I have, from time to time, been known to spend a little too much money on toys. (That’s pronounced “tech.”) I’m a firm believer in spending as much as you can in some circumstances. Can’t upgrade the storage or RAM on your phone or laptop later? Max it out now. That sort of thing.
But I cannot, in good conscience, get anywhere close to convincing myself that I’d ever be able to justify spending $600 on a consumer-grade router.
That’s the very quick conclusion I got after spending a couple of minutes poring over the very stylish Eero Max 7 at Amazon’s fall devices event at HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia. Full reviews of this thing will come from someone else at another time. But as someone who has had an Eero Pro 6 mesh setup at home — and recommended Eero to his parents and in other volunteer efforts — I can safely say that it’s a great system for someone who knows the basics of networking and wants just enough control over the network, or for someone who generally has no idea how the magic happens and just wants things to work.
We’ll leave the discussion about Amazon owning Eero and thus having some insight into lord knows how many home networks for another time.
It’s been almost three years since I set up my Eero network. We’ve now seen a couple of newer, faster, better versions of the Eero system come out, and I’ve had zero reason to upgrade. Gigabit fiber is more than fast enough for 95% of what I do on a daily basis when I’m wired in over Ethernet. The same goes for wireless, even if it’s at one-third the same sort of speed (it varies by device, of course).
Websites don’t actually load 10 times faster. Doorbell cameras don’t load any quicker. Unless you’re talking true throughput of file transfers, I’m never going to get anywhere close to maxing out that speed. And even with the dozens of devices (and counting!) that have access to my home network, I’ll almost certainly never get close to maxing out all the available addresses, or having too many devices pull too much data at one time. There’s only so much a family of four can pull down — even if two of them are glued to TikTok most of the evening.
That’s not to say the Eero Max 7 won’t be great. I’m sure it will. It’ll look great standing out in your living room somewhere. Or wherever. How and where folks set up their home networks is fascinating. Sleek press images still don’t take into account Ethernet coming and going — that’s always going to clunk up the aesthetics. But, still, the Max 7 looks great.
But what could I do with an Eero Max 7 that I can’t do with an Eero Pro 6? Or, rather, the three Erro Pro 6 units found in my house, that are now selling for under $250. That many Eero Max 7s would cost $1,700. That’s not a typo. My network won’t be seven times faster. It won’t be seven times more robust. Chances are I won’t find my network seven times more future-proofed.
That’s the sort of money professionals might spend on a business-class network. It’s absolutely not anything I’d spend for home. Not by a long shot.
But, damn, it still looks nice.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.