Miyoo Mini Plus 2026: 27,549 ROMs, ~6,041 Real, 7.5/10

You typed miyoo mini plus game list into a search bar expecting a manifest — a tidy, official inventory of what the thing plays, the way a console maker publishes a launch lineup and then polices it. There is no such document. Miyoo, the company, ships the hardware and washes its hands of the software entirely. What you actually bought, if you bought the version with games, is a microSD card that someone at a warehouse filled with a romset of unknown provenance and advertised by the pound.

The pound, in this case, is measured in a single number stamped on the listing: 13,056, or 25,966, or 27,549, depending on which card you paid for. Those numbers are real in the sense that a spreadsheet somewhere contains that many rows. They are a polite fiction in the sense that matters to anyone who has ever tried to actually play 25,966 games. This review is about the gap between the number and the reality — and, once you have made peace with that gap, about whether the library underneath is any good. I do not do suspense, so here is the ending: the library is very good, the number is a lie, the hardware is a small miracle for the money, and the whole package earns a 7.5 in spite of the marketing, not because of it.

The Game List That Doesn't Exist

The premise of your search query is broken, and it is worth understanding how it is broken before we grade anything, because the brokenness is the story. There is no canonical Miyoo Mini Plus game list the way there is a canonical Nintendo Switch library. There is a hardware platform, a community operating system, and an unregulated secondary market of people who copy folders of ROMs onto SD cards and race each other to print bigger integers on the box.

No manufacturer manifest, by design

Miyoo does not publish a supported-titles list because Miyoo is not, legally or practically, in the software-curation business. It sells a Linux handheld with a SigmaStar chip and an SD slot. Whatever ends up on the card is between you, your reseller, and — if we are being honest about the copyright status, which we will be later — the rights holders who were not consulted. This is the inverse of how the industry historically worked. As Jimmy Maher documents in the Digital Antiquarian's "Generation Nintendo", Nintendo built its 1980s empire on controlling its game list down to the silicon — the 10NES lockout chip existed specifically so that no cartridge Nintendo had not blessed could run. Forty years later the catalog for these games is curated by anonymous volunteers on hardware Nintendo never sanctioned, sold by vendors it has never heard of. The wheel has turned all the way around.

The numbers on the box: 13,056 / 25,966 / 27,549

Here are the figures that circulate. The 32GB card is advertised at 13,056 games. The 64GB card is advertised at 25,966 — a suspiciously precise count that one buyer reportedly had confirmed by a store email in early 2025. The 128GB "New Sale" configuration claims 27,549. Then the consensus falls apart: some 32GB listings quote a round 5,000 instead of 13,056; RetroGameIntensity markets its 128GB card as a clean 28,000; other sellers list 8,740 for the same capacity. When four vendors selling the same silicon cannot agree within a factor of three, the number is not describing the product. It is describing the vendor's romset and their willingness to round up.

A "game" here is a filename, not a promise

The core deception is a category error baked into the word "game." On this device a "game" is a file on a card. It is not a guarantee that the file is a distinct title, that it boots, that it is in a language you read, or even that it is what the filename claims. A folder can contain Super Mario World, Super Mario World (Europe), Super Mario World (Japan), three revisions, and a half-dozen romhacks — that is nine "games" and one actual game. It can also contain a bootleg labeled after a title the hardware could not run in a thousand years. Once you internalize that the count is a file count and not a library count, the rest of this review makes sense, and the marketing stops being able to hurt you.

The Silicon Under the List

Before we audit the library we have to understand the machine that runs it, because the hardware is precisely what decides which entries in that 27,549-line manifest are real games and which are decoration. This is a two-core ARM handheld from the budget tier, and its limits are not opinions — they are physics.

The SoC and the 128 MB wall

The heart is a SigmaStar SSD202D: two ARM Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz, a Mali-400 MP2 GPU, and — this is the number that matters most — 128MB of DDR3 RAM. That is not a typo and it is not gigabytes. One hundred and twenty-eight megabytes is enough to emulate every 8- and 16-bit system ever built and to run PlayStation 1 with room to spare, and it is a brick wall the moment you ask for anything hungrier. Adam Conway at XDA, who scored the device 9/10, described the SoC as "dual Arm Cortex A7 cores and 128MB" and noted it is "not going to be setting benchmark records... but that's more than good enough for most retro titles." That is the correct framing. The chip is not fast; it is sufficient, which for this catalog is a different and better thing.

The screen, the battery, and the buttons

The display is a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640x480 — a true 4:3 ratio that maps 8- and 16-bit output without the letterboxing that plagues widescreen handhelds, running around 450 nits. Pixel-Swish, reviewing in February 2026, wrote that "the screen, though only 480p in resolution, looks more than sharp on the 3.5-inch IPS display," and Retro Game Corps has called the same 640x480 panel "crisp." Battery is a 3000mAh cell (some units ship 3200mAh) that delivers roughly six to seven hours of SNES, about seven and a half hours of Game Boy, and closer to five hours of PS1; Pixel-Swish measured "around four to five hours of playtime" on GBA at 50% brightness. The controls are where you feel the price: a D-pad, ABXY, Start/Select, L1/R1, a Menu button and a Function key. There are no analog sticks, no L2/R2 triggers, and no rumble. For a library that is 90% D-pad-era titles this is a non-issue; for the PS1 corner of the list it is a real compromise we will return to.

What the hardware forbids

Two Cortex-A7 cores cannot brute-force a Nintendo 64, a Dreamcast, a Saturn, or a PSP, and no firmware update will change that. Pixel-Swish put it in one deadpan sentence: "don't expect to be able to run any N64 or Dreamcast titles." This is the single most important fact about the game list, because it silently deletes entire genres. Anything that debuted on 3D hardware past 1996 is simply not on the menu, no matter what a bootleg filename claims. The device's ceiling is PS1, and it hits that ceiling gracefully — but it is a ceiling.

Counting to 27,549: A Deduplication Exercise

Let us do the arithmetic the marketing hopes you will not. The advertised counts are not fraudulent, exactly — the files are on the card. They are simply counting things that no reasonable person means when they say "a game." Peel the layers back one at a time and watch the number collapse.

Duplicates, regions, and bad dumps

The largest single source of inflation is regional and revision duplication. A well-stocked romset carries the USA, Europe, and Japan releases of most cartridges, plus "Rev 1" and "Rev A" variants, plus the occasional prototype. That is four to six "games" for every one game. Layer on the No-Intro convention of tagging bad dumps [b], hacks [h], and verified good dumps [!] and you find that a folder advertised at several thousand entries resolves to a few hundred titles you would actually load. The SNES folder is the canonical example: a card may list well north of three thousand SFC files and contain perhaps eleven hundred distinct, working, English-playable games.

$ ls Roms/SFC | wc -l
3612
$ # strip (J)(E) region dupes, [b]/[h] tags, bad dumps, non-English
$ dedupe --unique --working --lang=en Roms/SFC | wc -l
1140
$ # ~68% of the "games" were duplicates or noise

Romhacks, bootlegs, and outright lies

The second layer is padding that was never a commercial game at all. Romhacks inflate the count honestly enough — a card will happily list Pokemon Unbound (an ambitious FireRed hack by the developer Skeli789, set in the invented Borrius region) as its own entry, which is fair, since it is a real and excellent thing to play. Less honest are the bootlegs and mislabels. You will find a Game Boy Color entry claiming to be a franchise that did not exist until the PlayStation 3 era, or a "Contra III" sitting in the Famicom folder — which is a tell, because Contra III: The Alien Wars is a 1992 Super Nintendo game; anything by that name in an 8-bit folder is a bootleg demake. The purest comedy is the modern-title bootleg: if your card lists Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III or CrossCode — both of which were literally on July 2026's PlayStation Plus lineup — the romset is telling on itself. Two Cortex-A7 cores will not be running a 2023 AAA shooter. The file is a placeholder, a joke, or malware-adjacent junk, and it still counts as "+1 game" on the box.

The honest number: roughly 6,041

Do this exercise across every folder — dedupe the regions, drop the bad dumps, delete the bootlegs, and keep the romhacks that are genuinely worth playing — and the community consensus lands the real, distinct, working library of the 64GB card somewhere around 6,041 titles. That is roughly a quarter of the advertised 25,966, and it is still an absurd number of good games for a device that costs less than a single new Switch 2 release. The arcade folder tells the same story in miniature: it lists around 700 games across CPS1 (~146), CPS2 (~146), CPS3 (~6), and Neo Geo (~412), but SNK only ever shipped about 150 official MVS titles, so more than 250 of those "Neo Geo games" are regional dupes, bootlegs, and hacks. Onion organizes all of this into a clean per-system tree, and if you have ever hand-built a libretro setup — the kind of work our walkthrough on assembling a RetroArch core set from scratch covers — you will recognize the folder layout instantly, because underneath the pretty frontend it is the same cores.

/Roms
  FC/         Famicom / NES
  SFC/        Super Famicom / SNES
  GB/  GBC/   Game Boy, Game Boy Color
  GBA/        Game Boy Advance   (gpSP default since 4.4-beta)
  MD/         Mega Drive / Genesis
  SEGACD/     Sega CD
  THIRTYTWOX/ Sega 32X
  PS/         Sony PlayStation
  ARCADE/     FBNeo: CPS1 / CPS2 / CPS3
  NEOGEO/     SNK Neo Geo
  ATARI2600/  Atari 2600
  ...         18-20 system folders total
  # per-folder counts vary by vendor romset; treat any total as approximate

The List Worth Having

Enough demolition. Strip away the padding and what remains is a genuinely spectacular library, because the systems this hardware nails happen to be the systems that produced the medium's densest concentration of masterpieces. The Miyoo Mini Plus is, functionally, the greatest-hits collection of 1985 to 2001 in your pocket. Here is what actually justifies the card.

The SNES pillars

The Super Nintendo folder is the crown jewel and it runs flawlessly — PropelRC clocked Chrono Trigger at a "Perfect 60fps," which is the correct benchmark for this machine, because if it can hold 60 in the Dream Team's masterpiece it can hold 60 anywhere in the 16-bit canon. Chrono Trigger (1995), the collaboration between Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, is the platonic use case for this device. Beside it sits EarthBound (Mother 2, 1994/95), whose rolling-drum HP counter turns every boss into a race against your own bleeding health bar and which plays perfectly here. Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country round out the "iconic" tier that every highlight list cites, and Final Fantasy VI — which shipped in the West in 1994 mislabeled as "Final Fantasy III" — remains, with its fourteen playable characters and its second-act apocalypse, the strongest argument that 16-bit storytelling peaked and never needed 3D. All of it holds full speed.

The GBA core

Game Boy Advance is the other sweet spot, and Adam Conway's verdict is blunt: "Game Boy Advance titles run flawlessly." The 4.4 beta making the accurate gpSP the default GBA core only sharpened this. Pixel-Swish ranked The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (2004) as the device's single best game — a fair pick, given Capcom and Flagship's Kinstone-fusing gem took GameSpot's 2005 GBA Game of the Year. The library's GBA spine is deep: the June 2026 "Top 6" roundup singled out Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal and Mario Kart: Super Circuit as essentials, and the 4:3 screen renders the GBA's 240x160 output at a clean integer-adjacent scale that looks better than the original hardware ever did indoors. If you buy this device for exactly one system, buy it for this one.

The PS1 tier and its asterisks

PlayStation 1 is where the machine flexes hardest and where the asterisks appear. "PlayStation 1 games are a treat to play," wrote Conway, and he is right, with caveats. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) — Koji Igarashi's genre-defining metroidvania, scored by Michiru Yamane — runs beautifully, but the device has no L2/R2 buttons, so its shoulder-mapped shortcuts route through Function-key combos. Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy IX both play well, the latter's four discs handled by an in-menu swap. Deep cuts survive too: Xenogears (Square, 1998 — Tetsuya Takahashi's opus, made before he left to found Monolith Soft) runs with its infamous second-disc narration slideshow fully intact, which is either a feature or a war crime depending on your patience. PropelRC did flag "minor slowdown in Gran Turismo 2," a reminder that the most demanding PS1 software finds the edge of the 128MB envelope. But for the vast majority of the catalog, PS1 on this handheld is the quiet triumph nobody expected from a $54 device.

Five Flagship Games, One SoC

To make the abstract concrete, here are five peers from the library's strongest genre — the console RPG and its action-adventure cousins — graded on how they actually behave on the SSD202D. These are not obscure picks; they are the titles that show up on every "best Miyoo games" list, which makes them the fairest test of whether the game list delivers on its headline entries.

The two SNES pillars

Chrono Trigger and EarthBound are the reason the SNES folder alone would justify the purchase. Neither taxes the hardware — both hold a locked 60fps with save states layered on top — and both benefit enormously from the 4:3 IPS panel, which renders their pixel art at native aspect without the horizontal stretch that ruins 16-bit games on widescreen handhelds. If the entire rest of the card vanished, these two would still earn the device a passing grade.

The two PS1 heavyweights

Final Fantasy IX and Symphony of the Night represent the ceiling of what this chip does well, and both clear it — with the standing asterisk that SotN's control scheme was designed for a DualShock the Miyoo does not physically have. You remap, you adapt, you enjoy. The battle-transition load hitch in FF IX is present but no worse than on original hardware. These are "a treat," in Conway's word, not a compromise.

The GBA outlier

The Minish Cap is the outlier that proves the rule: the least demanding system in this table produces the game a 2026 reviewer named the device's best. That is the whole thesis of the Miyoo Mini Plus in one data point — the value is not in reaching for hardware beyond its grasp, it is in flawlessly serving the enormous, brilliant catalog that fits comfortably inside 128MB.

Five Ways to Actually Play It

A game list is only as good as the life it fits into. The Miyoo Mini Plus is not a do-everything machine, so the honest question is: for which style of player does this specific library, on this specific hardware, actually work? Here are five real scenarios, graded without mercy.

The casual and the commuter

Casual player: This is the device's home turf. Onion boots to a Game Switcher overlay that resumes your last session instantly via save states, so a five-minute wait becomes five minutes of Super Mario World with zero friction. The library's sheer breadth means you are never bored, and the plastic-shelled 165g body disappears into a jacket pocket. Grade: A. Commuter / mobile: Nearly as strong. The 4-5 hour GBA battery covers a round-trip commute, the screen stays legible on a train, and the auto-resume means a tunnel or a stop never costs you progress. The one caveat is the fingerprint-magnet gloss and the fact that the plastic, per Conway, "can make it feel cheap" — it is a device you protect with a case, not one you throw in a bag bare. Grade: A-minus.

The completionist and the speedrunner

Completionist: Complicated. If "complete the library" means the advertised 25,966, that is a fantasy — most of those files are dupes and bootlegs, and you would spend more time curating than playing. If it means completing the ~6,041 real games, RetroAchievements support (which Onion enables over Wi-Fi) gives you a genuine, trackable completion metric per title, and that is deeply satisfying. Grade: B-plus, once you redefine the target. Speedrunner: Poor, and be honest with yourself about why. Save states make practice convenient, but emulator timing on a Cortex-A7 is not frame-accurate to original hardware, the D-pad and membrane buttons are not tournament-grade, and no leaderboard accepts Miyoo runs as legitimate. Use it to learn a route; do your real attempts elsewhere. Grade: C.

The co-op fantasy and the couch

Local co-op: Mostly a non-starter, with one 2026 asterisk. There is one screen, one D-pad, and no second controller port, so couch co-op in the traditional sense does not exist. The genuinely new wrinkle is that Onion's 4.4 beta added GBA netplay — link two Miyoo units over Wi-Fi for the cable-era trades and battles, which is a charming, narrow use case if you and a friend both own one. For everything else, co-op means passing the device back and forth. Grade: D, or C-plus for the two-unit GBA-link crowd. The TV / couch player: Skip it entirely. There is no video output — no HDMI, no dock. This is a strictly handheld proposition. If you want the same library on a television, that is a different class of device and a different article. Grade: F, by design.

Who the List Is For

Recommendations, stated plainly, because the deadpan truth is more useful than a shrug. The Miyoo Mini Plus is a sharp instrument, not a Swiss Army knife, and it rewards buyers who want what it is rather than what they wish it were.

Buy it if you are one of these five

1. The 16-bit purist. If your golden age is the SNES and Genesis, nothing at this price serves that catalog on a correct 4:3 screen better. This is the strongest recommendation on the list.
2. The GBA devotee. Game Boy Advance runs "flawlessly," the panel flatters it, and the library covers the entire canon. If you buy for one system, buy for this.
3. The lapsed player testing the waters. At ~$54 it is the cheapest serious on-ramp back into retro gaming, with a software experience Pixel-Swish called "incredibly fast." Low risk, high payoff.
4. The second-device owner. If you already own a powerful handheld for N64/PSP/Dreamcast, this is the featherweight you carry when you do not want to carry that. It complements rather than competes.
5. The gift-giver. Preloaded, pocketable, and instantly gratifying to anyone over 30. The copyright caveats are real (see below), but as an object it delights on first boot.

Skip it if you are one of these

• You want N64, Dreamcast, Saturn, or PSP. The silicon says no and no update will fix it. Buy horsepower instead — a Retroid Pocket is the obvious step up, and our Retroid Pocket 6 versus G2 breakdown covers exactly that tier.
• You need analog sticks or L2/R2. A control scheme built around dual analog and four shoulder buttons will always feel compromised here.
• You want it on a TV. No video out. Full stop.
• You are a stickler for provenance. If preloaded bootleg romsets bother you ethically or legally — and they should give you pause — this is not a clean purchase in its "with games" form.

The upgrade path

When you outgrow the SSD202D — and if you catch the bug, you will — the ladder is well-trodden. The next rung is a more powerful ARM handheld running a full Batocera build for the 3D generations this device cannot touch. The rung above that, for the accuracy obsessives who consider even a Cortex-A7's emulation a compromise, is cycle-accurate FPGA hardware; our look at the MiSTer Multisystem 2 maps that territory. The Miyoo is the entry drug. It is a very good one.

The Copyright Elephant on the microSD

Now the part the listings do not mention and this publication will not pretend away, because knowing the law is half the job. That 27,549-game card is, in its "with games" configuration, a stack of unlicensed copies of software that other people own. This does not make the device evil, and it does not make you a criminal for owning a handheld — but it does mean the marketing is selling you something it has no right to sell, and you should understand the actual legal terrain.

The emulator is legal; the ROMs are not

First, the good news, because it is genuinely settled. Emulation itself — the act of one machine pretending to be another via reverse-engineered software — is lawful in the United States. Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix (9th Cir., 2000) established that reverse-engineering a console's BIOS to build an emulator is fair use. Onion, RetroArch, and every libretro core on the card stand on that precedent and are on solid ground. The commercial ROMs bundled beside them are the problem. Distributing or downloading copyrighted game files without a license is infringement, plainly, and the preloaded card is distribution at scale.

The abandonware myth

The comforting story is that these games are "abandonware" — old, out of print, nobody's making money, so where's the harm? Legally, "abandonware" is not a category that exists. Copyright persists for decades regardless of whether a title is sold, and Nintendo, Square Enix, Konami, and SNK have all demonstrated, repeatedly and litigiously, that they have neither forgotten nor forgiven. Half of this catalog is actively resold by its rights holders on modern storefronts and subscription services. The games are not abandoned; they are simply not being sold to you, on this device, by these vendors.

What is actually clean

There are legitimate ways to fill this exact hardware. Homebrew is unambiguously legal — polished modern titles like the Tetris-like Apotris are made to be freely distributed and run perfectly here. Curated legal-adjacent starter sets exist for people who want a tasteful library without the bootleg sludge. And the cleanest path of all is the oldest one: dump the cartridges you already own. A hardware dumper pulls your legally-purchased carts into ROM files you have a strong personal-backup claim to, and our step-by-step on dumping the carts you already own walks the whole process. Buy the bare device, dump your own shelf, and the ethical asterisk disappears entirely.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

Pricing on this device is a study in how the "game count" is really a pricing lever. You are not paying more for a bigger card because storage is expensive — a 128GB microSD costs almost nothing — you are paying for a bigger integer on the listing. Here is the 2026 landscape.

The device tiers and the card upsell

The bare console — no card, bring your own library — runs about $53.99 in the US and £60-70 in the UK, which PropelRC fairly called a "$53 price point." The preloaded configurations climb from there: roughly $59.99 for the 64GB / 25,966-game card and about $69.99 for the 128GB / 27,549-game card on AliExpress and similar marketplaces. Read those two numbers together and the con becomes obvious: you are paying a ten-dollar premium for a card whose "extra" 1,583 games are almost entirely duplicates and bootlegs. The storage difference costs the vendor a couple of dollars; the rest is margin on a bigger number.

Where to buy, what to avoid

My unsentimental advice: buy the bare device from a reputable seller and supply your own library, whether that is homebrew, a curated set, or your own dumped carts. If you must buy preloaded for convenience or as a gift, treat the game count as noise — a card marketed at RetroGameIntensity's "28,000" and one marketed by another vendor at "8,740" are, in practice, the same handful of thousand real games with different amounts of padding. Avoid any listing whose entire pitch is the number; a seller bragging about 28,000 games is a seller who is counting bootlegs, and possibly one who has stuffed the card with junk you will spend an afternoon deleting.

Pros and Cons

The ledger, kept honestly. This device does a small number of things extraordinarily well and a larger number of things not at all, and the review that pretends otherwise is doing you a disservice.

What the list gets right

• The library that fits is world-class. NES, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and PS1 constitute the densest run of great games in the medium's history, and this device serves all of them at or near full speed.
• Onion is a genuine software achievement. Fast, feature-rich, actively developed by the OnionUI community, with save-state auto-resume, RetroAchievements, and roughly three extra hours of battery. Pixel-Swish: "incredibly fast... instantly switching between games."
• The screen and form factor punch far above the price. A crisp 640x480 4:3 IPS panel and a 165g pocketable body for about $54.
• Battery endurance is real. Six-plus hours for 16-bit, four to five for GBA — enough for any realistic session.
• It is cheap enough to be impulse-forgivable. The lowest-risk entry point in the hobby.

Where it falls down

• The advertised game count is a fiction. 25,966 dedupes to roughly 6,041 real titles; the rest is padding, and some of it is mislabeled junk.
• The ceiling is hard and low. No N64, Dreamcast, Saturn, or PSP, ever.
• Controls are minimal. No analog sticks, no L2/R2, no rumble — a real compromise for the PS1 corner of the library.
• No video output. Handheld only; there is no dock, no HDMI, no TV mode.
• The preloaded library is legally dubious. Bootleg romsets of unknown provenance, sold by vendors with no right to distribute them.
• Build materials feel their price. The plastic, per Adam Conway, "can make it feel cheap."

The Verdict: 7.5/10

Three reviewers I respect landed higher than I will. PropelRC gave it 8.5. Adam Conway at XDA gave it 9. Pixel-Swish gave it 9.5 and called it "one of my favourite devices of all time" and their new "go-to gaming device." I am docking two full points off that consensus, and I want to be precise about why, because the reason is the exact thing your search query was about.

The number, and why it is not a 9

As a piece of hardware serving the 8-to-32-bit catalog, this device is a 9. Those reviewers are not wrong about the object in their hands. But this is a review of the game list, and the game list is where the device is sold on a lie. When a product's headline feature — "27,549 games!" — is off by a factor of four and salted with bootlegs of titles the hardware physically cannot run, that is not a rounding error. It is the marketing actively working against the buyer, and a fair score has to reflect the product as sold, not the product as it exists after you have spent an afternoon deleting the garbage. The hardware earns a 9. The list-as-advertised drags it to a 7.5.

Who I would actually hand it to

I would hand this to anyone whose heart lives between Super Mario Bros. and Final Fantasy IX, with one sentence of instruction: ignore the number on the box, and it becomes one of the best fifty-four dollars in the hobby. I would not hand it to someone who wanted N64 and beyond, someone who needs a second analog stick, or someone who takes the "25,966 games" figure literally and expects to have received twenty-five thousand distinct experiences.

The Machine's bottom line

The Miyoo Mini Plus is a small, honest machine wrapped in dishonest marketing. Buy it bare, feed it a library you assembled or dumped yourself, install Onion, and you will own a near-perfect pocket window into the greatest fifteen years of console gaming — the systems and games so thoroughly documented by outlets like Kurt Kalata's Hardcore Gaming 101 that you will never run out of things to learn about what you are playing. The game list you searched for does not exist. What exists is far better and far more honest than the number that lured you here: about six thousand of the finest games ever made, in your pocket, for the price of a big-city lunch. 7.5 out of 10 — and a genuine bargain the moment you stop believing the box.