Last-minute holiday gift guide: Over 30 editor-approved gadgets for everyone on your list

Some people get their holiday shopping done on a responsible schedule. They budget, strategize, and stay organized for a stress-free season. Then there’s the rest of us. Last-minute holiday shopping is a time-honored tradition, and we’re here to help make it a lot easier. So this year, skip the gift cards and get everyone on your list gear they actually want and/or can really use.

Portable chargers don’t typically have the electrical oomph needed to keep up with a powerful laptop. This burly bank, however, can output up to 220W spread across three USB ports (two USB-C and one USB-A). It supports fast charging up to 140W, which is plenty of power, even for souped-up MacBook Pros and portable gaming rigs. The built-in display and companion app let you track performance and temperature as you charge, so you can ensure things are going smoothly.

The best gifts are things someone needs, but would never buy for themselves. This compact little box is an essential piece of emergency gear for anyone with a car. The built-in compressor can top off the air in a tire, while the integrated LED can light the way in the dark. The built-in battery can charge smartphones and other devices, but more importantly, it’s powerful enough to jump start the car itself. Batteries get finicky, especially in winter, which makes a jump starter a no-brainer for any roadside emergency kit. Get one for everyone you know and smile knowing that they’re safer for it.

This 14-inch display has a glare-resistant coating that makes it suitable for just about any spot in the house. It has 32GB built-in storage, but it’s expandable all the way up to 128GB. It’s a particularly great gift because you can set up the WiFi connection in advance so your recipient can open it and start gawking at the pretty pictures. A companion app allows several users to add photos remotely so the content always stays fresh.

Most people can tell when a room feels “off,” but they can’t tell you why. This monitor helps quantify that bad feeling, keeping tabs on irritants and pollutants like CO₂, particulates, VOCs, and humidity so you can make small fixes that actually matter. It’s the rare gadget that gets more useful after the initial unboxing novelty fades.

British speaker designers KEF have always been about coherence, so it should come as no surprise that the premium brand’s new portable focuses on a musical signature that doesn’t drown your bangers in bassy bloom. But it still bumps, and can handle bumps. A 20mm tweeter and P-Flex racetrack woofer are packed into a curvaceous aluminum IP67-rated shell, supporting aptX Adaptive Bluetooth 5.4 (plus SBC/AAC for comprehensive compatibility). This means punchy, but controlled lows and crisp transients that aren’t sanded down. Buy two and snap into wider stereo soundscapes. And it’s available in six colorways to match mood and getaway gear.

Marshall amps have been arming guitar heroes since 1962, and this faux leather-wrapped, metal grille-stamped tower of power on wheels bearing the brand name is like a stack rolled off a festival stage onto your back patio. Looking like real gig gear, this 58 lb., IP54-rated bruiser features 500W Class D power pushing front- and rear-facing 10″ woofers, plus side-diring drivers and top-firing tweeters so you get rumble without rattle and 360-degree “Stereophonic” chaos in a good way. Bluetooth 5.4 with Auracast, plus real hookups (XLR/1/4-inch combo inputs with delay/reverb, RCA, 3.5mm, USB-C) mean any source can take center stage with up to 40 hours of battery life. It’s an investment in space and money, but it brings heritage tone control with a Bluetooth twist.

Know someone real short on space but who wants real hi-fi? They can pair an equally compact integrated amp with these DALI KUPID bookshelf speakers and have an instant listening nook. Featuring a 4.5-inch wood-fiber bass/mid driver and a 26mm soft dome tweeter (plus a dual-flare rear port to cough out some actual low end), these diminutive 6.4 lb. Danish boxes make a small room sound closer to cathedral. They make more budget boxes look timid. DALI’s house sound is as organic as opening a window. It’s a structured comfort, agile Scandinavian clarity perfect if these are going in a turntable setup.

Motion sensors are fine until your lights shut off mid-movie because nobody waved their arms recently. A presence sensor is a more advanced version of that concept: it can tell when someone’s actually in the room, not just when something moved. It’s a quietly excellent gift for anyone deep into automations or just starting out in a smart home.

The Explore 4 cuts and writes, and it’s designed to handle the usual gateway projects—decals, labels, cards, and iron-on graphics for shirts—without you needing a ton of skill or space to get started. The best part is that it comes with vinyl and HTV/iron-on sheets, so the recipient can go from unboxing to making something tangible the same day. Also, it cuts 100+ materials and does it up to 2× faster than prior models, which means less time watching a machine do its thing and more time actually finishing the project.

You shouldn’t have to replace a perfect good device just to add “smart” capabilities. This kind of hub helps pull older devices into modern routines so you can automate without starting over. It’s not the flashiest gift—until the recipient realizes it’s the piece that makes everything else behave. Pair it with a smart light bulb or a smart speaker to get them started.

These are wall lights that sit somewhere between ambient lighting and programmable art. Set a subtle glow for work, go full color chaos for game night, or make it react to music if you want your living room to feel like it’s trying out for a music video. It’s the kind of gift that changes a space without requiring new furniture or a weekend of home improvement projects

Give someone the gift of time. Because time not spent cleaning carpets can be used for pretty much anything else. This vacuum-only bot navigates with LiDAR so it cleans in tidy, deliberate paths even at night. It pairs with iRobot’s app for scheduling, room targeting, and spot-cleaning when you just want it to hit the crumb zone under the table. The best part is the AutoEmpty dock: instead of you dumping a dusty bin every run, it offloads debris into a bag in the base.

If you want to crack open and fix a gadget, your typical tool kit won’t cut it. The tools are made for modern gadgets—tiny screws, delicate clips, annoying adhesive—so you can swap a battery, tame a drifting controller, or at least open something without looking like a raccoon got into it. It’s a gift that says, “I believe in your competence,” which is oddly powerful.

A Raspberry Pi is one of the best gifts for tinkerers because it can become almost anything: a media box, a retro game machine, a home dashboard, a small server, a sensor hub. A starter kit makes it less intimidating—power, case, and essentials are handled—so the recipient can spend their time building instead of troubleshooting.

Know someone who wants impossibly fresh salad with no dirt and no drama? The farmer’s market fits in an apartment with the Gardyn Studio 2.0. This hydroponic tower takes up just 1.4 square feet and grows 16 plants basically by itself. Set it up near an outlet, add water and yPods, then let the silicone-sealed, no-clean columns, sunrise/sunset lighting, and HD camera-enabled AI babysitter take over. Even if you’re out of town. Your sparkling-clean trowel might get resentful, but no-fuss burger toppings are extra delicious.

There are golf launch monitors out there for people who love spreadsheets, or this one for people who just want some practice insights/sim play without a 40-page manual. Setup is almost suspiciously easy, with five steps printed inside the box lid. The monitor packs in a dual-camera + Doppler radar array to track a sleeve of pre-dotted balls, spitting out core metrics so spin isn’t a guess. Spoken readouts make you reset instead of mindless bucket-bashing. Distances fell solid, even if the tracer sometimes seems imaginative. You will need to bring your own USB-C wall brick and consider a paid membership for the juiciest features, but there’s good feedback to be had.

This is a great entry point to hands-on electronics: lights, sensors, simple robots, home experiments. It’s approachable enough for beginners, but there’s plenty of runway once the first project works and the hyperfixation on making new things kicks in. If you’re trying to give someone a hobby instead of a trinket, this is a solid bet.

A marathon calibration setting can really throw a wet blanket on the excitement that comes with a new 3D printer. The best machines lower the friction so the fun part happens sooner. A short setup process enables users to create practical little fixes, custom organizers, mounts, and toys that didn’t exist five hours ago. This is a serious gift for a curious person. Just make sure they don’t start printing dragons and take it to the craft fair. There are plenty of those already.

People will forgive shaky footage. They will not forgive muffled, distant voices. A simple wireless mic kit like this makes everyday videos feel instantly more watchable. The difference is especially noticeable outside, in busy rooms, or anywhere a phone mic gives up. You have to watch their social media content, so this is also a gift for you, in a way.

This is a small box that modernizes an older stereo setup for Wi-Fi streaming, multi-room options, and easy daily playback without the need to rebuild an entire room. It’s a thoughtful gift because it respects the gear they already like. Also: fewer Bluetooth pairing rituals, which is a gift to everyone in the house.

Questyle’s SIGMA Pro is a little signal lab masquerading as a palm-friendly interface. The aluminum shell and glass aperture rest cool in your hand, circuitry nested tidily inside. Dual ESS ES9069 DACs in dual-mono feeding four fully discrete current-mode amp stages guarantee confident command of quick, percussive transients and impactful, fine-grain detail. PCM 768/32, DSD512, LDAC, Snapdragon Sound up to aptX Lossless provide a low-noise, gently analog-leaning presentation that nudges IEMs and headphones into better posture, whether they’re fed from MFI-certified USB-C, optical, coax, 3.5mm/4.4mm analog, or Bluetooth 5.4. Gifting the SIGMA Pro feels less like giving a travel-ready accessory and more like passing on a front end to blissed-out audio excursions.

Want that perfectly fluffy restaurant rice at home, but without under- or over-cooking anxiety and hot-spot drama? Get a Zojirushi rice cooker. I’ve given the NS-ZCC10 Neuro Fuzzy Logic model as a graduation/housewarming gift multiple times because I knew from personal experience it delivers year after year. Then I got this pressure + induction cooker in 2025 and daaaaaaamn … somehow the best got better. Sticky-plump sushi or stir-fry grains, pleasingly textured oatmeal, brown rice that doesn’t take all of eternity. No sad, beige cement. This tiny, calm chef quietly adjusts the heat to deliver evenly cooked everything. It’s not as fast as some cookers, but it beats them in consistency. Fill to the line, press a button, go live life, come back to perfection. This is an upgrade that quietly, magically improves your entire kitchen rhythm.

A lot of first telescopes end up as closet monuments to frustration. The StarSense approach relies on your phone to help locate targets so you don’t have to wonder if you’re looking at the right object. It’s a thoughtful pick for families, curious adults, and anyone who’s wanted to get into stargazing but bounced off the learning curve.

Levoit built its reputation cleaning the air, and the AERO vacuum reinforces that legacy from the (literal) ground up. This is a gift for the person who loves a tidy house but hates dealing with gross vacuum bins. The AERO is a light, cordless stick that parks into a slim all-in-one station, then WHOOOOOMP auto-empties using negative-pressure tech so dust, dander, pet hair, and Hot Pocket crumbs vanish into a sealed container. No dust cloud, no “How much of my own dead skin did I just taste?!?” That’s a magic trick you can actually appreciate. An anti-tangle brush says nope to choking on tumbleweeds, and a 5-stage HEPA filter traps micro-gunk. Plus, there’s enough runtime to easily maneuver around the whole house at max power, meaning you can still be the kind of person who likes to hit the trails and not worry about leaving a permanent trail.

Streamers love it, sure—but editors, photographers, and spreadsheet power users are the secret audience. It turns multi-step actions into single buttons: launch apps, run macros, trigger workflows, and reduce the daily friction of doing the same things over and over. It’s nerdy productivity that’s fun to use.

This is a great gift for someone who’s curious about music-making but doesn’t want a giant keyboard and a new desk. Record sounds, chop them up, build beats, get weird—then do it again with a dog bark or a microwave beep. It’s surprisingly capable, and it practically begs to be messed with.

In the early ’90s, I was part of a crew that threw “raves” in thrift stores and junkyards. Sometimes we’d buy “party lights” from RadioShack on Friday and take advantage of their 30-day no-questions-asked return policy Monday. I wish we had SOUNDBOKS Lightboks, which turns any space into a high-energy venue. It’s a battery-powered, stupid-bright, IP65-tough, sound-reactive LED light with curated color palettes/themes. You can even sync 100 Lightboks. Just add portable speaker (the Marshall Bromley 750 above, for example). If you’ve got a friend into DIY aesthetic, it’s perfect for bringing vibes on demand to backyards, basements, campsites … and you don’t have to worry about keeping receipts.

This is a very modern approach to filming: don’t worry about framing in the moment, just capture the scene and reframe afterward. It’s excellent for biking, skiing, travel, and any activity where “aiming a camera” is not your top priority. Also, the creative shots are genuinely fun without requiring film-school energy.

Thermal imaging is useful for real troubleshooting. Find drafty windows, overheating electronics, and mystery leaks. But it’s also just deeply satisfying to watch heat move through the world. Make art. Fix your home. Pretend you’re the Predator. It’s all good.

Good binoculars are quietly addictive. Birding, hiking, sports, wildlife spotting, casual astronomy all benefit from a solid set of optics. This is the kind of gift that gets used more than people expect because it’s useful in more situations than people plan for. They’re also small enough to easily fit in just about any bag so you’ll actually have them when you want them.

This is a small satellite communicator that’s basically an emergency plan you can clip to a pack. It’s a meaningful gift for hikers, skiers, overlanders, and anyone who ends up beyond cell coverage—sometimes intentionally. Honestly, it’s also a gift for the people who worry about them.

Perch the Valerion VisionMaster Max on the back of the bed, plop yourself on the mattress … instant immersion. We come to this place for magic, and this 4K DLP triple-laser cannon delivers, pumping out 3,500 ISO lumens with real night-scene swagger. A six-step iris plus Enhanced Black Level technology means the dark scenes don’t turn into grey haze, even with some ambient light. You can get up to 300 inches of picture that stays punchy, with Dolby Vision/HDR10+/IMAX Enhanced support plus optical zoom, lens shift, and auto-keystone. Flagship a bit indulgent? The VisionMaster Pro 2 packs in many of the features with slightly lower lumens/contrast.

The AeroPress is beloved because it makes genuinely good coffee without being precious about it. It’s fast, easy to clean, and travel-friendly. It works at home, at work, or in a cabin that claims it has “kitchen supplies” but definitely does not. The XL version is nice for people who want more than a tiny cup without making a whole pot.

This is one of those gifts that upgrades almost every meal without changing a recipe. It takes the mystery out of steak, chicken, fish, bread, and frying. Cooking with vibes can’t protect you from food poisoning. If you want to give someone more confidence in the kitchen (and fewer overcooked “learning experiences”), this is an affordable and accessible way to do it. 

 

2025 PopSci Outdoor Gift Guide

20+ editor-approved presents for the hikers on your list