If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. A lot of the time, we approach shopping with the mentality that more expensive products equals better products. Don't get me wrong--there are definitely some items worth splurging on, but the most expensive option is rarely the best. Here are 25 product categories where a less expensive model out-performs a high-end product. Just think of all the money you could save! Robotic vacuums are cool to begin with, and when you add smart technology, these hands-off cleaning gadgets are even more efficient.

A lot of the time, we approach shopping with the mentality that more expensive products equals better products. Don't get me wrong--there are definitely some items worth splurging on, but the most expensive option is rarely the best. Here are 25 product categories where a less expensive model out-performs a high-end product. Just think of all the money you could save! Robotic vacuums are cool to begin with, and when you add smart technology, these hands-off cleaning gadgets are even more efficient. However, there are definitely some models out there that are way too expensive--we're talking $1,000 or more. Instead, we'd recommend the Eufy BoostIQ RoboVac 30C, which comes with an easy-to-use app where you can set cleaning schedules, start the vacuum and more.

In this era of 24 hour news cycles where news breaks more often on social media than on the front page, newsrooms and journalists have been able to work more efficiently to stay on top of important stories by using Artificial Intelligence. AI has long been seen as away of relegating the more mundane, time-consuming tasks away from the man to the machine, allowing journalists more time to do the thing we rely on them for: reporting. But things are changing, and AI is developing with an aim of doing more to the newsroom than helping achieve maximum productivity. Some early adopters in the AI efficiency space were technologies like the BBC News' Juicer Project. Juicer launched in 2012 with the aim to "provide a source of tagged News content to power prototypes."

Driving across the border into Canada late this summer, the CBC anchor on the radio announced that a glut of blueberries had pushed their prices down to historic lows. Having brought a fancy new juicer with me, I sensed an opportunity. The juicer in the back of the car was a Hurom H-AI, a sort of Maserati of juice machines, with a powerful motor that gives it a near-unflappable ability to liquefy whatever you throw in the hopper. The Hurom H-AI has a powerful motor that gives it a near-unflappable ability to liquefy whatever you throw in the hopper. It is a very effective machine, but it had a lot of convincing to do if I was going to like it, as the damn thing costs $700--a number that created a hurdle I was worried I couldn't clear.

LOS ANGELES -- Looking back at 2017's tech products that bombed, none of these misses was more glaring than some wild video sunglasses that didn't exactly snap with consumers. The cute $129 video sunglasses called Spectacles from Snapchat parent Snap were initially hard to get. Then Snap put them on sale nationally in February and the broader based of national consumers showed little interest in the product, leaving a backlog of thousands of unsold glasses, and a $40 million write-down from Snap. A Wi-Fi enabled juicer with a sky-high price tag of $400 didn't make a lot of sense to consumers, especially when it required a subscription to buy proprietary Juicero bags of fruit to turn into juice. Another blow against this product was the discovery that squeezing the bags with your raw hands worked just as well as turning on the juicer.

A few changes are afoot at Engadget, Elon Musk has plans for brain-machine interfaces in a few years, and HTC made a phone that is rumored to be squeezable. Meanwhile, a high-end, WiFi-connected juicer with mountains of funding is also feeling the squeeze. Changes aheadWe're learning from our past to inform our future. It's not the weekend yet, but we have a letter from the new editor-in-chief, Christopher Trout walking down memory lane and laying out what you can expect from Engadget in the future. That's one way to sell more camerasGoPro's Fusion spherical camera is six GoPros in one Facebook, isn't the only one with a new 360-degree camera, as GoPro is announcing its 5.2K VR-capable Fusion camera.