A 1.9-kWh lithium-ion battery has been packaged within the car’s already beefy central tunnel, and additional cooling has been added to manage battery temperature. There’s also new software to harmonize all the components.
The hybrid adds 160 bhp for a total system power output of 645 bhp, which is almost identical to the amount produced by the thunderous ZO6. On top of that, the more overtly aero-oriented comp-inspired car also donates its wide-body look, the previously optional carbon-ceramic brakes are standard, and the tires epically chunky: 275/30ZR-20s at the front, 345/25ZR-21s at the rear. (Specially developed all-season Michelin Pilot Sports are available.)
Riotous Design
We’re not sure the car’s visuals are quite equal to the ambition being exercised elsewhere, though. The Corvette’s design trajectory since its 1953 launch is instructive of American automotive design overall, the ’60s C2 Sting Ray and ’80s C4 iterations culturally relative high-points. The latest car is an incoherent riot of competing angles and edges, undeniably dramatic and a crowd-pleaser to judge by the reaction it generates during WIRED’s drive. But still no oil painting.
Courtesy of Corvette
It’s unrepentantly expressive inside, too. It’s easy to get in and out of, the doors opening wide, the seats more luxurious in feel and amply cushioned compared to its more minimalist rivals. The steering wheel is one of those fashionably square items, its spars oddly downcast. But the driving position is good, the view ahead helped by fairly slender A pillars. A rear-view camera mirror helps ease reversing anxiety, usually a tricky thing in a mid-engined car.
Multi-configurable instrument dials lie straight ahead, there’s a crisp Head-Up Display, and an angled touchscreen handles the infotainment. Then there’s that swooping central tunnel, the leading edge of which houses the switchgear that operates the climate control and various other functions. Fearing total ergonomic catastrophe, it’s a surprise to discover that it all actually works well in practice.
Electric Stealth
Given that the Corvette’s V-8 is totemic, the E-Ray’s principal hybrid party trick is its “stealth” mode, which does what it says: enables the car to exit your street under near-silent electric-only propulsion. Its range in this mode is barely a few miles, but still, this is briefly an electric, front-drive Corvette. What a novelty.
On average, Proton dropped about 15 percent of my unprotected speed, but that number needs some context. In a location like Atlanta, Georgia, midday on a Thursday, I experienced a drop of only around 3 percent. In Columbus, Ohio, in the evening on a Friday, that grew to a 25 percent drop. This type of variation is normal. Providers like Surfshark and NordVPN see similar variations and have similar speed drops on average.
The difference for Proton is that I’ve yet to stumble upon a real stinker of a server. I’m sure they exist—with some 15,000+ servers, you’re bound to find one at some point—but I haven’t seen them after weeks of use. Windscribe and ExpressVPN are competitive with Proton on average, but they also have some locations where I saw anywhere from a 40 to 60 percent drop in speed. Those results aren’t indicative of the speed overall (you just swap to a different server), but Proton gets you there faster.
That edge is likely due to Proton’s VPN Accelerator. I’ll admit, it sounded like nonsense. In the Proton VPN app, you’ll find a toggle for VPN Accelerator, which boldly claims to increase speed by up to 400 percent; not likely. Despite the speedup, I don’t think VPN Accelerator will reach anywhere near that quoted number, at least in the vast majority of cases.
Still, there are some advantages, most notably, BBR. Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time, or BBR, is a congestion control algorithm developed by Google that’s been deployed on YouTube and Google itself. Rather than limiting packet transfer when packets are lost, as most congestion control algorithms work, BBR models the network and estimates available bandwidth. It doesn’t need to see lost packets to kick in.
Proton’s speeds aren’t entirely attributable to BBR, but I suspect it helps when connecting to servers over long distances. Connecting in the UK, for example, I saw an average speed loss of around 20 percent, which is much closer to my US results than it has any right to be.
You buy Lenovo’s new Legion Go 2 handheld for the screen. The performance is secondary to how beautiful recent 2D titles look on the 8.8-inch, 1200p OLED display. The Legion Go 2 is otherwise a big, meaty handheld for gamers with big, meaty claws. You’ll struggle to hold it above your head lying in bed unless you’re a professional power lifter; the controls won’t be your favorite; it’s as wonky as its predecessor. And it’s hard to argue anybody should spend well over $1,000 on a gaming handheld rather than just buying a full gaming laptop.
Despite all that, I can’t help but enjoy the hell out of it. My initial hours spent rolling my eyes at everything Lenovo failed to fix from its first iteration slowly morphed into the kind of appreciation that can only occur when a device starts to feel personal. It’s what happened when I downloaded Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades II to the device and had to hold back a gasp on a crowded plane for how gorgeous both games looked on Lenovo’s big, expensive, beautiful display.
Legion Go 2
It’s thick, heavy, and so damn pretty. It’s a shame it costs as much as it does.
Beautiful OLED display
144Hz refresh rate with VRR
New ergonomics
Low-wattage performance uplift
Annoying removable controls
FPS mode is pointless
Reflective display
Very expensive at $1,350
It’s the same feeling I get from Valve’s $550 Steam Deck OLED, which uses the same organic light-emitting diode screen technology to present deeper contrast and rich colors. Valve’s handheld maxes out at 800p on an older, custom AMD chipset. Even when you factor in performance and display size, the Steam Deck OLED is still a much, much better deal. My review unit version of the Legion Go 2 with the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, costs $1,350. I could literally buy two Steam Decks for this price (more if I opted for the LCD model). For Lenovo’s inflated price, I could run out and buy three $450 Nintendo Switch 2 handhelds. You could nab a version of the Legion Go 2 that starts at $1,100 for a version with a AMD Ryzen Z2, but judging by my tests that chip will land closer in power to handhelds that are three years old and cost much less.
It’s a ridiculous scenario that consumers are taking the brunt of Donald Trump’s obsession with import taxes, aka tariffs. And in that way, consumers are screwed no matter what. The upcoming Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, which is set to launch on Oct. 16 with the same Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, will set you back $1,000. The original Legion Go asked for $700 in 2023. The Asus ROG Ally X demanded $800 at launch last year. Both now retail at a higher price, likely due to tariffs. I would tell you to wait and buy a new handheld, but there’s no way to tell if prices might increase in coming months.
What drives me mad using the Legion Go 2 is how Lenovo held back from improving over the 2023 handheld. The revised version is far more ergonomic than the two-year-old device with its sharp corners. Both handhelds let you remove each controller and play with the screen separated, like the Nintendo Switch. The Switch 2 did away with rails and went for magnetic connections for each Joy-Con 2, which makes attaching and detaching the controllers a little easier. Lenovo’s old and new system still use a series of exposed pins you jam into a cavity on each side of the screen. You need two hands and a strong pitching arm to remove each controller with a down and out motion. Reattaching them can be just as annoying.
The controller uses Hall effect sticks that are much better at surviving stick drift, though they still feel a little too thin on my fingers compared to other handhelds I’ve used. The Legion Go 2 has slightly redesigned bumper buttons that make it easier to press and the same, large triggers. The $650 Legion Go S had a switch to enable instant triggers with less travel—better for first-person shooter games, but because of the removable controllers you’ll have to stick with the full range of motion.
The Switch 2’s big standout feature is its new mouse mode enabled just by putting the controller down on a table or your pant’s leg. Lenovo did it first on the Legion Go with its FPS mode. So is it any better now? No, absolutely not. You still need to remove the right controller and flick the “FPS” switch to turn on an optical mouse sensor. You then need to slot it into a base to hold it like an old-school flight stick, where the two side buttons act as the left and right mouse click. The DPI is still low enough you’ll struggle to get it working on anything but a desk. Even when you do, using a joystick and the FPS controller together necessitates changing the in-game controls. I tried it in both Cyberpunk 2077 and Borderlands 4, and it caused such havoc with both titles I was loathe to use the FPS mode again.
As for I/O, the Legion Go 2 has both a bottom and top USB-4 port. In theory, this could allow you to hook it up to an eGPU. More likely, it’s sole purpose is for charging or hooking up to a dock for HDMI passthrough. As much as Lenovo implies you’ll create a full “battle station” out of your device for instantaneous PC, you don’t want to hook it up to anything larger than a 1440p monitor, and only then for playing games most systems can run anyway.
Strangely enough, one of the best improvements over the last generation handheld is the Legion Go 2’s new soft carrying case. The old case was very protective, but it was also enormous. The new version is smaller and more squat than the default Steam Deck case, which makes lugging around the 8.8-inch handheld onto planes surprisingly easy. There’s two little hidey-holes for the FPS mode stand, but since you’ll never use it, you can stick anything else in there. Just don’t tell me what.
All the new ergonomics make it easier to hold, but not enough that it won’t feel heavy in your hands. You’ll find you’ll need a table or lap to rest your elbows on, or else you’ll use the built-in kickstand to prop it up on your desk. Either way you hold it, you’ll end up enjoying this handheld mostly for the display. As I said earlier, the 8.8-inch OLED display is sublime. It doesn’t have any higher screen resolution than the Legion Go’s 1,920 x 1,200, but it’s enough to make games pop.
For my hands, the Legion Go 2 is just large enough where I can grip it and access all the controls. Other users who are smaller in stature may not be so lucky. Ignore all those 11-inch handhelds out there. Near-9-inch devices are more than enough. The screen also sports a 144Hz refresh rate with VRR, or variable refresh rate. All those games that can hit above 100 fps (which, let’s be honest, will mostly be older or 2D titles), will look their peak on the Legion Go 2.
The screen feels bright enough indoors, but while Lenovo promises you’ll get 1,100 nits of HDR brightness, the screen is not great for using outdoors. It’s blinded by direct sunlight, and even sitting near a window you’ll see most details disappear. The screen is also very reflective. A matte coating would have dulled the display quality, but it’s at the risk of catching a glimpse of your girlfriend walking up behind you.
The AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU is purely iterative. If you’ve been watching like a hawk, hoping to devour the latest and fastest handheld chip, this isn’t it. The performance difference generation to generation is minimal. In some games, you could get 5 to 10 fps more at the highest TDP, or thermal design power, People who focus too hard on benchmarks will come away disappointed. If you care more about whether the system can play the latest AAA games, know that you’ll be able to achieve playable frame rates at the max 1200p resolution though only by dropping any hope of ray tracing for more-realistic lighting effects.
I’m fundamentally a gamer who refuses to drop the resolution of games for the sake of performance. I will lower graphics settings in a desperate attempt to eek out the minimum 30 fps. The Legion Go 2 can manage to take some AAA games into playable states at the max 35W of TDP (thermal design power) once the handheld’s engines are firing on all cylinders. TDP determines how much power is being sent to the processor, which will dictate overall performance. Borderlands 4 is one of those games notorious for running poorly on PC and consoles alike (you won’t find the game on Switch 2 in the coming days, either). I was able to get a stable sub-40 fps on the lowest possible graphics settings. I could achieve a little better frame rates in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Even at lower graphics settings, the game still looks and sounds great on the small screen.
Older games fare better. Control could average 40 to 49 fps at low settings with the handheld plugged in. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at 1200p and medium settings preset with AMD’s FSR upscaling saw an average of 44 fps, while at 1080p with the same settings it could hit 48 fps. In Baldur’s Gate III, I could average above 60 fps in the open areas of Act 1 and get between 45 and 55 fps in the city environments of Act III.
In 3DMark benchmarks, the Legion Go 2 hit a score of 3,305 and 24.48 average fps in Steel Nomad Lite tests. That’s 1,000 points better than the Legion Go S with its Ryzen Z2 Go chip running on Windows, but it’s only a little more than 300 points better than the Z1 Extreme on the Asus ROG Ally X from 2024. The new device hit 3,897 points in Time Spy tests, which again is barely more than 300 points better than an Ally X. It’s not much better than an MSI Claw 8 AI+, which uses a full Intel laptop chip. Simply put, the Legion Go 2 isn’t a huge step over the previous gen at the max wattage.
However, the device’s secret sauce is in how well it performs at lower wattages. Tests with multiple games at wattages as low as 34 fps still enabled relatively stable frame rates in games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider. While in Cyberpunk 2077 at full resolution and Steam Deck settings, the device gets 44 fps in benchmarks, at 15W it still managed to eek out nearly 30 fps. I don’t expect anybody will run high-end games on lower power. Instead, the best experience comes from games that are far less intensive. I could net well over 160 fps in Hades II on the “Balanced” performance setting. Hollow Knight: Silksong seems like it was built with the Legion Go 2 in mind with automatic settings to stay around 144Hz. These games play so gloriously on this handheld, I don’t want to play them on anything else. It’s a shame you have to spend $350 more than an Xbox Ally X jut for that pretty screen and higher refresh rate.
Windows still sucks for handhelds, but it could get better
On balanced power settings, I could game for around 2 hours and 40 minutes before the device was literally begging me to plug it in. In other tests where I was gaming at the full resolution and wattage playing Indiana Jones, it lasted closer to 2 hours. The Legion Go 2 sports a 74Wh battery, which is slightly worse than the ROG Ally X’s 80Wh. The larger OLED display and higher max resolution will inevitably drag the battery life down.
At this point, players should not expect a handheld that will last very long. The ROG Ally X still has one of the best battery life at full power when it gets closer to 3 hours of runtime. In real life, the difference is negligible. At this point in my life, having a max two hours of playtime is strangely beneficial. If I’m clearing room after room in Hades II late at night, the battery timer is essentially my alarm. If it’s close to 12 a.m. and I’m about to run out of power, it’s a sign I should get some rest.
Depending on the game you’re playing, the device’s fans can get relatively loud. Even at max speed I wouldn’t call them jet engine noise. It’s enough to remind you to be mindful when sitting next to strangers on a plane. The device kept very cool in my time using it. I never felt any heat around the controls, and the area around the fans also didn’t feel steamy when playing a game at max wattage.
I can’t excuse the price, but I had such a good time with the Legion Go 2 it felt like a personal companion after traveling for more than a week and a half away from home. But there’s an elephant in the room shaped like a big “X” we need to address. The Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are supposed to launch with a new version of Windows, dubbed the “Full Screen Experience” (FSE) built exclusively for gaming handhelds. While this may fix the lingering usability issues of Windows 11 on a 7- or 8-inch screen, the upgrade should also eliminate background tasks and—hopefully—boost performance by 20%. The issue is that Microsoft has said you may need to wait until next spring to get it on handhelds like the Legion Go 2.
Windows is terrible on handhelds. It gets in the way when trying to put the device to sleep while still in-game. It bombards you with popups for OneDrive that you need to use the touchscreen to excise. It saps power and makes the device run worse than it would if it was running SteamOS, the same Linux-based operating system running on the Steam Deck. In our tests, the Legion Go S with SteamOS outperforms its Windows counterpart by 20 to 30%. Unless you’re dead set on keeping your Xbox Game Pass games handy, I would suggest looking into installing Valve’s software on the Legion Go 2. I have not confirmed whether you can install SteamOS on the new handheld, though if its not compatible at launch, I assume an update may be around the corner. Without the FSE or SteamOS, this can’t be my handheld of choice. With a new operating system, the Legion Go 2 would become the bell of the ball for modern PC handhelds.
There are a lot of ways to be loud and annoying. For example, there’s snoring—a timeless classic that is not only loud, but also deprives you and others of sleep, killing two very depressing birds with one stone. Then there are more vestigial and niche forms of being obnoxious, like yodeling, which, if done outside of the Swiss Alps, feels like more of a cry for attention than anything else.
But those are nothing when you enter Bluetooth speakers into the equation. In the year of our lord, 2025, thanks to Bluetooth connectivity and LTE, there are hundreds of ways to be loud and annoying, and a lot of them will cost you. You’ve got premium options like Bose’s SoundLink Plus, which bring style and finesse to the Bluetooth speaker game, and then there are more rugged options like the Soundcore Boom 3i that you can literally throw in a pool. But what if style, durability, or even sound aren’t your top priority? What if you’re looking for a small way to sound reallybig? Well, if that’s your jam, JBL’s $100 Grip might have just what you need.
JBL Grip
The JBL Grip is a portable Bluetooth speaker with more volume than you’d expect.
Very tiny
Still a big sound!
Customizable lights are fun
Slightly expensive for what you get
Sound is just okay
The tall boy of Bluetooth speakers
When I first saw JBL’s Grip, I dubbed it the “tall boy of Bluetooth speakers,” and now, having held the Grip in my hand and having laid eyes on it for myself… I stand by that claim. The Grip is all about the size, which in this case, is similar to a “can of seltzer” according to JBL, or if you’re a hoodlum like me, then a tall boy. For proof of its tall boy-ness, I put the Grip side-by-side with a can that equals one pint. Here’s the Grip next to a Narragansett for your viewing pleasure:
While the Grip resembles a tall boy in size, it actually weighs less—this speaker is only 385g, which makes it both lightweight and compact, which is good because portability is what JBL is going for here. That’s also why there’s a loop on the top of the speaker so you can strap the Grip to a belt, or a bag, or maybe clip it to your bike to blast tunes while you get some cardio in. I didn’t strap the Grip to anything for my testing, but I did carry it around Manhattan and can confirm that it’s not very burdensome.
Don’t let the size and portability fool you, though; the Grip is no slouch in the volume department. The first thing I noticed when I played the Grip out loud in my office was that it really cranks. There’s 16W of power in this tiny speaker, which doesn’t sound like a ton, but believe me when I say it holds its own. While using the Grip in the park, I was able to drown out music from some live jazz being played in the vicinity. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was live music happening near me until I decided to pause the Grip momentarily.
Sound-wise, you’re not going to get the same nuance as a bigger Bluetooth speaker from Bose or even a bigger portable speaker like JBL’s Charge 5 (which I also own), but that’s not really the point of a speaker this size. What you want out of a speaker like the Grip is portability with a sound that is good enough, and I’d say that’s exactly what the Grip brings to the table. It does a decent job with treble (vocals are clear), though you won’t catch much complexity in the midrange where guitars live. Bass isn’t particularly booming, obviously, but I played some Daft Punk while walking around outside, and it didn’t sound bereft of low end. Overall, I’d say this speaker did better in a rock genre (I played a few of my favorite tracks by Geese), but your mileage may vary.
Needless to say, this isn’t the speaker you want if you’re trying to fill a room with sound, but if you’re just trying to grab a speaker to bring on a hike, or a picnic, or to the beach/park for a casual hang, there’s no reason not to grab a Grip—especially if you’re low on space.
Tall boy, smaller battery
As is the case with any gadget that emphasizes portability, battery life is always in question. The JBL Grip is rated for 14 hours of battery, though that will depend on the volume. I wasn’t able to test the Grip battery life extensively, but in my usage, the Grip seems to hold up as advertised, if not better. I tested the Grip, using the speaker at about 50% volume for an hour. I started my test at 40% battery, and by the time I was done listening, I was only at about 37%. Obviously, 50% volume is a little lower than what most people will be listening to out in the wild, but it’s still a decent showing from a small speaker. If you’re blaring this thing, you can obviously expect less.
The Grip has some character outside of the portability, too. There’s (of course) a companion app that you can use to fine-adjust EQ (seven whole bands) and switch between EQ presets. You can also monitor battery life using the JBL Portable app and use your phone to choose the color of the LED on the back of the speaker. One nice touch is being able to set the LED component to have different lighting effects via the app. There’s nothing super practical about being able to do any of that, but I guess if you were worried about losing your speaker in the dark, it might actually come in handy. I would have loved to see that feature turned into a battery indicator so you can tell how much juice you have left in the Grip at a glance, but using it for a little extra personalization is fine. I like being able to toggle lighting effects in particular, to give it some extra flair.
Another nice-to-have feature is an IP68 water and dust rating, which means this speaker is basically as water-resistant as an actual can of beer. To test that out, I gave the Grip a nice little shower in the sink, running it under water for a couple of minutes. Luckily, the Grip survived my test and came out a little soggy, but fully functional and able to play music just as well as before. It doesn’t float or anything like Soundcore’s Boom 3i speaker, which I tested not long ago, but you definitely don’t have to worry about dropping the Grip in a pool or leaving it out in the rain by accident.
Nothing to write home about the button selection here. On the front, there’s a play/pause button and a volume up and down. On top, there’s a Bluetooth button for pairing, a power button, and a button for Auracast, which lets you pair multiple speakers together, if that’s something you’re interested in.
Should you get a Grip?
JBL’s Grip isn’t for everyone. If you’re an audiophile looking for the best possible sound, this is not your pick. Nor is this the best pick if you’re looking for the most of lots of things, including features, battery, or even use in water. That being said, it does strike a solid balance of all of those arenas that should be on the radar if you’re looking for a speaker that’s very portable.
I do wish the price was a little lower than $100, considering speakers like the Soundcore Boom 3i, which do a few things very well and only cost $30 more. Sure, maybe Soundcore’s floatable speaker isn’t quite as small, but it’s still pretty damn portable, a lot more durable, and comes with more features than you would ever expect in that price range. I’m left wondering after testing the JBL Grip if the difference in size is really all that special. If you’re carrying a backpack around with enough room, will you really need the space? If you’re hiking, and every gram counts, that’s a different story.
So, if you’re emphasizing size above all else and you want something that sounds decent and won’t be overpowered by environmental noise, then you might want to look JBL’s way and grab a nice tall glass of Bluetooth audio. And if size doesn’t matter to you, then there are tons of other options out there, though maybe none quite as beer-like.
I recently went down a bright, RGB-laden hole with a mission: to satisfy my curiosity about smart lights that try to rip the colors off your TV and splash them onto the wall behind it. I’ve been skeptical of such TV lights muddying filmmakers’ intent the same way modern TVs with motion smoothing and other AI image processing can. After toying with the Philips Hue Play Wall Washer, I wouldn’t say I’m sold on the idea yet, but the good news is that’s not all this little can full of LED modules can do.
Signify, the company that licenses and makes products under the Philips Hue brand, might mainly advertise the Play Wall Washer as a way to spice up your entertainment system. But it’s equally adept as wall-coating accent lighting or a wake-up light in your bedroom, using the same interface that works for other colorful Hue smart lighting. The Wall Washer itself is a small, upright lamp inside an aluminum enclosure that feels very sturdy. It projects light outward and upward from three rows of LED lights, each working to produce smooth gradients and colors that are rich without being garishly oversaturated, which I’ve always appreciated about the whole Hue smart light line.
It’s a versatile little product, yet I find myself jumping through a lot of mental hoops to justify the Play Wall Washer. At $219.99, it’s not the most expensive RGB light in the usually-spendy Philips Hue lineup, but you would still need to either have or create an ideal space for it in your home to make it worthwhile. And it takes a whole lot more money to make it work as a TV backlight.
Philips Hue Play Wall Washer
The Philips Hue Play Wall Washer is a slick, well-made can full of vibrant and responsive color-shifting RGBs to paint your wall with—if you’ve got the money and the space.
Signify calls the Play Wall Washer an “immersive surround lighting” experience for your home entertainment center. The smart light’s product page shows two Play Wall Washers standing astride a giant TV, splaying green and blue gradients over a broad, near-featureless white wall.
It takes a hefty investment—$384.99 for a two-pack of the smart lights; another $384.99 for the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K; and $65.99 for a Hue Bridge—to achieve what Philips’ image shows, but it ain’t much easier on your wallet with just one Play Wall Washer. You can skip the Sync Box 8K (or the older $249.99 4K model) if you have one of the recent 2022 or newer Samsung or 2024 LG TVs, for which Signify has a standalone Hue Sync app. But because we can’t have anything nice, you’ll still be on the hook for a $129.99 one-time purchase covering a single TV or a $2.99 monthly subscription that’s good for three TVs. You don’t actually need a Hue Bridge if you’re not doing the TV-syncing thing—you can still use it as a fancy gradient-beaming light via the Hue app over Bluetooth—but you’ll also lose Matter support, limiting your smart home ecosystem options to just Google Home and Amazon Alexa.
I tested a single unit paired with the Sync Box 8K, which has four HDMI 2.1 inputs and one HDMI 2.1 output that can pass up to 4K content at 120Hz (or 8K at 60Hz) through to your TV using an included Ultra High-Speed HDMI cable. You can switch inputs via the Hue app, but I found I never needed to; its automatic input-switching when I turned on another device was flawless. It also supports Dolby Vision and HDR10 video.
Setup in the Hue app is fairly quick and painless, involving a little QR code-scanning and, for the Sync Box, tapping the button on your Hue Bridge and using a little graphic to drag the Play Wall Washer to its approximate location relative to your TV. After setup, controlling TV syncing—which you’ll do from the Sync tab in the app—is pretty straightforward, letting you do things like tweak the brightness of your lights and intensity of their effects.
The main advantage the Play Wall Washer has over covering the back of your TV with RGB integrated circuit (RGBIC) light strips—the kind with LED modules that can be controlled individually, making color gradients along the strip possible—is that physically setting it up is a breeze. You just plop it down behind your TV, plug it and the Sync Box into the wall, hook up your HDMI cables to the Sync Box, and you’re done. The disadvantage is that it being a single light source meansit’ll cast harsh shadows if there’s anything mounted on the wall above it. LED strips don’t really have that issue.
Once I cleared out some shadow-casting objects, the Sync Box and Play Wall Washer struck me as being good if what you’re after is more of a vibe than seeing colors bleed out from the edge of your TV, or perhaps bias lighting, which can make watching a screen easier on your eyes. Yes, it flashed its lights right alongside the lightning in the opening sequence of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, when Kylo Ren first visits Exegol, and bloomed red and orange in the sunset sequence of The Incredibles, as Mrs. Incredible races to save a commuter bullet train from certain doom. But the light wasn’t as precisely positioned around my TV as that you’d get from an LED strip slapped on the back of your TV.
It seemed a bit more precise when I slipped it into gaming mode and played Donkey Kong Bananza on my Nintendo Switch 2, but the effect was still muted. Even so, this left me a lot more convinced by the whole TV backlight concept, at least for gaming—I’d even say I enjoyed the spectacle. Movies are presented as a piece of art meant to wash over you, but video games are inherently participatory—how you experience their stories is up to you, and for me at least, a synchronized light show feels more additive than distracting.
So, price and precision are the Play Wall Washer’s big weak points. I A/B tested it against the $149.99 Govee TV Backlight 3 Lite Kit (see the GIFs above), which uses an LED strip and two light bars, and the even cheaper $94.49 HDMI Sync Box from Wiz, another Signify brand—both produced much more localized lighting and aren’t just cheaper than the Play Wall Washer on their own, and neither requires you to buy anything else to sync with your TV. Their colors are a lot more in-your-face than the Play Wall Washers, which is a good thing for some people, and if you don’t like it, there are ways to tone things down in their respective apps.
They each have their own drawbacks, though: Govee’s kit requires hanging an ugly camera from the top of your TV to capture color information, and the lights lag behind the picture slightly (for what it’s worth, the company does sell a Sync Box with specs similar to the Philips Hue Sync Box 8K), and the Wiz Sync Box only has a single HDMI input and is limited to 4K resolution at 60Hz or 1440p at 120Hz. And sticking an LED strip to the back of your TV is a pain in both cases.
But maybe you’re only interested in the Play Wall Washer as a decorative item. Good for you; you’ll save a little money, and the Play Wall Washer’s ability to bathe a broad surface in colorful light is excellent. The sweet spot, to me, started at about a foot from a wall, letting me coat the it all the way up to the ceiling. You can go with static lights or gradients—the Hue app has a ton of nice pre-made ones, but you can also roll your own with a color picker in the app—or you can choose from several effects like those that other colorful Hue bulbs and lightstrips use. My favorite was Cosmic Gold, which alternately undulates light in front of and above the lamp, blasts color everywhere, and quickly dials the brightness all the way down in a fluid, repeating animation.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to find somewhere to actually put it. It’s meant to be stood on a hard surface—either your floor or a table—and with the light pointing upward, everything ends up being underlit, casting harsh shadows if the light encounters any texture or decorations, making it hard for me to find a wall it would work on. Its power cord is a generous 6.2-feet long, but it’s embedded, rather than using something like USB-C, so you need a bulky extension cord if it doesn’t reach. Also, there are no mounting screw holes, so you’d have to get creative if you want to put it anywhere other than the floor or a piece of furniture.
The only hope for it in my house was my bedroom, which is a converted attic with walls that are only briefly vertical before angling to follow the roofline. The light covered the entire 15-foot length of the wall with vibrant, smooth gradients, and the angled wall helped with furniture shadows and kept the light from fading as it climbed higher. But the Play Wall Washer was smack in the middle of my bedroom floor, right in the walkway and ready to trip me. Ultimately, if you don’t have tons of space and an Apple-like minimalist sensibility, it’s hard to see this smart light being practical for decoration outside of something like an art gallery.
Smart home compatibility Matters
If you have a Hue Bridge to connect it to, the Play Wall Washer gets support for Matter, the universal protocol that lets your device work across any of the major smart home platforms. That approach—using a hub instead of giving the light Matter compatibility on its own—means I didn’t have to do anything after setup to get it working in Apple Home, Google Home, my Flic Hub, and Amazon Alexa; it was just already there. Without a Hue Bridge, it’ll only work with the last two in that list. That could be fine in the short term, but if some slick new platform emerges down the road, there’s far less chance this light will be supported without Matter.
Whatever your platform of choice is, you’ll still want to use the Hue app, as it’s the only way to make the Play Wall Washer show gradients. It’s also where you’ll find Hue’s various automations, like presence-mimicking that can randomly turn your lights on and off at night when you’re away, or geofencing that toggles them off or on when you leave or come home. The Play Wall Washer is actually really nice with the Hue wake-up automation, which turns it slowly over a long stretch, because it can be both extremely dim and very bright. That long wall I mentioned earlier? It was nice to close my curtains and wake up to it totally bathed in the colors of a sunrise.
The $219.99 Hue Play Wall Washer is a really cool little smart lamp that’s small enough that it won’t call attention to itself beyond the lush colors it produces. It’s not cheap, but for home decor purposes, the price may be right, so long as you have a big ol’ wall to shine its light onto and the space to keep it from being underfoot.
As a TV-syncing light, it might be too subdued and imprecise for many people, and it’s limited to TVs that are placed a little away from the wall if you want even lighting from a single Play Wall Washer. But even if you do like its vibe and super easy setup, the costs ramp way up to unlock that functionality, requiring you to buy hardware that costs much more than the light itself or have one of very few specific TV sets that can do it for you, assuming you already have a Hue Bridge. Given that the market is absolutely lousy with TV backlight options, it may be best to save your money and skip the Hue Play Wall Washer.
I owe the original Game Boy everything. Had it not been for Nintendo’s gray brick of a handheld, and a copy of Super Mario Land, I doubt I would be writing these words on Gizmodo. It was the gadget that started my lifelong obsession with cutting-edge technology and my passion for sharing it with others. So excuse me for being overwhelmed with emotion and nostalgia when Lego announced it was making a 421-piece brick set version of the iconic Nintendo handheld.
Released on Oct. 1 for $60, the Lego Game Boy is a pretty easy build. Lego says it’s for ages 18+ and up, but there was nothing complicated enough that a 10-year-old couldn’t follow the instructions. (Though, they wouldn’t have any nostalgia for the handheld that came out in 1989.) It took me about 1 hour and 15 minutes to complete, but I think it would have taken under an hour if I hadn’t stopped to shoot B-roll for a social video. (It’s all fun and games building Lego sets after work; this is also work for me.)
Lego Game Boy
Lego’s Nintendo Game Boy is easily one of the most fun brick sets of the year.
Easy to build
Pressable buttons, wheels, and switches
Nearly 1:1 replica
Includes lenticular screens and Game Paks
Affordable
Building it is over too soon
As I noted in my hands-on a few weeks earlier, the Lego Game Boy is more than just a charming—and almost 1:1 replica—display piece. In addition to the pressable buttons, scrollable dials, and the slideable power switch, you can also pop in brick versions of Super Mario Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening game cartridges into the Lego Game Boy. Remove the back cover and you get access to swap in three different lenticular screens featuring the two games and the Game Boy’s famous bootup screen featuring the Nintendo logo sliding down.
https://x.com/raywongy/status/1974417263097974908
There are tons of Easter eggs inside the Lego Game Boy that make it more than just a skin-deep recreation. I spoke with Carl Merriam, a senior designer at the Lego Group, and Simon Kent, a design director at the Lego Group, who worked on the Lego Game Boy set to unearth some of its unseen secrets.
There’s been some strongly worded opinions about which company gets credit for the Lego Game Boy. Is it Lego or is it Nintendo? The answer is both—as it should be. Nintendo is famous for being extremely protective of its IP—its products, franchises, and characters are well-guarded and require top-level approval. To do a Lego version of the Game Boy, Merriam and Kent had to go beyond just the outer gray shell and pink buttons.
“Nintendo was very involved,” Kent, who’s been at Lego for almost 20 years, told Gizmodo. “We have a team that works in Japan… they basically allow us to connect to different IP teams or hardware teams or even creative teams within Nintendo to get the right information to make the product as best as it can be. We also met with the hardware designer that I think may have worked on the original or certainly was connected to the original [Game Boy].”
Merriam, a senior designer who’s been at Lego for 12 years, started as a fan before landing at the toy company. He’s worked on Lego sets, including Boost, Minecraft, and Super Mario, to name a few popular series. For the Game Boy, which he says took around a year from concept to development, the team went through 10 to 20 iterations before landing on the final design and tweaking it to feel extra special, extra Nintendo-y.
The dimensions of the Game Boy proved to be restrictive in what Lego could do, but in the end, I would say it’s semi-faithful to the actual handheld, which has to be commended.
“We don’t really have a lot of room in here to do a lot of stuff, and we played around with all kinds of different functional ways to make you be able to do something with the games,” Merriam told Gizmodo. “It turned out that the one thing that we could achieve all over the entire thing was making all of the buttons have the same haptic feedback as the actual device, or as close as we can get in Lego bricks.”
He said each area of the Lego Game Boy was a design challenge on its own. Merriam says he probably built 30 to 40 versions for the way the D-pad, buttons, and switches. I noticed that attention to detail as I built the Lego set. Behind the D-pad is actually a little rubber piece that gives it a springiness when you press into it. Same goes for the A and B buttons; those are actually minifig hats painted pink, and there’s a little rubber band behind them that gives them a familiar button travel when pressed. The start and select buttons are black tire pieces changed to gray, and they date back to 1969, Kent told me. Comparing the Lego Game Boy controls with my original Game Boy that my mom bought in 1993, I gotta say it’s impressive how hard Lego went to replicate it.
I asked how they approached building the Lego Game Boy—did they 3D model it first or just get right to building? How do you even go about choosing the pieces, though? It’s estimated that there are tens of thousands of unique Lego pieces available to use. With an entire vault going back almost 70 years to select from, where do you even start? Sure, Lego could—and it did—create a few new, custom parts for the Game Boy, but where’s the creativity in making many new parts?
“My mind is built of the Lego system, so whenever I see anything in the real world, I see a Lego piece that maybe could be that thing,” Merriam said. He explained to me how the clear panel for the Lego Game Boy screen is actually a window frame that’s “quite an old piece,” and it was a good problem to have to design it so that it would be centered properly.
As for the custom pieces… well, you could try to find out which one it is, or I could just tell you. It involves one of the corners of the Lego Game Boy.
“We wanted to sort of incorporate everything that was mobile about the Game Boy,” added Kent. “We had discussions—should we do any peripherals that can plug into it? Should it come with some headphones? Should it come with a little light [like the Game Boy Light Magnifier]? But, in the end, we wanted to keep it simple and focused very much on… taking their favorite games and playing them anywhere.”
Speaking of games, the insides of the cartridges, or Game Paks as they’re officially called, were something that came later on in the process, after they finished making the outer case and making sure all the functions worked. In the Zelda game cart, there’s a “save battery” piece that replicates the way Game Paks preserved your game progress.
One burning question I had to ask the two was what the joint/kickstand-like piece that keeps the lenticular screens in place is called. “I call it a dingler, I don’t have a technical term for it,” Merriam told me. So there you have it, it’s unofficially called a dingler!
The Game Boy is the second Nintendo console that Lego brickified. The first was the Lego NES set released in 2020. That set was larger, had more pieces, and was more expensive. Kent says the Lego Game Boy was an attempt at a Nintendo set that’s more affordable.
“For a long time, the team in general has wanted to do the Game Boy, and we felt that now was probably the right time, and we also wanted to explore a different price point,” Kent said. “Obviously, the NES came with a TV. It’s a higher price point, so we wanted to do something smaller to test that area.”
I tried to get Merriam and Kent to tell me whether there are more Lego Nintendo consoles on the way, but they wouldn’t let anything slip. So if you’re waiting for a Lego SNES, N64, or GameCube, you’ll just have to keep waiting.
When I first saw the Lego Game Boy, I was both excited and curious to see how it would differ from the many fan creations out there. I was surprised—or maybe I shouldn’t have been—that Merriam and Kent didn’t look at the fan creations out there.
“If you search for anything related to intellectual property, there’s probably a Lego version of it out there somewhere,” Kent said. “We are very careful for that exact reason. We deliberately don’t look at fan-related material because we want to focus on the actual real thing and do what we think is the right thing with the partner who we are collaborating with.”
“One of the most interesting differences between being a Lego fan and the Lego designer is that we’re designing a product for people to build at home, and to make the experience of building the product fun is a totally different challenge than just making something look like the source material,” said Merriam.
At the end of the day, the Lego Game Boy—or any Lego set, really—should be fun to build. Yes, I often speed build Lego sets, but that usually comes at the expense of enjoying all the care that went into designing not just how the completed build looks on the outside, but the inside.
“The Lego system is like a language,” Merriam said. “I like to try to write poetry with the Lego system. Every once in a while, I can achieve it, and I believe I’ve achieved it in this one.”
As a nice digestif, we even had Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, which gave us a preview of the future of computing from the inside. The wild part is, all of those conferences and events don’t even cover all the gadgets we liked in September, so we made this list to make sure you got all of last month’s wild releases down.
Apple might not be the first of the big phone providers to go super-thin in a flagship phone (that distinction belongs to Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge), but this is still the first hyper-thin iPhone, and that’s a big deal. My colleague, Gizmodo’s Senior Editor of Consumer Tech, Raymond Wong, called it a “magic slab of glass,” and while I haven’t had a chance to use the phone in-depth myself, I did get to at least hold it, and I see the appeal.
It’s as thin and light as promised, and the fact that Apple managed to cram all of the compute power in the top portion of the phone and still deliver a serviceable battery life really is a feat of engineering. You don’t need an iPhone that’s this thin and light, but once you have one in you’re hand, you’re going to be tempted to buy one, even if the camera is barebones.
After trying Insta360’s new action camera out, we’re going to have to add swordplay to our list of usual tests. In case you missed it, Gizmodo Staff Writer Kyle Barr, tried out the Insta360 Go Ultra and, yes, it survived a blow from a sword, which is good news for anyone who’s bringing action cameras to a renaissance fair or to a reenactment of the movie Hook.
It’s not just durability; the Insta360 Go Ultra can record in 4K at 60 fps and comes with a magnetic mount that allows you to fix the camera in a lot of places, including square in the middle of your chest if you’re wearing a shirt while filming, which you probably should be. If you’re looking for a high-res, portable action camera that can survive sword attacks, this is worth a look.
After several long years, Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 got a real number update, and it was worth the wait. While the AirPods Pro 3 retain the same $250 starting price as the last generation, they get a few key upgrades, including better active noise cancellation, a redesigned fit, more ear tip sizes, and perhaps most importantly, two brand new capabilities: heart rate tracking and live translation.
Apple seems to be embarking on a new identity for its AirPods with health features in particular, and if you’re at all interested in keeping tabs on your biometrics, but don’t feel the need to strap an Apple Watch on your wrist, the AirPods Pro 3 could be the perfect gateway. AirPods Pro 3 are proof that you don’t need a generation update every single year—you just need one that feels worth the anticipation.
Would you buy a mouse that doesn’t click? Sounds like a trick question, but in the case of Logitech’s G Pro X2 Superstrike, that question is kind of literal. This mouse uses haptics to simulate clicking, which sounds like a gimmick, but is actually useful if you’re a competitive gamer. According to Logitech, the architecture of its G Pro X2 Superstrike mouse (Haptic Inductive Trigger System, for anyone interested) offers 30 milliseconds lower latency than a mouse with an optical switch, which uses a beam of infrared light to determine when you press the button.
Are you fast enough to even take advantage of technology like this? Probably not, but the fact that you could is impressive, and using haptics in a mouse instead of real-life clicks is objectively interesting if nothing else.
Sure, the iPhone Air may have stolen the show, but the base iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro/17 Pro Max versions also had a lot to like. We called the iPhone 17 base the “best iPhone value in years” thanks to its 120Hz always-on display, its great battery life, and its excellent performance, while the 17 Pros also held it down with the longest battery, the best performance, the best cameras, and a new “Cosmic Orange” model. Sure, the scratching didn’t help the fanfare, but you’re probably going to slap a case on these things anyway. If you’re in need of an iPhone upgrade, now may be the time.
What do I say about the Meta Ray-Ban Display? I’ve delved deeper and deeper into the burgeoning world of smart glasses over the last year, and Meta’s Ray-Ban Display (the company’s first pair of smart glasses with a screen in them) feels like the pair I’ve been waiting for.
They come with navigation abilities, message notifications, translation, a POV camera feature, and Instagram integration for watching Reels—and that’s on top of doing all the stuff that previous non-display smart glasses have done.
Sure, privacy problems abound, and they’re not quite a phone replacement yet, but based on my hands-on with them at Meta’s annual Connect conference, the Meta Ray-Ban Display are an exciting start and might just be the first pair of smart glasses you want to buy. Trust me, Meta’s Neural Band (a wristband that lets you control the smart glasses’ screen with your fingers) is just as magical as it sounds.
Wired security cameras might be a pain to set up, but they’re also superior in the fact that they have a higher likelihood of staying powered up—no battery and no climbing ladders to charge them when they die. The Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi security camera is no different and delivers fairly high-res 4K footage and doesn’t require a subscription. It’s got a huge 180-degree FOV, too. You will have to buy a microSD card to store your footage—there’s no cloud storage here—but the simplicity will likely appeal to some.
If the iPhone 17 is the best-value iPhone in years, the Apple Watch SE 3 may take the title for the smartwatch side of things. For $250, you get the proverbial “greatest hits” from the Apple Watch feature set, including an always-on display, an S10 chip, and even Apple’s “double-tap” gesture. There’s also 32 hours of battery life, which may not be enough for people who need the most out of an Apple Watch (that’s what the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is for), but should be plenty for most.
We would have liked to see some new colors here, but still, a good value is hard to beat, and that’s a note that the Apple Watch SE 3 hits perfectly in tune.
Because it’s so easy to build a gaming desktop at home, companies making prebuilt machines need to offer either a great value or something unique. That’s why the Asus TUF T500 isn’t technically a desktop PC, at least in the classic sense. Instead, it leverages a smaller motherboard and laptop CPU, reducing the overall footprint but dropping the ability to upgrade or repair some of the individual parts.
Most notably, the T500 is sporting a full-size desktop GPU, which is the biggest determining factor when it comes to gaming performance, and also the part that gets replaced the most often. That should give this desktop a much longer lifetime than gaming laptops that are similarly-equipped, at least on paper. This version came with an RTX 5060 Ti installed, a card that generally hits 60 to 90 frames per second at 1080p, a good match for a living room console replacement.
I’m pleasantly surprised with the execution, and the T500 offers a solid value and a unique upgrade path, with some expected compromises around cooling and ports. It’s a solid choice for the tech-averse or television-bound gamer looking to move from consoles to PC, but I think more savvy users will still want to build their own.
A Unique Appeal
Photograph: Brad Bourque
The upside to Asus’s approach is that the T500 is a relatively compact machine, around six inches wide and twelve inches deep, or just a little bigger than two Xbox Series X consoles sitting side by side. With gaming handhelds increasingly capable even for newer titles, I imagine the people who have room for a desktop and monitor, but only just barely, aren’t a huge audience. Asus specifically calls out college students, but I’d think a gaming laptop would get you through at least four years, and you could take it to class with you. At this size, it seems more likely you’d find one tucked into an entertainment stand in a living room or home theater.
There is no “perfect” mouse. Even Logitech’s long-rumored MX Master 4 and its tried-and-tested blend of form and function won’t be everybody’s everything. A mouse is merely a computer controller, one that should have enough switches and buttons neatly at your fingertips. The older MX Master mice had most of what any productivity-minded wannabe professional required. The new $120 MX Master 4 has one extra feature with a haptic button that could offer a bounty of extra options. If you already have your necessary keyboard shortcuts etched into your brain like the Ten Commandments carved in slate, you’ll find the rumble in your thumb wholly unnecessary.
Logitech MX Master 4
There aren’t so many true upgrades, and the Action Wheel may not be all that, but the MX Master 4 is an excellent successor to the best-feeling wireless work mouse.
Excellent ergonomic feel
Satifsfying haptics
Free-spinning and side scroll wheels
Works on almost everything
Action Wheel has surprising use cases
Not enough apps for Action Wheel
No compartment for Bolt receiver
Bigger and heavier than ever
The design for Logitech’s “perfect” mouse didn’t need to change. If you’re a proud user of a Logitech MX Master 3 or 3S (the latter retailed for $100 in 2023), and you haven’t worn away the silicone thumbrest with your affections, you don’t need another mouse. Then again, the new MX Master 4 is so nice, so precise, and so feature-rich, I can’t think of another mouse I’d rather drag my cursor around with. The smooth operation on my desk, combined with the near-silent clicks and free-spinning magnetic aluminum scroll wheel, feels as satisfying as it ever did. You simply can’t expect any real upgrades from this mouse. Even with haptics and software features, the MX Master 4 will still be a companion that’s so thick and heavy it will rarely, if ever, leave your desk.
There are a few minimal visual design changes to differentiate the MX Master 4 from the MX Master 3S. Logitech dragged the left and right click below the scroll wheel. That moves the middle “Shift wheel mode” button slightly downward, which swaps from a free-spinning wheel to something more traditional. There’s also a new clear plastic ring around the twin click buttons. There are an additional three programmable side buttons and the lovely side-scrolling wheel that’s handy for both spreadsheets and video editing. The shelf for the thumb sticks out more compared to previous generations, making the MX Master 4 appear even larger than the two-year-old MX Master 3S even though they’re nearly equivalent in stature. There’s one odd thing about the revised design. I was using a MacBook Pro, and the height of the mouse was just enough that the left-click button sat at exactly the height of the opened laptop. This would halt a click, leading to an odd moment of confusion. You can’t call this a flaw, exactly, but just a small thing to note considering just how well it works with the average Mac.
The MX Master 4 is a heavy mouse at 150g, and more hefty than the previous version, though it rolls as smooth as a buttered chicken on a water slide over most surfaces. Just like previous iterations, the mouse lacks the long begged-for compartment for the Bolt USB-C receiver. Ignoring ways Logitech could have improved the overall design, it feels ergonomic in a way that’s not completely as extreme as a full vertical mouse. Your hand slides into its shape with the thumb cupped in the cradle of the new textured silicone that doubles as the new haptics button.
Logitech didn’t want to enhance the base specs to entice buyers. Indeed, the company didn’t boost the polling rate—how often the mouse communicates with the computer—or DPI, the dots per inch that measure accuracy, compared to the MX Master 3S. The MX Master 4 is stuck at a maximum 125Hz polling rate—whether you’re using Bluetooth or the Logitech Bolt USB-C dongle—and a respectable 8,000 DPI. The DPI dictates how well the mouse tracks on various surfaces, and the MX Master 4 routinely proves it’s good for everything, from mouse pads to wood and even glass. That polling rate pales in comparison to the specific gaming mice designed for the most precise experience. For instance, Logitech’s upcoming G Pro X2 Superstrike gaming mouse with its haptic click is based on an 8,000Hz polling rate sensor. Can you still use the MX Master 4 for gaming? It’s a far heavier mouse than any game-specific controller, and it’s hard to exclaim “boom, headshot” when your mouse clicks are as silent as the grave, but you do you.
Instead of working out the usual mouse upgrades of better polling rate or DPI, Logitech focused mostly on the new haptics in its new top-of-the-line mouse. The button has a capacitive sensor that doesn’t physically depress, even though it feels like it does when you squeeze it. You’ll now feel a little rumble, depending on your settings. Your thumb might shudder if you move the cursor between two displays, for instance. The haptics belie the most important control change. Logitech hopes you’ll use the new software feature called Action Ring. If you hit the haptic button with your thumb, you can mouse over a ring full of customizable actions. On a Mac, by default the ring brings up options for a Finder window, a shortcut to screenshot the page you’re on or create a note, or summon up AI chatbots (because Logitech still thinks mice need an AI button like its M750).
To customize the ring, you need to dig into the Logi Options+ app. The interface is minimal and clean. Here, you can also set the level of haptics from minimal to thumb-shuddering. It’s here you can enable multiple different profiles for the Action Ring. Logitech includes one setup for Photoshop (it’s enabled for Adobe’s other apps like Lightroom and Premiere), Zoom, and more. You can look through the applications on your device and set up shortcuts for those apps, or else just create your own. Each action on the ring can also contain multiple folders, in case you want to bury specific actions all from your mouse.
I can see how this is useful, though in the weeks I spent using the mouse for work, I only ever hit up the Action Ring when I was trying to get it to work with outside apps. In my day-to-day grind, I have all the necessary keyboard shortcuts down pat. When I’m typing out a new review or getting my text onto Gizmodo.com, I’m not jumping to my mouse first, at least most of the time. What’s the time difference between sliding the cursor down to the Mac’s dock to open up Finder versus hitting a button and then clicking on the shortcut?
However, if you are using an app with more annoying controls, it can be especially handy. The Logi Marketplace currently houses 39 apps for application-specific controls, though most of them are Adobe apps. You may not make much use of the Action Ring on Spotify or Apple Music, unless you want to pause or play without opening the app first. Take Discord, for example—exchanging audio or mic input and output is annoying to access in the best of times, and having that accessible from the MX Master 4 can be incredibly handy. We’ll have to wait for more apps available in the store to show what the feature is fully capable of.
Logitech claims the MX Master 4 has an optimized antenna placement that results in better connectivity, but the mouse still won’t work outside the usual 30-foot range for both Bluetooth and 2.4GHz connections. The MX Master 4 makes up for it with an “Easy-Switch” button on the bottom of the mouse. You can pair it with up to three devices and hit the button to swap between them. This means you could have it paired with your phone (it’s compatible with iPadOS, iOS, and Android) and two computers. Pressing the switch swaps between each device. The Logi Options+ app also lets you see which devices are paired. Easy Switch was already a positive mark for the MX Master 3S, but it’s made even better thanks to the Action Ring, which lets you swap between devices without flipping the mouse onto its back.
Battery life among high-end mice is already at the point where most of us won’t be plugging our devices in for months. The MX Master 4 promises a 70-day battery life. I’ve used the mouse for three weeks, nearly every day in the office, and I’ve been incapable of running through its battery just by myself in that time. It came out of the box at a little more than 50%, and by the time I was done writing my review, it was stuck at 45%. Even if the mouse does run out of juice, the MX Master 4 supports quick charging with up to 70% from 3 hours of charging, or up to three hours of use from one minute of charging.
I won’t stop using the MX Master 4 anytime soon, though that’s because I didn’t already have the MX Master 3 or 3S at home. Logitech didn’t spend time putting real physical hardware upgrades into its new mouse. Unless you have a very specific use case for the Action Wheel, you’ll be perfectly serviced with your older working MX Master mouse. Instead, if you want the best wireless mouse and you’re tired of your old crusty work one, this is easily the best one—still—perfect or not.
The loss of soft-touch plastics may seem like a downgrade at first, but I vastly prefer uncoated plastics for long-term use: My MX Master 2S developed unsightly smooth spots on both mouse buttons where the soft-touch coating wore down, and other long-term users have reported the coatings becoming tacky over time.
Photograph: Henri Robbins
The two primary mouse buttons and the scroll wheel are nearly dead-silent. Despite this, they still have clear feedback with a distinct bump and no mushy feeling. In the ratcheting mode, the mouse wheel has a noticeable bump between each scroll. In the smooth mode, the wheel has just enough resistance to be controlled easily, while still spinning freely.
The horizontal scroll wheel on the side permanently scrolls smoothly and has significantly more resistance than the primary scroll wheel. This allows for greater control of the wheel and helps protect against accidental scrolling when moving your thumb. Scrolling is incredibly smooth, without any catching or scratchiness, and the ridged texture of the aluminum wheel feels comfortable and easy to manipulate. Clicking the wheel is still fairly loud, like any mouse. The three side buttons and the top button have a muted click, and it’s not disruptive.
Despite weighing 150 grams, this mouse is easy to glide around a surface. The feet are smooth, sliding easily while still having enough friction for precise control, and the sculpted shape makes it easy to move and lift. While the high weight means it won’t be ideal for competitive, high-intensity gaming, the shape is preferable for longer sessions, whether you’re grinding out dungeons or slogging through spreadsheets.
The sensor is capable of up to 8,000 dots per inch, but most people will likely leave the sensitivity well below that. I didn’t have any issues with input registration, skipping, or shaking, and the sensor felt incredibly precise on all surfaces, even frosted and transparent glass.
Gesture Controls and Haptics
Photograph: Henri Robbins
The MX Master 4’s gesture controls are one of its most prominent features. These have been featured on every generation of the MX Master line, with only small changes across generations. The gesture control button was previously located on the bottom of the thumb rest, hidden underneath the rubber surface, but has now been moved to a standard button on the side, which I found more comfortable and natural to use.
It’s never ideal being the second-most anything in the world, but there are worse places to be, too. The same applies to the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses Gen 2, which were the second-most exciting thing that Meta announced at Meta Connect this month. The first, if popular opinion is any indication, is Meta’s Ray-Ban Display that, as you may already have gathered, has a screen in it.
But even if the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 (starting at $379) are the second-most exciting pair of smart glasses to come out of Connect, they can still be the first-most something, and in my estimation, they are. These are the best pair of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses you can buy without a screen. Period.
Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses Gen 2
Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses Gen 2 aren’t exciting but they’re better then the original.
I’ve already covered this a few times, so I’ll keep it brief; the biggest updates in the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 are battery life and video. The size (aside from 2 grams of additional weight in Gen 2) is the same, there are all the same features as the original, and the speakers and mics are all carried over.
The battery life, though, is now rated for double, which in this case equates to about 8 hours of general use. The charging case also gets a bump from 32 hours to 48 hours. The battery increase in the smart glasses is thanks to what Meta is calling “ultra-narrow steelcan” batteries—the same ones it’s putting in the Meta Ray-Ban Display, its smart glasses with a screen in them. On the video side of things, it’s upping the max resolution of recording to 3K and also introducing a 60 fps option, though that will only be available if you’re recording in 1080p. Unfortunately, for anyone who is more interested in still photos, the sensors are the same this generation. It’s 12 megapixels with a max resolution of 3,024 x 4,032.
That may not sound like a lot, but you can’t really understate the importance of battery life and videos in a pair of smart glasses—those are pretty important to any device that would dare encroach on phone territory. Even more important, though, is how videos look, and whether battery life is actually as advertised. On that front, Meta mostly delivers.
I often use my first-gen Ray-Ban Meta to record video while I’m biking, because recording with your phone in one hand while you’re on a bike in New York City is kind of a death wish. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of a still frame pulled from the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1’s maximum 1080p video versus an image from the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2. As you can see in the screenshot on the right, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 came out less blurry, which is to be expected with the resolution increase.
In my experience, the improved detail in image quality is fairly noticeable. Where some edges used to be blurred and a little too smooth, the videos recorded in 3K feel like a more accurate slice of life. That’s not going to be important to everyone (a lot of people are just going to take still photos), but if you’re like me and you want to capture some beautiful foliage on a bike ride, the upgrade is welcome.
There’s another aspect to the video upgrade, 60 fps, that I would have loved to test out for you guys, but unfortunately, it’s not available yet. According to a Meta representative, 60 fps will roll out in a software update for Ray-Ban Gen 2 on Oct. 1, coinciding with the release of the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses. I’ll update this review once my review unit gets the 60 fps option.
So, the other big piece of the puzzle is the battery. While it may not be as easy to test as shooting videos, I tried my best to use the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 for as long as possible. The verdict here is that, while you may not get the full 8 hours promised, you’re definitely getting a lot more battery than the Gen 1.
As is the case with any gadget, the battery life will largely depend not just on density or size but also on your usage. One thing that I love to do with the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses is use them as open-ear headphones, and I think lots of people who own them would agree. The speakers are the same here, so there are no upgrades in fidelity, but I wanted to test the mileage when it comes to audio. Listening to a podcast and eventually a live radio broadcast (Buffalo Bills sports talk radio in case anyone wants to know), I was able to go about 5 hours, which drained the battery from 100% to about 15%. The volume was fairly loud, though (a metric that affects battery life), since I was listening in a crowded coffee shop and needed to overpower music and chatter. That’s not the 8 hours promised by Meta, but it’s also an improvement over the first-gen smart glasses, which usually expire fully after about 3 to 4 hours for audio streaming.
That’s not gold medal-worthy news, but again, your battery is going to depend on what you’re doing with the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2. My second-favorite use of Ray-Ban Meta AI smart glasses is taking calls with them. I hopped on a call with my mom, which lasted 32 minutes at full volume, and the smart glasses barely took a hit, battery-wise. I started at 100% and after more than 30 minutes of talking, they were at 96%. Again, your mileage here is going to vary based on what you’re doing. Taking lots of 3K video? Well, you can expect the Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 to die sooner. Using them intermittently for audio and calls? You might get closer to the advertised 8 hours of battery life.
One thing is for sure: the battery definitely gets more juice, which should be welcome for anyone who’s sick of having to pop their smart glasses back in the case just so they can listen to some music while they go for a walk. How this battery will hold up under the strain of Meta Ray-Ban Display is anyone’s guess, but this is definitely the best battery in a pair of non-display Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses yet.
Those are the two main arenas where you’re going to see improvements gen-over-gen, so if you feel like you want higher-res videos or you’re really yearning for more battery life, Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 should be on your radar. If you’re fine with how your smart glasses perform in those areas, though, I can’t see a reason to rush out and pick up a new pair. Whether the updates appeal to you or not, though, these are still the best pair of non-display Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses you can buy, even if I would have liked to see substantive improvements to things like Meta AI, which is still finicky at best. Still pictures could have used an update, too, but you’ll have to keep waiting for that.
As for connectivity to other apps, things are also the same. Spotify is what I use the most, and it works well most of the time. Meta’s voice assistant nails your simple commands the majority of the time (like skip this song or play and pause), but asking it to play specific songs or artists can be hit and miss. What’s also the same is the fact that messaging and calls are still limited. There is no direct integration with iOS and Android, so if you want to call or text with your smart glasses via the voice assistant, you’ll need to link your Instagram or WhatsApp. For some people, that will be fine, but for others who don’t use those platforms, it may be a dealbreaker.
Oh, and the Meta AI app still unfortunately loves to promote AI slop. And while it works fine for transferring and storing pictures and videos from your smart glasses, I still wish it didn’t shoehorn an LLM (large language model) in there.
As is the case with any of Meta’s products, you’re going to have to be okay with knowing that you won’t always get the best protections when it comes to personal privacy, too. As I’ve pointed out previously, Meta has a pretty bad track record on that front, so if the idea of Meta using photos and videos you take by using the “Hey, Meta” function to train its AI skeeves you out, you’d best steer clear of Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The second-gen glasses aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re improved. And for anyone who’s not willing to spend $800 on the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 are probably the only smart Ray-Ban smart glasses worth buying.
You can rename your vaults, but you can also assign them one of a few dozen icons, as well as choose from a handful of color presets. It’s a small addition, but a little color-coding goes a long way in finding what you need at a glance.
Beyond logins, you can also generate and store email aliases, similar to NordPass. It’s a standard feature, even if you don’t subscribe. Free users are capped at 10 aliases, while paying users can create as many as they want.
It’s not just a fake email tied to a real one. You can set up aliases like that, but Proton allows you to forward emails to multiple addresses, create catch-all addresses, and even reply directly from the web app. I appreciate the activity log most, though. Proton automatically creates contacts for everyone who interacts with your alias, and you can block spammy addresses without ever opening your email client.
No Desktop App
Proton Pass via Jacob Roach
Proton Pass was originally available only as a browser extension, but it now has apps for Windows, macOS, and even Linux, as long as you’re on a Fedora- or Debian-based distribution. I mainly used Pass in the browser, not only because it’s convenient but also because the extension is available on just about everything—Chromium-based browsers have access, and there are separate extensions for Firefox, Safari, and Brave.
The browser app has everything you need, and it works a treat when it comes to password capture and autofill. Proton occasionally asked me to save a password a second time after initially dismissing a capture notification. But outside of that small hiccup, I never encountered an issue with autofill for forms, logins, or credit cards.
Inside the app, you have a few features that aren’t available through the extension. The key feature is Pass Monitor, which is Proton’s security watchdog feature. It’ll show you weak passwords, accounts where you can enable 2FA, and critically, accounts that have been victims of a data breach. If you want to go further, you can turn on Proton Sentinel, as well.
Pass Monitor is great, but breach notifications have a problem. By default, Proton only monitors the email associated with your Proton account. If you’re importing passwords from another app, as I did, and you have different emails, those aren’t a part of the monitoring by default. And Proton doesn’t tell you that. You have to click into breach details and manually add addresses.
The Protein Plus options are pretty broad, comprising about half of Factor’s menu items overall. The meals remain mostly stolidly middle American: garlic herb chicken, barbecue wings, a red pepper frittata for breakfast. Jamaican jerk salmon and a Thai yellow curry chicken were among the most peripatetic options I tried, but even these feel domesticated, accessibly tame. (I did in fact like the jerk salmon a lot more than I expected to.)
Most dishes, though, are classic square meals: a meat, a starch, a veggie that’s probably green. It’s almost wholesome, Midwestern mom food. Heck, Factor—founded and based in Illinois—even has a Midwesterner’s sense of improvised adventure: An “unstuffed pepper” is basically the rice and meat and tomato sauce you’d canonically stuff into a bell pepper, but delivered in saucy meatball form with bell pepper bits strewn amid the rice. It looked sloppy, and it tasted like pure distilled comfort. If you hate what’s essentially a peppery meatball stew, I don’t know you.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
In bygone years, Factor was perhaps over-reliant on mashes and hashes to fill out meals, but these made only a few appearances—including an actually kinda tasty mashed potatoes with leeks, served as a gloppy side to a pleasantly thick slab of filet mignon that arrived medium-rare, and reheated up to more like medium.
The proteins, uniformly, came out tender and relatively juicy, whether chicken or shrimp or beef. Reheated veggies are always difficult to manage in terms of texture, and that was true here, too. In general, Factor’s veggies were likely to be a little soggy if you nuked them—and a lot better if you put them in an air fryer or convection oven. Also, steer toward meals with brown and wild rice over white or “risotto.”
Over the Long Haul
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
I will always like fresh-cooked food better than meals that have been prepared and reheated from a box: The brightness of a fresh tomato, the pop of a pea, the lively crispness of a just-so carrot, are impossible to replicate in food made yesterday or last week. But proteins and stews fared pretty well in particular, and so the Protein Plus options amounted to my best experience with Factor. It was also among my favorite prepared meal services overall. (See also WIRED’s guide to the best delivery meal kits.)
The Ultrahuman Home is a futuristic-looking home environment monitor that tracks air quality, light, sound, and temperature. All this data flows into the Ultrahuman app on your phone, offering potential insights into your environment and suggestions on how you could make it healthier. Sadly, this mostly amounts to reminders to crack a window open, because most of the touted features are not yet present and correct, despite the rather hefty $550 price.
Ultrahuman made its name with a subscription-free smart ring that made biohacking more affordable (though it may soon be banned in the US due to a lawsuit from Oura). The Home monitor may seem like a strange sidestep, but if you’re going to hack your body, why not your environment? After all, we know air quality, light and sound exposure, and temperature and humidity can impact our sleep and general health.
Setup and Tracking
Photograph: Simon Hill
Taking a leaf from Apple’s playbook, the Ultrahuman Home is a 4.7-inch anodized aluminum block with rounded corners (it looks like a Mac Mini). There’s an Ultrahuman logo and light sensor on top, a power button and LED on the front, and a USB-C port on the back flanked by privacy switches to turn off the microphone or connectivity (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth).
Setup is super simple: Plug it in and add it via the Ultrahuman app. The Home gets its own tab at the bottom of the Ultrahuman app, alongside the ring, and if you tap on it, you’ll get a score out of 100, indicating how healthy your environment is. Scroll down for a breakdown of the four scores that combine to create your overall Home score (air quality, environmental comfort, light exposure, and UV exposure).
Ultrahuman via Simon Hill
Ultrahuman via Simon Hill
To compile all this data, the Ultrahuman Home is packed with sensors:
Air quality sensors to track things like volatile organic compounds (VOCs), typically released by cleaning fluids, and carbon dioxide levels (CO₂) that might indicate poor ventilation. They also watch out for formaldehyde (HCHO), carbon monoxide (CO), and smoke.
Particulate matter sensors to track tiny particles in the air, including things like dust, pollen, mold spores, and particles released by cooking. Covering PM1.0, PM2.5, and PM10 (the number refers to the size in microns), the Home warns if you’re in danger of breathing these particles in.
Temperature and humidity sensors to track how warm or cool it is and how much moisture is in the air. You get a chart of the temperature in your environment and the humidity level.
Light sensors to track the level of light and also its makeup, including the amount of blue light and ultraviolet (UV) exposure.
Microphones to track the noise levels in your environment, showing noise in decibels in a chart.
Ultrahuman via Simon Hill
The data is all easy to access and read in the app. You get notifications throughout the day, including alerts if VOC levels spike or there’s prolonged noise. I set the Home up in my office for a few weeks and then tried it for another couple of weeks in my bedroom, after I moved houses. This raises the issue of where to put it, because it must be plugged in and isn’t really designed to be moved around. The bedroom seems like the best bet, but you ideally want both, though I can’t imagine springing for two or more of these to cover all your bases.
Oversensitive and Alarming
Photograph: Simon Hill
The idea of combining body and environment tracking data seems smart, but the Ultrahuman Home doesn’t really do it yet. The touted UltraSync with the Ultrahuman Ring Air is limited to basic common sense advice for now. I don’t think anyone really needs a box to tell them they will sleep better in the dark and quiet, and the air quality advice mostly amounts to opening a window for better ventilation.
I’ve been very impressed with Samsung’s third-gen wireless earbuds. The Galaxy Buds3 Pro ($190), which were released in 2024, were a solid AirPods Pro competitor for Android owners. Now, they’ve been joined by the Galaxy Buds3 FE, a new entry-level model that looks nearly identical to the Buds3 Pro but trades away a lot of bells and whistles for a more accessible price: $150.
The Pro’s high-tech LED “blade” lights are gone, as is head tracking, auto-pause, dual drivers, wireless charging, and full waterproofing. What matters more is what Samsung kept: a very comfortable fit, great sound quality, and surprisingly good ANC, transparency, and call quality. In short, the Galaxy Buds3 FE get the most important stuff right.
Like all Samsung Galaxy wireless earbuds, some of their more interesting features are exclusively available when using Samsung Galaxy phones (and don’t even think about buying them if you’re on an iPhone), which narrows their prospective market. But if you’re a true-blue Samsung fan on a budget, the Galaxy Buds3 FE are a great set of wireless buds.
Midrange Gems
Photograph: Simon Cohen
Though Samsung calls them Galaxy Buds3 FE—you’d naturally assume that means they replace 2023’s Galaxy Buds FE ($100)—they’re actually a kind of midrange option. Samsung is keeping the Buds FE around (and maintaining the price), which I think is a great idea. The original Buds FE are still excellent, and now you’ve got two different fit options: the older, button-style, and the newer AirPods imitation shape. As a bonus, if you opt for the Buds3 FE, you get better water and dust protection: IP54 versus IPX2.
Between the two FE models, I’ve got to give the comfort award to the Buds3 FE. With less mass in your ear and no silicone stability fin wrapped around the circumference, it’s a gentle, easy feel. If you’ve ever tried the Galaxy Buds3 Pro, Apple AirPods Pro, or similarly shaped, stem-based models, the Buds3 FE should feel instantly familiar. However, that also means they aren’t exactly rock-solid for high-impact activities like running. This is where the original Galaxy Buds FE still have an edge: Twist them into place and it’s unlikely they’ll budge unless you want them to.
Wear App via Simon Cohen
Samsung isn’t very generous with ear tip sizes. Beyond the preinstalled medium tips, you only get a small and a large size in the box—the new AirPods Pro, for example, give you four pairs. Make sure you use the fit test in the Samsung Wear app once you get the earbuds connected. I thought the medium tips felt OK, but the test prompted me to try the large, and it was right: They gave me a better fit and a tighter seal.
Speaking of what’s in (or not in) the box, Samsung, like Apple, no longer includes a charging cable. You probably have at least one USB-C cable already, but if you don’t, you’ll need one.
Moving to the stem-based design brings pinch and swipe gestures to the FE family. Samsung borrowed this system from Apple’s AirPods Pro, but the triangular shape of the Galaxy Buds’ stems can make these controls a little harder to use than Apple’s. You do get used to them, however, and overall, I think they’re an improvement on the first-gen Buds FE’s touch controls—especially using the up/down swipe gesture to control volume.
Samsung’s AirPods
Photograph: Simon Cohen
Sound quality on the Galaxy Buds3 FE is outstanding. It not only compares well to other earbuds at this price, it holds up to many more expensive models. The sound signature is robust, with excellent response across frequencies. The low end is resonant yet snappy, the mids and highs are clear and detailed, and the soundstage has a pleasing amount of width and depth.
None of that means you’re going to get good battery life, though. I was only getting around four and a half hours in a very light video playback test. That’s pretty short, limiting the laptop’s viability as a hybrid device for travel, work, or school.
Close Competition
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The RTX 5060 model is available only at Best Buy, starting at $1,870. I would not buy this right now—at least not at this price. Currently, the better deal is over at Lenovo.com, where you can pick up an RTX 5070 model for $1,795 on sale. Though I haven’t tested it (and both GPUs come with only 8 GB of VRAM), stepping up to the RTX 5070 is certainly worth it. Both configurations get you 32 GB of RAM and one terabyte of storage.
The Legion 7i Gen 10 is one of the most expensive gaming laptops to use the RTX 5060. You’re paying extra for the keyboard backlighting, faster HX-series Intel chip, higher-resolution OLED display, and superior design. These all add a lot to the laptop experience, but they are, for the most part, quality-of-life additions. For example, the Alienware Aurora 16 (a laptop I’ll be reviewing soon) also starts with an RTX 5060 and a similar resolution screen, but it’s IPS instead of OLED.
Just be careful with the cheap RTX 5060 laptops out there, such as the Gigabyte Aero X16, which is on sale for just $1,150 right now. I haven’t tested it yet, but it uses the 85-watt variant of the RTX 5060, which will mean a significant drop in performance compared to the Legion 7i Gen 10. That’s rock bottom for RTX 5060 gaming laptops. Lenovo has its own version of a cheaper RTX 5060 right now, the LOQ 15, which will be available in October, gets you an RTX 5060 for close to $1,000, but comes with a standard 1080p IPS display.
With that in mind, the Legion 7i Gen 10 is clearly not for those who value performance above all. But it’s one of the nicest looking gaming laptops I’ve reviewed lately that isn’t a Razer Blade, and it has enough performance and high-end features to make it worth the money—just make sure to opt for the RTX 5070 while it’s still on sale.
I’m so glad I caved and tested the Elemis Superfood Face Oil. As a longtime beauty editor, I’ve reviewed more serums, creams, and oils than I can count — yet only a handful ever graduate from the test pile to the “can’t live without” shelf.
I say “caved”, because I used to be skeptical of face oils (who wants to feel greasy on already busy skin?). That was, until, the Elemis Superfood Hydrating Nourishing Facial Oil — which promises to deeply replenish moisture and restore a healthy glow — completely changed my mind. To me, it’s proof that an oil can be lightweight, effective, and luxurious all at once.
As a mum of two, skin-care multitaskers aren’t a nice-to-have — they’re practically survival. This Elemis bestseller melts onto the skin without a trace, leaving my skin refreshed and nourished. With its crisp botanical scent, even three stolen minutes of alone time feels restorative. Elemis, the London-born brand celebrated for blending, created its Superfood line as a nutrient-rich spin on skin care (basically, a green juice for your face).
Keep reading to find out why this oil climbed to the top of my skin-care “menu.”
My Skin Goals
I have dry, sensitive, and reactive skin that tends to flare up easily, with an uneven tone that makes it challenging to maintain a smooth and balanced appearance. My biggest test is keeping moisture locked in, especially on my cheeks, where dryness sets in fast and no amount of lotion seems to stick. I truly need something that can effectively restore hydration and soothe those persistent dry patches, all while being gentle on the rest of my skin.
First Impressions
Let’s talk about the texture, because that’s usually the dealbreaker with facial oils. This Elemis Superfood Facial Oil manages to hit what I like to call the “Goldilocks zone.” It’s lightweight enough to sink in quickly, but rich enough to give my skin that immediate feeling of comfort. The consistency is silky, not heavy, and I’ll either apply a few drops straight from the dropper or warm them up between my palms before pressing into the skin. I’m pretty picky about fragrance, and this one keeps it simple and fresh. It’s herbal and subtle enough that I barely notice it once it’s on, which makes it easy to use every day.
Elemis Superfood Hydrating Facial Oil
The Formula
Poring over ingredient lists is basically our sport, and this one had us geeking out in the best way. What sets this oil apart is its buffet of plant oils — like flaxseed, daikon radish, rice bran, and meadowfoam — all loaded with fatty acids that replenish moisture and strengthen the skin barrier (a key benefit for those dealing with dryness, dullness, or irritation).
“Flaxseed oil is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, especially alpha-linolenic acid, which helps strengthen the skin barrier and keep it hydrated,” says Omer Ibrahim, MD, a board-certified dermatologist based in Chicago.
On the texture side, daikon radish oil lends an airy, silky slip that makes the formula feel weightless while forming a soft, flexible layer that helps reduce water loss. “It locks in hydration without clogging pores, making it ideal for people who want barrier support without residue,” adds Dr. Ibrahim. For antioxidant power, rice bran oil is “rich in compounds like gamma oryzanol, tocopherols, and ferulic acid that brighten skin, fight inflammation, and slow visible signs of aging,” he notes. Meadowfoam seed oil raises the bar by mimicking your skin’s natural sebum to further seal in hydration. “The long carbon chains also make the product more stable and less likely to oxidize,” says Anna Chacon, MD, a board-certified dermatologist based in Miami.
The same mildly flat indent on the stem of each bud indicates the location of the touch/squeeze controls, and there are black spots where heart rate sensors, wear detection sensors, and microphone ports hide. As with previous models, silvery tips bless the end of each elephant trunk, where a beamforming mic aims at your lips for maximum fidelity. These are all familiar, refined design cues from previous AirPods, and they are better executed than ever, even with such slight changes.
Well-Supported
Review: Apple AirPods Pro 3
I’ve been very impressed with Apple’s software support when it comes to AirPods Pro; last year it added a bunch of free hearing health features as a software update. That trend continues here with the addition of real-time translation and heart rate monitoring on these buds.
The translation can be activated by squeezing both of the buds at once, at which time any Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone (any iPhone 16 Pro or later with the feature on) will pull up the Translate app on iOS. Siri will then listen to the speaker in front of you and translate what they are saying in real time, provided they are speaking English, Spanish, German, French, or Portuguese. I tested this with my multilingual wife, who found it to be very accurate with her Spanish phrases.
This is great for multilingual work or education environments in the United States in particular, as well as for travel, and should help folks who struggle with more advanced phrases or need to deliver a more nuanced message in their native language.
I’ve seen this feature enabled on headphones like the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 (which do this, but using Google Translate). Side by side, Google’s Buds and associated app offer many more languages and bit better translation (my Thai mother-in-law was very excited at how well it worked with Thai, which isn’t available on AirPods Pro 3), but Apple’s version is still more than welcome.
The lack of Bluetooth connectivity is, presumably, for weight savings, but it makes this mouse inconvenient as a travel option. The lack of rigidity already makes traveling with it seem unwise. It’s meant to be kept on a desk.
The mouse has a total of five buttons: The left and right clicks, the middle click, and the two side buttons, which are mapped to “forward” and “back” by default. There are five built-in sensitivity presets, ranging from 400 to 2,000 dpi. These presets can be adjusted, and the number of presets can be decreased. With the default button maps, you can cycle through the presets by holding down the right click and back button for three seconds. The scroll wheel will flash three times to indicate that the setting has changed. It’s a little convoluted. More importantly, the dpi switch only works if the rear side button is mapped to the “back” key. When I remapped this button to anything else, the combination didn’t work.
Photograph: Henri Robbins
Corsair recently unveiled its in-browser Web Hub utility, replacing its iCue software for peripheral management. It’s a vast improvement, being easier to navigate and less issue-prone than its predecessor. With the utility, you can easily adjust settings like polling rate, dpi, and button mapping. However, a mouse this simple really doesn’t have much to adjust. I quickly remapped the side buttons, cranked the polling rate to 8,000 Hz, and never needed to use the software again (outside of testing). The only catch is that in-browser management means you need an internet connection, though maybe you have bigger issues if that’s the case.
The Sabre v2 Pro also includes rubberized “grip tape” stickers, applied to the primary buttons and either side of the mouse. These can improve grip and only increase weight by half a gram, but they don’t make a massive difference in functionality unless you have particularly sweaty hands. More than anything else, it makes the mouse feel softer and provides some added comfort. However, I found that the tape was limited-use. After removing and reapplying it a couple of times, the edges started to peek back when holding the mouse.
By Any Means Necessary
Photograph: Henri Robbins
This mouse has an ethos of lightness at any cost. It weighs practically nothing, to the point that it feels surreal when you’re holding it. You can easily flex the plastic by squeezing either side of the mouse, and pressing from the top and bottom too hard will cause one of the side buttons to actuate. Pressing hard on the mouse from any side causes a small creaking noise to emit from the shell.
The only exception to this high level of build quality is the controls, which give a slightly cheap vibe due to the way they rattle a bit in the housing. Still, they’re (mostly) intuitive, easy to use even with gloved fingers, and offer excellent tactile response.
None of this prepares you for the YH-L500A’s incredible comfort. Those large ear cups swallow up your ears as the plushly padded (and replaceable) ear cushions give your head a big, warm hug. The combination of clamping force, excellent headband padding, and their featherweight mass makes these cans an exceptional choice for long listening sessions, even while wearing glasses. My only note is that those with very small heads may have trouble. If my head were any smaller, the ear cups would sit too low, even at the headband’s shortest setting.
Photograph: Simon Cohen
Part of what gives these cans such a comfy fit is their seal, which also creates substantial passive noise isolation. When walking down busy urban sidewalks, traffic and construction sounds were still quite audible but not annoyingly so. At home it was a similar story, with mildly intrusive sounds kept at bay but louder ones getting through.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it obviates the need for ANC (especially for travel), but it’s not the deal-breaker I expected. What I missed more than the absence of ANC was the lack of a transparency mode. Without one, voices (both yours and others’) were muffled; I had to routinely pull the headphones down to my neck even for quick conversations.
Unfortunately, this means that even though the YH-L500A’s dual built-in mics have decent voice pickup and background noise canceling (especially indoors), using these cans for wireless calls can be exhausting. I quickly tired of not being able to hear my own voice clearly. At home, you can get around this by using the wired analog connection with a desktop USB mic.
Highly Detailed Sound
Headphone Control via Simon Cohen
Headphone Control via Simon Cohen
Equipped with a pair of 40mm dynamic drivers, the YH-L500A deliver precise, highly detailed sound, with excellent clarity. The factory tuning is conservative on bass and a bit too bright in the highs for my liking, though the midrange is just about perfect.
The Yamaha Headphones app gives you five EQ presets to play around with (Energy, Gentle, Vocal, Groove, and Openness), but none gave me the tweaks I was looking for. Thankfully, you can roll your own presets (up to two can be saved) via a five-band equalizer, and you can make your adjustments from neutral, or from any of the factory presets. By decreasing the levels of the highest frequencies, while giving a small boost to the lowest, I found a mix I really enjoyed.
