The marketing engine gets going every year with, “This new driver will go this many yards farther,” and “These new irons will be so many times straighter.”
So how can you sort through all of that and decide if this year’s tech is really worth buying new golf clubs?
That exact question was posed by GOLF multimedia wiz Darren Riehl to our gear team, and co-hosts Johnny Wunder and Jake Morrow tackled it on this week’s episode of GOLF’s Fully Equipped.
Basically, as Wunder puts it, you know when every OEM has incredible products and 2026 might be one of those years.
“This year is one of those years that you can just go, do you know what? I’m gonna spend a couple bucks this year, because there’s some really good stuff, because you kind of can’t go wrong anywhere this year,” he said. “And I’ve experienced in the past, like this year, I always feel like everybody has bangers all the time. Some better than others, but this year, I feel like neck and neck is more of a true statement now than it’s ever been. And that’s for the smaller companies and the gargantuan ones.”
TaylorMade Qi4D Custom Driver
SHAPED FOR SPEED
The re-engineered head profile increases ball speed thanks to improved aerodynamics developed through advanced simulations.
FACE FOR DISTANCE
60x Carbon Twist Face™ is a technological cornerstone that provides weight savings, incredible ball speed and more consistency vs. a titanium face.
ADJUSTABLE PERFORMANCE
4° loft sleeve can be used to adjust loft, lie and face angle for optimized flight.
TOUR PROVEN TECHNOLOGIES
New and improved cut-through Speed Pocket™ protects ball speed and reduces spin on low-face strikes.
Advanced CAD modeling creates a design with a clean and powerful sound, a foundation of TaylorMade driver performance.
Multi-Material Construction allows engineers to strategically place mass in areas of the head where it maximizes performance, speed, and stability.
ALSO AVAILABLE AT: PGA Tour Superstore, TaylorMade
Morrow compared this year of driver releases to 2016, when TaylorMade had the M1 and M2 — the latter being Rory McIlroy’s favorite driver — Callaway was about to unveil the GBB Epic driver (the first to feature Jailbreak technology) — Titleist had the 915 line of drivers that Jordan Spieth used for years and Cobra had the King LTD used by Bryson DeChambeau.
“Part of what made that year so successful for everybody was they were all doing their own thing,” Morrow said. “And depending on the kind of player that you were, you fit into a brand better.”
He said there’s a difference now, because each OEM offers three or four different driver models, as opposed to one or two then, but he expects many to fit into the same brand that they played 10 years ago.
“I think if you were an Epic or an Epic Flash player, I think you’re going to really like the new Callaway stuff,” Morrow added. “I think if you are an M2 person, you’re going to really like the Qi4D stuff. And the same thing, I think, and Cobra actually said this to us too, the new lineup is the closest they’ve gotten in internal and tour hype to LTD and then F9.”