All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Leave it long enough and every product category devolves into a range of gizmos, all aimed at different customers. Take the air freshener — once simply a bunch of lavender, now we have plug-ins which pump oil-stained air into your lungs 24/7, bulb-top burners and expensive atomizers.
Now, at last, this kind of attention has come to the notebook cooler market. The Cryo S from NZXT (if you know how to pronounce that name, tell me in the comments) is a “High Performance” notebook cooler. We know this from both the name and from the design, which somehow manages to look like both the kind of trashy car-stereo add-on on which a seventeen year-old boy-racer might spend his allowance, as well as mimicking every single crappy product from RadioShack.
The $50 cooler is a tea-tray with holes, a meshy platform onto which have been bolted a couple of fans (adjustable speed fans, of course — it is “high performance”). You’ll also find a pair of USB ports into which you might consider plugging a USB lap-warmer to keep your junk from cooling too far. And lest you worry about the huge power drain such a device might cause from your laptop’s own USB ports, you can plug this into the wall via an AC adapter.
The only thing missing is a row of glowing red blinkenlights, a feature which would catapult this lap-saver into the “high performance” stratosphere, via the 1980s.
Product page [NZXT. Thanks, Matt!]
