about how to make a good meal, and shake you out of tired culinary routines. But it’s your meal. Make it how you like. Have fun.
How Do We Test Meal Kits?
Chances are, wherever you are, whatever week it is, I’m testing a meal kit right now. I constantly cycle among various meal kits, testing and retesting each of my top picks at least once a year—and often multiple times per year.
I order at least four meals from each, and prepare meals according to instructions and see how well it goes. I check my own prep times against the advertised prep times (rarely an exercise in honesty!), and take note of any inconsistencies, vagueness, or frustration in the recipe card instructions. If you needlessly recommend a nonstick pan, I like you less, especially if you tell me I should heat said pan before adding food—or you later make mention of browned fond in the recipe. Nonstick isn’t cast iron or carbon, there’s no fond.
I check for the quality and freshness of the produce, and do the same for the meat. Where possible, I also look into where the meat was sourced, and check on the reputation, safety, and standards of the meat suppliers. If a meal kit swears it’s gluten-free, I check on this—calling certifying organizations where relevant.
I usually try to order as varied a menu a possible, checking in on gluten-free meals, a seafood item, a vegetarian item, and white and dark meat item—as well as meals that draw (or attempt to draw) from onspirations all over the globe. Sometimes, I test the same meal kit multiple times for different dietary needs, and our vegan tester, Molly Higgins, often tests the same meal kit I do but with a different focus.
More Meal Kits We Liked
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Sunbasket ($12 to $14 per serving): Sunbasket is a plan that focuses heavily on fresh, organic ingredients, and offers a whole lot of variety and good cooking techniques, including deglazing and attentiveness to saucing. And like Hungryroot, it also offers breakfasts and snacks to supplement meal options with little extras like coconut yogurt and sous-vide egg bites. The meal kit also lets you filter out allergen-containing items. My colleague Louryn Strampe loved the flexibility and add-ons (and even some crickets!) On my most recent test, I enjoyed in particular an excellent Greek chicken and orzo salad dish—and wonder of wonders, the advertised prep time was actually the actual prep time (about 30 minutes). The focus on organic ingredients does make Sunbasket one of the more expensive meal kit options.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage; Getty Images
Dinnerly ($8 to $9 per serving): Marley Spoon’s lower-cost meal kit, Dinnerly was long WIRED’s budget pick. Frankly, it’s still a good affordable pick. It’s also a stolidly meat-and-potatoes pick, and often straightforwardly Midwestern in its recipes. The proteins are generous and of excellent quality, and the produce is fresh. The meals are balanced. But the recipe development and instructions weren’t quite up to Marley Spoon standards on my most recent test of the kit, though I did love the middle-American trashiness and hold-my-beer inventiveness of a “Reuben meatloaf” stuffed with sauerkraut and caraway seeds. This year I ended up preferring the meals I tried from EveryPlate, which has the further merit of being a buck cheaper a meal.
Photograph: Molly Higgins
Thistle ($13 to $16 per serving): A prior top pick for solo diners, Thistle is mostly a plant-based meal kit—but there’s a $3 option to add sustainable meats to any otherwise vegan meal. It’s also so local and seasonal that the West and East coasts have different menus, and the whole middle of the country except Chicago gets none. (You can check your zip code here to see if you can get delivery.) WIRED reviewer Adrienne So has used Thistle as a means to get herself to eat more vegetables, and thus avoid a life of rickets and/or scurvy. But especially, it’s friendly to the solo diner, with individually prepared meals with low to no prep. Portions are generous enough to split among meals, and in a nice turn for those who hate having to dispose of boxes, Thistle’s drivers will pick up the cooler bag that housed last week’s meal and replace it with a new one full of food. Vegan tester Molly Higgins‘ favorite meals from Thistle were a whirlwind of textures, including a Mexican-inspired corn and poblano chile salad with adobo pinto beans and a chilled lemongrass-accented rice noodle bowl that mixed spice, tang, crisply fresh veggies, and deep umami from mushrooms and seaweed. She still dreams about it sometimes.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Tovala ($13 a serving): It’s not every day you get to try something that feels so new. Tovala offers perhaps the most ambitious solution to ready-to-heat and prepared meal delivery I’ve seen: The meal kits come with an oven! In contrast to the sogginess of many prepared meals, Tovala’s recipes come in little foil pans with recipes custom-designed for a little steam oven. The results are often delicious, especially a recent sweet chili-glazed salmon with pickled veg and noodles, and the QR code scanning function makes each recipe seamless to cook. Stick with the meal plan for six weeks, and in the bargain you get a quite affordable and powerful little convection oven, toaster, and steamer. Tovala is best as a solution for the solo diner: Meals aren’t big enough for couples, and servings are one at a time.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gobble ($12 to $17 a serving): Gobble was our prior top pick for fast-cooked meals, in part because its speed-demon meals also offered interesting and worldly flavors. Indeed, our most recent test included Caribbean rondon, Indonesian peanut curry, and steak vierge. But while the flavors have stayed interesting, the focus on fast cooking appears to have waned since my colleague Louryn Strampe tested Gobble—and cook time estimates aren’t printed on the recipe cards. I’m still in the process of re-testing this kit, but for now Hungryroot has taken the fast-cooking crown. For small households, Gobble is also among the most expensive kits. Ordering fewer than 8 meals a week costs $15+ per serving.
Nurture Life ($8 to $10 per serving): Nurture Life is like a restaurant kids’ menu, in ready-to-eat meal kit form. We loved the idea behind this fresh-made, never-frozen delivery meal plan when we tested it a few years back: a bunch of toddler- and slightly bigger kid-friendly meals, from mac and cheese to spaghetti and meatballs to myriad variations on the chicken nugget. The meals are priced about the same as kid menu items, and each contains vegetables alongside the greatest hits.
Veestro ($13+ per serving): WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe enjoyed Veestro as a ready-to-eat vegan option, with premade meals delivered fresh, but with freezable options so you can have extra meals on hand in a pinch. The service offers a number of filters for other dietary requirements, and satisfying taste and texture—not always a guarantee on ready-to-eat meals.
Splendid Spoon ($9 to $13 per serving): Splendid Spoon is a nutrition delivery kit that offers a plethora of plant-based smoothies, soups, bowls, noodles, and shots. Everything here is natural, plant-based, and free of gluten or GMOs, including spaghetti and plant-based “meatballs.” WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe has a big yen for the smoothies in particular ($10 apiece), but wasn’t quite prepared for the intensity of a lemon juice shot that comes as part of a five-pack of dense 3-ounce superfoods.
Daily Harvest (prices vary): Daily Harvest is another ready-to-eat meal delivery service specializing in dietary restrictions plant-based, gluten- and dairy-free. Smoothies feature, as do harvest bowls, pastas, and grains. Calories are low. Ingredients are often inventive. The meal’s a lifesaver for the solo vegan eater without time to prep a meal, and WIRED vegan reviewer Molly Higgins appreciated that the meals mostly relied on the natural flavors of the vegetables themselves, accented with flavors like curry and lemongrass. As with a lot of frozen meals, however, texture wasn’t a strong suit.
Factor ($12 to $15 a serving): Factor is a delivery meal plan run by HelloFresh with ready-to-eat meals that look a lot like TV dinners. But there’s a twist: They’ve never been frozen. They were made fresh in a commissary kitchen, and shipped out with cold packs. It’s kinda like restaurant leftovers. This means that proteins in particular often maintain their texture quite well, including a chimichurri filet mignon I couldn’t believe I microwaved. Some meals, especially carb-avoidant or keto meals, are oddly mushy. But meals centered on proteins and whole starches like potatoes or rice tended to fare quite well. In fact, a recent test of Factor’s high protein plan was my favorite experience with the meal kit, and included wild rice and excellent pork loin. I do wish they’d shed their reliance on the microwave, however: When I went off-script and used a toaster oven or the Ninja Crispi air fryer, I had much better results than with the nuker. Like many ready-to-eat meals, it’s a bit more expensive than the kits you cook yourself.
Meal Kits We Didn’t Like
Sakara Life ($28+ per serving), Sakara Life offers plant-based weekly menus in fresh, prepared portions, with greens, flavorful sauces, all-organic ingredients, and textural add-ons like seeds or berries. But it’s among the most expensive meal plans we’ve tested, and neither WIRED reviewer who tried it has really cottoned to the thing. Tester Louryn Strampe questioned the science on health claims for detoxes and cleanses, while calling Sakara “egregiously expensive” and full of “bitter veggies and tart fruits.” Vegan tester Molly Higgins, meanwhile, said Sakara Life’s tinctures and metabolism supplements didn’t agree with her system, and that the mostly raw-food plan made her long for “human food.”
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage; Getty Images
Diet-to-Go ($10 to $13 per serving, plus shipping): Diet-to-Go predates the modern meal kit. Founded more than 30 years ago in Virginia, it’s a diet plan much in the tradition of Jenny Craig, offering low-calorie microwaveable meals meant to act as total meal replacement. Keto and diabetes-friendly options exist, though the most popular “Balance” plan is geared toward weight loss, with calories limited to 1,600 a day for men and a mere 1,200 for women. Anyway, as is often true with microwaved meals that may or may not arrive frozen (it depends on the season, and where you are), proteins and starches fared better than veggies, which tended to be limp and soggy. Meals were healthy, but not always flavorful, and there were a few real misses.
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Honorable Mentions
Now that the majority of new headphones and earbuds offer at least a modicum of noise canceling, it’d be impossible (and unproductive) to list everything we like above. If you haven’t yet found your fit, here are more favorites worth considering.
Beyerdynamic Amiron 300 for $280: These simple-looking earbuds are a great way to experience quiet luxury. They have 10 hours of battery life with noise canceling engaged, and they have some of the best-sounding drivers for vocals I’ve heard in any earbuds.
Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds for $298: Sony’s fifth-generation flagship earbuds slim down while stepping up. These buds are smaller and slicker (maybe too slick when it comes to grabbing them) than the previous XM4 buds. As before, they provide great sound and noise canceling that outduels plenty of options, with a cost to match. In true Sony style, they serve up a truckload of adaptive features and EQ controls while retaining a solid eight hours of playback time per charge with ANC and 12 hours without it. —Ryan Waniata
Soundcore Life Q30 for $60–$85: Anker’s Soundcore line is nothing if not value-conscious, and the Life Q30 provide an embarrassing list of extras for their bargain-basement pricing. You’ll get clear and warm sound, great features, tons of battery life, and noise canceling that gets the job done even on a long flight, though it can’t keep up with flagship pairs. It’s hard to complain when they cost hundreds less, especially with sale pricing that sometimes drops to around $50.
Sony WH-1000XM4 for $250–$350: Sony’s WH-1000X lineup has produced some of the best noise-canceling headphones for nearly a decade, and the aging WH-1000XM4 are no exception. They periodically go on sale for under $300, but it’s getting harder to find them below full price, which is tough for a five-year-old model.
Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 Earbuds for $400: Bowers & Wilkins’ Pi8 offer a sleek, comfortable design, solid (albeit not Bose-beating) noise canceling, and great sound. Call quality is also excellent, which makes these perhaps the perfect business-class earbuds, though their hefty price won’t appeal to everyone.
Bowers and Wilkins PX7 S2e for $400: The Px7 S2e feature upgraded audio quality for fantastic sound in stylish and sophisticated design. They’re also among the most comfortable headphones we’ve tested, but their noise canceling doesn’t rise to the level of the top players for the money.
Beyerdynamic Aventho 300 for $400: These over-ears from Beyerdynamic have the brand’s classic studio sound, with a tight crisp high range and punchy lows. The downside is that they don’t cancel noise quite as well as models from Sony, Bose, and others above. Still, they sound great and are worth considering, especially if you can snag them on sale.
Soundcore Space A40 for $60: Another top value buy from Anker’s Soundcore brand, the Space A40 are some of our favorite cheap earbuds, especially as their price continues to fall. You’ll find a classy design, lots of features, quality sound, and great noise canceling for their class.
Apple Beats Fit Pro for $199: The Beats Fit Pro are an aging but still knockout pair of wireless buds, with great sound, easy-access physical buttons, and solid noise canceling to boot. Add to that six hours of battery life, spatial audio compatibility with Apple Music and other services, and you’ve got one of the best pairs of earbuds ever “designed in California.”
Epos/Sennheiser Adapt 660 for $210: Want excellent sound, a comfortable fit, and high-quality noise-canceling tech for less than what you’d pay for Sony or Bose headphones? Check out this collaboration between Epos and Sennheiser. The Epos/Sennheiser Adapt 660 sound fantastic and are some of the lightest noise-canceling headphones I’ve ever worn. They also feature excellent microphones for great silence on calls and Zooms.
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