Three weeks ago I lined up five e-readers on the kitchen table and told you to sit tight — a refresh wave was landing in October, and buying anything before it landed was a mistake. The wave made landfall on the first of the month. Amazon rebuilt the entire reading line from the display stack …
There is a zippered binder in my closet that has survived four moves, two format funerals, and one very confident declaration in 2014 that I would “never need optical media again.” Three hundred discs, most of them bought used for pocket change, sitting quietly through the entire streaming era while I paid a monthly bill …
I have spent twenty-five years reviewing gadgets, and most of them sit still while you use them — phones, laptops, the occasional robot vacuum that panics under the couch. The category that broke that streak this year has two wheels, a battery hiding in the frame, and a motor that turned my eleven-mile commute into …
Five weeks ago I wrote an article about firing Alexa from my house and replacing her with a voice assistant that never phones home. I stand by every word of it. Which is why it’s deeply annoying that Amazon announced something this morning that made me open a new browser tab and start building an …
There’s a house three doors down from mine that glows on random Tuesdays in March. Not holiday lights — the owners took those down sometime during the second Obama administration and never bothered again. This is different: a low, warm wash along the roofline that comes on at dusk every single evening, like the house …
On November 1, the clocks fall back, and by the following week the sun is clocking out at 4:45 in the afternoon. If you work at a desk — and especially if you work at a desk at home — that means your brain starts its “evening” chemistry while you’re still answering emails. I’ve been …
There’s a silver box that has lived on a shelf in my office since 2017. It has outlasted four phones, three laptops, two smart speakers that arrived with great fanfare and died quiet subscription deaths, and roughly every gadget trend this industry has cycled through since. It’s a Yamaha R-S202 stereo receiver — the $150 …
There’s a drawer in my test lab that I’ve started calling the graveyard. Inside it: eleven pairs of wireless earbuds, every one of them dead for the same reason. Not crushed drivers, not frayed cables — dead batteries. Lithium cells that swelled, faded, or simply gave up after two or three years of daily charging …
At 1:47 on a Tuesday morning, my phone buzzed: the Ring Nebula was ready. Forty minutes of exposure, stacked one ten-second frame at a time by a telescope sitting on my patio — alone, untended, under a sky with maybe eleven visible stars and the orange smear of a streetlight two houses down. I padded …
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 …
For the better part of two years, my workday ended the same way: on my hands and knees under the desk, swapping one USB-C cable between my work laptop and my personal desktop, fishing the keyboard dongle out of the back of the monitor, and mashing the input button until the right machine showed up. …