THE BEST PRODUCTS OF 2020

It’s been a weird year.

Like much of America, the staff of PCMag has been working from home since March, when COVID-19 hit our country hard. Our testing lab and photo-and video studio, which was housed in a tall office building on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, is now dispersed across various apartment living rooms and home offices in the five NYC boroughs and beyond. Laptops, CPUs, and graphics cards are benchmark-tested on coffee tables in Staten Island and Brooklyn, and phones and tablets are photographed against city skylines on the roofs of Queens apartment buildings. Despite the worst pandemic our country has seen in more than 100 years, the very important business of product testing and reviewing—to help you determine the right technology to buy and how to use it—marches on.

Once again this year, we battled, albeit virtually, to whittle down the list of almost 2,000 products we’ve tested to the 100 in this story, which represents the pinnacle of all that we’ve seen this year.

If you remember last year’s collection, you’ll see some familiar winners for 2020. After all, the best product lines, such as Dell XPS and Samsung Galaxy, pump out several new products each year, and they often get better with each iteration. And because we’re continually reviewing important products as their features, performance, and pricing change, you’ll see some old favorites, including Netflix and Spotify. That’s not to say it’s all predictable: Watch for some not-so-obvious choices and some new categories, too—the Best Smart Home Gym Machine, for example.