Electronics Specs Explained

Red switches are linear and light, brown switches have a soft bump, and blue switches add a click; the color names come from Cherry MX, and others follow.

Smartwatch battery life runs from about a day for a full-screen smartwatch to about two weeks for a fitness-first watch; LTE models connect on their own.

An SSD stores data on flash chips and is many times faster than a spinning hard drive; NVMe SSDs are faster still, and SSD life is rated in terabytes written.

Size a UPS by watts first; the VA number is apparent power and is always at least as high as the watt rating, so a UPS must cover your gear on both numbers.

Full-frame, APS-C, Micro Four Thirds and 1-inch name the size of the chip that records the image; a bigger sensor gathers more light from the same scene.

RAM is the laptop's short-term working memory; 16GB is the most common size among the laptops we list, and some features set their own minimum.

A laptop's screen size is the diagonal of the display in inches; 16 and 15.6 inches are the two most common sizes among the laptops we list.

Storage holds your files when the laptop is off; 1TB is the most common size among the laptops we list, and 1TB means 1,000GB.

Refresh rate, in hertz, is how many times per second a screen draws a new image; a 120Hz screen redraws twice as often as a 60Hz one.

Smartwatch case size is the maker's case measurement in millimeters; we group watches as small (42 mm or less), mid (43 to 46 mm) or large (47 mm+).

One maker's rule of thumb puts viewing distance at about 1.2 times the screen size, so a 65-inch TV suits a seat about 78 inches from the screen.

The Wi-Fi number names the standard's generation; Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 add the 6 GHz band, and Wi-Fi 7 is the most common among routers we list.