GADGET GURU’S MAGIC BOX

They have Wi-Fi 7 now? That is absolutely unacceptable – GaGu is still struggling on with bog standard Wi-Fi 6. His network is redundant! Never mind that he has never run into anything (bar large file transfers) that has really even tested its speed. He must have an upgrade now. But he cannot: Guru, like you, must wait until the middle of next year for the first rudimentary 802.11be Extremely High Throughput devices to sneak onto the market. Here’s a prediction that seems bold but really isn’t: don’t expect Wi-Fi 7 support in an iPhone for two years. Maybe even three, on the ‘tock’ part of the upgrade cycle. Guru called his close personal friend Tim Cook, and it seems he’s in no rush, because it’s a useful headline feature to throw in too late when Apple’s hand is forced. Ahem.

But do we always need to upgrade? Only now, seven years into his current desktop PC’s life, has GaGu been forced to fiddle with graphical settings to make a game work acceptably. There will come a tip-over point, and there’s no denying the pull of the new, but Guru is increasingly convinced that we’re camping on a comfortable plateau in many aspects of technology. It’s a good place to be – there are tasty upgrades available (an RTX 4090, why not) but if GaGu simply wants to sit around in his pants and play Monty Mole on his ZX Spectrum nobody’s going to sneer. They’d better not, anyway.

Forced upgrades plague Guru, though. He has unwillingly emptied his wallet for a new vacuum cleaner, for example, after both of his extremely crunchy old first-gen Dysons bit the bullet in a single month. He has clearly not learned his lesson, given that he has thrown $1,249 at a lovely Dyson Gen5Detect, but it seems to cope with his numerous cats’ hairy leavings with far more aplomb than his previous vacs.