Tech Editor · Consumer technology and apps
Kavita Iyer covers consumer technology for The Curated Weekly. Her beat ranges from smart home and personal computing to the apps people actually keep on their phones for years. She prefers long-term testing over launch-week impressions, and her reviews emphasize what an app or device looks like at the six-month mark.
The smart-home interoperability standard shipped in late 2022 with a promise to end the ecosystem wars. After running a 34-device household on it for the better part of a year, the picture is clear: lights, plugs, and sensors are solved. Cameras, vacuums, and anything with a screen are not.
Local models have got genuinely good and the hardware has caught up unevenly. We ran the current crop on three machines to find where the line sits between useful and technically impressive.
Three years into the rollout of AI-assisted programming, a working developer's assessment of what these tools have actually changed in the practice of software engineering.
A long-term review of Apple's flagship phone after six months of daily use, with attention to the parts of the experience launch reviews are not built to surface.
Five laptops under $900 tested as a primary work machine, ranked by build quality, sustained performance, screen, keyboard, and how they hold up in week six.
The apps we used to love are now full of features we never asked for, paywalls behind features that used to be free, and 'AI' overlays that solve problems we did not have. A working argument for software that does less.
Five e-readers tested over a six-week reading window, ranked by reading experience, library compatibility, and how they hold up to actual sustained reading rather than spec-sheet comparison.
Four prominent Wi-Fi 7 routers benchmarked across a six-week home-network test, with the unfashionable answer that most households can comfortably wait.
Convolutional networks, portion-size estimation, and the unsolved problem of mixed dishes. A plain-English explainer for readers who want to understand what their phone is actually doing when it counts the calories on a plate.
A look at the data practices of the most widely sold consumer security cameras in 2026, with attention to what is encrypted, what is retained, and what gets shared with law enforcement.
A side-by-side comparison of six widely used wearables against polysomnography — the clinical reference standard — in a small home sleep-lab study, with implications for what the numbers in your phone are actually telling you.
Anker now sells more than forty different chargers, banks, and cables under at least three sub-brand names. A working tester's guide to the ones that earn their place in a backpack and the ones that don't.
A surprisingly contentious category. The USB-C marking on a cable does not actually tell you what the cable will do, and a meaningful fraction of cables on the market are not what they appear to be.