Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.
Grand Award Winner: A tangle-proof vacuum head
Anyone living with a long-haired person or pet knows all-too-well the struggle of clearing a vacuum brush head after a thorough cleaning. Those formerly luscious locks love to loop, loop, loop around the rotating cylinder until it’s so clogged you have to wield scissors or a utility knife to free it—barely able to tell which bristles are built in and which used to be on someone’s dome. Dyson solved this modern woe by eschewing the standard tubular brush head shape for a cone inspired by the ancient design of Archimedes’ screw. Pop one of these onto the end of a compatible Dyson vacuum (including the V8, V10, V11, Outsize, and V15) and those obnoxious hairs will find it harder to hang on. As the screw spins, it funnels follicle-grown filaments off its skinniest end, where the bristles are also softer to shake off any hairy grasps. There, they’re helpless against the suction of the vacuum—leaving more hair in the dustbin and less cleanup when you should be done cleaning.
A transforming utility knife
Any frozen ingredient can be ice cream
No mistakenly mopped carpets
If your floors are a mix of carpet and wood—or any other hard surface—it can be risky to buy a cleaning robot that vacuums and mops. Without significant babysitting, a bumbling device can easily soak a shag by dragging its wet, dirty sponge into the wrong room. Not the Roborock S7, which can detect carpet and lift its mopping attachment to avoid making a mess. It knows what’s underfoot thanks to an ultrasonic sensor that blasts sound at the floor, reading the echo to determine what’s soft and what’s not. We like to think it screams so you don’t have to.
The lightest, quickest cookware
More than six years of metal research turned into seven patents and one line of All-Clad pans. The stainless steel and aluminum bodies have pyrolytic graphite cores that heat up faster than copper thanks to the arrangement of the carbon atoms inside. They’re also 80 percent lighter, making these pans good for tossing onions and flippin’ pancakes. Not only will the pans withstand the highs of your oven or broiler, but they’re so eager to take on heat that they work well at even the very low temps that delicate foods like fish demand.
A lighter, more powerful tool battery
DeWalt’s new Powerstack pouch battery represents a whole new approach to energizing cordless tools. While standard lithium-ion bricks are stuffed with vertical, cylindrical cells—and have only been getting bigger as manufacturers look to add more power and runtime to their products—DeWalt’s batteries use stacked cells, so there’s no wasted space. This both reduces weight and boosts output: They’re 25 percent smaller than the previous generation and 50 percent more powerful. They also fit existing 20V Max tools and use the same charger as all DeWalt lithium-ion batteries, so you won’t have to buy new gear to add them to your kit.
