My method for making >$100 purchases is open up Consumer Reports, look at the top 3 ratings, and often the first will be some I'm sure very good product at $1200, and the second-best will be $500, so I buy the second-best rated of everything.
Like a Peloton is really good, yeah, but there's probably a $1000 treadmill that's pretty good, or Traeger makes great if overpriced pellet grills, but there's definitely some cheaper options that will smoke your meat fine if you don't need wifi and bluetooth for your smoker. And then sometimes the expensive products are really terrible quality with an aura of mystique about then (looking at you, Molekule air purifier) and Consumer Reports is willing to call these snake oil salesmen companies.
They won't influence you if you don't subscribe, of course.
I used to subscribe, my sense is that they do a good job, but their tastes are geared toward those of more affluent boomers and genxers. If you're someone who can't afford a Lexus, or who'd even consider choosing a Kia over a Lexus even though you can easily afford one, then Consumer Reports may not cater to your tastes.
I subscribe to their web site. Because my father subscribed and liked it, and I find it useful as well - also my former team lead was a lead there for a while. It is $40 a year.
They do surveys of consumers as well as do their own testing. About once a year they survey about vacuum cleaners - I had to buy one recently, and some brands got high grades, other low grades - so I bought a Shark vacuum cleaner. A few years ago I needed to buy an air conditioner and used CR for that as well. I also needed a laptop in a hurry and CR was one source I consulted (although I consulted several sources).
$40 a year is worth it to me to get a decent air conditioner and vacuum cleaner and such at a decent price (and laptop, although CR was just once of the consulted sources). The Shark vacuum cleaner was the last item I bought and it picks up dirt good, is easy to empty, and can vacuum rugs as well as things that need the hose to vacuum.
How so? I mean, I could imagine that they were reviewing computers on practical things that real-world users cared about, but maybe a tech enthusiast would find irrelevant.
I remember they rated the Atari (8 bit) computers a best buy. At the time I was an Atari fan and that how great it was. On hindsight, it was obvious even back then that the Atari was obsolete and the PC was where everyone was going for a reason. (though they could reasonably put mac/St/Amiga in the review, at least they were not obsolete)
That would have been the mid-late 80s, but it set the tone for the time: rate something high because it was cheap not because it was the best for the job.
