As a harsh reminder—even though it feels like its been a decade since December, 2024—we have only managed to muddle through three months of 2025. It’s been an awkward time to love tech. As both consumers and the world’s biggest tech companies wrestled with the impact of Trump tariffs on supply chains. At the very least, we found several new favorite products of 2025 have already arrived. AMD started with with its response to Nvidia’s mid-range GPUs, and Apple seized our attention yet again with the launch of its MacBook Air M4 and new Mac Studio.
But the ides of March did indeed bring ill winds. This month was supposed to offer us the full look at Google Pixel 9a plus a heaping helping of gaming laptops sporting the latest Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs. However, there’s been a rash of delays. We now have to sit on our hands, waiting for Google’s latest phone and our most-anticipated laptops, plus devices like Nothing 3a Pro and—reportedly—Nvidia’s RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti. With more mobile gaming platforms on the way for April, including the full reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2, next month is shaping up to be one of the most impactful for the tech world in recent memory.
We’ve long been promised an exoskeleton revolution. While the Hypershell X won’t have you throwing cars or jumping 20 feet in the air, it does actually do a lot to make leg exercises easier. The device detects when you move your leg, then assists that movement with in-built motors. In our tests, we found it aided a three-hour hike so well it left us a third as fatigued as we would be without it. The Hypershell Pro X model also had a surprisingly strong battery life that could keep up even when on the move for several hours.
Foldables have yet to find their place in today’s crowded U.S. smartphone market, but the Oppo Find N5 is making a strong case that U.S. foldables need to catch up, and soon. The Find N5 is larger than Samsung and Google’s offerings, and it’s thinner to boot. Bummer then that the device isn’t available for sale in North America. Our next best hope to get a device like the Find N5 is to wait for OnePlus. That company is owned by the same conglomerate as Oppo.
The MacBook Air remains one of the best laptops, just as it has been since the advent of the M1 chip. The new version comes with a “sky blue” color that looks more like a cloudy day than a sunny sky, but it also starts at its lowest price ever at $1,000. For that, you’re getting a strong performance uptick from the M3 MacBook Air. It has especially powerful graphics performance, managing to scoot in just under the MacBook Pro 14 with M4 in our benchmarks. At this point, the MacBook Air M4 is so close to perfection it just needs a new display without the notch to become our most-recommended laptop.
One of the best (and most-expensive) gaming laptops is now smaller (and more-expensive) than it’s ever been. The Razer Blade 16 in 2025 includes a Nvidia GeForce RT 5090 at the top end, so you already know performance is going to be solid across the board. It also packs a 2560 x 1600 OLED display to show off all those pretty graphics from the most-demanding titles. While it doesn’t have the battery life you need for using it as your all-day, on the go device, the thinner design is a benefit for those who want to put the Razer Blade 16 in their bag and not feel like they’re lugging around a 5-pound brick.
For the sake of on-the-go, pill-shaped speakers, the JBL Charge 6 is leading the pack in audio quality for its size. We found its audio quality was far more measured than the previous iterations of the Charge, with solid highs and mids to go along with its normally-excellent bass. JBL’s small speaker continues to be durable and still has enough juice to last for a long listening session. If you have two on hand, you can combine them with the PartyTogether on the JBL Portable feature to facilitate some stereo audio too.
When the high-end graphics card market was effectively monopolized by Nvidia, AMD had to show up and make a case for lower-end, cheaper GPUs. With the Radeon RX 9070 XT, the company succeeded with room to spare. The graphics card meets or beats performance from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and costs $150 less MSRP. The new FSR 4 upscaling model, which is exclusive to this and the Radeon RX 9070, also provides a solid uptick in performance without sacrificing too much visual quality. Of course, you’d be lucky to get the RX 9070 XT at $600 (or even find it in stock), but it still comes out cheaper than Nvidia’s equivalent.
