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CNET’s Daily Tariff Price Tracker: Prices Steady as Major Retailer Issues Warning

Check out CNET’s tariff impact tracker is keeping tabs on price moves for several popular products as Walmart becomes one of the biggest retailers to warn of price hikes.

The Trump administration has made moves in recent weeks to try and deescalate its tariff policies amid widespread concerns, but major companies are still warning of forthcoming price hikes in the months ahead. On May 15, Walmart, the largest grocery chain in the US, said that increased prices are inevitable due to the «magnitude» of the White House’s import taxes.

«We will do our best to keep our prices as low as possible,» CEO Doug McMillon said during an earnings call. «But given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins.»

In this article, we’re closely tracking the effect of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the prices of 11 popular products you might want or need to buy, whether it be a new phone, laptop or your daily coffee. So far, we’ve seen notable price hikes for the flagship Xbox game console, while everything else has either remained steady aside from occasional fluctuations that might not be tariff-related. That sort of consistency is far from certain, however, especially with new reports emerging that Apple might be looking to make iPhones more expensive this year.

The recent trade agreement with China, much-hyped by the White House, did significantly cut tariff rates against our biggest trading partner, but the new 30% rate is only temporary and still historically high, it just looks better next to the ludicrous 145% rate that was previously in place. As those negotiations move along, companies continue to warn of impending price hikes in order to deal with the new tariffs, including Sony, which could potentially mean a price hike for its ever-popular PlayStation 5 consoles.

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 for each year: the iPhone 14, iPhone 15 and 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.

Below, we’ll get into more about each individual product.

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 given 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.

In April, Apple flew bulk shipments of iPhones into the US to get a stockpile here ahead of tariffs kicking in. In recent weeks, reports have indicated that the company is working on moving all manufacturing of US-bound iPhones out of China to India to evade the worst of Trump’s tariff agenda. However, it’s also been reported that the iPhone 19, planned for release in 2027, will need to stay in China, because of the level of complexity planned for its design, tied to the iPhone line’s 20th anniversary. On May 12, further reports emerged suggesting that Apple plans to raise the price of the iPhone with the forthcoming iPhone 17 line, but that it also plans to avoid attributing this to Trump’s tariffs.

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. In recent days, this model has fluctuated from $400, where its been for most of the year so far, and $470, where it sits today. These fluctuations don’t seem to be influenced by tariffs, at least for the time being.

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 were also 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. The AirPods Pro 2 have hovered steadily around $200 on Amazon in 2025, but were on sale for $169 the first few days of May before jumping back up.

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. While the price has remained steady throughout the year, it is currently on sale for $16 on Amazon, but only for Prime members.

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.

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.

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.

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for May 16, #705

Here are hints and the answers for Connections for May 16, No. 705.

Looking for the most recent 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, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Do you think the makers of the Connections puzzle keep a notebook, and when they see words containing other words, they write those down, eventually coming up with four of a kind? I bet that’s how they get a lot of the purple categories, like today’s. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

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

Yellow group hint: Grow.

Green group hint: No more.

Blue group hint: Red cape time.

Purple group hint: Bob the Builder.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Kinds of plants.

Green group: Discontinue.

Blue group: Associated with bulls.

Purple group: Ending with building materials.

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

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is kinds of plants. The four answers are herb, shrub, tree and vine.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is discontinue. The four answers are dissolve, end, shrub and sunset.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is associated with bulls. The four answers are Michael Jordan, rodeo, Taurus and Wall Street.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ending with building materials. The four answers are Hollywood, hourglass, Kubrick and neuroplastic.

Toughest Connections puzzles

We’ve made a note of some of the toughest Connections puzzles so far. Maybe they’ll help you see patterns in future puzzles.

#5: Included «things you can set,» such as mood, record, table and volleyball.

#4: Included «one in a dozen,» such as egg, juror, month and rose.

#3: Included «streets on screen,» such as Elm, Fear, Jump and Sesame.

#2: Included «power ___» such as nap, plant, Ranger and trip.

#1: Included «things that can run,» such as candidate, faucet, mascara and nose.

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Technologies

The Samsung S25 Edge’s Camera Is Good Enough to Rival the Ultra

If you ever wondered whether people buy phones for the cameras, take a look at the Samsung S25 Edge.

Creating a super thin phone is a prime opportunity for compromise. If the goal is to reduce the profile of an already slim device, a bulky camera would naturally be one of the first things to toss overboard.

And yet the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, now officially announced, includes a surprising 200 megapixel (MP) f/1.7 wide-angle camera that shares the same specs as the one in Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra. In fact, you could argue that the 200MP camera alone justifies the Edge’s $1,100 price, with the latest versions of Android and Gemini as added bonuses in a thin and light body. To get that same camera resolution on the S25 Ultra, you’d need to fork over $1,300 or more.

So why did Samsung choose to include a top-tier feature in a phone that sits in the middle of its S25 lineup?

Most phones are cameras with phone features

The difference between phones in the same lineup often comes down what each model adds over the others. 

The Galaxy S25 is a thoroughly capable phone that (to cherry pick specs) runs the latest software on a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, packs a 4,000 mAh battery, has a 6.2-inch display and features the following array of cameras: 50MP wide-angle, 12MP ultra-wide, 10MP 3x telephoto and 12MP front camera. For 256GB of storage, it costs $860. The 128GB base model starts at $800, but I’m using the 256GB version to keep the storage consistent across all our examples.

The Galaxy S25 Plus shares all of those same features in a larger package, with a 6.7-inch screen and — due to its roomier case — a larger 4,900 mAh battery. For that you’ll pay an extra $140 more than the S25 to get the 256GB config at $1,000.

Then you jump $300 for the $1,300 Galaxy S25 Ultra, which boasts several specs such as the aforementioned 200MP main camera, a 50MP ultra-wide camera, a second 50MP telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom, a slightly larger 6.9-inch screen and a 5,000 mAh battery.

So where does the Galaxy S25 Edge slot into the lineup? For $1,100, it has the same 6.7-inch screen as the S25 Plus with an additional layer of protection (it’s covered with Corning’s Gorilla Glass Ceramic 2), the same Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, a smaller 3,900 mAh battery (to be expected in a thinner case) — and that 200MP wide camera.

Although the camera shares the same specs as the one in the S25 Ultra, it’s not yet clear whether it’s the same hardware. In Samsung’s event video officially announcing the S25 Edge, the company described how it redesigned the camera housing to fit the 200MP camera. I’m assuming it’s the same core hardware, just repackaged to fit a smaller form factor, but a direct photo comparison will be the real test.

Thin isn’t enough on its own

By the name alone, the primary appeal of the S25 Edge is its thin design. The company’s introductory video is full of schematics and computer-generated animations of all the phone’s components slotting together into its svelte body. And thinness does have value — just look at Apple’s obsession with making everything thin and light over the years, including its own rumored iPhone 17 Air.

But thinness as a feature isn’t additive enough (to make the obvious joke, it’s literally reductive). Samsung could have easily included the 50MP wide camera used on the S25 and S25 Plus and focused solely on the phone’s design to set it apart. By including the top-end 200MP camera from the series’ most expensive and premium phone, though, it hits a sweet spot where a customer thinks, «I’m getting a super thin version of the S25 but with the camera of the $1,300 S25 Ultra.»

Decent zoom is still possible, even without a telephoto camera

The other thing that sets the S25 Edge apart is the fact that it does not include a dedicated telephoto camera. Every other S25 model includes at least one telephoto camera to zoom in on distant subjects.

That extra reach is usually the dividing line between «consumer» and «pro» models. For example, the Pixel 9 and 9A and iPhone 16 and 16E all include wide-angle and ultra-wide cameras, but no telephoto. People regularly zoom in when taking photos, so Google and Apple pitch higher-quality optical zoom as a premium feature at the higher price levels of the pro models.

But by including the 200MP camera on the S25 Edge, Samsung can still claim a 2x «optical quality» zoom. Technically that’s a crop into the middle of the sensor, but the high megapixel count means there’s still plenty of resolution to get quality images. You can still zoom at farther ranges, but you’re leaning heavily on image processing to enhance the digitally-zoomed image.

(An important aside about resolution: Keep in mind you’re not always capturing images at 200MP resolution. The default resolution is a pixel-binned 12MP, where the camera groups pixels together on the sensor to act as a larger pixel that gathers more light. So at that resolution, the S25 Edge is likely using AI upscaling to zoom. But at the 50MP and 200MP resolution settings, the 2x zoom is more likely to be a straight crop from what the sensor is recording.)

This also reinforces the fact that phone photography is increasingly buttressed by real-time, AI-supported image processing. Shooting at the full 200MP resolution involves considerable processing to enhance details recorded by such a physically small image sensor. Even with pro phones, I regularly see people use pinch-to-zoom instead of switching among the better quality preset optical options. (Android Authority surveyed its readers and found that about 27% of respondents zoom freely versus sticking to preset zoom levels.)

Will customers specifically buy the S25 Edge because of its camera features? Not entirely, but touting the 200MP camera prominently along with the new thin design gives them extra incentive to choose it.

We’re looking forward to testing the S25 Edge’s camera to see how well it performs. In the meantime, be sure to check out the photos that CNET Managing Editor Patrick Holland made for his Galaxy S25 Ultra review, as well as Andrew Lanxon’s images pitting the S25 Ultra head-to-head against the iPhone 16 Pro.

The ‘Color of AI’: Samsung Galaxy S25 Phones Stay Cool in Blue

+6 More

See all photos

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Friday, May 16

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 16.

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.

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword took me longer than usual. 1-Down is tough — hint, there’s an old-fashioned bottled beverage with the same name. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. 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 at those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Unit of distance that can precede «stone» and «age»
Answer: MILE

5A clue: Kind of powder used for hot chocolate
Answer: COCOA

6A clue: On the button
Answer: EXACT

7A clue: Connections
Answer: LINKS

8A clue: «___ not and say we did!»
Answer: LETS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Gutsy determination
Answer: MOXIE

2D clue: «That’s not gonna work for me»
Answer: ICANT

3D clue: Strands
Answer: LOCKS

4D clue: Has a bite
Answer: EATS

5D clue: Spreadsheet unit
Answer: CELL

How to play more Mini Crosswords

The New York Times Games section offers a large number of online games, but only some of them are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.

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