budget
Spoot: Spotted Early keeps budget in one place: 2 stories so far. The section currently leads with “Rega strips the turntable to its bare essentials and halves the price” and “Prime Day's cheap seat: six things under $25 that don't suck”. Rega stripped its turntable down to the bare essentials and then halved the price. You could spend a Prime Day budget on one big thing, or you could let six smaller ones burrow into your life for under $25 total. Spoot: Spotted Early New things, caught while they're still new and a little weird. Spoot finds fresh gadgets, clever inventions, crowdfunding campaigns,… The list below is every budget story on Spoot: Spotted Early, newest first.
Rega strips the turntable to its bare essentials and halves the price
Rega stripped its turntable down to the bare essentials and then halved the price. The British hi-fi brand just released an entry-level model that gives me two things to genuinely get excited about: a seriously minimalist design and a price tag roughly half what you'd pay for the starter Planar. No frills, no fuss, just the spinning platter and the arm doing what they need to do. It's the kind of lean, no-apologies engineering that makes you wonder why every turntable costs so much. If you're curious about clever hardware that rewrites the rules on pricing, you might also want to check out our piece on Orioner's magnetic phone stand, which tries to stick where others couldn't. Spoot approves of anything that cuts the nonsense and lets the music speak.
Prime Day's cheap seat: six things under $25 that don't suck
You could spend a Prime Day budget on one big thing, or you could let six smaller ones burrow into your life for under $25 total. This roundup sniffs out the deals that actually deliver: JLab Go Air Pop earbuds with a charging case that doubles as a plug, an Anker 45W charger that shows you its power flow like a tiny dashboard, and a LifeStraw that filters microplastics from whatever questionable water you find. The Best Picture winner *Everything Everywhere All At Once* on 4K Blu-ray for twelve bucks? That's the kind of chaos we can get behind. Fewer picks this year because everything costs more, which stinks, but the ones here earn their spot. If you're hunting bigger prey, our robot vacuum roundup shows how Prime Day scrubs prices there too.