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Finding the best monitor for you and your desk setup is important. If you’re spending hours at your desk, you’ll need a monitor that’s easy on your eyes and has ergonomic features. If you’re gaming then you’ll want a display that can keep up with the action. Right now, Dell, LG and others are all offering great deals and steals on some of their most popular monitors, so if you’re in the market for something new, now is a great time to buy.

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The Dell Inspiron 16 Plus remains just out of OLED range. I reviewed the previous version earlier this year and bemoaned the fact that it didn’t provide an OLED or any other display options to upgrade. It’s otherwise a competent content-creation laptop, with a powerful CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics. And content creators are the very people who would benefit the most from the superior contrast and colors you get from an OLED display.

As with previous versions, Dell offers a lone display option for the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630. Despite featuring fewer pixels than the previous model’s panel, the new display is an improvement. While it dropped a notch in resolution from 3K to 2.5K, the refresh rate has doubled to 120Hz. That’s an important number for anyone thinking about putting its discrete graphics muscle toward gaming. Video creators will also appreciate the smoother motion of the 120Hz panel.

Inside, the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 received the requisite upgrades to a 13th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU and Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics. The system offers capable application and graphics performance but is only worthy of consideration when Dell’s revolving discounts land on it. I don’t like this configuration at its full price of $1,650, but at a sale price of $1,300, I’m less grouchy about missing out on a better display.

Configuration as tested

Price as reviewed	$1,300
Display size/resolution	16-inch 2,560×1,600 IPS LCD
CPU	2.4GHz Intel Core i7-13700H
Memory	16GB DDR5 4,800MHz RAM
Graphics	8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060
Storage	1TB NVMe SSD
Networking	Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), Bluetooth
Operating system	Windows 11 Home

Dell offers a dizzying array of configurations for the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630. Pricing starts at $1,200 for a system with a Core i7-13620H processor, 16GB of RAM, integrated Intel graphics and a 1TB SSD. At the time of this writing, however, the base model has a Core i7-13700H CPU and is only $800 with a massive $500 discount. Our test model is $350 off, which brings its price down to $1,300 and features the Core i7-13700H chip and RTX 4060 graphics, which is the highest GPU offered. All models feature the same display, a 16-inch LCD with a 2,560×1,600-pixel resolution that’s rated for 300 nits of brightness. The Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 starts at 899 in the UK and AU$1,999 in Australia.

With its 13th-gen Core i7 H-series CPU and RTX 4060 graphics, our Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 test system had a strong showing in lab testing. It was clearly a step or two ahead of the previous Inspiron 16 Plus 7620 based on a 12th-gen Core i7 H-series chip and RTX 3050 Ti graphics on both our application and 3D graphics tests. Its scores were also competitive with other large-screen, content-creation laptops. It took a step back, however, in battery life. The previous 7620 model lasted over an hour longer on our battery drain test, despite having the same six-cell, 86-watt-hour battery. I attribute the shorter runtime to the faster 120Hz display, which consumes more battery resources than a 60Hz panel.

Under heavy load, our test system did get warm to the touch but never reached a point where it was uncomfortably hot or led to performance degradation. It also operated in near silence, its cooling fans spinning at a whisper.

Now in silver

Dell made a cosmetic shift with the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630, and not for the better to my eyes. Gone is the lovely, subtle green chassis of the previous model. In its place is a pedestrian brushed-silver enclosure. It looks no different in the sea of silver laptops available, although the keys are a muted gray instead of the traditional black. On the whole, there is nothing captivating about the design.

The Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 is also a tad heavier than its predecessor. It weighs 4.8 pounds, which is a few ounces more than the 4.6-pound Inspiron 16 Plus 7620. In the middle of the last two Inspiron 16 Pluses is the 16-inch MacBook Pro at 4.7 pounds. At nearly 5 pounds, these large-screen laptops are better choices for lugging around the house than for daily treks to a coffee shop or the office. Not all large-screen laptops are poor choices in terms of portability. The 16-inch Acer Swift Edge weighs just 2.6 pounds, and the 17-inch LG Gram 17 weighs only 3.2 pounds.

The Plus model means you are getting an all-aluminum chassis. With “non-Plus” Inspirons, you are dealing with plastic shells or a mix of plastic and metal, where the body is made of plastic with perhaps an aluminum lid. With the large expanse that the keyboard deck covers, some flex in the middle beneath the keyboard detracts from the typing experience.

The keys felt springy with shallow travel; I was immediately comfortable typing on the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630, partly because of the lively keys and also because Dell omits a number pad. The keyboard is centered below the display instead of shifted left to accommodate a numpad, so the keys are right where you expect them to be. And there are no shortened keys that might have you hitting the wrong one for days or weeks before your fingers adjust to the placement and size.

The touchpad design has been tweaked, but it still has too firm a click response. The previous model had an invisible border at the top of the touchpad, but the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630’s has the traditional framing of four borders — one on each side. Given the wide wrist rest below the display, I feel the touchpad could be bigger. A 16-inch, 16:10 display is a large swathe across which to move a cursor with an undersized touchpad.

Swifter display

The 16-inch, 16:10 provides a large canvas on which to work or be entertained. Its 2.5K resolution (2,560×1,600 pixels) is down from the previous model’s 3K resolution (3,072×1,920 pixels). Still, the 2.5K resolution suffices for the 16-inch panel; text looks crisp and deeply black as opposed to the fuzzy, gray letters you can get on a 16-inch FHD panel.

While this year’s model forces you to sacrifice in the area of screen resolution, it makes up for it in refresh rate, doubling the standard 60Hz rate to 120Hz for smoother motion for videos and games. You can also enable a dynamic refresh rate to run a smoother 120Hz when needed and 60Hz at other times to conserve battery resources.

The higher refresh rate is the only positive for content creators. Otherwise, the display is decidedly average. It’s rated for a ho-hum 300 nits and lacks HDR support. I measured the display’s brightness with a lux meter, and it tested at a peak brightness of 380 nits. But the display’s overall performance is still disappointing.

The webcam hits on two items I like to see: a 1080p resolution and a physical privacy shutter. It produced a crisp, properly exposed image with accurate colors and skin tones. It lacks IR capability for facial recognition logins, but a fingerprint sensor is built into the power button for easy and secure logins.

Dell outfits the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 with four speakers producing fuller sound than the typical stereo set. The low end is lacking, but there’s enough oomph for the sound to fill a small room. For watching shows and movies and YouTube they were fine — dialogue was clear, and sound effects were natural. The lack of bass response, however, limits music playback.

With a large vent on either side, the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 looks a bit like a gaming laptop. In front of these large vents are three ports. On the left side, you’ll find a USB-C Thunderbolt 4, a USB-A and an HDMI port. On the right is a second USB-A port alongside a combo audio jack and microSD card slot. I’d like to trade one of the USB-A ports for a second USB-C port, but since the lone Thunderbolt 4 port isn’t needed for charging — the laptop uses a barrel connector — I’m more accepting of having only a single Thunderbolt 4 connection. That said, I have no need for a second USB-A port.

One note on the microSD card slot: it’s only on the RTX 4060-based configuration. Oddly, the other models with integrated graphics or lower-end RTX graphics feature a full-sized SD card slot.

Listen, I don’t expect to get both a strong midrange RTX GPU and a large OLED display for our test system’s $1,650 price, but I’d argue getting both items for, say, $2,000 is a better value than getting one or the other for $1,650. And what’s frustrating is that Dell offers RTX graphics with the Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 but no OLED option and then also has the Inspiron 16 two-in-one that offers an OLED option but no RTX graphics. I want to be able to smoosh the two together and come away with a 16-inch content-creation laptop that would rival the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, our current pick for content creators in need of a large-screen Windows laptop.

Geekbench 5 (multicore)

Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023) 15,009Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 12,639Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra 12,558Dell XPS 17 9730 12,355Lenovo Legion Pro 5 12,340Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7620 11,875Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 9,471

Cinebench R23 (multicore)

Lenovo Legion Pro 5 18,067Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 17,167Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra 15,965Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7620 15,045Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023) 14,803Dell XPS 17 9730 13,948Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 11,223

3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited

Lenovo Legion Pro 5 23,711Dell XPS 17 9730 17,740Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 17,717Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 15,620Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023) 12,989Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra 12,853Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7620 10,965

Guardians of the Galaxy (High @ 1920 x 1080)

Lenovo Legion Pro 5 157Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 144Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra 131Dell XPS 17 9730 122Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7620 111Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 64

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest @ 1920 x 1080)

Lenovo Legion Pro 5 178Dell XPS 17 9730 121Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 109Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra 105Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 83Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7620 60

Online streaming battery drain test

Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023) 1,474Dell XPS 17 9730 714Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7620 677Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra 634Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630 608Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 478Lenovo Legion Pro 5 227

System configurations

Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7630	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-13700H; 16GB DDR5 4,800MHz RAM; 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics; 1TB SSD
Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7620	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-12700H; 16GB DDR5 4,800MHz RAM; 4GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050Ti graphics; 512GB SSD
Dell XPS 17 9730	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-13700H; 32GB DDR5 4,800MHz RAM; 16GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics; 1TB SSD
Lenovo Legion Pro 5	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 3.6GHz AMD Ryzen 7 7745HX with Radeon Graphics; 16GB DDR5 5,600MHz; 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics; 1TB SSD
Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.9GHz Intel Core i7-13700H; 64GB DDR5 5,200MHz RAM; 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics; 1TB SSD
Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra	Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-13700H 16GB DDR5 6,000MHz RAM; 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics; 1TB SSD
Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023)	Apple MacOS Ventura 13.2; Apple M2 Pro (12 CPU cores, 19 GPU cores); 32GB LPDDR5 RAM; 1TB SSD

Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sale, essentially an October Prime Day event, started Tuesday and ends Wednesday. It arrives just in time to kick-start your holiday shopping. These events usually bring some of the online retailer’s best prices of the year, and right now you can take advantage of all of the best deals.

If you’re looking to save big ahead of the holidays, now might be a good time to take the plunge on a Prime membership, which you’ll need to get these deals. A standard Prime membership will run you $139 a year, or $15 a month. If you’re a student, you can get a Prime membership for $69 a year, or $8 a month, and if you qualify for government assistance programs the monthly subscription price drops to $7.

You won’t just get free shipping with your Prime membership. With your subscription you’ll also receive access to Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music Prime, discounts at Whole Foods and on Amazon Alexa products, and even more perks.

Prime Days usually mean big deals on tech (think phones, tablets and smartwatches) and home products (like air fryers and espresso machines). So, if you think a Prime membership is right for you, read on and we’ll walk you through how to sign up. If you’re still on the fence, no worries: You can sign up for a 30-day free trial.

For more, Amazon’s layaway program could be an ace up your sleeve for big-ticket items.

How to sign up for Amazon Prime

To take advantage of Prime Day deals, you’ll want to be a Prime member. To sign up, all you’ll need to do is:

1. Navigate to www.amazon.com/amazonprime.

2. Tap the rectangular orange box that says Start Your 30-Day Trial.

3. If you already have an Amazon account, sign in. If you don’t have an Amazon account, tap Create Account. You will be prompted to enter your name, email address and password. Amazon will require you to verify your email address with a one-time password.

4. Select your payment method — which can be a credit card, debit card, gift card or whatever other payment method you choose — and add that information. Then click Continue.

And that’s it. You’re now officially a Prime subscriber.

How to cancel your Prime membership

If you decide a Prime membership is no longer right for you, or if you want to end your free trial, it’s pretty easy to cancel.

1. Sign into your Amazon account, and tap the Account & Lists dropdown menu.

2. Then select Prime Membership in the Your Account column.

3. Next, under the Manage membership heading, tap Update, cancel and more.

4. Then, simply select End Membership.

If you don’t want to follow these steps, you can also go to this support page and jump directly to the End Membership button. Either way, after selecting End Membership you will no longer be subscribed to Amazon Prime.

While most modern TVs come with a smart TV system, grabbing a streaming stick from your preferred platform can make a big difference. Handily, there are a lot of great early Prime Day deals at both Amazon and Best Buy on several Roku streaming devices, from the basic Roku Express to the fancier Roku Streambar, with prices from just $21.

If you want to grab a Roku streaming device for as cheap as possible, the new Roku Express is a great option, and Amazon has even discounted it down to $21 from $30. It can stream in HD quality, with upscaling to 1080p if you have a full HD TV, although it doesn’t support any HDR standards. Though, we’d probably suggest grabbing the Roku Express 4K Plus instead, since it’s only $8 more at a discounted price of $29. While it also uses upscaling, it’s much better and can hit 4K resolutions. It also supports HDR10 Plus, which is nice to see at this price.

If you want something a bit more high-end, there’s the Roku Streambar, which is a streaming device and a soundbar in one. Granted, it’s not going to give you the most premium audio quality, at least when compared to stand-alone soundbars near the same price range, but for a discounted price of $100, it’s a great device to pick up if you’ve just bought a TV and would like a bit better sound than it can deliver. It also comes with several excellent features, from the HDR and 4K to the voice-controlled remote and app — this is a really great soundbar and streaming device combo.

T-Mobile is forcing users on its older unlimited plans to move to some of its latest options. The carrier confirmed to CNET that starting next week, notices will be sent out to T-Mobile users on its older One, Simple Choice, Magenta and Magenta 55 Plus plans alerting them that starting with their November bill cycles their respective plans will change and that their monthly pricing will go up.

The notices will go out starting on October 17 and T-Mobile tells CNET that “there will be an increase of approximately $10 per line with the migration.” A spokesperson noted that those who sign up for AutoPay can save $5 per line (on up to eight lines per account).

T-Mobile recently changed its automatic payment rules to require a linked bank account or debit card as opposed to a credit card, though with the company’s troubled history of data breaches consumers may be wary of linking banking information to their accounts.

“We’re always looking for ways to give our customers more from our services so we’re moving a small number who were on older rate plans to newer plans that will deliver them enhanced features,” T-Mobile said in a statement. It was not immediately clear how many people will be impacted or what a “small number” meant.

The company adds that those who don’t want to have their plan changed will be able to reverse the move, but they will need to call T-Mobile’s Customer Care support line to make that happen.

The carrier is giving users an undisclosed period of time to call in and reverse the forced switch, but how long that period will be was similarly not immediately known. It was also not known if those who go back will be able to stay on their older plans for good or if any reversal simply buys these users a little more time before a switch is once again forced upon them.

News of the plan changes first leaked on Reddit, The Mobile Report and on the Tech Life Channel on YouTube.

According to the leak on Reddit, those on Simple Choice will be moved to either Magenta or Essentials Select, those on Magenta or One will move to Go5G and those on Magenta 55 Plus will be migrated to Go5G 55 Plus. Business users on Simple Choice Business will similarly be switched over to the carrier’s Business Unlimited Advanced.

The forced changes to legacy plans come over three years after T-Mobile completed its merger with Sprint. One of the promises to get the merger approved by regulators was that the carrier would not raise rates on plans for three years. It has since introduced a “Price Lock” promise to not raise rates on plans, but that guarantee largely only applies to its newer plans from the last two years.

As part of its “Price Lock” page, T-Mobile does note that those who are on “eligible plans” from before April 28, 2022 and don’t want to switch to a new T-Mobile plan will be able to have the carrier cover “your final month’s recurring service charge if we were to raise prices and you choose to leave.”

Those looking to take advantage of that offer will simply need to give the carrier notice “within 60 days.”

If there’s one thing I’m picky about, it’s the quality of sound, so before I invested in a small Bluetooth speaker I did my research. (By which I mean I went through CNET’s list of the best Bluetooth speakers.) The one I chose, and one that continues to rank high in quality for its size, is the Bose SoundLink Flex Bluetooth speaker, and it’s $30 off right now for October Prime Day.

Instead of its usual $149, the SoundFlex Bluetooth speaker is on sale for $119 at Amazon. And as another perk for people who’d rather support a business besides Amazon: The speaker is also $120 at Best Buy and $119 through Bose itself.

I really love this speaker for the reasons you’d love a speaker — music sounds really good on it, speech is clear when I’m listening to a podcast and the sound is full enough to fill my (tiny) studio apartment.

But I like it more for another reason: As a restless and light sleeper, I need some sort of sound going that’ll mask the noise from inside and outside my apartment building. In a series of events I don’t completely remember, I found that playing the “Commercial Airliner” soundscape track from my Calm app through my Bose speaker effectively blocked the bass sounds I can hear in my apartment. It’s also a whole lot more comfortable than trying to sleep with the same track flowing through headphones (which, I’ll note, weren’t designed for sleeping either).

While I can’t compare its off-label use as a white noise machine to the real white noise machines out there, I can say its versatility is one of the main reasons I’m tied to this Bluetooth speaker. In terms of how it tests in overall audio quality, you can read David Carnoy’s full Bose SoundLink Flex review here.

There’s nothing worse than low battery anxiety — that point where your phone goes below 20% battery life, and you have no idea when you’ll be seeing a charger in the next few hours, be it because you’re on a plane, a train or just out and about. That’s why a supplementary battery is a must.

For iPhone owners, there are plenty of choices, but it’s the Anker MagGo 622 that I’ve grown to appreciate — first with my iPhone 14 Pro, and now that I’ve upgraded to an iPhone 15 Pro Max. All five colors of this device are currently $40 for Prime Big Deal Days — a nice 20% discount from the usual $50 price, or a whopping 43% off the list price.

Previously, I had — and liked — the similar 321 model. Like Apple’s similar (and now discontinued) MagSafe Battery Pack, the MagGo 321 magnetically attaches and powers recent iPhones that are MagSafe-equipped (that’s most models since 2020’s iPhone 12). However, that Anker only cost me $22 at the time. And it gave my iPhone another full charging cycle, while still being slim enough to fit in my pocket without any annoying connecting cords or cables.

Read more: Best MagSafe Accessories for iPhone

But the MagGo 622 adds a fold-down kickstand. That’s a key feature when I’m traveling — plop it on the tray table of a plane or a train, and you can enjoy video on your phone in landscape or portrait mode. Have a nearby power outlet? The 622 has passthrough charging via its USB-C connector. (And now that the iPhone uses USB-C too, that’s one less cable in my bag.)

Now, a few notes and caveats:

• The Anker products aren’t officially compatible with Apple’s MagSafe standard, so they charge more slowly than those pricier Apple-sanctioned products. (The latest iPhones support the newer Qi2 wireless charging standard, but few if any of those have hit the market yet — and Apple has yet to detail which improvements, if any, the new chargers will deliver.)
• You’ll need to have a MagSafe-compatible phone case for the 622 or any magnetic battery to attach properly. And, like most gadgets nowadays, you’ll need to bring your own power adapter, as only the USB-C cable is provided in the box.
• Lastly, you don’t get the fancy on-screen indicator of how much juice the battery has left in it (but it does have a four-bar LED indicator on the side for that).

But those are all basically quibbles. If I’m spending the day traveling — or just walking around — the Anker MagGo 622 is clipped onto my iPhone, ready for action.

This story was originally published for the July Prime Day event, and has been slightly updated for October’s Prime Big Deal Days.