These are the Father’s Day gifts dads crave

Father’s Day isn’t just about barbecue anymore.

These days there are all different kinds of dads, and that makes shopping for their weird obsessions all the more difficult. Perhaps the dad in your life is a lossless audio dad, and your house is slowly filling with speakers and nondescript boxes with knobs and HDMI ports. Or maybe they’re a video game dad poking around estate sales for old CRT televisions.

Our Father’s Day guide may not cater to every type of dad out there, but we can assure you that something on this list will spin them into a new, almost manic project guaranteed to threaten your retirement. Enjoy!

The goods

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Dads love motorcycles. Whether they should have them is another question, but what if there was something just a little bit less intense but also way cooler? That’s the Metacycle, an electric bike from Sondors. With a top speed of 80 miles per hour and a total range of 80 miles, the Metacycle will have your leather-jacket dad (or daddy 👀) zooming between dystopian landscapes in style.

You’ve probably seen Nanoleaf’s RGB accent lights in the background of your favorite YouTuber or Twitch streamer, but now the company has a new offering: Nanoleaf Elements. These lose the RGB but gain a wood finish that will match a wide variety of furniture and decor. They also illuminate with a wide color temperature range (1,500-4,000K), allowing you to closely match the rest of your lighting. And they still include Nanoleaf’s usual smarts, like an AR app for seeing how they’ll look in your space, the option to create custom “scenes” of lighting patterns, and the ability to respond in time to your music.

You can’t beat a classic. This hose grip is the GOAT — squeeze a little bit and you get the mist, squeeze a lot and you get a stream. Buy one in the durable and timeless finish that dads love: Zinc.

What are dads doing all day? Nobody is quite sure, but during the summer it’s bound to be something sweaty. Our style editor Edgar Alvarez doesn’t have children, but he does run a lot, which I assume is just as difficult as 18+ years of fostering human life.

Anyway, he reviewed Apple’s Powerbeats 4 and found them to have insane 15-hour battery life and reliable IPX4 water and sweat resistance.

The only thing better than a piece of functional home decor is one that physically folds up and out of the way depending on the circumstances. Our reviews editor Raymond Wong wrote about the Yamazaki folding door hook here.

Is the dad in your life a total sneakerhead? Do they need a pair of the highest caliber but with restrained, fatherly vibes? Nike’s Jordan 3 “A Ma Maniére” are just what the doctor ordered, and style editor Edgar Alvarez wrote about them here.

I know that this is going to be a difficult thing to accept, but it’s at least possible that the dad in your life... has a penis. I know, I was as shocked as you are. Now, should you buy your father a sex toy? That might be awkward. But should you buy your spouse a sex toy? Immediately. Like what are you waiting for, it’s literally the best gift.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a Boomer dad, Gen X dad, or even an aging Millennial dad, they love retro gaming. That’s just a fact. And right now the MiSTer FPGA is the go-to, do-everything box that retro gamers are obsessing over. This thing not only enables the dad in your life to play their favorite titles, but to do so at the highest level of accuracy on retro hardware like CRT televisions, which are booming right now.

As someone who has done a bit of DIY Powerwall building, I can personally attest to the fact that not all soldering irons are created equal. And if you’re shopping for a dad, you know they’re particular about their tools. So don’t be like me and buy a cheap Amazon soldering iron, instead get them the Hakko Digital Soldering Station, which is also sold on Amazon but is actually extremely good. Watch out for fakes!

Listen, you know why dads need AirTags. We all know. Make searching for the car keys a thing of the past.

Is the dad in your life experimenting with high-fidelity audio? Be warned; that’s a gateway drug to spending way too much money. But for the loved one looking to indulge their Hi-Fi dad, you can’t beat a Raspberry Pi DAC or amplifier kit. The PecanPi DAC shown above is just one of many Raspberry Pi audio kits that are out there, allowing dads everywhere to build their own insanely overengineered audio equipment.

Once you get yourself some brawny audio equipment you’re going to need some Hi-Res audio to play on it. Qobuz has a lot of music and works with Volumio, a specialized OS for the Raspberry Pi not entirely unlike Plex but for music. Tidal and now Apple Music are also options for lossless or extremely high-quality music.

Perhaps you have a mechanical-keyboard type of dad? If so, the Tofu65 is a solid entry into the world of custom keyboards. In fact, one of the keyboard enthusiasts on staff has informed me that the combination of the polycarbonate body with the brass plate (for extra weight), the optional lube service, and the foam dampeners really makes for a top-tier, low-noise mechanical keyboard. Did we mention that you can program the lights?

The PlayStation 5 is one of the ugliest pieces of consumer technology I have ever seen in my life. Still, Sony does have a ton of great exclusives, so there will be dads that have no choice but to buy Sony’s weird robot butt-crack of a game console. Ease the pain with a pair of Dbrand’s “Dark Plates” for the PS5.

Got a creative dad that's still struggling with just a keyboard and mouse? As Ray says in his review, Monogram’s modular control surfaces are pricey, but you can add a ton of functionality to a number of workflows with them, like photo and video editing, DAW control, and more.

You certainly don’t have to be a dad to enjoy Microsoft’s 2020 Flight Simulator. But is turning an entire room in your home into a perfect replica of a Cessna 172 a dad thing to do? It absolutely is. Here’s to you, sky captains.