Hardware

Nobody starts a hardware company with the express goal of destroying as much of the planet as they possibly can. Walking around the startup hall at CES, however, I noticed that — with a few notable exceptions — there was painfully little attention given to material choice, repairability, ease o

It there's one thing Nothing's first phone excelled at, it was bringing a bit of excitement to the staid world of smartphones. Shipments have been stagnating, slowing and contracting for the past several years, and are now at some of their lowest numbers in roughly a decade. The Phone (1) w

Apple has been lauded for a deliberate hiring approach that saved the company from the mass layoffs conducted by top competitors like Alphabet and Amazon. But not even the iPhone maker is immune from economic headwinds. In quarterly earnings posted today, the company notched its first year-over-ye

Over the past few years, we’ve spoken with hundreds of hardware startups, and there’s one phrase that has been showing up in almost every interview: “supply chains.” They were always important for people shipping physical products, of course, but the pandemic and the interna

Maybe nothing ever truly dies in Apple land. The Mac Pro went on an indefinite hiatus as the hardware design team regrouped and reengineered. MagSafe appeared to be gone forever, only to be reborn in altered form on MacBooks of recent vintage. Various models and sizes across different lines have be

The new MacBook Pros are a lot of things, but cheap isn't one. Performance, it seems, comes at a price. It's certainly a philosophy Samsung has long subscribed to with its highest-end products. Take the group of laptops it announced alongside the Galaxy S23 at today's Unpacked event. Th

Social media company and Snapchat maker Snap has for years defined itself as a “camera company,” despite its failures to turn its photo-and-video recording glasses known as Spectacles into a mass-market product and, more recently, its decision to kill off its camera-equipped drone. But

Everyone's talking about unplugging these days — climbing a mountain, trekking through the forest, finding your way to a truly secluded beach. Central to that concept is turning off notifications, uninstalling work apps or even — if you’re feeling especially brave — leav

Laptops and tablets are getting better and more powerful by the day but our fingers aren’t getting any more precise, and for extended writing and work, it’s still more helpful to have a keyboard and a larger screen at hand. These types of products have been around for at least a decade,

Welcome to the dark night of the smart speaker. A few years back, the category felt inevitable — and, frankly, why not? We've smartened our phones and watches. Why shouldn't our homes be the next step? For decades, many looked longingly at home automation. Smart blinds that opened wit

Before they were robots, they were “androids” or “automatons.” The word “robot” is commonly accepted as having arrived in English through — of all places — a Czech play. “R.U.R.” made its public debut in Prague 102 years ago, yesterday. It would arrive in

Nobody is going to accuse Angry Miao of making boring keyboards (or earbuds). The company’s previous releases, the CYBERBOARD, Am Hatsu and Am AFA, are as overengineered as they are unique. When the company first started teasing its new 60% board, it almost looked too conventional to be an An

One of the most remarkable things about construction robotics is the sheer breadth of tasks that can potentially be automated. As I've noted before, the entire category is a prime target for robotics startups, given that it fills all of the big Ds of automation — dull, dirty and (quite of

Amazon made headlines this month when the company began to work through its long-rumored 18,000 job cuts. Going, too, are a number of products and strategies as the company right-sizes for the current state of the economy, the market's attitude to tech stocks and the current landscape as dictat