Enlarge / Home sweet home. (credit: SCIEPRO/Getty)

On August 25th, 2012, humanity became an interstellar species. There was no fanfare or galactic welcome party as a humble robotic probe, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, crossed an invisible threshold. It slipped between the region dominated by the physics of the Sun and into the thin milieu of plasma between the stars.

Whatever fate befalls us now, whatever future civilizations rise and fall, whether we heal the Earth or continue our self-destructive path, we will still, and always, have this. A monument, a marker, a testament to the existence of our species and the ingenuity of our minds. It’s unlikely that any alien civilization will encounter our spacecraft, yet it will still exist, circling the center of the Milky Way for eons to come.

In the coming decades, Voyager 1 will be joined by other craft sent along solar-escape trajectories: the Pioneer probes, New Horizons, and more. And now that we’ve crossed this astrophysical threshold, we are forced to ask a difficult question: Is this it? Is this all we’ll ever accomplish beyond the Solar System, a scattering of wayward probes sent out into the infinite night?

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We see a lot of gear at Ars Technica. Plenty of keyboards and mice have come across the desks of our reviewers and editors, from mechanical models to the slew of low-profile keys that are attached to the decks of laptops and notebooks. A few notable picks even get our stamp of approval. But do our editors put their money where their fingers are?

In the spirit of Chairs Technica , we asked our staff members what they rely on to stay productive, game, and create content. Through the clickety-clacks of their typing, this is the gear our editors told us they swear by.

Eric Bangeman: Apple Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad

Believe it or not, I love the Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad. And it’s not just because they match my Apple gear perfectly (they do) or because I care about aesthetics (I do).

Enlarge / Apple's M2 Ultra Mac Studio. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The original Mac Studio , despite the absence of "Pro" in the name, was Apple's most compelling professional desktop release in years. Though it was more like a supercharged Mac mini than a downsized Mac Pro, its M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors were fantastic performers, and they were much more energy-efficient than the one in the most recent Intel Mac Pro, too.

Apple is releasing the M2 version of the Mac Studio this week , and even though it's being launched alongside a brand-new Mac Pro , it still might be Apple's most compelling professional desktop. That's partly because the new Studio is even faster than the old one—Apple sent us a fully enabled M2 Ultra model with 128GB of RAM—and partly because Apple Silicon Macs are designed in ways that make Mac Pro-style expandability and modularity impossible.

There is probably still a tiny audience for the redesigned Mac Pro, people who still use macOS and still use internal PCI Express expansion cards that aren't GPUs; it should also be relatively easy to add gobs of cheap, fast internal storage, a kind of upgrade the Mac Studio is still frustratingly incapable of . There's also a bit of awkward pricing overlap with the high-end M2 Pro Mac mini that didn't exist last year.

Enlarge / Apple's 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's a credit to Apple's chips that when I'm using my 13-inch MacBook Air, I feel much more constrained by the screen size than I do by the performance.

That wasn't always the case. The Intel MacBook Airs of years past were perfectly fine for basic computing, but you could feel the difference between an Air and an iMac or MacBook Pro as soon as you tried to edit something in Photoshop or Lightroom or export something with iMovie. The M1 and M2 Macs also feel slower than their Pro, Max, and Ultra counterparts, but for the kinds of light-to-medium-duty work that I spend most of my time doing, I rarely find myself waiting around for things to happen.

That's why I've been looking forward to the 15-inch MacBook Air, which has been rumored for at least a year and is being released to the public this week . Before now, getting a larger Mac laptop meant paying at least $2,000 for the privilege—$2,500 for the 16-inch MacBook Pro—because getting that bigger screen also came with extra ports, more powerful chips, and fancier screen technology.

Enlarge / A photo of the 2023 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia on the author's family room shelf. (credit: Benj Edwards)

These days, many of us live online, where machine-generated content has begun to pollute the Internet with misinformation and noise. At a time when it's hard to know what information to trust, I felt delight when I recently learned that World Book still prints an up-to-date book encyclopedia in 2023. Although the term "encyclopedia" is now almost synonymous with Wikipedia , it's refreshing to see such a sizable reference printed on paper. So I bought one, and I'll tell you why.

Based in Chicago, World Book, Inc. first published an encyclopedia in 1917, and it has released a new edition almost every year since 1925. The company, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway , claims that its encyclopedia is "the only general reference encyclopedia still published today." My research seems to back up this claim; it's true even for other languages. Its fiercest competitor of yore, The Encyclopedia Britannica, ended its print run in 2012 after 244 years in print.

In a nod to our present digital age, World Book also offers its encyclopedia as a subscription service through the web. Yet it's the print version that mystifies and attracts my fascination. Why does it still exist?

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When Diablo 3 released 11 years ago, it was a mess.

Put aside the action role-playing game’s infamous server problems at launch—a product of the series going online-only for the first time—the game itself had fundamental issues. At core was its ill-conceived and universally reviled real-money auction house , which changed the thrust of the series’ loot hunt from “look at this badass helm I got from killing an elite demon” to “look at these practical pants I bought from an in-game spreadsheet for $2.99 USD.” Difficulty and balance were all over the place, and, perhaps worst of all to long-time Diablo fans, the previous games’ dark horror aesthetic was replaced with a more colorful, cartoony vibe.

Two years and a management shakeup later, we got the Reaper of Souls expansion, which completely revamped Diablo 3 ’s loot and endgame, giving us the game we should have had from the beginning . Art direction notwithstanding, Diablo 3 ended up in a good place, and I played a ton of it, largely due to its genre-leading combat. (Lest we forget, Diablo 2 also had a game-changing expansion in Lord of Destruction .)

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I’ve had an emotional connection with Street Fighter since I was 13 years old.

It was early March 1991, and my friend and I were celebrating his 14th birthday in Santa Cruz, California, spending as much of our weekend at the boardwalk arcade as possible. His mom handed us each a $20 bill for the change machine, and we were determined to stretch our quarters as far as we could.

Scrolling brawlers like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Final Fight were our favorite games. We also loved squaring off in what I consider the first true fighting game, the buttonless, Robotron -style, twin-joysticked Karate Champ .

When we came across a Street Fighter II: The World Warrior cab sitting in the middle of the arcade, we stopped dead in our tracks. Everything about it, from the six buttons per player to the large dynamic sprites and backgrounds, felt larger than life to our teenage brains.

Enlarge / In this illustration, SpaceX's Starship vehicle is seen landing on the Moon. (credit: NASA)

Last Friday, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to a team led by Blue Origin for the design and construction of a second Human Landing System to fly astronauts down to the Moon.

The announcement capped a furious, two-year lobbying campaign by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to obtain a coveted piece of NASA's Artemis Program. NASA also notched a big win, gaining the competition with SpaceX it sought for landing services. But there is a more profound takeaway from the announcement.

After losing the initial lander contract to SpaceX two years ago, Blue Origin did not just bid a lower price this time around. Instead, it radically transformed the means by which it would put humans on the Moon. The Blue Moon lander is now completely reusable; it will remain in lunar orbit, going up and down to the surface. It will be serviced by a transport vehicle that will be fueled in low-Earth orbit and then deliver propellant to the Moon. This transporter, in turn, will be refilled by multiple launches of the reusable New Glenn rocket.

Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Earlier this month, AMD briefed the press on its first mainstream RX 7000-series card, the RX 7600. A mostly incremental upgrade over the original RX 6600 but with many of the new features from the RX 7900 XTX and XT , it would come with a price cut, from the RX 6600's $329 to $299. Nvidia then briefed the press on its new mainstream RTX 4060 series. The prices for the higher-end 8GB and 16GB RTX 4060 Ti are already set at $399 and $499. The price for the lower-end RTX 4060 was left undisclosed.

A few days later, presumably having caught wind of AMD's pricing plan for the RX 7600, Nvidia announced the price for the RTX 4060 : also a surprisingly low $299. (This entire time, review embargoes and briefings have been shifting by a few days here and there as the companies maneuver around each other.) Then, around 36 hours before this article was published, a new update came from AMD: The RX 7600 will now be launching for $269, $30 less than the RTX 4060 and $50 less than the old RX 6600.

This is what competition in the mid-range GPU market looks like after a years-long cryptocurrency-and-scalper-fueled shortage and many more months of Nvidia and AMD focusing on their pricey flagships. These are new, modern cards with modern features available at a price that can at least be called "literally affordable" even if they aren't quite "budget."