Technologies

What a Fusion Energy Breakthrough Means for Green Power

Four times now, researchers have produced a fleeting burst of fusion energy, an encouraging sign for making this zero-carbon energy source a reality.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who achieved a major fusion milestone a year ago have repeated it three times more. Each experiment used 192 lasers to ignite a fusion reaction that for a fleeting moment produced more energy than was used to trigger it.

Fusion powers the sun, and humans reproduced the process more than 70 years ago to power thermonuclear weapons. The scientific and engineering challenges of a controlled fusion reaction, though, are formidable. The repeated successes by the scientists at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, gradually increasing the laser power that causes a tiny fusion fuel pellet to implode, are important steps of progress toward sustained, controlled fusion.

«Higher laser energy can help achieve a more stable implosion, resulting in higher yields,» said Jean-Michel Di Nicola, a NIF leader, in a statement after the fourth fusion success on Oct. 30.

But what do the experiments mean for science and for the dream of a new energy source that would power our homes and cars without releasing any carbon dioxide?

In short, it’s fine to applaud the NIF achievements, but they don’t mean a green energy revolution is imminent. It’ll still be years before fusion power progress bears fruit — likely a decade or so — and it’s still not clear if fusion will ever be cheap enough to radically transform our power grid. Continuing today’s investments in solar and wind is critical to combating climate change.

Commercial fusion ventures applauded the NIF experiment and have made gradual progress since then. Commonwealth Fusion Systems opened a new headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts, where it’s building an experimental reactor designed to produce power. Tokamak Energy and General Fusion announced new facilities to be built near Oxford in the UK. Microsoft has agreed to buy fusion power from a Helion Energy plant called Constellation scheduled to go online in 2028. Other startups like Zap Energy and TAE Technologies are touting progress, too.

Here’s a look at what’s happened and what’s still to come.

What is fusion?

An illustration of laser light producing X-rays to initiate a fusion reaction at the National Ignition Facility

Fusion occurs when two lighter elements like hydrogen or helium merge into a single, heavier element. This nuclear reaction releases a lot of energy, as exhibited by the biggest fusion furnace around, the sun.

It’s harder to get fusion to occur on Earth, though, because atomic nuclei are positively charged and therefore repel each other. The sun’s enormous mass produces tremendous pressure that overcomes that repulsion, but on Earth, other forces are required.

Two general approaches to squeeze atoms together and produce fusion are called inertial and magnetic confinement. Inertial confinement usually uses lasers to zap a pellet with a lot of power, triggering an explosion that compresses the fusion fuel. That’s the method NIF uses.

The other approach uses magnetic fields. It’s more widespread among companies trying to commercialize fusion energy.

What did the experiment at NIF accomplish?

In December 2022, a NIF experiment crossed a critical threshold for fusion where the energy that the fusion reaction generated — 3.15 million joules — exceeded the 2.05 megajoules from the lasers to trigger the reaction. Because much more energy is required to run the lasers, though, the reaction overall is highly inefficient.

Fusion researchers denote the ratio of output energy to input energy with the letter Q, and the December 2022 reaction was the first time a fusion reaction surpassed Q = 1. On July 20, Oct. 8 and Oct. 30 of this year, NIF repeated its success in which Q was greater than 1. The Oct. 30 experiment used a record amount of laser power, 2.2 megajoules, an improvement that’s difficult since the lasers can destroy the optical equipment that guide their light.

«It’s all about the control of the damage,» said NIF operations leader Bruno Van Wonterghem in a statement. «Too much energy without proper protection, and your optics blow to pieces.»

Fusion reactors will have to reach a threshold of Q = 10 before energy generation is practical. That’s what everybody is aiming for, including another massive government-funded project called ITER in France. And fusion reactors will have to reach Q = 10 much more frequently than NIF can.

In some ways, these are academic milestones, which fusion experiments have nudged toward for decades. But given fusion’s reputation for not ever getting there, it’s an important proof of what’s possible. Think a little bit more carefully before you repeat that oft-quoted snarky remark that fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be.

What does the NIF experiment mean for green power?

Not a huge amount, for a few reasons. For one thing, most commercial fusion energy projects are using various forms of magnetic confinement, not NIF’s laser-based approach, so the engineering challenges are different. For another, NIF is a gargantuan, $3.5 billion national lab project funded to research nuclear weapons, not a project designed to produce reliable energy for the grid at the most competitive cost.

«Don’t expect future fusion plants to look anything like NIF,» said Princeton researcher Wilson Ricks in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Huge inefficiencies in NIF’s lasers and in the conversion of fusion heat to electrical power mean its design is inherently impractical. In comparison, «magnetic confinement fusion holds some real promise,» Ricks tweeted.

Lowering fusion’s cost is critical to its success since it’ll have to compete against zero-carbon alternatives like today’s fission-based nuclear reactors that can generate a steady supply of power and renewables like wind and solar that are cheaper but intermittent.

«Fusion’s first competitor is fission,» researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory concluded in an October research paper, not yet peer reviewed, that assesses fusion’s prospects on the electrical grid. They expect that if fusion’s high costs can come down enough, it could replace the need for future fission plants, and if lowered further, could also compete against the combination of solar and energy storage.

NIF is a big, complicated site. If fusion power plants can be built in cheaper, smaller units that are more like something coming off a factory line, production costs should decrease. That’s thanks to a phenomenon called Wright’s Law, the experience curve or the learning curve, which has steadily lowered costs for solar and wind. The bigger and more customized a fusion plant is, the less costs will drop and the less competitive fusion will be.

Are there some less direct benefits from NIF’s results?

Yes. Scientists could benefit somewhat from the NIF experiment by updating fusion physics models to account for the fact that it’s supplying its own heat instead of relying on external sources, said Andrew Holland, chief executive of the Fusion Industry Association, an advocacy group for the industry.

And the attention could help, too, especially given longrunning skepticism about fusion energy.

TAE Technologies CEO Michl Binderbauer called NIF’s result «a huge stepping stone into the dawn of the fusion age,» and said it’s an important illustration that fusion energy really is plausible.

Investors have noticed, too. Downloads of the Fusion Industry Association’s annual report, which details the $4.8 billion in venture capital investments in fusion energy startups, increased tenfold after the first NIF achievement was announced, Holland said. Many of those requesting it are from investment firms, he added.

How does fusion work at NIF?

NIF triggers fusion using 192 powerful infrared lasers with a combined energy level of 4 megajoules — about the same as a two-ton truck traveling at 100 mph. That’s converted first into 2 megajoules of ultraviolet light, then into X-rays that strike a peppercorn-sized pellet of fusion fuel.

The intense X-rays cause the outer layer of the pellet to blow off explosively, compressing the pellet interior and triggering fusion. The heat from that fusion sustains the reaction until it runs out of fuel or becomes lopsided and falters.

An aerial photo of the National Ignition Facility shows that it's the size of three football fields

Nuclei? Hydrogen? Catch me up on atomic physics, please

Sure! Here’s a quick refresher.

Everything on Earth is made of tiny atoms, each consisting of a central nucleus and a cloud of negatively charged electrons. The nucleus is made of neutrons and positively charged protons. The more protons in the nucleus, the heavier the element is.

Hydrogen usually has one proton and one electron. An unusual variety called deuterium has a neutron, too, and using nuclear reactors or fusion reactors, you can make a third variety called tritium with two neutrons.

Chemical reactions, like iron rusting or wood burning, occur when those positive and electrical charges cause atoms to interact. In comparison, nuclear reactions occur when the nuclei of atoms split apart or join together. Here on Earth, it’s harder to marshal the required forces to get nuclear reactions to take place, which is why it’s easier to make a steam engine than a nuclear bomb.

When you heat atoms up enough, they get so energetic that the electrons are stripped loose. The resulting cloud of negatively charged electrons and positively charged nuclei is called a plasma, a more exotic state of matter than the solids, liquids and gases that we’re used to at room temperature here on Earth.

The sun is made of plasma, and fusion reactors need it, too, to get those hydrogen nuclei to bounce around energetically enough. A convenient property of plasmas is that their electrically charged particles can be manipulated with magnetic fields. That’s crucial to many fusion reactor designs.

What do you use for fusion fuel?

NIF and most other fusion projects use the two heavy versions of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, called DT fuel. But there are other options, including hydrogen-boron and deuterium-helium-3, a form of helium with only one neutron instead of the more common two.

To get deuterium and tritium to fuse, you need to heat a plasma up to a whopping temperature of about 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit). Other reactions are even higher, for example about a billion degrees for hydrogen-boron fusion.

Deuterium can be filtered out of ordinary water, but tritium, which decays away radioactively over a few years, is harder to come by. It can be manufactured in nuclear reactors and, in principle, in future fusion reactors, too. Managing tritium is complex, though, because it’s used to boost nuclear weapon explosions and thus is carefully controlled.

How do you turn that fusion reaction into power?

The deuterium-tritium fusion reaction produces fast-moving solo neutrons. Their kinetic energy can be captured in a «blanket» of liquid that surrounds the fusion reactor chamber and heats up as the neutrons collide.

That heat is then transferred to water that boils and powers conventional steam turbines. That technology is well understood, but nobody has yet connected it to a fusion reactor. Indeed the first generation of fusion power reactors being built today are designed to exceed Q=1, but not to capture power. That’ll wait for the pilot plants that are expected to arrive in the next wave of development.

Is fusion work funded by the government or the private sector?

Both. NIF is funded by the US government’s nuclear weapons program. Government funding also pays for the Joint European Torus in the UK and ITER in France, both of which are more closely aligned with the goal of fusion energy generation.

But increasingly fusion energy is privately funded. Investors have poured $4.8 billion total into fusion energy startups, of which $2.8 billion arrived in the last year, according to the Fusion Industry Association’s annual report published earlier in 2022. Most of that went to Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that spun out of MIT and raised more than $1.8 billion in a funding round in 2021.

The government is now helping the private sector, too. The US Energy Department in September 2022 announced a Milestone Program that provides up to $50 million to build fusion energy pilot plants. The Biden administration, a fusion proponent, said in November 2022 that fusion energy is one of five key approaches to halve carbon emissions by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050.

«Uncle Sam is getting serious,» said Holland of the Fusion Industry Association. NIF’s achievement is «a pass-the-torch moment, where it goes from science and national labs to the commercial sector.»

How is fusion different from fission?

Fission, which powers today’s nuclear reactors, is the opposite of fusion. In fission, heavy elements like uranium split apart into lighter elements, releasing energy in the process.

Humans have been able to achieve fusion for decades with thermonuclear weapons. These designs slam material like uranium or plutonium together to trigger a fission explosion, and that provides the tremendous energy needed to initiate the secondary and more powerful fusion reaction.

In bombs, the process occurs in a fraction of a second, but for energy production, fusion must be controlled and sustained.

Do fusion reactors create radioactive waste?

Yes, generally, but it’s not nearly as troublesome as with fission reactors. For one thing, most of the radioactive emissions are short-lived alpha particles — helium nuclei with a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons — that are easily blocked. The fast-moving neutrons can collide with other materials and create other radioactive materials.

Fusion reactors’ neutron output generally will degrade components, requiring periodic replacement that could require downtime lasting perhaps a few months every few years. It’s vastly easier to handle than the high-level nuclear waste of fission power plants, though.

Hydrogen-boron fusion is harder to achieve than deuterium-tritium fusion, but part of its appeal is that it doesn’t produce any neutrons and attendant radioactive materials. The most prominent company pursuing this approach is TAE Technologies.

What are the safety risks of fusion power?

Fusion power plants don’t have the meltdown risks that have caused problems with fission reactors like the Fukushima and Chernobyl sites. When a fusion reaction goes awry, it just fizzles out.

But there still are significant operational issues that you’ll see at major industrial sites, including a lot of electrical power and high-pressure steam. In other words, the big problems are more like those you’d find at an industrial site than at one of today’s fission nuclear power plants.

So there are real advantages to fusion. NIF’s work helps show that there’s a future for fusion energy. But there’s still a very long way to go.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Saturday, July 12

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for July 12.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It’s one of those long Saturday puzzles, and a few clues are tricky. Read on for the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Havana’s home
Answer: CUBA

5A clue: Last word in many bowling alley names
Answer: LANES

6A clue: Lots and lots
Answer: SOMUCH

7A clue: Left-leaning social media site
Answer: BLUESKY

8A clue: Hepburn of «Breakfast at Tiffany’s»
Answer: AUDREY

9A clue: Word after «break» or «banana»
Answer: BREAD

10A clue: Car loan figs.
Answer: APRS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: They always shoot their shot
Answer: CAMERAS

2D clue: Brand-new
Answer: UNUSED

3D clue: Woman with «the good hair,» in a famous Beyoncé lyric
Answer: BECKY

4D clue: In need of moisturizer
Answer: ASHY

5D clue: «We can’t hear you back here!»
Answer: LOUDER

6D clue: Drink noisily
Answer: SLURP

7D clue: ___ ghanouj
Answer: BABA

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for July 12, #292

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for July 12, No. 292

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition has one of those classic purple categories, where you probably won’t figure it out before you’ve answered all the others. Need help? Read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That’s a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by the Times, will continue to publish it. It doesn’t show up in the NYT Games app but now appears in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can continue to play it free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Show Me State.

Green group hint: Old Line State.

Blue group hint: Gridiron greats.

Purple group hint: Names begins with a certain creature.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Missouri teams.

Green group: Maryland teams.

Blue group: Hall of Fame football coaches.

Purple group: Sports people or terms starting with an animal.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is Missouri teams. The four answers are Blues, Cardinals, Chiefs and Royals.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is Maryland teams. The four answers are Maryland, Navy, Orioles and Ravens.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is Hall of Fame football coaches. The four answers are Levy, Madden, Noll, and Shula.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is sports people or terms starting with an animal. The four answers are batter, Catchings, Cowherd and dogleg.

Technologies

CNET Daily Tariff Price Tracker: I’m Watching 11 Key Products for Changes, Here’s What’s Happened

The deadline for the start of Trump’s heaviest tariffs has been delayed until next month, leaving consumers stuck with more uncertainty over prices.

For the last three months, tariffs have been a hot topic, leaving consumers and businesses alike worried: Will they hike prices and by how much? It’s a question more relevant than ever this week, as President Trump punts another major deadline down the road and price-slashing Amazon’s Prime Day sales wind down as the week ends.

Amid those worries, I’ve been tracking prices every day for 11 key products likely to be hit by tariff-induced price increases, and the answer I’ve come to so far is this: Not so much, at least not yet. The winding road of tariff inflation still stretches before us into an uncertain future, so the threat of price hikes continues to cloud the horizon.

To date, I’ve seen two noteworthy price increases, one for the Xbox Series X and the other for a popular budget-friendly 4K TV. Some other products — including Apple’s popular AirPods and printer ink — have gone on sale for brief periods.

CNET Tariff Tracker Index

Above, you can check out a chart with the average price of the 11 products included in this piece over the course of 2025. This will help give you a sense of the overall price changes and fluctuations going on. Further down, you’ll be able to check out charts for each individual product being tracked.

We’ll be updating this article regularly as prices change. It’s all in the name of helping you make sense of things, so be sure to check back every so often. For more, check out CNET’s guide to whether you should wait to make big purchases or buy them now and get expert tips about how to prepare for a recession.

Methodology

We’re checking prices daily and will update the article and the relevant charts right away to reflect any changes. The following charts show a single bullet point for each month, with the most recent one labeled «Now» and showing the current price. For the past months, we’ve gone with what was the most common price for each item in the given month.

In most cases, the price stats used in these graphs were pulled from Amazon using the historical price-tracker tool Keepa. For the iPhones, the prices come from Apple’s official materials and are based on the 128-gigabyte base model of the latest offering of the iPhone 16. For the Xbox Series X, the prices were sourced from Best Buy using the tool PriceTracker. If any of these products happen to be on sale at a given time, we’ll be sure to let you know and explain how those price drops differ from longer-term pricing trends that tariffs can cause.

The 11 products we’re tracking

Mostly what we’re tracking in this article are electronic devices and digital items that CNET covers in depth, like iPhones and affordable 4K TVs — along with a typical bag of coffee, a more humble product that isn’t produced in the US to any significant degree.

The products featured were chosen for a few reasons: Some of them are popular and/or affordable representatives for major consumer tech categories, like smartphones, TVs and game consoles. Others are meant to represent things that consumers might buy more frequently, like printer ink or coffee beans. Some products were chosen over others because they are likely more susceptible to tariffs. Some of these products have been reviewed by CNET or have been featured in some of our best lists.

iPhone 16, 128GB
Duracell AA batteries, 24-pack
Samsung DU7200 65-inch TV
Xbox Series X
Apple AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C case
HP 962 CMY Printer Ink
Anker 10,000-mAh, 30-watt power bank
Bose TV speaker
Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook, 256GB
Starbucks 28-ounce ground dark roast coffee

Below, we’ll get into more about each individual product, and stick around till the end for a rundown of some other products worth noting.

iPhone 16

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone brand in the US, so this was a clear priority for price tracking. The iPhone has also emerged as a major focal point for conversations about tariffs, given its popularity and its susceptibility to import taxes because of its overseas production, largely in China. Trump has reportedly been fixated on the idea that the iPhone can and should be manufactured in the US, an idea that experts have dismissed as a fantasy. Estimates have also suggested that a US-made iPhone would cost as much as $3,500.

Something to note about this graph: The price listed is the one you’ll see if you buy your phone through a major carrier. If you, say, buy direct from Apple or Best Buy without a carrier involved, you’ll be charged an extra $30, so in some places, you might see the list price of the standard iPhone 16 listed as $830.

Apple’s been taking a few steps to protect its prices in the face of these tariffs, flying in bulk shipments of product before they took effect and planning to move production for the US market from China to India. A new Reuters report found that a staggering 97% of iPhones imported from the latter country, March through May, were bound for the US. This latter move drew the anger of Trump again, threatening the company with a 25% tariff if they didn’t move production to the US, an idea CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly shot down in the past. This came after Trump gave a tariff exemption to electronic devices including smartphones, so the future of that move seems in doubt now.

Duracell AA batteries

A lot of the tech products in your home might boast a rechargeable energy source but individual batteries are still an everyday essential and I can tell you from experience that as soon as you forget about them, you’ll be needing to restock. The Duracell AAs we’re tracking are some of the bestselling batteries on Amazon.

Samsung DU7200 TV

Alongside smartphones, televisions are some of the most popular tech products out there, even if they’re an infrequent purchase. This particular product is a popular entry-level 4K TV and was CNET’s pick for best overall budget TV for 2025. Unlike a lot of tech products that have key supply lines in China, Samsung is a South Korean company, so it might have some measure of tariff resistance.

After spending most of 2025 hovering around $400, this item has now seen some notable upticks on Amazon, most recently sitting around $450. This could potentially be in reaction to Trump’s announcement of 25% tariffs against South Korea this week.

Xbox Series X

Video game software and hardware are a market segment expected to be hit hard by the Trump tariffs. Microsoft’s Xbox is the first console brand to see price hikes — the company cited «market conditions» along with the rising cost of development. Most notably, this included an increase in the price of the flagship Xbox Series X, up from $500 to $600. Numerous Xbox accessories also were affected and the company also said that «certain» games will eventually see a price hike from $70 to $80.

Initially, we were tracking the price of the much more popular Nintendo Switch as a representative of the gaming market. Nintendo has not yet hiked the price of its handheld-console hybrid and stressed that the $450 price tag of the upcoming Switch 2 has not yet been inflated because of tariffs. Sony, meanwhile, has so far only increased prices on its PlayStation hardware in markets outside the US.

AirPods Pro 2

The latest iteration of Apple’s wildly popular true-wireless earbuds are here to represent the headphone market. Much to the chagrin of the audiophiles out there, a quick look at sales charts on Amazon shows you just how much the brand dominates all headphone sales. For most of the year, they’ve hovered around $199, but ahead of Prime Day sales this week they are currently on sale for $149.

HP 962 CMY printer ink

This HP printer ink includes cyan, magenta and yellow all in one product and recently saw its price jump from around $72 — where it stayed for most of 2025 — to $80, which is around its highest price over the last five years. We will be keeping tabs to see if this is a long-term change or a brief uptick.

This product replaced Overture PLA Filament for 3D printers in this piece, but we’re still tracking that item.

Anker 10,000-mAh, 30-watt power bank

Anker’s accessories are perennially popular in the tech space and the company has already announced that some of its products will get more expensive as a direct result of tariffs. This specific product has also been featured in some of CNET’s lists of the best portable chargers.

Bose TV speaker

Soundbars have become important purchases, given the often iffy quality of the speakers built into TVs. While not the biggest or the best offering in the space, the Bose TV Speaker is one of the more affordable soundbar options out there, especially hailing from a brand as popular as Bose. You can currently get this model at a healthy discount for Prime Day, down to $200 from $280.

Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush

They might be a lot more expensive than their traditional counterparts but electric toothbrushes remain a popular choice for consumers because of how well they get the job done. I know my dentist won’t let up on how much I need one. This particular Oral-B offering was CNET’s overall choice for the best electric toothbrush for 2025.

While this product hasn’t seen its price budge one way or another most of the year, there is a $10 coupon listed on Amazon right now.

Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook

Lenovo is notable among the big laptop manufacturers for being a Chinese company making its products especially susceptible to Trump’s tariffs.

Starbucks Ground Coffee (28-ounce bag)

Coffee is included in this tracker because of its ubiquity —I’m certainly drinking too much of it these days —and because it’s uniquely susceptible to Trump’s tariff agenda. Famously, coffee beans can only be grown within a certain distance from Earth’s equator, a tropical span largely outside the US and known as the «Coffee Belt.»

Hawaii is the only part of the US that can produce coffee beans, with data from USAFacts showing that 11.5 million pounds were harvested there in the 2022-23 season — little more than a drop in the mug, as the US consumed 282 times that amount of coffee during that period. Making matters worse, Hawaiian coffee production has declined in the past few years.

All that to say: Americans get almost all of their coffee from overseas, making it one of the most likely products to see price hikes from tariffs.

Other products

As mentioned, we occasionally swap out products with different ones that undergo notable price shifts. Here are some things no longer featured above, but that we’re still keeping an eye on:

Nintendo Switch: The baseline handheld-console hybrid has held steady around $299 most places — including Amazon — since it released in 2017. Whether that price will be affected by tariffs or the release of the Switch 2 remains to be seen. This product was replaced above with the Xbox Series X.
Overture PLA 3D printer filament: This is a popular choice on Amazon for the material needed to run 3D printers. It has held steady around $15 on Amazon all year. This product was replaced above by the HP 962 printer ink.

Here are some products we also wanted to single out that haven’t been featured with a graph yet:

Razer Blade 18 (2025), 5070 Ti edition: The latest revision of Razer’s largest gaming laptop saw a $300 price bump recently, with the base model featured an RTX 5070 Ti graphics card now priced at $3,500 ahead of launch, compared to the $3,200 price announced in February. While Razer has stayed mum about the reasoning, it did previously suspend direct sales to the US as Trump’s tariff plans were ramping up in April.
Asus ROG Ally X: The premium version of Asus’s Steam Deck competitor handheld gaming PC recently saw a price hike from $799 to $899, coinciding with the announcement of the company’s upcoming Xbox-branded Ally handhelds.