I’ve spent the last few weeks with the Keychron Q5 Pro and Q6 Pro mechanical keyboards, and I think they’re some of the best bang-for-your-buck full-size keyboards you can get today. The Q6 Pro is a traditional full-size keyboard layout with a NumPad and navigation keys, while the Q5 Pro is a slightly more compact 1800-style layout.
Both of them are gasket-mounted, with thick aluminum cases and a knob in the top right corner. You can buy either model with Keychron’s red linear switches, brown tactile switches, or banana tactile switches, and they include hot-swap sockets, RGB lighting, and Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity by default. If you don’t mind a cord, you can also connect them via USB-C. (Read my guide, How to Shop for a Mechanical Keyboard, if you want to learn more about some of these terms!)
Why a Full-Size Layout?
Anyone who wants a full-size keyboard layout already knows they want it. In my experience, it’s something you’re already acclimated to, not something you’re going to switch to on a whim. These things are huge and can have a dedicated key for everything, especially if you take advantage of the ability to reprogram keys.
The bare-bones version of the Q6 Pro allows you to add your preferred set of switches and keycaps.
Photograph: Keychron
Yes, the entire keyboard is completely reprogrammable. Keychron’s Q Pro line supports QMK/VIA, an open source third-party software that lets you reprogram every key. QMK is a system for keyboards that allows users to flash new firmware and keymaps, and VIA is a system that makes this reprogramming quick and seamless within a web browser. These keymaps persist across devices and have nearly limitless potential once you’ve learned the software.
Because of the utility of QMK and VIA, I found the number pads useful even though I hardly ever use them to input numbers. They can easily be reprogrammed and used as a dedicated macro pad, or for any other number of uses. (It’s worth noting that with both QMK and VIA, you have to plug in the keyboard to reprogram it.) The placement of the reset button underneath the spacebar on the top of the printed circuit board (PCB) makes reprogramming easy, since you don’t have to take the entire keyboard apart (unlike quite a few other keyboards that place the button in a hard-to-reach spot).
Even if you don’t plan to reprogram any keys, the number pad is great for quickly typing long strings of numbers or if you want to utilize Alt Codes so that you don’t have to constantly Google “Em dash” and copy and paste the symbol on Windows. (Hot tip: The Alt code for an em dash is Alt + 0151.)
The Typing Feel
Both the Q5 Pro and Q6 Pro use a gasket mount, meaning the main keyboard assembly (plate, switches, PCB) is suspended inside the case using two compressed layers of foam instead of being directly attached to the case. This creates a bouncier typing feel and isolates the internal assembly to create a softer, more crisp typing sound.
Keychron’s gasket-mount system is fairly bouncy, meaning the key presses feel soft and relaxed. This meshes with the switches provided, which have fairly light springs, to create an overall typing experience that’s crisp and bouncy without feeling cheap or flimsy.
The two boards I received have the Red and Banana switches from Keychron’s K Pro switch line. The Reds are simple, effective linear switches that sound poppy and feel fairly smooth. The Banana switches are tactile with a medium-strength bump and a good amount of travel after the bump. I’d recommend either one since both are high-quality examples of their respective switch types that will be acceptable to a large number of users.
Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, a shameless Twitter clone, is set to become a publicly traded company as soon as next week.
Shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. voted to merge with Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. The vote is a culmination of a years-long saga attempting to merge Trump Media with a publicly traded company in what’s known as a SPAC deal. The company will trade under the ticker DJT once it goes public.
On Rumble, more than 2,000 people watched a man dressed in a Jack Sparrow costume narrate the shareholder meeting in a livestream. After the vote passed, the chat erupted. “THANK YOU JESUS!!!!!” read one comment from an account called CanAmPatriot17.
The vote could grant Trump a substantial windfall of almost $3.5 billion dollars in shares of the company, of which Trump owns about 60 percent. Digital World Acquisition Corp.’s stock price jumped about four percent following news of the vote.
This possible fortune couldn’t come at a better time for the former president. Trump is struggling to put up cash to cover a $454 million judgment against him in the State of New York as part of a civil fraud case. Trump also owes $83 million to E. Jean Carroll, as a result of a January judgment in a defamation lawsuit regarding a previous jury’s findings that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s. Trump’s posts on Truth Social were used as evidence in the January case.
As part of Trump’s agreement with the company, he must wait around 6 months before selling any shares. (Trump claimed on Truth Social this morning that he now has nearly $500 million in cash.)
Truth Social looks nearly identical to Twitter, with some key distinctions. Instead of “tweeting,” users post a “truth.” A “retweet” is called a “retruth.” Unlike many right-wing Twitter clones, the site functions well, has remained mostly online, and actually appears to have a somewhat active user base. But since launching in February 2022, after Trump was kicked off of mainstream platforms for inciting violence during the January 6 riot at the Capitol, the company has been mired in controversy.
The site is exactly what one might expect from a Trump-inspired social network. Groups dedicated to QAnon, election deniers, and other conspiracies are easy to find.
And in October 2022, Will Wilkerson, one of Trump Media’s senior employees filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, claiming that the company had made “fraudulent representations” in violation of federal securities laws. Wilkerson was fired shortly after filing the complaint. The SEC eventually approved the merger proposal in February.
Trump Media’s co-founders, Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, sued Trump Media in February, saying the company devised a scheme to dilute their shares. The two men, who are both former Apprentice contestants and shareholders in the company, said that the company needed to abide by a 2021 agreement that granted them the ability to appoint directors to the company’s board and other financial incentives.
The company has become a meme stock, where its performance seems tied more to Trump’s political prospects than the actual financial performance of the company. The price of the stock could change dramatically before Trump has a chance to cash out.
As for sound, it’s the most powerful and quietest air purifier I’ve tested. The maximum setting has a published ultrafine particle removal rate of 650 cubic meters per hour. (This is the measure of how fast and effectively an air purifier removes dust.)
According to my certificate of testing, at its highest setting the Atem X maxes out at 63 decibels, which is slightly higher than conversational speech in a restaurant, or from an air conditioner. At half that fan speed, the Atem X effectively cleans at a rate of 326 m3/h, well above its published rate of 250. It’s also one decibel above a bird call at 45 dB. It’s barely noticeable. Several times I put my hand over the grille to feel for airflow. I wasn’t sure whether it was on.
An HVAC Replacement
While it’s true that my 135-year-old Brooklyn apartment is not the Berkeley Laboratory, it is the perfect location to test a consumer air cleaner. Aside from my two cats and a dog, there’s my close proximity to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a constant source of gasoline fumes that produce the cancer-causing volatile organic compound benzene as well as particulate matter.
My apartment also has vintage steam radiators. That viral tweet, “The hottest summer I ever spent was a winter in a New York City apartment,” is true. That’s by design. The steam radiator system was intended to keep the apartment warm when you open the windows for airflow. Fresh air is healthy … on good air days, at least.
Like many of my neighbors apartments, mine won’t be retrofitted with an HVAC system complete with MERV filters to clean my air anytime soon. What happens when the air outside is toxic? I rely on portable air cleaners, especially at times like last spring, when New York City turned orange with heavy PM 2.5 from wildfires in Canada. At one point that day, New York had the worst air quality on Earth, with an index of 218. For context, Mumbai has the worst air as I’m writing this at 182. New York mayor Eric Adams said out loud what we were all thinking that day: “I went outdoors and basically said, you know, What the hell is this?”
The fact that it’s quiet—rustling-leaves quiet—on its lower settings makes the Atem X an ideal investment for those without a central HVAC system with MERV filters, which are those pleated 1-inch-thick square filters that fit into a furnace or central air system. (MERV filters can also cover a box fan to make an inexpensive DIY air purifier.)
What doesn’t the Atem X do? Unlike IQAir’s GS Series or the Dyson Pure Hot+Cool, the Atem X doesn’t have a carbon filter and cannot clear the air of odor, gases, or volatile organic compounds, like benzene. The Atem X uses a hyperHEPA filter, which captures all the tiny but potentially deadly stuff, like viruses such as Covid-19, bacteria, and PM 2.5. That designer cleaning has a cost: A replacement filter four-pack costs $199.
It’s been over four years since the world went into lockdown and indoor air quality became a main character. In a few short decades, we went from a society that smoked on airplanes to wearing KN95 masks in business class and coach. The minimalist white disc that IQAir says is “made in Germany with love” might signal a new way to think about air filters, a statement piece that brings the room together in a burning world. Even with the Atem X’s price tag, I would buy one. It’s playing the long game, a well-made handsome air filter made to go the distance.
The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it and have to discard it, the device will become e-waste, joining an alarmingly large mountain of defunct TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, cameras, routers, electric toothbrushes, headphones. This is “electrical and electronic equipment,” aka EEE—anything with a plug or battery. It’s increasingly out of control.
As economies develop and the consumerist lifestyle spreads around the world, e-waste has turned into a full-blown environmental crisis. People living in high-income countries own, on average, 109 EEE devices per capita, while those in low-income nations have just four. A new UN report finds that in 2022, humanity churned out 137 billion pounds of e-waste—more than 17 pounds for every person on Earth—and recycled less than a quarter of it.
That also represents about $62 billion worth of recoverable materials, like iron, copper, and gold, hitting e-waste landfills each year. At this pace, e-waste will grow by 33 percent by 2030, while the recycling rate could decline to 20 percent. (You can see this growth in the graph below: purple is EEE on the market, black is e-waste, and green is what gets recycled.)
Courtesy of UN Global E-waste Statistics Partnership
“What was really alarming to me is that the speed at which this is growing is much quicker than the speed that e-waste is properly collected and recycled,” says Kees Baldé, a senior scientific specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and lead author of the report. “We just consume way too much and we dispose of things way too quickly. We buy things that we may not even need, because it’s just very cheap. And also these products are not designed to be repaired.”
Humanity has to quickly bump up those recycling rates, the report stresses. In the first pie chart below, you can see the significant amount of metals we could be saving, mostly iron (chemical symbol Fe, in light gray), along with aluminum (Al, in dark gray), copper (Cu), and nickel (Ni). Other EEE metals include zinc, tin, and antimony. Overall, the report found that in 2022, generated e-waste contained 68 billion pounds of metal.
Courtesy of UN Global E-waste Statistics Partnership
Here in the Pacific Northwest, spring has sprung. Yes, it is but a false spring, and by the end of the week, we will again be moping through chilly gloom and rain. But for the time being, the sun is shining on our gleaming white vampire limbs and we are frantically preparing ourselves for summer picnics, lakeside hangs, and, naturally, plenty of biking.
That makes this year’s TrekFest spectacularly well-timed. Trek holds its largest sale of the year from March 15 through April 30, and we noticed that our top electric bike recommendation for most people, the Trek FX+ 2, is $500 off. One of our favorite electric mountain bikes, the Trek Fuel EXe, is also $1,000 off. You can also shop the rest of the sale here—there are discounts on helmets and lights too.
As always, if you don’t see anything you like or need here, don’t forget to check out our Best Electric Bikes, Best Bike Accessories, and Best Bike Locks guides.
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Best Electric Bike Deals
FX+ 2
Photograph: Trek
If you came to me and said, “I want an electric bike and I’ve never ridden one before,” I would consider a few items. You probably don’t want a 65-pound direct-to-consumer behemoth that will crush you at a standstill or require you to learn how to tune hydraulic brakes yourself. At a mere 40 pounds, the Trek FX+ 2 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a relatively lightweight, aluminum city commuter made by a company with a wide network of retailers who can help you if things go awry. I’ve been testing electric bikes for years, and this is the first and only bike my dad, who is in his 60s, grabs to chase after my kids.
Before you murder me, I have to say that if you like mountain biking, $5,500 is not an insane price to pay for a super light bike with full suspension—even without an electric motor. Trek is offering a few different models for sale. This is the most affordable version; the quality of the components increases as you go higher on the price scale. However, this one still has a carbon frame with a quiet motor and the same specs as the model I tested. The modest 250-watt motor is just enough to keep up with your friends on the uphills so you can all enjoy the downhills together.
If you’ve dug your helmet out of the garage and discovered that the foam has all quietly rotted away during the winter, you need a new one. This is a modestly-priced helmet by Bontrager, which Trek owns. It features MIPS, or the Multidirectional Impact Protection System, which allows the helmet to slide relative to the brain and deflect impact.
Today, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will determine whether the government can communicate with social media companies to flag misleading or harmful content to social platforms—or talk to them at all. And a lot of the case revolves around Covid-19 conspiracy theories.
In Murthy v. Missouri, Attorney Generals from Louisiana and Missouri, as well as several other individual plaintiffs, argue that government agencies, including the CDC and CISA, have coerced social media platforms to censor speech related to Covid-19, election misinformation, and the Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy, among others.
In a statement released in May 2022, when the case was first filed, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt alleged that members of the Biden administration “colluded with social media companies like Meta, Twitter, and Youtube to remove truthful information related to the lab-leak theory, the efficacy of masks, election integrity, and more.” (The lab-leak theory has largely been debunked, and most evidence points to Covid-19 originating from animals.)
While the government shouldn’t necessarily be putting its thumb on the scale of free speech, there are areas where government agencies do have access to important information that can—and should—help platforms make moderation decisions, says David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital rights organization. The foundation filed an amicus brief on the case. “The CDC should be able to inform platforms, when it thinks there is really hazardous public health information placed on those platforms,” he says. “The question they need to be thinking about is, how do we inform without coercing them?”
At the heart of the Murthy v. Missouri case is that question of coercion versus communication, or whether any communication from the government at all is a form of coercion, or “jawboning.” The outcome of the case could radically impact how platforms moderate their content, and what kind of input or information they can use to do so—which could also have a big impact on the proliferation of conspiracy theories online.
In July 2023, a Louisiana federal judge consolidated the initial Missouri v. Biden case together with another case, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense, et al v. Biden, to form the Murthy v. Missouri case. The judge also issued an injunction that barred the government from communicating with platforms. The injunction was later modified by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which carved out some exceptions, particularly when it came to third parties such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research lab at Stanford that studies the internet and social platforms, flagging content to platforms.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD), an anti-vaccine nonprofit, was formerly chaired by now presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The group was banned from Meta’s platforms in 2022 for spreading health misinformation, like that the tetanus vaccine causes infertility (it does not), in violation of the company’s policies. A spokesperson for CHD referred WIRED to a press release, with at statement from the organization’s president, Mary Holland, saying “As CHD’s chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out, our Founding Fathers put the right to free expression in the First Amendment because all the other rights depend on it. In his words, ‘A government that has the power to silence its critics has license for any kind of atrocity.’”
