From the Editor’s Desk: Bias ⭐

The other night, we were going to bed, so I turned off the floor lamp in the living room and noticed something odd in the dark. We have two small USB-powered table lamps in this room, and both were attached to power, but only one of the two was displaying a telltale charging light. This light is in a ring at the base of the lamps, and it’s either green or red depending on the charging status. But one was just … off.

Curious, I turned the floor lamp back on to examine the smaller table lamp. There’s a history here, and as is always the case, that history, that experience, colors one’s view. My wife and I had seen this small USB lamp at a bar in Washington D.C. and we liked it enough that I used AI to find it online and then buy three of them from Amazon for our place in Pennsylvania. When they arrived, we realized they were even better than expected, as you can change the warmth and brightness of the light. So we ordered three more for our place in Mexico City too.

These lights aren’t smart in any way, just USB-powered, but they’re nice and they provide a soft, warm light that’s just right for a music night or watching TV. When the set of three arrived, however, one didn’t work whatsoever, and so I simply returned it and ordered another. Amazon is a lot of things, but it makes that sort of transaction as simple as possible, and I didn’t think about it again.

Until, that is, a week or so before we left for Mexico when one of the lights in PA stopped charging. Or, more accurately, the USB port inside the base of the lamp had become detached. So I had to unscrew the base, crack it up, and charge that lamp with its innards exposed. This is not ideal, but it works. And even with my limited handyman skills, I figured I could fix it with some superglue or whatever, though that would have to wait until we got back.

With this memory jumping to the forefront in my brain, I looked at the non-charging table lamp in Mexico. It wasn’t the same problem, the USB charging port was still attached normally. But it wasn’t charging. I slowly unplugged and replugged the charging cable a few times, and once I saw a small red light, not the ring charging light, but something right at the USB port, appear and then quickly disappear. Hmph.

Too tired to think about this clearly, I turned off the floor lamp again, went into the bedroom, and announced to my wife that one of the little lamps wasn’t charging. “Again?” she asked, going immediately to the same place I was at. The lamps were relatively inexpensive, less than $30 each, but they aren’t to our minds disposable. Maybe they are just cheap, as my look at the inside one and the string of issues suggested. Maybe buying them had been a mistake, a waste of money.

The next morning, I did what I always do, a combination of drinking espresso and reading the news, always depressing these days. But the lamp was bothering me. So I picked it up again and unplugged and replugged the charger, this time with no hint of a light, though that was perhaps too bright to see in the morning. I considered opening it up. I decided to wait.

Later that morning, I was doing what I often do, resetting and reinstalling Windows 11 in various ways on different laptops, this time for the Windows Setup chapter for De-Enshittify Windows 11. I sometimes think that I set up Windows more than just about anyone on earth, and the evidence for that claim is pretty strong. But that morning, I needed to babysit three or four laptops, and I would need to use various power receptacles in the living room to power them all while this happened. There’s an empty table to my right as I sit on the couch, and there’s a two-port power receptacle beneath, so it’s a good spot for this kind of work.

Glancing around to see which power adapters and cables were readily available, I grabbed the USB charger I’d been using for that small lamp, plugged it into a receptacle under the table, and then into one of the laptops. Here, too, I noticed something unexpected. The laptop didn’t charge. Without thinking, I had paused, waiting for the tiny little pinprick light on the side of the laptop to light up, indicating it was charging. I had already half turned to move on to the next laptop, but I stopped. Maybe that little light was on the other side of the laptop, I thought. But no. It just wasn’t charging.

Huh.

I hadn’t tried to charge the USB lamp with another charger, which one might describe as a basic and obvious troubleshooting 101-type step to take. This was obvious in retrospect, but I feel like it would have been obvious from the get-go had I not been influenced by those previous reliability incidents. My experience with these lamps had biased my thinking so strongly that I had stopped thinking clearly about it.

That bothered me. A lot.

Sure enough, I plugged the USB lamp into another charger and it lit right up, charging normally. Briefly bothered by the idea that I might have actually twisted this thing open to try to see what the problem was, it suddenly occurred to me that this was not an isolated issue. This was happening to me elsewhere.

USB is a disaster of capabilities in chargers, cables, and ports that are rarely if ever clearly identified. And so like many (or perhaps all) of you, I fumble around, mixing and matching, and hoping things work while preferring that everything is as efficient as possible. I buy a lot of Anker equipment, basically, in an attempt to seize control of this mess, but now I have so much of it, I forget which is which. I find myself squinting at the tiny 1-point type on USB chargers, the text always one hue off from the color of the charger itself, to figure out its capabilities.

At least you can read that text, at least most of the time. Cables are even worse, and even less clear when it comes to their capabilities. And so last fall, randomly reading tech articles one morning, no doubt while drinking espresso, I came across an article, probably in Macworld, about Beats-branded USB-C cables. These were identical to Apple’s high-quality cables, I was told, but they were cheaper and came in colors other than white. This was of interest to me, so I purchased a two-pack of Beats USB-C cables in navy blue from Amazon and put them in the kitchen, attached to a high-power Anker charger. I told my wife she should use one of those cables to charge her phone each night, as I would do, because they were the best choice.

And they were. Until one morning, possibly a few months later, when my wife woke up, went into the kitchen, and detached her phone from the charger. “My phone isn’t charged,” she announced. And so I did what I always do, what we all do in these situations. I checked to see what the problem was. Long story short, it was the Beats cable. It had stopped working entirely.

With that dream dead, I had one navy blue cable in the kitchen and one white Apple cable. My wife no longer trusted the Beats cable, of course. And I was vaguely bothered by the mismatched colors. But I forgot about it, as one does, and by the time we came to Mexico on our current trip, in early January, I had packed the navy blue Beats cable along with whatever other gadgets and accessories I would bring here.

In Mexico as in Pennsylvania, I play games in Windows on a laptop using an Xbox Wireless Controller. I connect the controller to whatever laptop using a USB cable because Bluetooth introduces lag and I found myself replacing the two AA batteries a wireless connection requires too frequently. And in Mexico as in Pennsylvania, this cable was an older, but very well made Anker USB 2.0 cable with USB-A on one end (for the PC) and USB-C on the other.

One of my mini goals for this trip was to modernize the laptop selection I keep here, and I’ll probably discuss that further in whatever “What I Use” post I will write later. One of the laptops I brought was the HP OmniBook Ultra with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chipset. This laptop is notable for several reasons—it plays AAA games about as well as a laptop with dedicated graphics, which is rather impressive—but it only has three USB ports, and they’re all USB-C. So I can’t use the old Anker cable I had been using for the Xbox controller. And while I don’t recall how or why I chose this, that navy blue USB-C cable ended up connected to the Xbox controller here in Mexico.

Who cares, right? Except that one of the other notable things about this laptop is how unreliable it is. It’s not a prototype per se, but it is a pre-production or early production unit, and I have all kinds of problems with it. In addition to the usual x64 issues I routinely experience when I open up the laptop, this one doesn’t come on at all many times. And it ignores my attempts to power it on by pressing the power button. Sometimes, I close and reopen the display lid several times, hoping to see the little blue power light appear on the power button, indicating that it will now come on. And then I wait while it slowly does so.

But it’s not just the basics. When playing Call of Duty online, it will frequently report that the controller isn’t connected via a pop-up dialog in the middle of the screen, so I unplug it and replug it until that goes away. Worse, it also frequently tells me that I’ve lost the Internet connection despite me being connected via both Ethernet and Wi-Fi. In this case, there’s almost no recourse, and I have to end the game and restart it. This never works: There’s a weird error message in the game about one or more of the players in my party not meeting some security requirement, despite me being a party of one and having made no changes. So I have to reboot the computer. Then it works. Fun!

We’re over one month into this trip, and the frequency of these issues has been the only thing about this laptop that is reliable. And when it happened this morning, I finally had a thought. What if it’s the cable? What if it’s the laptop?

Obvious, I know.

But I shut down Call of Duty and moved the controller and Ethernet connect to a different laptop. Started the game. And played for a few hours without issue. The cable is fine. And so is the Internet connection. The problem is the laptop, this not quite production quality laptop. So there’s no blame to be had per se. Unless I wish to blame myself for not explicitly testing this for so long, though I had been playing games on the other laptop too. I guess I never tied the issues to the laptop for some reason, even though its reliability is sketchy at best.

In a final bit of irony, another notable thing about the HP OmniBook is that it comes with a tiny, slim GaN-style charger. It’s a standard 65-watt unit, but it’s about half the size of a normal HP charger and, if anything, it looks a lot like some of the Anker chargers I have. In fact, it looks a bit too much like some of the Anker chargers I have here. Just now, I got up, went out into the living room and looked at the charger that hadn’t been charging the little USB lamp. It’s not the Anker charger I thought it was. It’s the HP charger.

I was so quick to blame that lamp. But it wasn’t the lamp, and it wasn’t the Anker charger (or USB cable) I thought I was using to charge it. It was just another unreliable part of an unreliable laptop that has nothing to do with anything. But these incidents, collectively, are troubling to me. I don’t like how easily I was sidetracked. I know how to troubleshoot. I just never did it correctly. Multiple times.

I’ve defended the word bias many times because I feel it’s misused and misunderstood by many. But with the USB lamp, especially, my thought process really was biased in the traditional or commonly accepted sense. I would like to think I’m better than that. But the thing is, this is all too common. And I can think of examples from many years ago, decades even.

I won’t bore you with a list, but one that stands out is the original iPad. When Apple announced this device in 2010, Steve Jobs provided the feeblest of excuses for its existence—you may recall the “the question has arisen” nonsense he spouted at the time—and I, like many, saw it as little more than a very large iPod touch and not the second coming. It was “no game changer,” I wrote at the time.

I was right about the iPad. But I was also biased by something semi-unique to my experience: I had owned and used dozens of Tablet PC models by that point, had even gone on a tour to show them off to groups all over the country on Microsoft’s behalf at one point, and that vast experience colored my view. Where the Tablet PC was designed to be a no-compromises superset of a Windows laptop with digital pen and handwriting recognition capabilities, the iPad seemed like a toy and a money grab, yet another device for Apple’s best fans to buy.

As it turns out, I was also wrong about the iPad. The iPad was a new and different type of tablet. It was entirely multitouch-based, unlike the Tablet PCs, and it didn’t (yet) support a digital pen. It was a simple device, not a complex PC, and so it performed impressively and reliably. It also had terrific battery life, an issue that would dog all Tablet PCs and laptops for many, many years to come. The iPad was better than the Tablet PC, overall, and it was a more personal device, one that was about entertainment and relaxing, and not about work, though that would come too, in time.

Today, the Tablet PC is long gone, the Surface RT failed immediately, and tablet-type PCs are, at best, a niche market. The iPad is routinely in the same ballpark as the Mac from a revenue perspective, but it sells much better, given its lower average cost. Whether it’s a game changer is an open debate, but the changes Apple introduced in 2025 position this device, suddenly, as a laptop killer. That it took so long, 15 years, is on Tim Cook and Apple. This could, and should, have happened years ago.

I’ve often mused about my initial impressions of the iPad and about how my unique experience, which should have been a benefit, instead biased my thinking. But these recent incidents with the USB lamp, Beats cable, and HP laptop and power supply are collectively a reminder that this type of thinking keeps happening and is difficult to shake. Our experiences matter, they shape us and who we are. It is sobering to realize that they can betray us too.