Month: November 2020

Enlarge / The Herman Miller x Logitech Embody chair. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Recently, our coverage of the work-from-home universe expanded to include "gaming" chairs. This is because, in spite of their branding, they're not much different from average office chairs—and in a year when remote work has become ever more commonplace, they're sometimes a competitively priced home-office option.

But what about the inverse idea of a traditional office-chair company launching a gaming chair? That's the idea behind Herman Miller's latest line of Logitech-branded chairs, which caught our eye when the company reached out with a loaner chair. Herman Miller's decades of $1,000-and-up chairs have never previously included a gaming-branded product, while Logitech, better known for peripherals like keyboards, mice, and headsets, has never produced its own chairs. We were curious what the mashup would produce.

The quick answer is simple enough: it's an existing Herman Miller chair model with a mild aesthetic tweak. And while it's as solid as you might expect from a $1,499 home office chair, its game-specific branding doesn't quite add up.

Enlarge / Headroom is one of several apps advertising AI as the solution for your messy virtual/video meetings. (credit: Headroom )

Julian Green was explaining the big problem with meetings when our meeting started to glitch. The pixels of his face rearranged themselves. A sentence came out as hiccups. Then he sputtered, froze, and ghosted.

Green and I had been chatting on Headroom, a new video conferencing platform he and cofounder Andrew Rabinovich launched this fall. The glitch, they assured me, was not caused by their software, but by Green’s Wi-Fi connection. “I think the rest of my street is on homeschool,” he said, a problem that Headroom was not built to solve. It was built instead for other issues: the tedium of taking notes, the coworkers who drone on and on, and the difficulty in keeping everyone engaged. As we spoke, software tapped out a real-time transcription in a window next to our faces. It kept a running tally of how many words each person had said (Rabinovich dominated). Once our meeting was over, Headroom’s software would synthesize the concepts from the transcript; identify key topics, dates, ideas, and action items; and, finally, spit out a record that could be searched at a later time. It would even try to measure how much each participant was paying attention.

Meetings have become the necessary evil of the modern workplace, spanning an elaborate taxonomy: daily stand-ups, sit-downs, all-hands, one-on-ones, brown-bags, status checks, brainstorms, debriefs, design reviews. But as time spent in these corporate conclaves goes up, work seems to suffer. Researchers have found that meetings correlate with a decline in workplace happiness, productivity, and even company market share. And in a year when so many office interactions have gone digital, the usual tedium of meeting culture is compounded by the fits and starts of teleconferencing.

Enlarge / There are lots of deals on Nintendo Switch games this Black Friday. (credit: Photo Illustration by Guillaume Payen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Black Friday is here, and it's brought a deluge of discounts on video games and gaming gear. We've already posted a more general roundup of the best Black Friday deals, but with more and more people using video games to keep themselves occupied during the ongoing pandemic, we thought it'd be helpful to specifically highlight the best video game deals we're seeing across retailers.

Before you dig into our roundup, we'll state what's probably obvious at this point: no, there aren't any Black Friday deals on the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S. Demand for those new consoles remains incredibly high, with most retailer restocks selling out within minutes (at most), so don't expect to see any discounts there for a long, long time.

That said, many of the year's biggest games have dropped to the lowest prices we've seen to date, Steam and Epic are running sales for PC gamers, and a number of worthwhile accessories are deeply discounted. You can further stuff your backlog by checking out our rundown below.