PCWorld highlights six Prime Day home office deals worth buying, including the Acer Aspire 14-inch laptop for $589 and LG 27US500 4K monitor for $170. Featured deals include the Wavlink Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station at 35% off and EMeet S600 webcam at its lowest price with 4K resolution. The article warns against the Seagate 8TB external drive deal, recommending cloud storage instead while promoting practical office upgrades over flashy features. Amazon's Prime Day offers a terrific opportunity to overhaul your home office with affordable laptops, displays, and peripherals, all at substantial discounts -- and no, that's not hype! Understandably, things have felt somewhat bleak. Tariffs have pushed prices higher, and shortages of memory and storage have elevated the price of PCs and laptops.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Amazon's Prime Day is one of the best opportunities for shoppers to score great deals on Thunderbolt docks and their cousins, USB-C hubs. I should know -- I've been tracking them for years now. Docking stations and hubs offer an opportunity to connect more peripherals to your desk without breaking the bank. Amazon has been the traditional home of the best deals in both categories, year round, which makes it an even more ideal place to shop during Prime Day -- and before.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The Ugreen Maxidok combines Thunderbolt 5, DisplayPort 2.1, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, and an M.2 slot for SSDs up to 8TB. I put this premium docking station through its paces to see if it really delivers in everyday use. The Ugreen Maxidok 17-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 docking station is currently one of the most technically comprehensive Thunderbolt 5 docks on the market. It delivers the full bandwidth of 120Gbps, supplies the laptop with up to 140 watts, and combines this with 17 ports as well as an M.2 slot for an internal SSD upgrade.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The DotDisk is by far the most portable 80Gbps enclosure I've reviewed thanks to fan cooling. Despite its diminutive size, you never need to worry about thermal throttling with the handsome Satechi DotDisk 80Gbps enclosure thanks to an internal fan. But it's pricey -- as are all 80Gbps enclosures. It's uniquely portable, as it employs active cooling in the form of a small fan rather than the bulky passive cooling fins most 80Gbps enclosures feature. Yet, despite its svelte profile, the DotDisk proved a top-flight performer.

A more exciting MacBook Pro is waiting in the wings, but the M5 Max shows the continued success of Apple Silicon. The M5 Max is a monster performer. Gaming is surprisingly smooth, and on-device AI speeds up. The display, keyboard, ports, and speakers remain top-of-class. The MacBook Pro is in its awkward era.

Gear Computers 10 things to know about Apple's new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros The latest versions of Apple's MacBook Pro laptops include M5 chips with revamped architecture to bring performance upgrades across the board. The new computers look similar, but the guts have gotten revamped. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Apple's latest MacBook Pro refresh landed today with two new processors, the M5 Pro and M5 Max, built on what the company calls its Fusion Architecture. We have already been using the vanilla M5 chip in the latest version of the Apple Vision Pro headset, but these new MBP models crank up the power level even more.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the combo delivers record-setting performance. The launch of new Nvidia RTX mobile graphics--including the top-tier RTX 5090 with 24GB of VRAM--has the potential for chart-topping performance. Now it's joined by AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, a 16-core CPU with the company's vaunted 3D V-Cache, an extra stack of L3 cache that can prove useful in games. The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W brings both new chips into one chassis. That's incredible hardware, but the laptop retails for an equally incredible MSRP of 5,099.99. Each is an undisputed heavyweight in its category and should deliver a killer one-two punch of CPU and GPU performance. With that said, however, this MSI Raider A18 HX A9W still must deal with the power and thermal constraints faced by every laptop--and it will be interesting to see the results. The MSI Raider A18 HX A9W delivers additional technical highlights, too, like the PCIe 5.0 solid state drive and the 4K Mini-LED display.

The MSI Raider 18 HX AI isn't a looker, but it packs incredible CPU and GPU performance. The MSI Raider 18 HX AI is the very model of a "desktop replacement" laptop. It's big, it's not much to look at, and it has a mediocre touchpad that implies users are really expected to connect a mouse. That might leave some shoppers asking, "What's the point?" That question is answered once the laptop is tossed into a demanding game or application. It might be thick, but the MSI Raider 18 HX delivers top-tier CPU and GPU performance. It even has gobs of RAM and a PCIe 5.0 solid state drive.

The Mac Studio is Apple's ultimate performance computer, but this year's model came with a twist: It's equipped with either an M4 Max or an M3 Ultra processor. The latter might seem like a step backward, since nearly all Macs (except the Mac Pro) are now equipped with M4 chips. However, the M3 Ultra is indeed Apple's best-performing processor, which makes the new Mac Studio its fastest computer ever. While the M3 Ultra model appears highly capable for creative pros and engineers, it starts at 4,000 and goes way up from there. I'm intrigued by that model based on benchmarks I saw elsewhere, of course.

More than a year has passed since Asus' acquisition of the NUC brand from Intel, which marked the first major change the brand had seen since Intel launched it back in 2013. After more than a decade of continuity -- including last year's transition year where Intel still had a say on design -- this will be the real first year in which Asus has done most of the groundwork, fronting up with its own designs and innovations. So how is the NUC different now in this new era? I spoke to Kuo Wei Chao, general manager of Asus IoT business unit, to find out. The Asus NUC lineup announced at CES 2025 in Las Vegas included the NUC 14 AI and the more premium NUC 14 Pro AI with 48 TOPS NPU AI power and a dedicated Copilot button for quick access to the AI assistant. They were on display alongside two new powerful mini-PCs for everyday use featuring the latest Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) chips: the NUC 15 and NUC 15 Pro .