Every tech writer has a drawer of shame. Mine holds four laptops that were “too slow to use, too good to toss.” Last month my nephew needed a machine for his first semester of computer science, and instead of pointing him at a $900 new laptop in the middle of the worst memory pricing cycle …
My 2015 Accord has a CD player. It has a 3.5mm auxiliary jack that I actually used to use. And until six months ago, the most advanced piece of technology in the center stack was a Bluetooth module so bad that calls sounded like I was broadcasting from inside a tin can at the bottom …
I’ve been wearing a smart ring on my finger for the better part of four months. Not the same one — four different ones, rotating weekly, charging constantly, and explaining to my wife why there are tiny titanium circles scattered across every flat surface in my office. The reason was simple: I wanted to know …
I remember the exact moment I realized my laptop had betrayed me. It was a Tuesday morning in a coworking space in Austin, and I needed to do three simple things: connect to the projector for a client demo, plug into wired ethernet because the Wi-Fi was drowning in a sea of video calls, and …
I’ve been staring at the same leaked CAD renders for three weeks. My team has been pulling specs from FCC filings, parsing accidental Amazon listings, and cross-referencing Telegram leak channels until our eyes blurred. And now, with six days left before Google’s Made by Google event on August 12, the picture is finally clear enough …
I’ll start with a confession. When the first Ember Mug landed on my desk back in 2019, I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly pulled a muscle. A hundred-plus dollars for a coffee cup with a battery in it? A mug that pairs with your phone? I wrote it off as the kind of …
I’ve been testing AI hardware for years — NPUs, GPUs, dedicated accelerators, the works. But the most surprising AI upgrade I’ve made in the last six months didn’t involve a new computer at all. It came from three devices sitting on my desk that I hadn’t thought about in years: my webcam, my headset, and …
I’ve been testing gadgets professionally for over 25 years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about health tech, it’s this: the number most people obsess over — total body weight — is the least interesting thing your body can tell you. I learned that lesson the hard way last spring, when I started training …
I’ve been testing smartwatches since the original Pebble convinced a million people that a wrist computer was a reasonable thing to want. In the years since, I’ve worn everything from a $1,800 Apple Watch Ultra to a $12 no-name fitness band that arrived in a box with no English text whatsoever. After months of testing …
We’ve all been there. You’re three hours into a six-hour layover, you’ve finally found the one outlet that actually works in the entire terminal — and someone’s already camped in front of it with a family-size pizza and a tablet playing cartoons at full volume. Your laptop battery icon has gone from comforting green to …