The 10 Best Gifts Under $100

Every year, TIME's editors and correspondents work together to compile a collection of the most interesting and groundbreaking new products and innovations for the Best Inventions list. As holiday season approaches, the TIME team has pulled out a selection of 10 best items from the list under $100 that would make a perfect gift.

After the pandemic forced him to work more flexibly between home, office, and the infinite spaces in between, Horace Lam began searching for a mouse that could keep up. Some were too slick—he's dropped and broken two. Others felt too heavy. Lam, an inventor who has worked with Targus and Logitech, created the myAir.0 OriMouse, which weighs just 40 grams and charges via USB-C. Inert, the mouse sort of resembles a flattened origami frog. But magnetically snap its two legs together, and the mouse takes on a faceted shape that allows it to nestle comfortably in your palm. —Daniel Varghese

The new Nothing Ear 3a headphones offer ample aesthetic appeal in an affordable package. But they impress for their unique capability to record and share what you're listening to. Once you've paired the headphones and set up an account in the Nothing app, you can squeeze both earbuds to start taking an audio snapshot, which you can then replay, transcribe, or share with friends. You can even adjust the recording window so that your snapshot includes audio played up to 30 seconds before you actually pressed the buds. Snapshots are under a minute, but the headphones can also record a phone call of up to an hour long. —Daniel Varghese

At the ripe age of 23, TJ Driver decided his relationship to his phone needed to change. “It was getting in the way,” he says. He enlisted Zach Nasgowitz, a friend from his undergraduate computer science program, to create Brick, a productivity system that married the available app blocking capabilities of iOS software with a corporeal magnet that acts like a key. If you want access to a blocked app while you're “Bricked,” you have to tap your phone to the drab, concrete colored Brick, equipped with an NFC chip—often that's all the friction needed to get you to do something other than doomscroll. The app is now also available on Android. —Daniel Varghese