Marcus Reed | Tech Reviews & AI Hardware

Category: Hardware

What a Hit-and-Run Taught Me About Dash Cams — and the Six Cameras That Earned My Windshields

It took a hit-and-run in a grocery store parking lot to finally teach me a lesson I should have learned a decade ago: the truth doesn’t set you free — footage does. Somebody backed into my wife’s car with a pickup, left a crease the size of a forearm, and drove off like nothing happened. …


The Best Pocket Camera of 2026 Is One America Can’t Officially Buy

The box arrived from a colleague in Hong Kong with a handwritten note that read, simply, “worth the paperwork.” Inside was the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P — the dual-lens flagship pocket gimbal camera that DJI launched worldwide on July 30, and that American buyers are officially not supposed to be able to purchase at all. …


Eleven Watts of AI: How a Mac mini Quietly Replaced My Home Server

The Subscription Math Problem: I Ran the Numbers on Every AI Voice Recorder

The Subscription Math Problem: I Ran the Numbers on Every AI Voice Recorder I’ve been testing AI hardware for twenty-five years, and I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself: brilliant hardware crippled by subscription fatigue. Smart rings that charge you monthly just to see your own data. Security cameras that hold your footage hostage. NAS …


The Mechanical Keyboard Buyer’s Guide I Wish I Had Three Years Ago

The 3 P.M. Eye Burn: What Actually Fixed My Screen Fatigue (and What Was a Waste of Money)

I’ve been staring at screens since dial-up was a personality trait. Twenty-five years of CRT monitors, laptop panels, phone displays, and — for the last few years — an AI workstation setup with enough glowing rectangles to light a small runway. Somewhere around last winter, I noticed the pattern I’d been ignoring for a decade: …


RAMageddon Made New Laptops Expensive. Your Old One Is the Bargain.

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 …


The Ninety-Nine Dollar Fix That Put Wireless CarPlay in My 2015 Honda

Four Smart Rings, Four Months, Zero Subscriptions: The Sleep Tracking Experiment That Changed My Nights

Six Months and Twelve Hubs Later: What I Actually Use to Turn One Port Into Everything

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 …