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 …
Every so often a gadget lands on my bench that makes me wonder how I ever diagnosed anything without it. This month it was a palm-sized slab of aerospace-grade metal called the RISION Magic, a thermal camera that plugs into your phone’s USB-C port and turns it into a heat-mapping inspection tool. It arrived alongside …
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 …
I’ve been covering Google hardware launches since the original Pixel back in 2016, and I’ve learned something over those ten years: the company’s product events have a rhythm. Some years it’s all software and incremental bumps. Other years, like today, Google walks on stage and empties the entire parts bin. The Made by Google 2026 …
I spent six months with a pinched nerve in my lower back that I blamed on everything except my desk. My chair, my posture, my mattress, my running form — I rearranged my entire life trying to fix it. Then a physical therapist asked me one question that stopped me cold: “How much of your …
I have a confession. Over the past three years, my team and I have ordered roughly 140 desk gadgets from Amazon in the sub-$25 category. Most of them went back. Some went into a drawer of shame. A handful earned permanent spots on the desks in our test lab — and then migrated to my …
I’ll be honest — when my team first suggested I test a walking pad under my desk, I was skeptical. I’ve been writing about technology and productivity gear for over 25 years, and I’ve seen every “revolutionary workspace upgrade” come and go. Balance ball chairs. Under-desk ellipticals. Those bizarre standing desk converters that wobbled like …
I’ve been testing smart glasses since the original Google Glass made everyone nervous in 2013. Back then, the idea of a camera on your face felt like a dystopian episode of Black Mirror waiting to happen. The hardware was clunky, the battery died before lunch, and the social stigma was real enough that I stopped …
I’ve purchased exactly one monitor that I’ve kept longer than two years. Every other display I’ve bought — from the cheap 1080p panel that couldn’t hold brightness at the corners, to the 4K screen that looked gorgeous until I tried to game on it — has been replaced, returned, or relegated to secondary duty. If …
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the most interesting tech launches rarely happen at the big keynote events. They show up in plain boxes on my doorstep, usually in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, and they either earn a permanent spot on my desk or go right back in the box. …