Every year, the electronics manufacturers of the world practically fall over themselves trying to create gadgets that’ll make you want to part with your hard-earned money. Some of those gadgets end up becoming household staples for years or decades to come, and others turn out to be Juicero. The trick is being able to tell the difference. There are some gadgets that can legitimately make your life easier, and many of them have almost no hype at all – they’re just quality products that do useful things.

Here are 6 gadgets that might just change your life.

Toaster Oven

The humble toaster oven is perhaps as far from the hype cycle as a gadget can possibly get. If you’ve only ever seen dial-operated toaster ovens with dinging timers, though, you have no idea how far these devices have come over the past decade or two. Today’s toaster ovens are more useful and more powerful than ever, and they can do just about everything – convection, air frying, dehydrating, broiling and more.

The best thing about toaster ovens is that they heat up in seconds, essentially cooking food as quickly as a microwave would and with much better results. A toaster oven also consumes less power than a traditional oven and won’t make your kitchen hot. If you buy a good toaster oven, we can just about guarantee that your regular oven will start collecting dust before too long.

Vape

If you’re a smoker, you’re definitely aware that vapes exist because you can buy them from almost all of the same places that sell tobacco products. Maybe you’ve even tried one of those devices but weren’t able to make the jump from smoking to vaping successfully. Well, it’s time to give vaping another shot because modern disposable vapes are easier to use, more enjoyable and more satisfying than the vapes of the past. Vaping is a completely different experience today than it was several years ago.

How can switching from smoking to vaping make your life easier? For starters, there’s the fact that it can save you thousands of dollars a year compared to smoking. Vaping can also help you avoid the drastic reduction in value that happens when you smoke in your house and car. Don’t forget that smoking also affects the way that you smell. Switching to vaping can dramatically benefit your self-esteem, and that can make your life easier in ways you can’t even imagine yet.

Mini Flashlight

If there’s one thing that you can take away from this article, it’s this: The gadgets that are most likely to actually make your life easier are often the ones with no hype whatsoever. Case in point: the pocket flashlight. You probably own at least one flashlight already, and you almost certainly have a flashlight in your phone as well. Using your phone’s flashlight requires a swipe and a tap, though, and that’s inconvenient. You haven’t experienced how incredibly useful a flashlight can be until you’ve owned one that’s always immediately available because it’s clipped to the inside of your pocket.

Modern LEDs are so bright that a flashlight containing a single AAA battery can actually throw more light than a much larger flashlight with a traditional incandescent bulb – all while feeling completely weightless in your pocket. Dropped something in a dark parking lot at night? Use your flashlight. Need to find something in the back corner of your closet? Use your flashlight. Once you have a bright flashlight that’s always at hand when you need it, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it.

Battery-Powered Car Starter

Do you have a set of jumper cables in your car? Of course you do; jumper cables are every bit as essential as a spare tire because everyone experiences a dead car battery at some point. What would you do, though, if there wasn’t anyone around to help you jump start your car? That’s why you need a battery-powered car starter. Charge it up and keep it in your trunk, and you’ll never need to worry about a dead car battery again.

A car starter is powered by lithium-ion batteries and will typically have several USB ports. That opens up a world of possibilities and makes the device useful for much more than just starting your car. What would you do if your car was disabled, and your phone’s battery was also dead? A car starter can charge your phone. Many car starters have built-in flashlights. A car starter can even be useful in a power outage and will probably have sufficient capacity to charge all of the phones in your household more than once.

Stick Vacuum

Speaking of things with lithium-ion batteries, you’ve got to consider making your next vacuum a battery-powered stick vacuum – even if you’ve tried one before and thought that it wasn’t powerful enough for everyday work. Lithium-ion technology has come a long way in the past decade, and there are battery-powered vacuums today that would put a budget upright vacuum to shame.

It’s true that a stick vacuum – even a really good one – won’t have more cleaning power than a high-end upright vacuum. As the old saying goes, though, the best vacuum is the one that you’ll actually use. Do you find yourself procrastinating on floor cleaning because you don’t feel like digging the vacuum out of the closet and plugging it in? A stick vacuum can charge through a wall cradle, where it’s always ready for immediate use. Floor cleaning is never fun, but a stick vacuum will definitely make it easier.

Water Filter

Are you a fan of bottled water? There’s a good chance of it because Americans collectively throw away 60 million empty water bottles every day. Bottled water is generally just regular municipal water that’s been filtered through reverse osmosis, and you can make exactly the same thing yourself – at a much lower cost and without the colossal waste – by buying a water filter.

Don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on a reverse-osmosis filter? That’s not a problem. You can get a result that’s nearly as good with a standard pitcher filter as long as the filter has both activated charcoal and ion exchange stages. The filter will remove lead, fluoride, jet fuel and a host of other contaminants, and the result will taste just as good as bottled water. Do you prefer mineral water? That’s not a problem either because you can buy liquid electrolytes and add a few drops to the water before drinking it.