Is it worth upgrading your tech now or waiting for what’s next?
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00:00Is now the right time to buy a new iPhone or should you wait for next year's rumored iPhone 17?
00:04What about OLED TVs? If you're ready to upgrade your home theater setup,
00:07is something better just around the corner? And when it comes to gaming handhelds,
00:10are today's options still worth it or should you hold out for next year's models?
00:15Welcome to Ask TG, the show where I grab your comments and questions from our videos and
00:19articles and get you answers from our Tom's Guide tech experts. Just use the hashtag AskTG
00:24for your chance to get featured in our next episode and stay subscribed to see if you made the cut.
00:28John, the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro just came out a few months ago, but if someone's trying to decide
00:34whether it's for the holidays or start of the new year that they want a new phone, should they
00:38get these devices or should they kind of wait and maybe see what the iPhone 17 brings?
00:43It's always a tough one to answer. And I look at it from like how long it's going to be. So right
00:48now we're in December. iPhones typically get announced and released in September. So that's
00:53a long stretch. iPhone Air, iPhone Slim, whatever it's going to be. Yes, it might be worth the wait,
00:59but since we're so far out and when you pair all the deals that are happening right now on the
01:04iPhone 16, 16 Pro, 16 Pro Max, I tell people to get it now because you're getting, first of all,
01:12you're going to wait another year. And at that point, your dilemma is going to be,
01:16should I wait for the 18 at that point? So you mentioned the deals is like around
01:20the holidays, usually one of the best times. A lot of deals could happen at any given time.
01:24It's just a matter of, do you need that phone right now? And how much are you willing to spend?
01:27But here's one advice I always give everyone. You never buy your phone full price because there's
01:31always deals, whether they're instant deals. Yes. Whether they're trading deals like those
01:37make it worth buying right now. What you know about the iPhone Slim, can we dive into that a
01:41little bit more? The one reason why I'm kind of hesitant about the iPhone Slim, iPhone Air is
01:47because the price. They say the rumors hint that it's going to be more than the Pro Max,
01:53whatever the 17 Pro Max was going to, is going to end up being. That phone's already going to be
01:57what? $1,200. Yes. It's going to be thinner. It's going to be probably lighter. It's actually
02:03more in line to the size of the iPhone 16 plus, because I think it has a 6.7 inch display. So
02:09it's bigger than the, uh, the pro, but I don't think it's going to be as big as the 16 Pro Max,
02:14but you're paying more and there's only a single camera in the back, one rear camera, which
02:18I don't know. I just feel like having the versatility of the three cameras.
02:22You take a lot of photos. So I don't know if you could make that switch.
02:25And then you have trade-offs. We don't know yet for sure whether the battery,
02:28battery life's going to be impacted. It's tough.
02:32If you've been eyeing a gaming handheld, the ASUS ROG Ally is still a fantastic choice,
02:36especially with recent discounts. But if you're after more performance and a less compromised
02:41experience, holding off for a few months is probably the smart move. One big reason MSI's
02:46upcoming CLAW 8AI Plus. It comes with several big upgrades that could make it a top tier handheld,
02:52including a larger eight inch, 120 Hertz display, a revamped concave D-pad,
02:56hall effect joysticks, and even better shoulder buttons that are easier to trigger.
03:00Under the hood, it's powered by the new Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 processor, 32 gigabytes of RAM
03:06and one terabyte of NVMe SSD storage. MSI is claiming up to 20% better performance than the
03:11ASUS ROG Ally X, the successor to this, at similar wattages and impressive FPS improvements in
03:17certain benchmarks. And while the CLAW 8AI Plus starts at a steep $899, the better display and
03:23longer battery life and beefier internals could make it worth waiting for compared to this year's
03:28models. But also exciting beyond MSI, next-gen handhelds like the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and its
03:33rumored sibling, the Legion Go S with the AMD Z2 Extreme chips, drop next year, possibly delivering
03:39notable performance boosts over the Ally. But with CES just around the corner in January,
03:44the best move is probably to wait and see what other handheld announcements come through.
03:48And even if the CLAW 8AI Plus is on your radar, giving it a few weeks could reveal some other
03:52exciting alternatives, as well as its real world benchmarks. So keep an eye out for those.
03:57Hey, buddy. Someone's trying to get a new TV for an extra bedroom. They're trying to upgrade to a
04:02bigger size. And they're trying to decide if they should, you know, get this year's model versus
04:07an upcoming year model. For someone, right, who has TV from a year ago, two years ago,
04:12you don't have to upgrade. You have about the same feature. I mean, even LG and Samsung are
04:16upgrading the software on their TVs. Like you're not getting significantly better picture quality.
04:20Very incremental. And a lot of it has to do with the AI stuff that a lot of people are
04:24of it has to do with the AI stuff that a lot of these companies are doing now. You're going to
04:28get better upscaling on these TVs and stuff. But it's again, like if you put them side by side,
04:32it's pretty hard to tell. Maybe a little different for the four year old TVs. But if you have a TV
04:37from two years ago, one year ago, like especially one year ago, like it's like still premium TVs.
04:42I don't know if you know anything about rumors.
04:43I would wait and check out to see what CES has in store. Pretty recently from LG that their G5
04:50will have 165 hertz native refresh rate. It's interesting, right? We haven't seen
04:55refresh rate upgraded since I think 2022. I would say look out for LG, look out for Samsung.
05:02They've got some exciting stuff coming up. You might even see OLEDs come down in price slightly.
05:06It's because the technology is becoming more available and cheaper to produce probably.
05:09My hope personally is that since Roku and even Amazon this year and even Panasonic
05:15jumped on the mini LED train, right? I'm hoping that Roku and Amazon will maybe bring an OLED to
05:21market this. Maybe like 1,000, 1,200 bucks. That's like somewhat reasonable for some people, right?
05:29So that's it for this week's episode. Are you planning on grabbing any of this year's devices
05:33or are you waiting to see what's next? Let me know in the comments or use the hashtag
05:37Ask TG to share your thoughts and questions for our next episode. You can find us everywhere
05:41at Tom's Guide and you can follow me to see what other cool tech I'm reviewing.
05:44Thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one.