THE MOLEY ROBOTIC KITCHEN
Treat yourself to that private chef you’ve always wanted
History will likely regard these tumultuous mid-20s as a rather significant period, when civilization largely went into reverse, but, by contrast, technology advanced in a rapid spurt and enabled all kinds of things previously imagined only in science fiction.
The great, outboard A.I. brain we’ve all suddenly acquired is the most important of these advances, easily as momentous as the Internet, television, radio, air travel, electricity, sanitation, writing, and so forth.
Humanoid robots, however—like that other classic red herring, flying cars—just have not happened. Somehow, a robot that can carry a cup of coffee up a flight of stairs without spilling the entire contents still eludes us. True, Amazon is testing humanoids to deliver packages from vans to front porches, and that will certainly look alarming, but it’s a relatively simple task.
Real non-humanoid robotics, though, is advancing well. Indeed, this quite spectacularly unnecessary—but utterly inspired—robot chef currently drawing crowds to a store window on London’s Wigmore Street is the most impressive thing, both technically and in terms of sheer wackiness, I think I’ve ever seen.
It may not quite be the mother of all gadgets, but it’s definitely the crazy brother-in-law. And, to my amazement, far from regarding it as a bit of swaggering performative techno-nonsense, real people across the world, and even restaurants and catering businesses, are buying them. Moley Robotics, the London-based brains behind Moley kitchen robots, has installers up and running in the U.S., and it’s likely there will soon be a Moley store or two. For now, early American adopters are willingly coming to London for demos, as I did recently when a Moley mesmerizingly ran up a simple but decent shrimp stir-fry for me in 12 minutes.
Dazzling, bonkers, and entertaining as the technology is, don’t for a moment make the mistake of thinking that a Moley as your in-home mechanical chef will make domestic gastronomy easier. Au contraire, this is cooking made monumentally complicated. You need to source all the ingredients, do all the cutting and chopping and seasoning, place the constituents in special little receptacles, and position pans, implements, and oils in places specified by the A.I.-generated on-screen instructions.
I would be surprised if, after the initial flurry of showing off your Moley system in operation, you were to fire it up more than once a month. And only then, it might be to justify its existence and your $70,000-plus expenditure. I would furthermore be astonished if more than one in 200 Moley purchasers are women. But still, this is ingenious, and I wouldn’t hesitate to buy one if … well, if a lot of things.
The delicacy and precision with which Moley handles kitchen implements has to be seen to be believed. It has a Disney cartoon–cute way of tapping a spatula three times on the edge of a pan to loosen stuck-on bits of food. You’d have to be a robot not to laugh out loud each time you see this.
The system currently comes with a rather sparse 60 recipes in its repertoire, but the company is adding several a month. If you have a particular favorite recipe you’d like included, Moley’s engineers will program your system to cook that. There are also plans to get well-known chefs to contribute their own recipes.
Most private Moley buyers are going for a single-robotic-arm system, but you can have two arms, like the more industrial variants, and you will probably need them if you want your Moley to do more complex things, such as opening and closing the oven.
THE OURA RING 4
Keep track of your biometrics without looking like a health freak
While we’re on the subject of technological miracles, from the moment they appeared, 10 years ago, I’ve found fitness rings, as pioneered by Finland’s Oura, extraordinary.
“Wearables” such as connected sunglasses—even the moderately popular Ray-Ban/Meta collaboration you see in stores—typically look a little awkward and medical, which is probably why they are often marked down.
Oura rings, though, are genuinely rather stylish. And inside their sleekly built, featureless body, there’s a mass of sophisticated electronics on a near-microscopic scale: a range of sensors and L.E.D.’s, and sufficient battery to keep the ring powered for days at a time.
The newest Oura Ring 4 I’ve been trying watches over your biometrics around the clock, tracking steps, heart rate, sleep, stress levels, body temperature, heart-rate variation, and more. I’ve not been unwell since I began wearing it, but users have reported that the ring accurately predicts illnesses a few hours before they manifest.
The Oura app, additionally, is really refined compared to how it was a few years ago—easy to use and full of insights. If you sleep badly or your readiness score is low, it will advise you to take it easy that day. If you’re stressed, it suggests mindfulness articles and recordings. O.K., that bit’s just annoying, but it means well.
THE NUPHY AIR60 V2 WIRELESS mechanical KEYBOARD
A keyboard that restores the satisfying click-clack your laptop is missing
You don’t hear many amusing or interesting stories about that most boring of computer accessories, the keyboard. The only notable thing about them, really, is that it’s 2025 and we’re still using this Victorian invention barely updated—all attempts to fundamentally modify the design have failed.
I’ve heard a couple of entertaining things recently, though, about employers’ attempts to track the activity level of people working from home. Gen Z homeworkers apparently buy “mouse jigglers”—see Amazon for multiple examples—to give the impression of being busy when supposedly working remotely. Then there was the police detective in England’s West Country who adapted her keyboard to make it look like she was busy by weighing down the keys for as long as four hours at a time. Tracking software at police headquarters couldn’t help noticing she made in excess of 21 million keystrokes in a year, almost three million of them in one month alone—enough to have written nearly three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The defective detective was duly fired.
So anyway, keyboards. You need to know, among Gen Z there’s a big vinyl/Polaroid-type fad for mechanical keyboards with keys that need a substantial push and make an old-fashioned sound. And one name keeps coming up: NuPhy, a Chinese maker of gaming keyboards, whose solidly built products the young’uns love.
Perhaps it’s a gaming thing, but there’s some serious geekery going on, with fans even specifying the type of electronic switch they like their NuPhy keys to fire: “Its Gateron magnetic switches bring adjustable actuation and quad actuation points per keypress,” says one reviewer of the Air60 V2 model, the only NuPhy I’ve tried. “There’s also 8K polling,” the writer enthuses, “Rapid Trigger and last input prioritization (AKA ‘Snap Tap’).”
I have no clear idea what any of this means, but I have to confess that the Air60 V2 NuPhy I tried was very satisfying. I’m not quite sure I’m a convert, but if you find that modern short-travel keyboards don’t quite do it for you—or even give you repetitive strain injury—you might try a NuPhy. This may be another good instance to use Amazon so you can return it, no questions asked.
THE KAGI SEARCH ENGINE
At last, a search engine that won’t collect your data and feed you ads
There’s a hugely busy highway called the M6 that skirts the city of Birmingham in England. A few years ago, it got so congested from constant construction work that a new, privately owned toll section—unusual in the U.K.—was opened. It saves 20 or 30 minutes and has relatively sparse traffic.
When it opened, it made me think that one day soon there might be a parallel private Internet that’s exclusive, better curated, safer, and cordoned off from the rough-and-tumble of the public Web.
About the same time, a successful California tech entrepreneur originally from Serbia, Vlad Prelovac, started to believe that Google is “an insult to people’s intelligence.” “We’ve been oblivious for two decades that Google is not optimized for we consumers, but for advertisers,” he says.
“My kid was just starting school and receiving her official school Chromebook, and I was horrified at the idea of her being profiled for two decades and then being advertised to based on the vast amount of data held on her.”
Instead of building a private Internet, Vlad the Improver did something more realistic—he built Kagi, the only paid-for search engine, which is customizable by you and doesn’t collect any data. There was one previous attempt at a paid-for search engine, which crashed and burned in 2021. Kagi, however, is tiny—50,000 users so far—but profitable and greatly loved.
“For something as profoundly important as search, it was incredible that there was no alternative. There were other search engines, but all had the same ad-based business model as Google,” Prelovac says. “We turn the traditional search equation on its head. And if it’s not good, people will walk away with their wallets. The results are profoundly better, and you have total privacy.”
Kagi is a lot less fancy and colorful than Google. It has none of the new and arguably dubious A.I.-generated results that Google cooks up and foists on users—unless you request a customized Kagi A.I. summary.
On first use, it’s not easy to see why Kagi has been judged by some as the best search engine available. But you start to rely on the clean, honest results you get. It also has its own companion browser, Orion, which is optimized for Kagi, and a mobile version is imminent for iOS only.
Kagi is interesting, well built, well priced, and probably well worth searching out.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
