Gear / Reviews

The mesh backrest is wide enough, from the shoulders to the love handles, cradling my body just right. I wouldn’t call it comfortable, but I felt decently supported, and I haven’t experienced any back pain. (It has a 275-pound weight capacity.) I wish there were more adjustment options for the …

When you have three different floors in your house, like I do, using a cordless stick vacuum is the key ingredient to keeping them clean. It’s easy to carry around to different areas, compact enough to vacuum two staircases without pulling a muscle, and still wide enough to vacuum an …

When I test a mechanical keyboard with “Pro” in the name, I expect it to be the best of the best, with no compromises over its non-Pro variant. Razer has this figured out: The BlackWidow V4 Pro is better than the original V4 in every way, and it proves that …

Factor’s selling point over other ready-to-heat meal kits has always been twofold. One is that its meals are friendly to keto and other versions of high-protein and carb-conscious diets. The other is that its microwaveable meals have never been frozen, leaving open the possibility for actual texture in one’s meal—a …

The first meal I ever cooked for myself was ramen. The next 12 were all, also, ramen. So were a sizable percentage of the next hundred. By age 11, as a latchkey kid, I had mastered the art of the Maruchan egg drop, the sliced green onion, the chili and …

A discrete GPU means the Vivobook Pro 15 offers some solid gaming performance, even if that’s not the main purpose of this laptop. I tested a few games, such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Marvel Rivals. Because this is a 40-series GPU, you have access to frame generation, which can net …

Specs are not bare-bones but are far from luxe; the 14-inch touchscreen has a 2,880 x 1,800-pixel resolution, and the system is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V CPU. That’s a few steps up from the basic processor model, but still a step down from higher-end options you …

For five minutes, water dribbles through a shower filter into a thick, tamped coffee puck, working its way slowly through the puck but releasing very few drops. Only when I start hand-pumping is the water pushed more quickly through the puck, dribbling out over the course of another minute or …

If a Transformers toy existed for grown women, it would be Parallelle’s Traveller series of toiletry bags. Ribbed on the outside like Optimus Prime’s boots, the Traveller looks like a typical (albeit stylish) makeup bag on the outside, but peer inside and you’ll see a warren of different-sized pockets and …

Blow-drying my hair feels like flossing: necessary, tedious, and something I do only because I know I’ll regret it if I don’t. I don’t daydream about blow-drying my hair. I don’t look forward to aiming a hot contraption at my scalp for 15 minutes or so, while my comfort podcast …