I review tech for a living: 9 top-rated gadgets under $50 and on sale at Amazon now
As I was checking prices for some camera gear, I couldn't help but notice that quite a few of my favorite budget products are on sale.
For instance, the EarFun Air Pro 3 are currently on sale for just $47 at Amazon, and these are some of the best wireless earbuds around if you're on a budget. Looking for a new Bluetooth speaker? The JBL Go 4 is now only $43 at Amazon — I reviewed this speaker personally and loved it! And if you're a gamer, check out one of our favorite budget gaming keyboards, the Lemokey X1, which is just $22 at Amazon.
And there's more where that came from. To help you guys save money, I rounded up my favorite sub-$50 deals here. And don't miss out on these Amazon promo codes.
My team reviewed the EarFun Air Pro 3 last year, when we awarded a 4-star rating to these budget earbuds. The sound quality is strong for the money, while the ANC and battery life are excellent. I own the EarFun Air Pro 4s (also on sale for $67 at Amazon) and I would recommend these instead if you can stretch the extra $20, as they're phenomenal and won 4.5 stars from us. You won't regret the Air Pro 3s, though, as they're still brilliant buds.
"Proof that gaming performance can come cheap" is how we described this mouse in our 4-star Redragon M916 review. This brilliant little gaming mouse is extremely light and offers excellent gaming features for the money, including adjustable DPI up to 8K. This deal is for Prime Members only.
I tested the JBL Go 4 personally last year and was impressed by how well this speaker performed given its size, awarding a 4-star score. It offers decent sound quality, high levels of waterproofing, multi-point connectivity and is super portable. It's ideal for slipping into your bag to soundtrack spontaneous gatherings or for playing music while you study.
I won't lie, this one took us a little by surprise in our GameSir G7 SE review. We awarded this controller 4.5 stars and our Editor's Choice award. It's a fantastic pad for the money, with hall effect triggers and sticks (so no stick drift); excellent companion software and customization options; and a lightweight but sturdy build. "Better than an official gamepad" was our conclusion.
Alright, full disclosure, my team hasn't reviewed this. However, I own one of these chargers and honestly, I don't go anywhere without it. It's so useful having three charging points, so I can charge all my devices simultaneously from one power outlet when on the go. This version is 65W: so good for phones, gadgets, tablets and small laptops like a Chromebook or MacBook Air. I own the 100W version, which is pricer (although currently $10 off), but it can charge my full-size MacBook Pro.
We're big fans of the Gamakay TK75, awarding 4 stars to the Pro model after our testing. This model is slightly cheaper, using Gateron switches rather than Gamakay's own brilliant switches. Absolutely nothing wrong with a Gateron switch, though, especially for $34. And besides, this deck is hot swappable, so you can change switches anyway! This board is perfect for typing and productivity — ideal for anyone heading back to school.
Another keyboard, and one of my team's favorite gaming decks. The Lemokey X1 is a budget gaming keyboard from Lemokey — that's Keychron's gaming-focused sub-brand. This budget board offers great gaming performance, is good to type on and is built very well given its minimal price tag. Gamers on a budget, look no further.
Where would we be without our air fryers? I use mine day in, day out. We tested this Corsori Mini Air Fryer's bigger sibling, the Cosori Dual Basket, awarding 4 stars. This smaller version is great if you need to save space, maybe in a dorm or small/shared kitchen!
We bestowed upon the Amazfit Band 7 our 4.5-star Editor's Choice award when we tested it last year. We asked: "why spend $150 when the Amazfit Band 7 is right here?" A lovely display with great battery life; tons of fitness, health and sleep tracking features; plus a minimal, lightweight design... all for $37. What's not to love?
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Don't wait! Huge Apple sale live on Amazon from $24 — 15 early Labor Day deals I'd add to my cart now
Labor Day weekend is just around the corner, but you don't have to wait until September to upgrade your favorite Apple devices without breaking the bank. It's no secret that Apple's premium brand comes with a similarly premium price tag. Thankfully, you can say goodbye to paying full price this weekend, as Amazon is discounting select Apple products from the latest AirPods, iPads, MacBooks and more. With up to 32% off select devices across Apple's entire lineup, it's the perfect time to snag any coveted Apple gadgets you've been hesitating to click "add to cart." For instance, the new MacBook Pro with an M4 chip is now $300 off, the lowest price yet for one of the best laptops currently on the market. If you're constantly losing track of your belongings, you can also snag the Apple AirTag 4 pack for just $74, or a single AirTag for just $24 now. Below, I've rounded up all the best Apple deals I could find on Amazon. Here are my 15 favorite early Labor Day deals on Apple devices. If you're interested in even more ways to save, be sure to check out this week's best Amazon promo codes. While you're at it, why not peruse our round-up of the best early Labor Day deals on tech, home decor, and sneakers to shop now? The Apple AirTag is an excellent key finder that is extremely easy to set up and does a great job of locating your valuables. What more could you ask for? Save $5 right now. Save $25 on this 4-pack of Apple's AirTag trackers, letting you track multiple objects direct from your iPhone. Whether you're traveling with multiple bags, or just can't keep track of your bags and keys, these could prove invaluable in the months ahead. The best new iPads, including iPad mini 7, all get to benefit from the new features in the Apple Pencil Pro — like the squeeze and barrel roll features. Not to mention all the classic Apple Pencil capabilities like pressure sensitivity, low-latency and tilt support. The AirPods 4 boast a new design as well as Apple's H2 chip, which delivers clearer calls with Voice Isolation, and a new, hands-free way to interact with Siri. The AirPods 4 also have USB-C charging and include up to 30 hours of listening time. In our AirPods 4 review, we said the Editor's Choice earbuds bring Apple's wireless earbuds lineup into the modern day with Pro-level features for less. The AirPods Pro 2 are Apple's best wireless earbuds. Our AirPods Pro 2 review found excellent sound quality, great noise cancelling performance and immersive Spatial audio. The base model Mac mini M4 is a big step up from its predecessor and likely enough for most people without any expensive upgrades. It comes with Apple's powerful M4 chip, 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You also get plenty of ports in a tiny package with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-C ports, HDMI and Ethernet. The Apple Watch SE (2022) is the best budget Apple Watch and one of the best affordable smartwatches on the market today, even before a discount. For folks with smaller wrists, the 40mm SE is Apple's lightest and easiest-wearing smartwatch. It also offers the same battery life, water resistance and many of the same features as the pricier Series 10. The Apple Watch 10 boasts a thinner and lighter design, faster charging and a new sleep apnea detection feature. Some new key features include 30% more screen area, rounded corners and a first-ever wide angle OLED display. The device also feature advanced health insights, including the ability to take an ECG anytime. The 2025 iPad Air packs Apple's M3 processor, an 11-inch LED (2360 x 1640) display, 128GB of storage, a 12MP rear camera, and a 12MP front camera. The tablet features a more powerful 8-core CPU, which makes the M3 up to 35% faster for multithreaded CPU workflows than the iPad Air M1. There's also a 9-core GPU on board with 40% faster graphics performance. In our iPad Air M3 review, we called it "the best Apple tablet for most people."Price check: $449 @ Best Buy This larger size iPad Air sports the same M3 processor, but it's coupled with a 13-inch LED (2732 x 2048) display. Otherwise, it packs the same 128GB of storage, 12MP rear camera, WiFi 6E support, and a 12MP front camera. The new CPU and larger display should make this iPad a favorite for gamers. The 11-inch iPad Pro packs Apple's latest M4 processor paired with a stunning 11-inch Tandem OLED (2420 x 1668) display. The new M4 processor features 9 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores. In our iPad Pro 2024 review we said it could very well be the most stunning tablet ever made. At 5.1mm thick, this is one of the thinnest iPads Apple has ever made. It packs Apple's new M4 processor, a 13-inch Ultra Retina XDR display, and 12MP camera. The new MacBook Air is powered by Apple's latest M4 chipset. The new Mac upgrades the camera from 1080p to 12MP with Center Stage support. The M4 chipset also supports dual external monitors, even when you have the laptop's lid open. It packs a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display (2560 x 1664), Apple's M4 CPU w/ 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. In our MacBook Air M4 review, we said the Editor's Choice laptop is irresistible thanks to its speedy performance, sharper camera, and lower starting price. Prefer a bigger screen? The 15-inch model is also on sale. It packs a 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display (2880 x 1864), Apple's M4 CPU w/ 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. Thanks to its M4 chip, the new MacBook Pro offers up to 2x faster Neural Engine performance for AI tasks and 2x faster ray tracing compared to the old M3 models. As we said in our MacBook Pro 14-inch M4 review, you also get a sharper 12MP Center Stage webcam and extended battery life of over 18 hours in our testing.
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The Great Shrinking of corporate America
In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had a blunt message for his 350,000 corporate employees: There were going to be fewer of them in the near future, thanks to the "efficiency gains" he expected from AI. The proclamation generated big headlines and an uproar from staff. But it struck me as merely honest. He was acknowledging something that pretty much every CEO who sits atop a large white-collar workforce is quietly hoping to achieve sooner or later. After all, Jassy hasn't been the only executive to hint at a future of lower headcount. The head of JPMorgan's consumer and community business predicted in May that AI will reduce the number of employees in its operations division by 10%. That same month, the CEO of Klarna said that the company's investments in AI has already driven the company's headcount to shrink by 40%. And the CEO of Ford — a company that employs tens of thousands of white-collar professionals — declared that AI will wipe out "literally half" of all white-collar jobs. Meanwhile, Kian Katanforoosh, the CEO and founder of the software startup Workera, tells me that he never wants to have much more than the 80 or so employees he has today, no matter how successful his business ends up becoming. "I truly believe we can go super super far without growing more," he says. "I'm an engineer. I don't want to have to manage so many people if I don't need to." It's not like CEOs ever enjoyed shelling out for the salaries or navigating the personnel headaches that come with the sprawling bureaucracies they employ. But for more than a century, armies of office workers were a necessary cost of doing business. To grow from tiny upstarts into titans of industry, companies needed an ever-multiplying number of HR reps, accountants, marketers, engineers, analysts, and project managers. In recent months, that 100-year-trend is starting to come undone. Everywhere you look, AI appears to be helping leaner teams take on work that used to require more people. And executives are talking about their large workforces — once their greatest competitive advantage — as if they're an unfortunate holdover from a bygone, bloated era. If today's corporate giants shrink their ranks, and if tomorrow's giants never need to bulk up in the first place, we may well be witnessing the end of a defining feature of corporate America: the mega-employer. That could give rise to a whole new generation of nimble companies that innovate faster — but also leave workers navigating a world of diminished career paths and fewer jobs. Before the Industrial Revolution, most Americans worked for themselves as farmers or craftsmen. And those who didn't worked for very small operations — say, a few journeymen training under a master shoemaker. The resulting economy was a patchwork of all these tiny businesses. That started to change with the advent of capital-intensive industries like textile manufacturing, which required organizing larger groups of people under a single employer. Then came railroads in the late 19th century. With projects that took many years to realize and stretched over thousands of miles, vast numbers of workers needed to be on the same page. "If you mess it up, there's a big explosion," says Louis Hyman, a political economy historian at Johns Hopkins. "You needed to really coordinate your mechanisms and make sure that people are doing things exactly the same way." As mass production developed, Hyman says, many of the most consequential innovations during this time weren't so much technical breakthroughs: They were social inventions to coordinate the labor of all the people it took to get the most out of the new machines. The assembly line broke down complicated work into simple, repeatable, standardized tasks; scientific management emphasized the importance of monitoring, measuring, and optimizing everyone's performance; and the M-form corporate structure created a blueprint to manage sprawling bureaucracies through a clear chain of command. In the 1930s, about a tenth of the labor force worked for businesses that employed at least 10,000 people. By the end of World War II, that share had surged to about a third. By the 1970s, some of that bigger-is-better ideology started to change. A new management philosophy set in, normalizing layoffs that took aim at bloat. And as robots automated many blue-collar jobs, IBM mainframes and word processors eliminated a whole set of white-collar clerical roles as well. Still, there was plenty of work that technology couldn't automate, which meant that companies needed large teams of college-educated professionals to keep them going. Even the most tech-forward companies saw their people — especially their coders — as mission-critical to their success. "Hiring great people — especially engineers — is one of the biggest challenges that any technology company has," Mark Zuckerberg lamented in 2013. "Our country doesn't produce the volume of engineers that the companies would want to hire." Tech giants often hired more than they needed to make sure they had a steady supply of talent, and to attract and retain the best of the best, they treated their employees like gods. If you were to pinpoint one moment the gods turned mortal, it would probably be November 9, 2022 — the day Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees. From there, virtually every tech company followed suit, with employers across other industries close behind. At first, the cuts were chalked up to overhiring in the pandemic. But two and a half years later, the layoffs haven't stopped and hiring is still down. More and more, AI appears to be driving those austerity measures. In an industry that once hoarded talent like gold, the shift is striking. CEOs no longer seem to view the bulk of their workforce as indispensable, and they say as much: A common refrain among tech leaders from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk to Dara Khosrowshahi now is some version of "If you don't like it here, you should leave." Companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Salesforce had reliably increased their headcounts year after year. Now, according to the workforce analytics provider Live Data, all of them employ fewer people than they did at their 2022 peak. J. Scott Hamilton, Live Data's CEO, says this is probably just the beginning. To gauge how much deeper the cuts could go, his team recently analyzed the detailed responsibilities of most roles at Microsoft to estimate the share of tasks that could, in theory, be done by AI. Their conclusion: If Microsoft were to offload all of those automatable tasks to AI, it would eliminate 36% of the work currently done by employees. That would mean the company could lay off some 80,000 employees. On the one hand, that's an aggressive scenario: Companies are rarely able to overhaul their workflows to take full advantage of a new automation technology's capabilities. If they do, that transition takes a very long time. And besides, some work is simply too high-stakes to entrust to error-prone AI — even if it's technically possible. On the other, the estimate may prove conservative: Live Data's predictions assume that AI will remain at 2025-level capabilities. Given how much better the leading large language models have become over the last two years, the best tools will almost certainly be able to handle more than what they can today. "The optimists are saying that the good companies will simply redeploy the assets elsewhere now that they can be more efficient," Hamilton says. "But I think an equal argument can be made that they'll just say, 'We're going to do the same amount with fewer people.'" If that sounds like a far-off hypothetical future, consider what's already happening today at startups. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he's making bets with his friends on when we'll get the first "one-person billion-dollar company." And Arthur Kaneko, a general partner at Coreline Ventures, tells me he's noticed that early-stage founders are raising their initial rounds of funding with fewer employees than they would have had in the past — among the AI-fluent founders, perhaps with less than half. "The way companies are being built is just fundamentally changing right now because of AI," Kaneko says. "Through the use of AI coding, AI marketing, AI sales, people are able to do a lot more work with way fewer people." And he thinks these startups will stay lean as they scale into successful businesses. "They just won't hire the people that Meta and Microsoft had to hire to get to where they are," he says. "I do think per-company headcount will permanently be depressed in startups." There are reasons to be hopeful about a new era of smaller employers. If AI makes it cheaper and easier to launch companies, we'll probably see more of them — and that would be great for the long-term health of the economy in all kinds of ways. New businesses tend to employ people with less experience and fewer credentials who get passed up by the bigger companies. They're more willing to try new things, which drives innovation. And they create more competition for the established giants, which is good for consumers. Smaller companies may also be good for the workers inside them. There's a lot that people hate about working at big organizations: the constant turf wars, the endless layers of approval, the meetings before the meetings, the sense that you're just one tiny inconsequential cog in a giant machine. Smaller bureaucracies would minimize that, which is one reason why people often feel more motivated in leaner workplaces. According to Gallup, employees at small companies report the highest engagement, with scores dropping below the national average once organizations hit 500 employees. On the same stage where Altman made his one-person unicorn prediction, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian raved about the benefits of this possibility. "CEOs and founders are going to be so excited to get up and go to work with much smaller, much more performant, much more culturally strong teams," he said. But a world of shrunken employers could also rob workers of something essential: the long-term career paths that big companies used to offer. With so many roles under one roof, big companies made it possible for workers to try new things, move up, and build careers. Smaller firms don't offer the same range of opportunities, which means people will likely need to switch companies a lot more in the future. Smaller firms are also less likely to invest in on-the-job training — a shift that would hit early-career professionals hard, just as their roles face the greatest risk from AI. The big question is what this all means for college-educated workers. If enough startups emerge, they might create new jobs to offset the ones disappearing from big companies. But that would require an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship — one enormous enough to make up for the retrenchment of the giants. In 2022, 29% of the American workforce worked for an organization that employed at least 10,000 people. Meanwhile, the country's education system is churning out ever more college grads, who studied hard with the expectation of a stable future in white-collar work. If big companies hire less, and small companies also hire less, where will they all go? The usual reassurance is that AI, like every disruptive technology before it, will eventually create more jobs than it destroys. That glosses over an important detail, according to Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist at Oxford. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, most innovations simply made existing work faster and cheaper — like the loom, which automated the work of skilled weavers but still produced more or less the same fabric. That made a handful of industrialists very rich, but for the average worker, wages barely budged for the first 80 or so years of industrialization. It was only later — with inventions like electricity and the automobile that gave rise to entirely novel industries — that economic growth surged and better, high-paying jobs emerged. Had that second wave never arrived, we'd remember the Industrial Revolution very differently. "Most productivity gains over the long run," Frey says, "come from doing new and previously inconceivable things." Right now, corporate America seems stuck in that first phase. So many executives are laser-focused on using AI to do the same work with fewer people, rather than applying it to problems we couldn't solve before — the kind of breakthroughs that would open up new lines of business and generate more demand for labor, not less. "A real risk is that we're getting leaner organizations, but they're not really creating that much new," Frey says. "That would be a bleak future, and I do worry we're moving in that direction." Correction: August 11, 2025 — A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Louis Hyman teaches at Cornell, his former employer. He now teaches at Johns Hopkins. Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Insider
an hour ago
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Here's why Google might have to sell Chrome, and which companies want to buy it
Chrome is the world's most popular web browser. But how much longer it belongs to Google is an open question. A court last year ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws by maintaining a monopoly on internet search. A second ruling in April found Google also monopolized open-web digital ad markets. The Justice Department asked a judge to force Google to divest its premier web browser to remedy the case. A court is expected to rule on that by the end of this month. Chrome, a free web browser developed by Google, is an important distribution tool for Google Search and its other services. It also provides insights into users' search habits and is the most popular web browser on the market. Being forced to sell Chrome would be an undeniable blow to Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. Analysts at Barclays said such an action could be a black swan scenario for Google stock, sparking an estimated 15% to 25% decline. Google denies it's a monopoly. It said in a blog post in May that offloading the web browser to another party could render it "obsolete" and "expose billions of people to cyber-attacks." Although the judge has not yet decided Chrome's ultimate fate, competitors are already lining up to gladly take it off Google's hands. an AI search chat platform, confirmed to Business Insider that it made a $35 billion bid for Chrome this week. JP Morgan and several private equity firms backed the bid. is a division of the digital marketing company Public Good, which acquired in July. Public Good President Melissa Anderson and CEO Danny Bibi told Business Insider they reached out to Google on Wednesday. "Given the number of worldwide users Chrome has, it's a really just phenomenal way to scale user adoption," Anderson said. The pair said they're committed to using AI ethically, which means offering its search for free in an effort to make knowledge accessible for all. They also said founded in 1998, already has a network of clients, so finding potential advertisers wouldn't be a heavy lift. Perplexity Perplexity, an AI search startup, made a $34.5 billion bid for the web browser this week. The company launched an AI-native browser, Comet, in July. Although the bid is higher than Perplexity's entire valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported that several investors have agreed to back the potential deal. Perplexity said it would continue supporting Chromium, Google's open-source web browser project that's the foundation of Chrome, as part of the deal, according to the outlet. The outlet reported that Perplexity would continue to keep Google as the default search engine, but users could change that through settings. OpenAI Although OpenAI's ChatGPT turned it into the leading AI startup in Silicon Valley, the company is a tiny fraction of the size of a Big Tech mammoth like Google. Purchasing Chrome, however, would help even the playing field. During Google's antitrust hearing in April, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT testified that the company would be interested in acquiring Chrome if Google were forced to divest. "Yes, we would, as would many other parties," Nick Turley told the court, according to Bloomberg. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also recently said he'd be interested in snapping up Chrome. "If Chrome is really going to sell, we should take a look at it," Altman told a group of journalists on Thursday, according to The Verge. Yahoo Yahoo, a direct competitor of Google, would also be interested in bidding on Chrome, Bloomberg reported. Brian Provost, the general manager for Yahoo Search, said Chrome is "arguably the most important strategic player on the web" during a hearing for Google's antitrust case in April. "We would be able to pursue it with Apollo," Provost said, referring to Yahoo's owner, Apollo Global Management Inc.
