At the end of every year, news websites start publishing their gift guides (usually about two months in advance). It helps them gather extra traffic, and when you make a purchase, they earn money through affiliate links. So here’s my list of gift ideas with no affiliate links. These aren’t necessarily for someone else—you can treat yourself, too!

Sennheiser Momentum 4

AirPods have taken over the world, but good over-the-ear headphones provide a completely different experience. While most recommend the Sony XM5, I suggest you check out the Sennheiser Momentum 4, which, in my opinion, sound even better. With these, I’ve rediscovered entire genres and individual artists. I wrote a separate review here.

Price: ~€269

Backpack

At some point, I realized that a good backpack is far superior to a regular one. The quality of materials, zippers, pocket design, laptop protection—all improve significantly if you invest around $200. Since everyone’s needs vary, I recommend two options:

• Aer City Pack for most people.
• PeakDesign Everyday Zip or Wandrd Prvke if you want to carry a camera with lenses.

Price: €150/€239

UGREEN 65W GaN Charger

One way to improve your life is to place chargers and cables around your home and workspace instead of constantly gathering them to take with you. If you need to buy new ones for this, check out UGREEN. It’s a great alternative to Anker with excellent service. For trips, I only take this adapter with a few cables to charge everything. It’s noticeably smaller than Apple’s equivalent adapter and offers two USB-C ports and one USB-A. UGREEN cables are also cheaper and reliable. There’s a 100W version if your laptop demands more power.

Price: €40

UGREEN Power Bank 20000mAh

Continuing the charging theme, UGREEN also offers an excellent power bank. It has three ports, fast charging, and a side display showing its exact charge percentage. There’s a version with a larger capacity, but some airlines limit battery sizes to 100W, so check if you really need it.

Price: €80

Anker MagSafe Stand

I love MagSafe chargers, but for the price, you can find more interesting solutions. For instance, this stand from Anker also charges your AirPods case.

Price: €49

Kindle Paperwhite

You might already own a Kindle, but if yours is from 2018, I highly recommend upgrading to the latest version. It’s hard to put into words how much faster and more convenient it is.

Price: €182

The Food Lab

This is the best culinary book, an ultimate encyclopedia that explains all the basic techniques scientifically. I first bought the digital version and later got the physical one. Highly recommend.

Price: €48

Fifine AM8 RGB USB/XLR Mic

If you’re on a lot of calls, it might be time to invest in a dedicated microphone. Sound quality is actually more important than video. Here’s a great affordable mic suitable for any purpose.

Price: €56

Mi Smart Bedside Lamp 2

I’m not a fan of overhead lighting, so I’ve filled my home with various lamps. This one looks great, is programmable, and can help you wake up on dark winter mornings.

Price: €65

Sunset Lamp

I won’t recommend a specific brand here—just visit any marketplace like Temu, order one, and place it in your living room or bedroom. Super cheap and cozy.

Price: €10

Kodak Ektar or Fujifilm InstaX

If you want to explore film photography, there are two relatively affordable options:

• Kodak Ektar, which shoots vertical photos on standard 35mm film you can develop and scan.
• Fujifilm InstaX, which produces small instant photos.

Price: €50/€60

Anbernic Emulator RG 40XXV

Anbernic produces endless retro game emulators at a low cost. It’s a great way to revisit the games from your childhood. It’s very affordable, perfect for flights, and compact enough to store away when not in use.

Price: $69

Steam Deck

If you’ve been living with just a MacBook and no PC, this might be the perfect way to get back into gaming. It’s relatively inexpensive, doesn’t require additional setups, and can connect to a TV, monitor, or peripherals. You can also install games from anywhere. Plus, it’s an engineer-driven device rather than a marketing one (in a good way). I now barely see the need for a PS5.

Price: €469

NuPhy 75

I hesitated to try a mechanical keyboard, fearing I wouldn’t like it. Turns out, I loved it! NuPhy makes beautiful ones. Typing feels much better to me than on the Magic Keyboard, and they’re similarly priced.

Price: $120

Logitech MX Master 3S

This is simply the best mouse in the world.

Price: €99

Flipper Zero

Flipper Zero is a unique device that visualizes invisible things: radio signals, data on NFC cards, or the chip code in your pet. Plus, it looks incredibly cute.

Price: €169

I’m still using the 11-inch iPad Pro from 2018, and it’s great. Yes, it’s showing its age a little bit: the transitions aren’t as smooth, and the battery life is getting worse. Considering its age, it’s still a fantastic device.

But worst of all, Apple doesn’t have anything I can reasonably replace it with.

I was reading the review of the latest iPad mini on The Verge and it’s just sad. Yes, it’s half the price, but it’s built on outdated hardware and has a terrible screen. The new Pro with M4 is good, but if you want a keyboard, your only first-party option is a $300 Magic Keyboard. I vastly preferred the old Smart Keyboard. It was much lighter and cheaper. Basically, a cover that you can use to type if you have to. The new Magic Keyboard turns your iPad into a heavy laptop. And despite all of this, it’s still made out of this polyurethane that looks terrible in a couple of years. 

I don’t really want to spend $1300 on a device I mostly use to watch YouTube and read saved articles. 

And you could say that I should compromise. Technically, iPad Air is there for $600. But the bezels are still worse than on my device from six years ago. And the screen is 60Hz, which I do notice quite a lot, since we have one of these at home. iOS is no longer built for this. So if I upgrade, I’d actually downgrade.  

Tim Cook says that he uses an iPad as his main computer. This makes sense because he falls exactly into one of three categories I outlined here. For most people, it’s a media consumption device. But for many years, Apple has been neglecting this obvious use case. 

I bought the iPad Pro back in 2018 because it was the first one with proper stereo audio with four speakers. Which was quite neat for all the video-watching. And that was going on for years! Why lock proper sound behind the more expensive “Pro” devices? What’s Pro about it?

We went over this hump, now it’s the screen. I don’t believe all users need a pencil and a keyboard with a trackpad. But both the screen and the sound are paramount to the iPad’s primary use case. 

And while I do want to update, I find it crazy to spend so much money on an iPad I can’t use for most things, because iPadOS just isn’t there.

You see the same suspects whenever there’s a discussion of over-ear wireless headphones with noise canceling. People mention Sony WH-1000XM5 (orthodox want XM4), AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort (Ultra). 

If you face the same dilemma, I recommend you try Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless. It’s an underrated pair of headphones that deserves to be on the same list. And it usually costs just $250, which is extremely competitive with other options.

What’s great about them? Sound, comfort and battery life, more or less in that order. 

The sound is fantastic. It’d be fair to say they helped me reignite my love of music (along with a more conscious approach to using Spotify). I truly enjoy listening to music in Momentum 4.

Previously, I used Bose QC 35ii in airplanes or when it’s cold outside, but I never loved how they sounded too much. Sennheiser, on the other hand, knows how to tune their products. 

Momentum 4 are very comfortable and made of good-quality plastic. They are much lighter than AirPods Max and feel sturdier than Sony. There’s a power and Bluetooth button, and the rest you control through a flat touch-sensitive panel on the right. 

Noise-canceling is OK. Is it mind-blowing? No. You can get better results from Bose, AirPods Max, and maybe even Sony. But to me, it’s more than enough. What’s the point of best-in-class noise canceling if you don’t want to wear your headphones? And these I actually want to wear. 

On a related note, their transparency mode is worse than AirPods Pro or Max could do, but it doesn’t sound too artificial or metallic. For some reason, it can pick up and slightly amplify sounds you wouldn’t notice ordinarily, like running water or rustling plastic bags. You can adjust the headphones between full noise canceling and full transparency on a linear scale. I find them to sound the most natural exactly in the middle of it. 

But the microphones on Momentum 4 are great for phone calls. They reliably pick up your voice and isolate external noises, particularly wind, very well. 

Bluetooth Multipoint has come a long way, so they can reliably connect to two devices simultaneously. Stop podcast on your phone and click Play on that YouTube video on your laptop and it will just start without issues. My only gripe is that Bose could remember more devices, and you’d switch them in the app and tell it which ones should be active. Momentum 4 may jump connections between all the devices in the range they remember, so it is better to unpair them altogether if you don’t want them to suddenly engage your iPad.

Except for that thing, their iOS app is very good. You can adjust the equalizer and they remember the transparency setting. My old Bose QC 35 had an extremely bad app and software in general, for instance, turning them on required three button presses, because they’d always start with NC at max be default.

Momentum 4 Wireless can last up to 60 hours on a single charge, beating all the competitors we’ve been talking about. You don’t even think about charging them; one day, you just notice a low battery level and reluctantly connect a cable. 

They have autopause, which is nice when you want to quickly take them off when meeting somebody. On several occasions, I’d notice that they continued playing, but it seems to be a rare miss. 

There are a few things I dislike about Momentum 4.

First, I sometimes don’t understand if they’re on or off. Even the quick chirps they produce when you power them sound too similar. To turn them on or off, you have to push that button for a few seconds; I wish it happened faster. 

Second, I don’t have a problem with the touch-sensitive panel per se, but I wish there was a way to disable certain gestures. There are so many of them, and I don’t need most. There’s one to adjust transparency that I somehow trigger from time to time and only notice that it shifted a bit later. 

If you want to learn more, here’s the video that convinced me.

Modern iPads are marvelous machines. I still use the iPad Pro from 2018 and it’s incredibly powerful. Yes, I can’t run Final Cut on it and Stage Manager is limited (I don’t like it anyway). I don’t feel any necessity to replace it any time soon.

When I bought it, I still had my Intel-based MacBook Pro. One day its keyboard broke and I spent a week working on the iPad Pro instead. It was doable. I could open Google Documents, Slack, email. Create documents, write in them, share them, and communicate with the team. What I really liked was how quick it was. Felt like magic.

But everything around the work was so convoluted. A trivial task like taking a file from one app into another is 10 times harder on MacOS. You must find a way to “share” it using the system menu. Or put it in some location in Files only to open from another app.

Then I bought my first MacBook Pro with an M1 chip, which was just as fast. So iPad lost its primary advantage. For some time, it was my weekend computer. I used it to limit my exposure to work-related stuff consciously. But most apps I had on the iPad were far worse than their desktop counterpart. It’s not only about Google Docs. Even researching the backpack you want to buy is simpler on an actual computer.

iPad’s software is underpowered. Limited. Unreliable.

Changing the keyboard layout happens with a delay (can’t believe no immigrants are working at Apple). And in Google Docs it sometimes just doesn’t work.

The way it seems to me, you can comfortably work on the iPad if you’re:

• an artist, because drawing right there is very helpful
• an executive, who only needs to review stuff, give comments, join calls and write emails
• someone who has reconfigured the entire workflow for themselves and their team for the sake of the iPad

That’s it. I want to use this fantastic computer more. But it’s mostly relegated to planes and launching Apple Fitness.

I’ve always been into watches and for the last 5 years, since Series 2, I’ve been almost exclusively wearing an Apple Watch. Recently I pulled a trigger on a mechanical timepiece I wanted a long time ago and have been enjoying it since. There’s a lot of people who went in the opposite direction but I haven’t seen too many people who got out. In the end, mechanical watch movements are an obsolete technology and a basic quartz watch can challenge Rolex for its accuracy, while an Apple Watch can provide you with unique complications and features, such as notifications, weather, or calendar alerts.

But first, why wear a watch in the first place? We all have precise atomic time on our phones. Well, to me that’s simply not enough, I want to be able to just glance and get a feeling of time. Not sure how you can be punctual without that. Therefore, I need a watch.

Apple Watch has some amazing capabilities for a $400 device. Let’s start with easily-accessible powerful complications with a user-friendly interface like timers, stopwatches, and alarms. And then there are unique complications you won’t find on any other watch: weather, calendar, notifications from your phone. Yet, in the end, I wasn’t compelled.

Below are five reasons one might prefer a classic watch instead.

Distractions

Apple Watch wants too much from me. Unless you proactively disable and mute notifications you’ll be bombarded with every alert you’re getting on the phone and watch-induced requests, like suggestions to stand up, exercise, or marvel at your partner’s fitness achievements. Sometimes you want that but in the evening I just wanted to get rid of it.

Having a “dumb” watch allows me to separate contexts. I can put off my phone and nothing will disturb me, unless it’s something truly urgent – then people will probably call me. You can go and disable all notifications on the watch, but it kinda raises the question of whether you wanted it in the first place.

Design

Apple Watch is by no means terrible, but unless you buy a stainless steel version it still looks like a fitness gadget. I just don’t enjoy looking at it, especially compared to my quartz and mechanical watches. Whether it’s a $50 G-Shock or a $1000 mechanical timepiece, they just have a lot more character in them. And since you’re going to replace it in a couple of years I feel a bit weird paying for that steel and sapphire.

That is also part of the reason you might want a mechanical piece. Most esteemed watch companies, with the exception of the likes of Grand Seiko, are focused on mechanical watches. If you want something truly beautiful and exquisite you likely will go mechanic.

Readability

The same applies to watch faces. Apple Watch is fantastic in the way it allows you to build your own watch using the design you like and the complications you need at the moment.

When I was a kid, I did have issues with reading analog watches – simply because for the first twelve years of my life, I didn’t have them at home. But I’ve learned and now I can read analog watches with a single quick glance. Apple Watch has gotten much better since Series 5, when Apple added an always-on display. Still, I realized I need to spend a few tenths of a second more to grasp it. Unfortunately, Apple’s watch faces just aren’t great. Marco Arment wrote a pretty extensive post 4 years ago and not much changed since then. Designers at Apple clearly know watches and recreated many classic designs like Divers and Chronographs. But they often lose important nuance making it’s quite hard to read the analog time quickly. For instance, all hour markers are usually the same, both hands have the same thickness, and so on. The only good analog watch face is California.

Apple Watch is clearly better as a digital watch, and I believe there’s an opportunity to improve. You either have Infograph Modular with a clock that’s rather small or artsy faces where digits take the entire screen with no place left for complications.

What I want is something like this. On Apple Watch Nike there’s a similar watch face but it’s not pretty, has visual bugs, and one slot is always taken by Nike Running, which I don’t use.

Longevity

To me, my watch is almost like my friend (don’t worry, I have friends). It’s with me all the time. I change my clothes but I wear the same watch. It might very well still be on my wrist in 20 years’ time. And from that we got the most massive disadvantage Apple Watch has – it’s short-lived. Even if you replace the battery on your Watch, in a few years it’d look painfully slow and you’d have to upgrade. It’s a replaceable gadget.

Both mechanical and quartz watches can survive for decades with basic care and maintenance. With mechanical watches, you need to have them serviced and while that can be quite expensive, especially in the case of in-house movements powering complicated watches, it’ll at least work perfectly afterward. Quartz watches are easier, you just need to replace the battery and ensure they won’t leak. Even some of the first quartz watches from the 70s are still running. Although, if something does break inside finding a replacement part might be challenging. With simpler mechanical movements it’s a bit more obvious.

And if you do that, your kids can wear the same watch. Whether you cherish that idea or not is entirely up to you, but I like it. My father had a collection of mechanical watches and I enjoyed looking at them as they were telling me about his life.

Battery Life

Apple Watch needs to be charged every night to operate properly. If you go out late at night you might end up with a dead watch. If you travel, even only for a weekend, you have to bring a dedicated charger.

Quartz watches live between 2 and 10 years on a single battery. There are some fantastic pieces that operate on solar power so you only need to replace the accumulator when it’s just dead – most outlive the 10 years period stated by the manufacturer. Mechanical watches usually live between 40-80 hours, but most of them are automatic, meaning they utilize the kinetic energy of your movement to charge. It’s a fantastic device, both mechanically and philosophically, as it’s literally powered by your own body.

The fact I can trust my watch to continue going however late it is, take it off my wrist, and just put it on in the morning while it’s still running is a blessing.

***

Maybe this isn’t forever. Maybe Apple Watch Series 9 will be able to track my blood pressure and glucose 24/7 and it will become a necessity for sustaining health and I’d switch. And I’m still using Apple Watch for training and sleep tracking (mostly for the silent alarm feature). But for the moment I’m enjoying watches that don’t add anxiety in my life.