We’re already halfway through 2026, so I went back through everything I bought on Amazon this year. 75 orders total. Lined up like that, most of it turned out to be recurring supplement subscriptions, cat food, and ingredients for cooking at home — 10kg of soybeans, koji, kombu, dried shiitake, natto spores. Even I have to admit it’s a pretty plain lineup.

Once I set aside all the consumables and kept only the things I can genuinely say I’m glad I bought, it came down to four. The prices and categories are all over the place, but each one actually changed something about how I live. Here they are, in order.

MacBook Neo A18 Pro: if you want one, just buy it now

I picked up the 13-inch model in June for just under 100,000 yen. No contest — this is my best purchase of the year.

It’s small and light, full stop. And despite that, it runs on the A18 Pro, so nothing about my day-to-day work ever feels sluggish. Getting this size, this weight, and this much performance for under 100,000 yen honestly doesn’t add up when you think about it. On top of that, the design is just good-looking. Feeling good about the thing you’re carrying around matters more than people admit, especially for a tool you use every single day.

On the price front, memory costs and everything else are pushing PC prices up gradually right now. So if you’ve been telling yourself “I’ll get one eventually,” there’s not much reason to wait. Every day you hold out for a lower price is really a bet on it getting more expensive instead. If you want it, buy it now — that’s the honest takeaway here.

Like-it frozen rice containers: unglamorous, but I touch it every day

I bought a 6-pack of these in January for a bit over 3,000 yen. There’s nothing flashy about them, but in terms of satisfaction, this might actually rank right behind the MacBook.

I used to assume all frozen-rice containers were basically the same. I was wrong. Each one holds exactly one serving (160-200g), and once it’s thawed you can just pop it straight into a rice bowl — the shape is built to match. And the rice itself doesn’t turn soggy. The containers are designed to let steam escape, so even after microwaving, the grains stay separate and intact instead of turning to mush.

That “kind of watery, kind of sticky” annoyance you get with frozen rice disappeared the moment I switched containers. For someone who cooks a big batch of rice and freezes it instead of cooking daily, that difference is huge.

Nadesori hair-removal roller: hair removal by just petting your skin

Bought this in May for 2,450 yen. This one was a total surprise pick.

The idea is that you roll it over your skin and it removes unwanted hair — no cutting, no pulling. I was skeptical, but once I tried it, what stood out was how little damage it does to your skin. None of the nicking you get from a razor, none of the pain of an epilator.

It won’t do a deep shave — this isn’t a tool for clearing thick, fully grown-in hair, it’s for maintaining skin that’s already been mostly cleared. Within that use case, it’s genuinely impressive. The hair it removes doesn’t scatter much either, so cleanup is easy, which matters more than it sounds. A tool that lowers the mental barrier to actually doing your grooming routine ends up being the one you keep using long-term.

Fascia release gun: forgivable, for the price

I can’t give this one an unqualified rave. It’s a cheap one I picked up in January.

It does work. Point it at a tight calf or shoulder and it loosens up. Given the price, that alone is a pass.

That said, cranking it up to max power means holding the button down the whole time, rather than just setting a level and letting it stay there — a bit of an annoyance. Every time I use it I think “ugh, this again.” Still, if this price gets you massage-gun-level results, that complaint is easy to live with. It’s the kind of tool you use with a shrug of “well, you get what you pay for.”

Looking back

Lined up together, the only expensive purchase here was the once-a-year MacBook — everything else was a few thousand yen. And yet satisfaction didn’t track with price at all. Cheap, everyday items like the rice containers and the hair-removal roller ended up punching well above their price tag.

Picking out the things you’re actually glad you bought turns out to be a backwards way of noticing where you’ve been quietly annoyed every day. I’m guessing the second half of the year will bring more of the same — plain ingredients, supplements, and a handful of small gadgets mixed in.