40 Best Holiday Gift Ideas for Every Budget

The JBL Tune 510BT is already a budget-friendly option that delivers sound quality in the ballpark of far more expensive headphones, and it has a 40-hour advertised battery life. It sits on the ears, which some people find more comfortable than being engulfed by bigger, over-the-ear style cans. As an extra perk, you can use the headphones with a cable if you forget to charge them. These aren’t noise-canceling headphones, but for the price, they’re hard to beat.

Protecting your skin from sunburn can help reduce the risk of skin cancer, and this La Roche-Posay sunscreen has continuously been near the top of our ratings for the best sunscreens. It’s lightweight and delivers on its broad spectrum promise in our tests. Even better? It pairs perfectly with a trip to somewhere warm.

For more options: The Best Sunscreens

The NuWave Brio has especially easy-to-use controls that make it easy to adjust temperature and time during the cooking process. In our tests, we also found it to be pretty quiet when operating. Its measured capacity is 2.9 quarts, so it’s not the right air fryer if you like cooking for a crowd. But it’s perfect for small batches of fries or vegetables, or cooking dinner for one to two people. It comes with an impressive 100 programmed cook settings for specific foods and 50 memory slots where you can save your temperature and cooking time preferences. It’s dishwasher-safe and comes with a one-year warranty.

The GE G8H1AASSPSS blender is an immersion model that comes with a whisk and chopper, and it’s available now at a sweet price. It showed excellent performance in our soup purée tests, and the chopper attachment did a great job grating cheese. The whisk attachment allows you to quickly whip egg whites to stiff peaks and easily turn heavy cream into rich whipped cream.

The Amazon Fire TV Cube is a mashup of an Amazon Echo and a 4K Fire TV streamer. It has Amazon Alexa voice assistant built in, and its universal remote control capabilities let you control a host of other compatible A/V gear, including TVs and soundbars. The updated model has a faster processor, which upscales lower-resolution content to 4K, and HDMI 2.1 connections for controlling other devices using your voice. (One cool trick is that the Cube will also upscale any content from a source connected to its HDMI input.) Other features include WiFi 6E and support for both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ high dynamic range.

The Ring Battery Doorbell Plus is one of the company’s newer doorbells. It doesn’t excel at video quality, but it does provide strong data security, speedy alerts, and quick-loading live video feeds. Features include color night vision, a rechargeable and swappable battery pack, activity zones, and voice/app control via Amazon Alexa. Cloud video storage and additional features (such as person alerts) require a Ring Home subscription.

With more than 120 years in the business, Lodge knows a thing or two about cast iron, and the Lodge 6-quart Dutch oven turns out bread that’s nicely browned and crispy, earning a very good rating in our bread-baking test. Cleanup is a breeze. It weighs 13 pounds and has a 7-inch cooking surface diameter. Like the Le Creuset, the Lodge has wide loop handles.

This nonstick pan from Caraway, a popular internet brand, is impressive. In our tests, fried eggs easily slid out one after another, and the surface heats evenly, so there are no hot spots. The handle is super-sturdy, so it won’t get wobbly, and it stays cool to the touch as you cook. The nonstick coating is ceramic and stood up well in our durability test, in which we abrade the surface with steel wool (something you shouldn’t do at home!).

Among our top-rated nonstick frying pans, the All-Clad Essentials offers a lot of bang for your buck, beating out more expensive models in many of our tests. It wows our testers when it comes to cooking evenness, earning an excellent rating for uniformly browning pancakes. Made of anodized aluminum, it features sturdy handles that stayed cool to the touch in our tests. While we tested the 10.5-inch pan, you also get an 8.5-inch for this price, making it a great value for your money.

For more options: Best Nonstick Frying Pans

The Coop Home Goods The Original pillow is made of shredded memory foam and earns an excellent rating in our tests for support, no matter your size and whether you sleep on your side or back. It comes with extra foam so that you can adjust the filling to your liking. This pillow also keeps its shape well, showing little or no change in height or fluffiness in our resilience tests. Our panel of testers liked the look and feel of the pillow, too. The only test where this pillow falls slightly short is in how well it allows air to circulate. It sleeps slightly warm, so your head might feel a little sweaty at night.

For more options: Best Pillows

The Arlo Pro 5S is one of the company’s higher-end security cameras. It’s weatherproof and battery-powered, allowing you to place it just about anywhere on your property within WiFi range. It offers decent video quality and features color night vision, a built-in siren, and two-way audio. Additional features like AI object detection and activity zones require an Arlo Secure subscription.

These are the previous-gen Studio Buds, not the newer, more expensive Studio Buds+, but they perform almost identically, delivering quality sound and effective noise canceling. Unlike Apple’s entry-level AirPods, which have a hard plastic earpiece, these have silicone ear tips, which many users prefer. The Studio Buds also have a transparency mode that pipes in sound from outside to keep you connected to the world. In fact, the Studio Buds have many of the features of Apple’s AirPods Pro for less.

The XG300 delivers satisfying sound plus the features you want in a modest-sized tailgating speaker: decent volume, an IP67 water-resistance rating (which means it can survive a dunking), and a rechargeable battery with 25 hours of battery life, according to Sony. All in all, our testers say, it’s a significantly better speaker than its more expensive XG500 sibling, and here it is at less than half price.

The Ninja DualBrew Pro 12-Cup is a dual coffee maker that can brew both ground coffee and K-cup pods. That means it can brew all of 13 preset quantities of coffee, from large servings of coffee in a carafe (from coffee grounds) to individual brew sizes (from either grounds or K-cups). Our tests do show that its first-cup speed is excellent, and it’s pretty quick to brew follow-up cups too. It performs very well in our overall brew tests, though it’s a little inconsistent in temperature when it comes to single servings of coffee. But it offers four brew styles, including settings for brewing over ice and for brewing pods of tea, and it has a built-in milk frother (though if you want your milk frothed hot, you’ll have to heat the milk yourself first).

At just about 5 pounds, this 6-quart Dutch oven from Our Place is lightweight—but only in the best sense of the word. When it comes to performance, no other Dutch oven in our ratings matches it. It earns excellent scores from ease of cleaning to bread baking, sauce simmering, cooking evenness and speed of heating. Made of aluminum with a ceramic coating, it’s also induction-compatible, and oven-safe to 425° F.

With its pink blush exterior, white ceramic interior, and gold handles, the GreenPan Padova Reserve cookware set certainly makes a style statement. But how is it on substance? Not too shabby. In fact, its scores on all our major cooking tasks are top-notch, including an impressive score for speed of heating. Its handles are sturdy and stay fairly cool to the touch. The nonstick coating is durable, although some of the nonstick pans we tested did even better on that test. The 10-piece set has two frying pans, two saucepans, a sauté pan, a stockpot, and four lids.

For more options: Best Cookware Sets

The AirPods Max are exceptional over-the-ear headphones—with one drawback: the price. The sound quality, noise-canceling tech, design, and construction are all very appealing, especially to Apple fans. Yes, this is the previous-gen Max model, but aside from the choice of colors and the Lightning charging port (instead of the industry standard USB-C), there’s little to separate the two options.

The updated Sonos Beam is an all-in-one model that delivers admirable overall sound quality. Compared with its predecessor, the model supports Dolby Atmos audio, though it doesn’t have upfiring drivers. Instead, it uses signal processing and phased speaker arrays to create Atmos effects. Like its predecessor, the new Beam is a smart speaker with Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant built in. It also includes support for Apple AirPlay 2.

This rugged-looking (and high-performing) Samsung smartwatch is aimed at outdoors enthusiasts—and anyone who wants the latest premium health- and fitness-tracking features. Just note that Galaxy Watches work only with Android devices. 

The brand-new Apple Watch Series 10—reviewed here for CR members—comes with a bigger, brighter display and faster charging capabilities, which might make tracking your sleep easier. The model is also equipped for the first time with sleep apnea detection cleared by the Food and Drug Administration.

This basic, hard-shell carry-on by Away impresses in our tests for impact resistance and construction quality. Away is also a top brand for carry-on luggage, based on our survey of CR members. The bag’s special features include a compartment divider, leather luggage tag, and laundry bag. It has an unusually generous limited lifetime warranty and, like a mattress, a 100-day trial period, so you can see how you like it on the road.

For more options: The Best Hard-Shell Carry-On Luggage

You’ll see 10 Vitamix full-sized models in CR’s blender ratings; this is the best one that goes for less than $500. The Vitamix 5200 has an 8-cup capacity and a seven-year warranty. It’s skilled at making more than smoothies—it can make hot soup, too. At 20 inches, this model is on the tall side, so if you’re buying it for someone else, you may want to ask them to measure their under-cabinet space first.

For more options: Best Blenders for Making Smoothies