In short, the charger has changed my daily carry. The small size and weight make it easy enough to include in my cable pouch. I’ve also been able to trim some cables because of it. Now, I just need a USB-C to Lightning cable, my MacBook USB-C charger, and its USB-C to USB-C cable to power every Apple device I take with me, including AirPods.If you’d prefer something a tiny bit lighter and smaller, check out the 10k version. It will also save you $10. But, overall, I think the 5-Day Fast Portable Charger hits a very sweet spot as the far as ports, compact size, and cost are concerned. (If you really are interested in regularly charging a laptop with USB-C, you should look at the 20k version)
Oh, and as an added bonus: Nimble’s portable chargers are made with recyclable aluminum and plant-based bioplastics. The packaging is intentional as well with recycled paper and no harmful inks, plastics, or dyes. To top it off, an envelope is included to ship other electronics back to them free, for responsible recycling.A big promise of USB-C was more device compatibility, including laptops, and now with Nimble’s 13k and the others in the line of portable chargers, I think we’re reaching that promise. At the very least, it will help keep you connected to the things that matter when no outlet is near.
It's not like there aren't cool VR experiences. One of the most popular right now is Beat Saber, a $20 rhythm game in which you slice through bricks to the beat of a song. It's become the top-selling VR game on the popular Valve Steam Store, and people who've filmed themselves playing have garnered millions of views on YouTube.But even with those successes, the money that might help fund developers, game studios and others working on those killer apps seems to be drying up.Venture funding for consumer VR software companies may drop by more than half this year, to $265 million from $576 million a year ago, SuperData says. It's even a third lower than funding levels in 2015, just after Facebook's Oculus acquisition.
VCs aren't the only ones cooling on VR. Industry executives and developers tell me that alternative sources are drying up, too. They say Hollywood marketing teams, which had tapped companies to build VR apps to hype hit movies such as 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and TV shows including Game of Thrones, are paying less and appear to be more cautiously approaching projects.Even early VR boosters are tapping the brakes. Samsung, which was one of the first to market with its Gear VR mobile headset, didn't say anything about VR in its major headset announcements this year.That's sure to be on the minds of the more than 2,500 developers heading to San Jose for Facebook's fifth annual Oculus Connect developer conference, starting Wednesday. There, they'll brainstorm in talks like "the next generation of storytelling," "video that doesn't suck" and, tellingly, "building brand + community (on a budget)."
"There has been a cool-down in general in terms of investment," said Tipatat Chennavasin, a general partner at the Venture Reality Fund. Companies are still getting funded, he notes, and new initiatives like VR arcades, where people can go to a mall or a warehouse and play VR games in a large room, are gaining traction.The wait for VR's eventual uptick has already been too long for Nicolás Alcalá, a film producer in LA who founded a well-regarded VR studio Future Lighthouse in 2015. At the beginning of this year, he had to shut down because he couldn't raise enough money to keep going.People need a reason to try VR and they don't have it yet, he said. "The industry is hoping people will embrace this new technology that isn't yet so useful, but it's cool."
The killer app isn't some mythical thing in tech. It's a proven, reliable way to get you and me to buy.Nintendo's Wii video game console took off in large part because of Wii Sports, a tennis, golf and bowling game that sold nearly 83 million copies after its 2006 debut, making it one of the most successful games ever. The Wii went on to sell more than 101 million units, becoming one of the best-selling consoles of all time. It was replaced by the less popular Wii U in 2012.Not so much with VR. After decades of development, billions of dollars of investment and so much hype Steven Spielberg made a movie about it earlier this year, there isn't anything that truly resonates beyond VR's current fan base.Industry executives say they still have hope, in particular because many of VR's nagging technological problems are being solved.One of the biggest complaints is that high-end headsets such as Facebook's Oculus Rift, HTC's $499 Vive and Sony's $299 PlayStation VR need a powerful computer or video game console to power them, adding hundreds of dollars of cost.
Oculus' upcoming "Santa Cruz" headset, which doesn't yet have a release date or price, won't need a computer to offer a high-end experience. That means it also gets rid of the annoying wire that connects headsets to computers."So many pain points are disappearing in VR, and it's being ignored at the worst possible time," said Denny Unger, creative director of Cloudhead Games, which makes the well-reviewed episodic VR puzzle solving series The Gallery.Those hundreds of millions of dollars dropping out of VR investment aren't disappearing. They're shifting to companies working on augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR), where computer information is laid on top of the real world. Think Pokemon Go, which dropped cartoon monsters around your neighborhood that you saw through your phone.It's not just in our smartphones. There are mixed-reality headsets like Microsoft's HoloLens, Magic Leap and even Apple's secret research project reportedly aimed at creating a headset in 2020 with better specs and capabilities than anything on the market today.
Unlike VR, whose use beyond video games is still unrefined, mixed reality has already impressed Ed Moore, senior technology strategist for oil giant Chevron. After testing all sorts of tech, he's bought hundreds of Microsoft HoloLens devices and is offering them to people who work on oil rigs and gas refineries this month.The killer app for Moore was a feature called remote assist, through which an expert can connect with employees anywhere in the world over video. While talking, the expert can draw circles, arrows and diagrams around a pipe, engine or whatever else the employee is looking at.It can take days to fly experts to a remote location where they're needed, Moore says, and that doesn't include the costs and risks associated with globe trotting. With HoloLens, they can have "an expert in the field" immediately.
The thing is, you and I aren't the target audience, at least not yet. HoloLens costs as much as $5,000 apiece, and it's intended for companies, though Microsoft has shown people using it to play things like the world-building game Minecraft as well. The $2,295 Magic Leap One is only meant for app creators and creatives for the next year or more, company co-founder Rony Abovitz said in August, as part of its strategy to get more apps in the market before he releases a lower-priced consumer version.Even so, money is already flowing into the technology. Investment in companies working on MR is expected to jump by nearly 50 percent this year to $427.1 million, according to SuperData. Next year, it'll jump again to $644.6 million.Sales of MR headsets are expected to explode to "tens of millions" of units by 2022, said Tim Merel, managing director of market watcher Digi-Capital. Part of the reason, he added, is that much of VR has been focused on gaming, while MR is already branching into the business world."Companies are seeing a return on investment right away," said Lorraine Bardeen, the general manager for MR efforts at Microsoft. "There are scenarios where VR is important, but the reason investment has been magnetically drawn to these use cases is they're proving themselves."