My phone says I have 41,712 photos. I checked the number last week because my editor asked me to, and I’ve been mildly uncomfortable about it ever since. Roughly forty thousand of those pictures will never be seen again by anyone — not by me, not by my family, not even by the algorithm that …
I did something embarrassing last week: I priced a 2TB NVMe drive I’ve been recommending for two years and briefly assumed the retailer had been hacked. The kit that sat at $99 through most of 2023 now carries a sticker north of $350. My first instinct was to wait it out. Then a member of …
The water heater in my basement is seventeen years old, which means it has been living on borrowed time for at least two of them. Every technician who has looked at it says the same thing: “That thing could go tomorrow, or it could go in five years.” What none of them could tell me …
The storm itself was unremarkable. Forty minutes of wind, a lot of rain, done by nine. What followed was fourteen hours without power — long enough to learn that my house, which I’d spent three years making smarter, had quietly become the dumbest thing on the block the moment the grid blinked off. Here’s what …
On the first of September, in Paris, James Dyson stood on a stage and revealed a toothbrush. Not a vacuum, not a fan, not a hair tool — a toothbrush with a camera in its head, a water jet in its handle, and a $499.99 price tag. The CameraJet is the company’s first swing at …
I watched Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” event Wednesday night with three browser windows open, two colleagues on Slack, and a legal pad I filled with conflicting product names. That last part is the story nobody at Apple will admit: the biggest hardware launch in years shipped with a communications problem. The company that famously obsesses …
The most common question I’ve fielded in twenty-five years of this job has nothing to do with laptops, phones, or whatever chip NVIDIA announced on Tuesday. It’s some version of “what TV should I buy?” — usually from a friend, a neighbor, or a reader whose patience died three smart-TV interfaces ago. And for most …
It started with an expired credit card. A friend on my testing team — the person who handles shipping labels and invoice copies around here — logged a support ticket that read like a ransom note: her printer refused to print, and the screen kept directing her to a billing portal. Nothing was broken. The …
The Audio Foundation of Focus: Building Your Sound Environment for Deep Work After twenty-five years of testing gear and writing about technology, I’ve learned that the most overlooked aspect of productivity isn’t your processor speed or your monitor resolution—it’s your audio environment. The difference between a scattered, distracted work session and deep, sustained focus often …
I’ve spent the last six months slowly rewiring my house. Not the electrical panel — though that’s a project for another day — but the invisible layer of connectivity that makes a modern home actually feel modern. WiFi that reaches every corner. Cameras that don’t require a $15/month subscription to be useful. Lights that turn …