The holidays are upon us. Time to make some sort of impression on the hopelessly inattentive parents in your life. If you get yourself a bit of a tablet, laptop, or smartwatch, there are certain gifts you will need to get quickly. Unfortunately, the gifts for “2015” are going to be difficult to find.
Let’s call it the “Banana Peels in a Chocolate Box” CES Edition, for those of you who are familiar with something called CES. You will probably recall last year’s big tech show, where computers with detachable keyboards and other utterly silly and/or arbitrary things made a big splash. You won’t find some of these items at CES 2018 — no reason that anyone would want to make that bet. Let’s instead consider the 18-inch MacBook and the Pixelbook. That PC isn’t available to purchase for many, many months yet, and a Pixelbook requires an invite-only upgrade program.
Other than that, all the stuff on this list should be pretty easy to find. Some of these, like the Uber Black or the basic Samsung Galaxy S8 phones, have been on their way out for years already. The type of thing you find in the “good” markets for tech gifts, like high-end Android phones, probably aren’t the kinds of things you would want to get if you wanted to impress anyone.
Instead, the real options are really for the people who spent their entire lives squinting and scanning every Pixelbook screen. It is going to take months for all the promised fixes to take effect and roll out to everyone. When they do come, watch for these projects: the password manager Dragon, the Clue Lite webcam system, the Porsche Design iPhone, the Apple HomeKit hub, and several others that should help you do more of the thing you’re doing in your first year of owning a new machine. The real, cool, eBay products that will come out in these months are $2 keychains. As long as you don’t feel rushed to buy anything after today (as long as your butt tastes like bubblegum at the end of a year of hard work and endless tech poo-pooing), everything else will settle in pretty quickly.
This might give you some extra motivation to get something you don’t yet own. For all those people you want to impress this holiday season, I’ve got you covered. Also, nope, they don’t have the best smartwatches. Well, maybe Apple does.