consumer technology
8 articles
Q: What exactly is a GaN charger, and why is it smaller than the brick that came with my laptop?
A: GaN stands for gallium nitride, a semiconductor material used inside the charger instead of traditio… Read more
There is a growing pattern in consumer technology that deserves more scrutiny: buying a device is no longer the same as buying all of it. A doorbell may record video only if you pay monthly. A printer may refuse to scan … Read more
Most people ignore their phone's photo storage until the phone is full, usually at the worst possible moment. The easy fix pushed at that point is a monthly cloud subscription, but a portable external drive solves the sa… Read more
Walk through the laptop aisle of any electronics store and you will run into the same pitch: this machine has an NPU, that one has more TOPS, and the one on the end is an AI PC. The marketing has arrived well ahead of a … Read more
A new router ships with the same factory settings as thousands of others, which makes setup easy and your network easy to attack. Before you connect anything important, log into the admin panel — usually at 192.168.0.1 o… Read more
For the past few years, most consumer AI features worked the same way: you tapped a button, your request traveled to a data center, and an answer came back a second or two later. That model is now being challenged by a d… Read more
USB-C has become the default connector for phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, game controllers, and just about anything else with a battery inside. The promise is appealing: one cable shape for your entire life. The r… Read more
If you have ever watched your phone climb from 5 percent to 50 percent in twenty minutes and then take another forty to reach 100, you have seen one of the most deliberate engineering decisions in consumer electronics. I… Read more