At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Long battery life (almost 24 hours in our test) Beautiful OLED screen Great webcam Cons Lunar Lake’s multithreaded performance isn’t ideal for some workloads Glossy screen can be difficult to read in harsh lighting conditions A little expensive Our Verdict The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is a sleek 14-inch Lunar Lake laptop with a beautiful display and extreme battery life. It’s a nice machine, and it would be easy to recommend more widely if it was less expensive. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is a 14-inch 2-in-1 convertible laptop with an Intel Lunar Lake processor. It combines a touchscreen and 360-degree hinge along with 32GB of RAM, a beautiful OLED screen, and the long battery life Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware is known for. Unlike some other Yoga-branded laptops I’ve reviewed in the last year, this model is a 2-in-1 convertible PC with the 360-degree hinge the Yoga name was once known for. This machine has the same CPU as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10, and I reviewed them both at the same time. The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 is the consumer alternative to the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 with the same CPU on the inside but a different design and a more entertainment-focused display choice. The battery life is long, the screen looks beautiful, and the machine looks and feels sleek. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Specs The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is an upgrade to the previous-generation Lenovo Yoga 9i (Gen 9). This time around, the machine has a Lunar Lake CPU — specifically, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. That means it gets much longer battery life and can run Copilot+ PC AI features that Intel’s older NPU just wasn’t powerful enough to run. It also has a more powerful integrated GPU that is surprisingly good for integrated graphics—plus a generous allotment of 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Model: Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Memory: 32 GB LPDDR5x RAM Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc 140V NPU: Intel AI Boost (up to 47 TOPS) Display: 14-inch 2880×1800 OLED display with variable refresh rate up to 120Hz and HDR Storage: 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD Webcam: 5MP 1440p webcam Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C), 1x USB Type-C (USB 20Gbps), 1x USB Type-A (USB 10Gbps), 1x combo audio jack Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Fingerprint reader, IR camera for facial recognition Battery capacity: 75 Watt-hours Dimensions: 12.44 x 8.66 x 0.63 inches Weight: 2.91 pounds MSRP: $1,749 as tested This is a wonderful laptop for people looking for a sleek, portable 2-in-1 with a vivid display and long battery life. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Design and build quality IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1’s design feels similar to other Lenovo Yoga machines I’ve used in the past year or so. This Yoga laptop uses “Cosmic Blue,” in contrast to Lenovo’s ThinkPad line, which opts for a business look with more shades of gray. Combined with the rounded edges and glossy high-resolution OLED screen, it’s a sleek experience. The blue is rather dark, though. In real life, it looks a lot closer to black than you might expect while catching light in an intriguing way. The top and bottom are made of aluminum, and the build quality is solid — this is a proven Yoga design, and it’s not Lenovo’s first time putting out a machine in a chassis like this one. It looks very similar to the Lenovo Yoga 9i (Gen 9), for example. The hinge works well. The hinge also has what Lenovo calls a “rotating soundbar” built into it. There’s no flex that shouldn’t be there, no undesired movement of the display as you type, or anything else you wouldn’t want to see on a machine like this. The design just works like it should. At 2.91 pounds, it’s a standard weight for a laptop like this one — not too heavy and not unusually light. The built-in software is a little more cluttered than I’d like: it’s got McAfee antivirus popping up and asking you to subscribe out of the box, for example. Consumer laptops tend to have more bundled offers than business laptops, but it feels a little much for a $1,749 laptop. Still, that doesn’t matter at all when you can quickly uninstall it. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Keyboard, trackpad, pen IDG / Chris Hoffman The keyboard feels fine to type on. Lenovo says it has “soft-landing” switches, which the company describes as having a “snappy” feel, along with 1.5mm of key travel. It’s not mushy, and the switches feel good to type on for a lightweight portable laptop. Once again, I have a criticism to make about a Yoga keyboard’s layout. Lenovo has put the fingerprint reader at the bottom right corner of the laptop. Personally, my fingers naturally gravitate towards the bottom-right corner of the keyboard, anticipating the presence of the right arrow key there, which disrupts my muscle memory! And, on the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1, Lenovo put the fingerprint reader to the left of the arrow keys. So that appears to be a touch reserved for Yoga laptops alone. Sure, you’ll get used to it — and if you like this machine and plan on spending a lot of time with it, perhaps that won’t be an issue for you. The trackpad feels nice and smooth, and it’s plenty large. When you click down, there’s a fine click that isn’t mushy. I would like to see laptops like this one include haptic trackpads — that’s just my preference — but this is a good mechanical trackpad. Lenovo also includes a Yoga Pen, which magnetically attaches to the top of the laptop, on the lid right below the camera bump. It’s an active pen that charges via USB-C. You can use it to draw on the laptop’s display, and it works well if you’re looking for that kind of pen experience on a consumer laptop with a 360-degree hinge. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Display and speakers IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 has an excellent 14-inch OLED display with a touchscreen. It’s designed to wow — with a 2880×1800 resolution, HDR support, and the vivid colors OLED displays are known for. The screen is glossy, unlike the matte one on the business-focused ThinkPad X1 2-in-1. This machine is more interested in providing the most beautiful screen possible for media consumption, while the ThinkPad’s anti-glare display is more optimized for readability in various lighting conditions. It’s always a trade-off when selecting a laptop. To be clear, the screen glare is not unusual — this is just what happens in harsh lighting conditions when a laptop has a glossy OLED display. IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1’s display tops out at a refresh rate of 120Hz, but it has a variable refresh rate, which probably helps Lenovo squeeze more battery life from this system. In fact, the most impressive thing about the display is probably that Lenovo has managed to squeeze long battery life out of this system, despite a display that feels like it should be power-hungry. Intel Lunar Lake is necessary, but the variable refresh rate on the display and the larger battery built into the laptop are probably the things that complete the puzzle. Lenovo makes a big deal of the rotating soundbar, saying it “allows the device to project audio independent of the device’s orientation.” The soundbar has two tweeters that rotate with the screen, and the laptop has two woofers on the bottom. The speaker setup sounds quite good. Listening to Steely Dan’s Aja on Spotify—a classic audiophile test track for speakers—the sound was clear and detailed. Swapping over to Daft Punk’s Get Lucky for a more electronic sound with more bass, the audio sounded punchy and fun — but obviously without the kind of bass you’d get from a good pair of headphones or external speakers. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Webcam, microphone, biometrics The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 has a 5 MP webcam with a 1440p resolution. That sounds great on paper. It looks high-quality, too, with a clear picture. In fact, it’s one of the better webcams I’ve seen on a laptop — even compared to the webcams on some business laptops I’ve reviewed. The quality is more than good enough for video meetings and calls. Lenovo has also included a physical privacy shutter, so you can block the laptop by sliding a switch right above the webcam. These are always good to see. The microphone picks up clean, clear audio and has good noise cancellation in a room with desktop PC fans whirring. To my ears, it may be one of the better microphone setups I’ve tried in a laptop recently. Given that the Yoga line primarily caters to consumers, the webcam and microphone performance is impressive. The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 has a fingerprint reader at the bottom-right corner of the keyboard and an IR camera built into the camera bar above the display. You can sign in with Windows Hello using either your fingerprint or face. Both work well. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Connectivity IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 doesn’t have the largest selection of ports, but I’ve seen worse. On the left side, you’ll find a USB Type-C port (USB 20Gbps) and a USB Type-A port (USB 10Gbps.) On the right side, you’ll find two Thunderbolt 4 ports (USB 40Gbps) and a combo audio jack. This laptop charges via USB-C, so you’ll plug the charger into one of those USB Type-C ports. Anyone looking for an HDMI out port, a microSD card reader, or a second USB Type-A port will need to look elsewhere. (For example, the business-focused ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 has a built-in HDMI out port.) But this isn’t too bad for this type of portable laptop, especially if you’re prepared to use a dongle if you ever need more ports. I’m just happy to see Lenovo included a headphone jack on this machine! I’ve reviewed a similarly named Lunar Lake-powered Yoga laptop without a headphone jack, the Yoga Slim 9i. Thanks to Intel’s Lunar Lake, this machine also comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 as standard. It’s imperative that these features become standard for new laptops. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Performance The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 delivers snappy desktop performance thanks to its Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU. Lunar Lake works well for day-to-day productivity applications and delivers extremely long battery life — plus surprisingly good graphics performance for integrated graphics hardware. As always, though, we ran the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs. IDG / Chris Hoffman First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. With an overall PCMark 10 score of 7,719, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 seems to squeeze every bit of performance it can out of Lunar Lake’s hardware. We like to test laptops in their default state without tweaking them much — like a normal PC user would experience them — and I imagine recent changes to Windows 11 that put laptops into a higher-performance state automatically when they’re plugged in helped this machine in the benchmarks. IDG / Chris Hoffman Next, we run Cinebench R20. This test is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage. With a multithreaded Cinebench R20 score of 4,306, Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware shows its biggest weakness here. With fewer CPU cores, it’s not just substantially slower at multithreaded CPU workloads than AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series hardware, which also has an NPU and can run Copilot+ PC AI features. It’s also substantially slower than Intel’s own previous-generation Meteor Lake chips. Lunar Lake does provide longer battery life than its competitors, but it comes at a cost. This isn’t representative of real-world productivity application usage, which is good — but it will be an issue for multithreaded CPU-heavy workloads. IDG / Chris Hoffman We also run an encode with Handbrake. This test is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. It demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load. The Lenovo Yoga 9i completed the encode process in an average of 1,414 minutes, which is about 23 and a half minutes. Again, multithreaded CPU performance is a weakness here. IDG / Chris Hoffman Next, we run a graphical benchmark. This isn’t a gaming laptop, but it’s still good to check how the GPU performs. We run 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. With a 3DMark Time Spy score of 4,716, Lunar Lake delivers great graphics performance for integrated graphics — second only to laptops with discrete Nvidia or AMD graphics hardware. Overall, this machine delivers solid performance. This laptop showcases Lunar Lake at its peak performance. It also struggles with Lunar Lake’s lower-than-ideal multithreaded performance, as Intel included fewer cores on Lunar Lake than on the last-generation Meteor Lake hardware. That’s only a concern if you have workloads that need sustained multithreaded performance, but it’s an important thing to consider on a $1,749 laptop. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Battery life The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 combined a substantial 75 watt-hour battery with long-lasting Lunar Lake hardware, so we’d hope it would have long battery life. And it does — it’s very impressive. IDG / Chris Hoffman To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks, and it’s worth noting that the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1’s OLED display has a bit of an advantage, as OLED screens use less power to display the black bars around the video. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this. The Lenovo Yoga 9i lasted for 1414 minutes before suspending itself — that’s 23 and a half hours. The OLED display almost certainly uses more power, but the choice of a variable refresh rate for the display and the larger battery help this machine achieve extremely long battery life. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Conclusion The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is a sleek machine with a beautiful display and long battery life. The 2-in-1 experience is great. It’s as nice as it looks in the photos. The downsides are evident: the glossy screen may not be ideal in certain situations, the low multithreaded CPU performance may disrupt some people’s workflows, and the fingerprint reader located to the right of the arrow keys may not be to everyone’s liking. But the main concern is the price — at $1,749, this is a little on the premium-priced side for a consumer laptop. Still, it is a 2-in-1, and a high-quality one at that. This is a wonderful laptop for people looking for a sleek, portable 2-in-1 with a vivid display and long battery life. If those are your priorities — and the price seems reasonable to you — this machine is great. Read...

Aussie Paralympian Ellie Cole has fired up at James Magnussen and the Enhanced Games, saying the controversial event `blurs the lines between morality and entertainment`. Read...

Last week, ESPN put a price tag on the standalone streaming service it’s launching in the fall, and it’s not cheap. ESPN’s streaming service will cost $30 per month, with an option to bundle Hulu and Disney+ for $6 more. (A limited time offer at launch will throw in both services free for the first year.) By contrast, ESPN’s carriage fees—the amount it charges cable TV providers to carry its channels—are reportedly around $10 per month, amounting to a 200% markup for a la carte viewing. If you’re having trouble figuring out who would pay for such a thing, the answer might be “hardly anyone.” ESPN’s standalone service is supposed to unappealing enough that people don’t cancel cable to get it, and the high price is a signal that you should probably get the channel some other way, be it through a pay TV package or newer kinds of streaming bundles. You wanted a la carte TV, you got it Let’s say you want you watch all the NFL games that are normally part of a cable TV package. That would require ESPN ($30 per month), Peacock ($8 per month), Paramount+ (also $8 per month), and Fox (whose forthcoming Fox One service will reportedly cost around $20 per month). All that would add up to $66 per month. Opting for the ad-free versions of Paramount+ ($13 per month) and Peacock ($14 per month), which are required for local CBS and NBC feeds outside of NFL coverage, would push the price to $77 per month instead. That’s not much less than a full-size pay TV package. YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV each cost $83 per month. DirecTV’s new MySports bundle is a bit cheaper at $70 per month, but lacks CBS currently. A standalone ESPN subscription might still make sense in conjunction with an antenna, supplementing what’s available for free over the air. And perhaps there’s a certain kind of ESPN superfan for whom it’s the only thing keeping them glued to a pricier pay TV package. But for sports fans who want full coverage of what’s normally on cable, the a la carte route won’t add up. Unlike with general entertainment content, you can’t merely cycle through streaming services one at a time to save money. Outside of password sharing or piracy, bundling will be the only way to defray the costs. Back to the bundle That brings us to the real goal with ESPN’s streaming service, which is to serve as a starting point for new kinds of TV bundles. Just look to Disney’s own bundling strategy as an example. Hulu and Disney+ each cost $10 per month on their own, but $11 per month when bundled together. When you add them to ESPN’s flagship service, the cost for the pair goes down to $6 per month (and, at the outset, free for the first year). Disney’s been branching into bundles with other companies as well. It already offers a $17-per-month package with Disney+, Hulu, and Max (soon to be HBO Max again), saving $4 per month over each company’s separate ad-supported offerings. Disney hasn’t announced a tie-in with ESPN, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen given the bundle’s apparent popularity. Disney had also planned to collaborate with both Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox on a joint service called Venu Sports, which combined all three companies’ sports and broadcast channels for $43 per month. That plan died in court, but they could still work together on bundling their individual services at a discount. Wireless carriers have gotten into the streaming bundle business as well. Verizon in particular offers Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ (that’s the current ESPN service that excludes most cable content) for $10 per month with its newest unlimited plans. An option to include ESPN’s flagship service seems like the next logical step. Streaming companies like these kinds of bundles because they discourage subscription hopping, where you bounce between services every month to watch the best content on each. If they set a high enough price for their standalone offerings, like Disney is doing with ESPN now, those bundles start to look even more attractive. But none of this can happen if ESPN doesn’t actually have a standalone streaming service to offer. The new service is less about selling you a $30 per month plan for a single sports channel and more about setting the table for new kinds of streaming bundles. What sets the new ESPN streaming service apart from the ESPN+ Whether this is better than the old pay TV system is hard to say, but it’ll probably beat the alternative of paying for every individual service a la carte. That idea was never going to happen as cord-cutters imagined it. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter weekly newsletter to get more streaming advice every Friday Read...

The SwitchBot Hub 3 smart home controller is now available for purchase. The Matter-capable device is quite different than other smart home hubs we’ve tested, starting with its rotary knob that can adjust the target temperature on a smart thermostat, the brightness of smart lighting devices, or the volume level of a connected speaker. Another feature that makes the $120 controller so interesting is the USB-C cable that connects it to its power supply: The cable senses the ambient temperature and relative humidity in the room where the Hub 3 is installed. These readings are shown on the hub’s display. We have a hands-on review of the all-new SwitchBot Ultra, which is also shipping today.SwitchBot Outfitted with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios, users will be able to control most any of SwitchBot’s own smart home products—ranging from its smart locks to its motorized curtain and tilt-blind controllers—while also rendering those devices Matter compatible. The hub is also equipped with both an infrared transmitter and an IR receiver for controlling TVs and other home entertainment gear as well as appliances such as fans and air conditioners that use that control interface. The device is also compatible with Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings. IFTTT support rounds out its near-universal compatibility. Users will be able to send up to 30 programmable commands to trigger automation scenes involving Matter-compatible products from other brands that are already integrated into Apple Home. The SwitchBot Hub 3 comes with a tabletop stand or it can be mounted to the wall with either screws or double-sided 3M VHB tape (both come in the box). The SwitchBot Hub 3 is available now for $119.99. We had a very favorable take on the earlier SwitchBot Hub 2, so look for our in-depth review of this new model soon. Read...

The lineup offers more big screen options, including sizes up to 100 inches, redefining immersive home entertainment for movie lovers, gamers and sports fans. Read...

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Space Marine II now has official mod support baked into the base game, fresh from the devs’ hands to your eyeballs. This is big news, albeit for a very particular kind of fan. Allow me to give you some necessary context. Space Marine II is based in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Which, in terms of pop culture settings, is about as deep as it gets. Starting with a tabletop strategy game that was itself a spinoff, the setting has been going strong since the late 80s, with ten editions of the main game, all with deep accompanying lore; several alternate games (ditto); hundreds of novels; and dozens of video games. All of that is, to a greater or lesser degree, canon to the game’s story. A story that takes place across literally millions of planets and tens of millions of years, dozens of human and alien species, psychic magic, demons, and sci-fi tech, all rolled together in one miserable, glorious heap of grimdark fiction. Focus Entertainment It’s a lot. I think it’s very possible that Warhammer 40K might have the most information and lore of any media property, ever. It is so deep and so wide that it makes Star Trek look like Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys. (What? Exactly.) And here’s the crazy thing: That’s just the official material. As a tabletop war game that also includes building, painting, and customizing your own incredibly delicate, tiny, and expensive army, 40K attracts the kind of fan who loves to literally get their hands dirty. You can spend thousands of hours and a small fortune painstakingly choosing your perfect fighting force, assembling them, and showing off your skills. And a lot of players aren’t content to simply go along with the game’s official story; they’d rather invent their own “chapters” or “factions” of the game’s various sci-fi legions. They do the same with the fiction itself. There are decades of fan content, an entire culture, surrounding this game, its stories and lore, and even its basic mechanics. I’m not exaggerating when I say you could spend the rest of your life obsessed with Warhammer 40,000 and still never see everything there is to see. Here’s one of my favorites, playing off the Ork’s latent psychic powers. 40K’s space Orks aren’t smart enough to make things like cars or spaceships, but because they believe a car-shaped thing should work like a car, it does. They also believe that painting a car red makes it go faster. For them, it actually does. Space Marine II knows this, knows that its most dedicated fans want to dive into all of that headfirst. While a single video game can only encapsulate a fraction of the full breadth of 40K’s official material and can’t even begin to accommodate all the unofficial stuff, it includes an impressive customization tool that lets you equip and “paint” your giant, grimdark supersoldier in an incredible variety of ways. It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes a 40K fan’s heart go pitter-patter. But for the most dedicated 40K fan, that’s still not enough. Which is why the game now has official, native support for player-created mods. It’s a formula that’s worked well for tons of PC games, from Skyrim to Cities Skylines to Baldur’s Gate III. But because of Warhammer 40K’s unique relationship with both its own medium and its fans, it’s inevitable that an explosion of user-generated content is coming. Within the first release of the official Integration Studio, modders will get access to tools for making new levels, new modes, new NPCs and enemy behavior, and even the base game’s logic. But that’s just the bones of what players can make. They can recreate essential moments from 40K fiction, like, say, the Fall of Cadia or the throne room battle of the Horus Heresy. (That would be roughly equivalent to the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the Charge of the Light Brigade, for those not in the know.) They can add in iconic allies and enemies, from an Avatar of Khaine to Ciaphas Cain. They could bring in some Exodite Eldar and play as an alien elf riding a dinosaur, which Games Workshop has yet to give players in the real game. And again, that’s just emulating the stuff from the official fiction. Warhammer 40K fan content goes hard and crazy, often leaning into the setting’s most ridiculous elements or its largely forgotten satirical bent. (The humans and Space Marines are unequivocally and almost universally bad guys, if not necessarily the Bad Guys, something that’s often overlooked in the video games.) I can’t wait to see Buzz Lightyear marines, or the Angry Marines, or the best unofficial chapter: the Space Maids, who go around in pink maid dresses giving aid and comfort to the armies of the Imperium. This is a joke. But also it isn’t. The Space Maids have semi-official lore, as official as fan content can get. They have divisions of their army with documented insignias, and they have a “Primarch” or founder like all the other Space Marine chapters/legions. They’re based on cutesy anime tropes, including lots of catgirls and baked goods. They’re wonderful. Space Maid Marines are coming to Space Marine II. It is inevitable, and it’s going to be glorious. Read...

I hoard tech devices, but funny enough, I don’t keep piles of tech accessories. I tend to buy cables, dongles, and organizational bits infrequently. I wait until I need them, since I figure I can always buy them. But that soon may not be the case, as a lot of such stuff comes from China. Even as tariff policies are changing, shipments dropped pretty dramatically over the last month and a half. Plus, when availability goes down, prices go up. So I’m biting the bullet and finally stocking up on a few small but key items—the same things that many friends often grumble about not having on hand. Chances are, you’ll want to grab some of these, too. 1) Cables Anker Somehow, I always need more USB-C cables. (I recently rescued an e-reader and an unwanted phone, so that may have something to do with it.) Right now a pack of two is under $10. I also recently decided to rework my layout for networking gear within my home. Longer cords would make the project easier, and I may as well get faster ethernet cabling anyway. A 50-foot CAT 6 cable is $28, but if I’m willing to forgo future-proofing, I can grab a CAT 5e variant for just $10. Plus, I always need HDMI cables. So at least one cheapie $9 six-foot one goes in the cart, too. 2) Zipties HAVE ME TD / Amazon A lot of zipties are made in the U.S.—but since I don’t know if their factories rely on materials and parts made overseas, I figure this is an easy buy now, too. A pack or two of zipties doesn’t take much space or much money ($4/each). I own Velcro ties as well, but I hoard my gigantic roll for PC building projects and other places where I may want to adjust or redo the cabling. I won’t stay rich in Velcro ties if I use them everywhere. (Even if they’re only $10 for 100, they’re preeeecciouuusss to me.) Zipties are more versatile around the house, too. For tech, I use them to tidy up cabling at my desk, behind my PC, and along the back of my entertainment center. But they also come in handy with my plants, organizing craft supplies, securing loose pieces of (cheap) furniture, and the like. Pretty much every time I’m grumbling about a twist-tie breaking but being too stubborn to use one of my precious Velcro ties, I should be using a zip tie. So now I’ll have plenty. 3) USB dongles StarTech / Amazon So, in theory, USB ports can hold up to removing and inserting cables many times over. In practice, death can come faster than expected. (RIP to the charging port on my old laptop after someone tripped over the charging cable.) Whenever I can, I buy USB extender dongles for USB ports I know I’ll be swapping devices in and out of frequently. I’ve been making use of a few older USB 2.0 models I already had, but recently I started using gear needing USB 3.0. So that gets an upgrade, and I’m getting two just in case. (May as well, at $8 a pop.) 4) Cable adapters Cable Matters / Amazon I have a lot of HDMI cables. (At least, in theory I do—they’re stashed all over my place so I can’t always find them right away. Hence buying more because I may as well.)  I don’t have many specialty display cables, like HDMI to mini-DisplayPort and HDMI to micro-HDMI. I use them infrequently, but they’re valuable when doing tech support or stretching life out of older hardware. I could buy more of the specialty cables, but I’m snagging adapters instead. (Right now, I’m starting with a $10 HDMI to mini-DP option.) Converting a standard HDMI cable gives me much more flexibility, like if I need a longer cable than the specialty one I own. Read...

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