I have two pairs of wireless earbuds that I rotate during long gaming sessions. When one starts complaining about its battery, I swap in the other pair and put the first one on charge. It’s a mildly ridiculous system, but it works. Apparently, my gaming setup now requires something resembling shift work.
Then my mouse died in the middle of a game.
A few weeks later, my keyboard did the same thing. Neither had gone anywhere. Both spend essentially their entire lives on my desk, within arm’s reach of the computer they’re connected to. Somehow, I’d turned two completely stationary objects into additional batteries I had to remember to maintain.
That was when the cable started looking surprisingly convenient.
The wireless keyboard on my desk is good enough that I usually forget it’s wireless. That’s exactly how I want things to be until I press a key, nothing happens, and I spend the next few seconds figuring out whether it’s asleep, connected to the wrong device or simply asking for electricity.
A wired keyboard has considerably fewer moods.
I’m not pretending that waking a keyboard or plugging in a mouse is some great hardship. The irritation comes from how many objects now have their own little state to keep track of. Something is asleep. Something else needs charging. A receiver has migrated to whichever drawer contains all the other tiny pieces of technology I’m apparently keeping for archaeological purposes.
Eventually, the devices start taking turns asking for attention.
The funny part is that battery life itself has become a weak reason to complain. Logitech rates its Pro X Superlight 2 DEX gaming mouse for up to 95 hours, while Keychron claims its B6 Pro keyboard can last up to 1,200 hours, or roughly eight months at five hours of use per day.
That’s extremely good. I don’t think wireless manufacturers have failed to solve the battery problem.
I wasn’t always this accepting of wireless audio either. When Apple announced the AirPods, I held on to wired earphones for much longer than I probably needed to. Eventually, I started to suspect I was less a practical holdout and more the guy insisting the dangling cable was part of the experience. There’s only so long you can resist convenience before you start looking like you’re making a counter-culture statement nobody asked for.
My earbuds prove that I’m willing to put up with much worse. I own two pairs specifically because I sometimes game long enough to exhaust one, then swap to the other while the first charges. That is objectively more ridiculous than plugging in a keyboard once every few months, yet I’m perfectly happy to do it.
The difference is that I use what wireless gives me there. I can stand up, walk around, grab a drink and keep listening. My mouse gets a similar exemption because it moves constantly, and I can actually feel the benefit of losing the cable.
My keyboard has a tougher argument to make.
It sits under the same monitor every day. My desktop speakers aren’t going anywhere either. Once a product spends most of its life in one spot, I start wondering why I’m maintaining a battery for mobility I barely use.
There are already enough things in my life that need charging. Phones, earbuds, headphones and controllers all come with their own routines, and I’ve mostly accepted that because portability is part of what makes them useful.
Long battery life can even make the interruption stranger. Anything I charge every night becomes routine. Something that lasts for months gives me enough time to forget that charging is part of owning it at all. Then one evening the keyboard stops responding and I briefly have to remember which cable it uses.
At some point, the supposedly untidy option begins to look simpler. A wired keyboard might add one permanent cable to the desk, but after that there’s nothing to charge, nothing to wake and no battery warning waiting several months down the road.
I’m still going to rotate two pairs of earbuds like an airport ground crew because wireless actually earns its keep there. I’ll probably keep the wireless mouse too.
The keyboard can stay plugged in.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.