Having kids around makes the holidays more magical, and to be honest, the toys they have nowadays makes our basic Lincoln Logs and Lego blocks look a little old fashioned. True, Lincoln Logs and Legos will always be awesome, but these toys are decidedly more high-tech. Like the classic toys of our own youth, they’re still designed to stimulate the imagination, help kids master new concepts, and provide hours and hours of entertainment. Now they just require charging a little more often.

We play-tested every toy on this page to make sure it was fun to use and age appropriate for both the children in your house—and, yes, the big kid who is you.

BB–8 by Sphero

Show me a kid who isn’t excited about Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I’ll show you a kid who probably just needs to see the trailer a few dozen more times. My own son loves the BB–8, or as he’s nicknamed it, “the soccer ball dwoid.” And when he saw me unbox this toy version, I instantly became his hero again—in your face, Han Solo.

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The iPad Pro is not something you can review in a couple of days. That’s not because it’s a new product category or even a dramatic reimagining of one—we’ve all used iPads by now, and more or less understand what kinds of tasks they can do and apps they can run. If anything, the iPad Pro represents a shift in workflow. The trick isn’t what the iPad Pro can do, but how it allows you to do more with an iPad than you’re doing already.

I’ll be giving myself a little over a week to write Macworld’s iPad Pro review, since it’ll take some time to adjust to the iPad and evaluate what benefits and drawbacks it offers over my Mac. But from the moment I ripped off the shrink wrap and fired it up, I noticed a few things I wanted to share. Here are the five most striking impressions the iPad Pro made on me in the first couple of hours.

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