About Me
Hi, I'm Dave, the person behind BestofBuyer.
This site started from a fairly ordinary problem. I'm forty-two, give or take, and I've been taking things apart since I was old enough to be told not to. A few years back I needed a charger that could actually run a laptop and a phone at the same time. Simple enough, I thought. Two hours later I was fifteen tabs deep, comparing spec sheets that contradicted each other, reading reviews that were clearly for a different model, and no closer to an answer than when I started. I bought the wrong one. Then I bought a second wrong one.
What struck me was how little of what's written about consumer tech is actually about the product. Listings quote a headline number the device only hits for thirty seconds before it throttles. Roundup sites copy each other's picks without anyone having handled the thing. Half the "features" in a bullet list are the same feature written three ways. So I started doing the boring part properly: pulling the manufacturer's own documentation rather than the retail bullet points, working out which spec in a category actually decides whether you'll be happy, and reading through hundreds of real customer reviews to see which complaints keep coming up.
That's still the whole method behind every "best" post here. I'm not a lab, and I don't pretend to be. I'm someone who got tired of guessing, and who finds it genuinely satisfying to work out why one thing lasts five years and the near-identical thing next to it dies in eight months. Every product gets judged on the same four things, and I'll tell you plainly when something in a roundup is only there because it's cheap.
How the star ratings are calculated
The star rating next to each product isn't decorative and it isn't made up. It starts from that product's real, current Amazon customer rating, pulled from the listing at the time I write or update the post. From there I adjust it up or down slightly based on my own assessment of four things: performance, meaning whether it does its core job as well as the spec implies rather than just on paper; build quality, covering materials, heat, and the parts that fail first, like cables, hinges and ports; features, judged on whether they're genuinely useful rather than how long the list is; and value against the other products in that same roundup.
That adjustment is capped at half a star in either direction. It's a deliberate limit. It means a product that real buyers are lukewarm about can't be talked up into a top pick by my opinion alone, and a well-liked one can't be buried by it. The crowd rating stays the anchor. My assessment moves it just enough to separate two products that look identical on a spec sheet but aren't.
Two honest caveats. Amazon's own rating drifts as new reviews come in, so the number here is a snapshot from when the post was written, not a live feed. And because the adjustment is my judgement, applied with the same four criteria every time, it's a considered opinion rather than an independent lab result.
I also don't publish prices. Tech pricing moves weekly, and a figure typed into an article is wrong almost immediately, so you'll see me describe something as mid-range or premium instead of pretending to know what it costs today.
Away from the workbench I do a lot of hill walking, keep a bike that needs more attention than it gets, and own an embarrassing number of USB-C cables that all look identical and definitely are not. The site's readers are all over the world, so product links point you to your nearest Amazon store automatically — worth checking that what you land on matches what you read about here, because specs sometimes differ between regions.
If there's something you'd like properly looked into, or you think I've got something wrong, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. BestofBuyer is a work in progress and it gets better every time someone points out where it's falling short.
BestofBuyer is an independent publication. When you buy through a link on this site I may earn a commission. It costs you nothing extra, and it's never influenced which products end up recommended. See the Advertiser Disclosure for the full picture.