When Is a Sale Price Actually a Lower Price?

Every week seems to be a sale week now. Festival sale, midnight sale, end of season sale, ends in four hours. You start to feel that not buying today is itself a small loss. That feeling is the product being โ€ฆ

Does Your Old TV Really Need Replacing?

The television works perfectly. But the apps on it have stopped updating, and one has vanished altogether. The shop says the answer is a new television. Very often the answer costs a fraction of that. What does a streaming stick โ€ฆ

Who Paid for That Review You Just Read?

You search for the thing you want to buy and read six reviews about it. All six praise the same three features. All six admit the same one tiny flaw. By the sixth you feel informed, and you have learned โ€ฆ

The Spec Sheet Says a Lot. Most of It Does Not Matter.

At the bottom of every product page there is a long table of technical rows. You scroll through it and understand a handful. Then you assume the one with more rows must be the better product. That assumption is exactly โ€ฆ

Band or Smartwatch? How to Decide Before You Buy

You have decided to buy something for your wrist. Then forty options appear in the shopping app. They all promise the same things. The listing shouts about features you will never open. It stays quiet about the two or three โ€ฆ

4K, Refresh Rate and the Numbers That Sell TVs

The sticker on a new television carries more numbers than a school report card. 4K, hertz, contrast ratios with far too many zeros. Only a couple of them change what you see from your sofa. What does 4K actually mean? โ€ฆ

Decide What You Need Before You Open Any Shopping App

The laptop is a few years old and something about it has started to annoy you. So you open a shopping app and begin scrolling. An hour later you have twelve tabs open and no decision. The problem is that โ€ฆ

LED, QLED, OLED: What the Box Is Really Saying

You walk into the showroom to buy one television. You walk out confused by three sets of letters. Every sticker says LED, QLED or OLED, and the salesman says the expensive one is better. Let us take the words apart, โ€ฆ