Lofree Flow 2

MSRP $159.00

Advertisement

“The Lofree Flow 2 types beautifully, but its awkward extras lack the same polish.”

Pros

• Excellent typing experience
• Premium aluminum construction
• Smooth, refined Surfer switches
• Hot-swappable design
• Wired and wireless connectivity

Cons

• Touch strip activates accidentally
• Awkward side-mounted USB-C port
• No storage for the wireless receiver
• VIA setup is needlessly difficult

“Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.“

The Lofree Flow 2 made an excellent first impression. Its aluminum body feels reassuringly solid, its minimalist design looks expensive without screaming for attention, and once I started typing, my fingers felt strangely lithe.

That isn’t a word I normally associate with fingers, but it fits. Moving between keys required less effort without giving me the shallow, slightly dead sensation I usually get from laptop keyboards. I even felt like I was typing faster.

For once, the numbers supported the new-product placebo. I normally average between 90 and 95 words per minute on Monkeytype, but I regularly crossed 100 words per minute with the Flow 2. That hardly qualifies me for competitive typing, assuming such a terrifying sport exists, but the difference was consistent enough to notice.

Living with the Flow 2 also revealed several decisions that aren’t nearly as polished as the keyboard itself. None made me want to stop using it, but they suggest Lofree spent more time perfecting what happens under your fingers than considering everything your hands might do around it.

Price and configuration

I tested the latest 84-key Mac version, which costs $159 and comes with Lofree’s Surfer linear switches. These belong to the newer Cloud Series developed for the Flow 2, replacing the Ghost and Phantom switches offered with the original Flow.

Lofree also sells the keyboard with quieter Void linear switches and tactile Pulse switches, so the exact typing experience will depend on the configuration.

At this price, the Flow 2 competes with premium low-profile keyboards from Keychron, NuPhy and Logitech. That makes its smaller frustrations harder to dismiss. A less expensive keyboard can get away with asking its owner to improvise. A premium one should have already thought through where the dongle goes.

The Flow 2 offers an excellent typing experience

The Flow 2 sits somewhere between a traditional mechanical keyboard and a laptop keyboard without feeling like a compromised version of either.

Its keys have enough travel to make each press feel deliberate, while the low-profile design keeps movements short. Each press lands softly without becoming mushy, the Surfer switches are smooth and consistent, and the wider keycaps give my fingers a comfortable target.

My regular mechanical keyboard feels heavier by comparison. I encounter less resistance while moving through a sentence, which probably explains those higher Monkeytype results. That’s especially pleasant during long stretches of writing, when a heavier keyboard can gradually make every key feel like a tiny administrative task.

The aluminum construction completes the effect. The board doesn’t noticeably flex, and it stays planted on my desk. Its restrained design also avoids the usual gamer aesthetic. You get white backlighting, but no rainbow running beneath the keys like a tiny nightclub.

My space bar has a faint springiness if I listen for it, although it’s negligible during normal typing. I didn’t encounter the prominent metallic resonance reported in some other reviews. Whether that comes down to the Surfer switches, production differences or plain unit-to-unit variation is difficult to say.

The Flow 2 is hot-swappable, so you can replace its switches without soldering. That gives enthusiasts some room to alter the typing experience and means one failed switch doesn’t condemn the entire keyboard.

I’d still approach that feature cautiously. The plastic clips on low-profile switches seem more delicate than their chunky full-height equivalents, and compatibility is narrower than it is in the standard MX-style market. Hot-swappable doesn’t mean every mechanical switch you find online will fit.

Fortunately, I haven’t wanted to replace the stock switches. People who normally open a new keyboard and immediately start adding foam and tape in pursuit of the perfect “thock” may be surprised by how refined this one already sounds and feels.

The touch strip creates some daily frustration

The touch-sensitive strip on the right side is the Flow 2’s most conspicuous experiment. It controls volume and can adjust screen brightness. When I remember it exists, sliding a finger across it feels more elegant than repeatedly tapping a function key.

The trouble is remembering it at the right time while somehow forgetting it whenever I touch the keyboard’s edge.

Even after getting used to the Flow 2, I still trigger the strip by accident. My hand occasionally brushes against it, particularly when I’m repositioning the keyboard. Physical buttons or a dial would have been less novel, but they would also have been easier to use deliberately.

The USB-C port occupies that same side. Depending on how your desk is arranged, the cable can stretch toward the mouse area instead of disappearing neatly behind the keyboard. It works perfectly well, but its position seems better suited to the keyboard’s internal layout than anyone’s actual desk.

The 2.4GHz receiver, meanwhile, has nowhere to live. I keep mine in the box because I know exactly how this story ends otherwise. It’ll sit loose on my desk, migrate into a drawer and eventually disappear into the same dimension that collects missing socks and single wireless earbuds.

That omission feels especially strange on a compact wireless keyboard. The Flow 2 is small enough to carry between desks, yet its smallest and easiest component to lose has no home inside it.

My most personal complaint involves the mode selector underneath the keyboard, which switches between wired, wireless and off. Hiding it there prevents accidental changes and would normally make sense, except I also have cats.

When one jumps onto my desk and decides the Flow 2 is a perfectly acceptable walking surface, I can’t quickly disable it without lifting the entire keyboard. A side-mounted control would make those little hostile takeovers easier to manage. This may be a specific complaint, but pet owners understand that every exposed surface eventually becomes a collaborative feature.

The 84-key model has a 3,000mAh battery rated for up to 120 hours with the backlight switched off. That’s competitive for this category, although maximum-brightness backlighting cuts the advertised figure substantially. Since the Flow 2 spent most of its time on my desk, battery life never became the central issue that its other design choices did.

VIA customization is harder than it should be

The Flow 2 supports VIA, which lets you remap keys and configure different layers through a browser interface. It should be one of the keyboard’s most useful features, especially for anyone who regularly moves between operating systems.

Actually getting it working was far harder than necessary.

During my testing, I couldn’t find the correct JSON configuration file on Lofree’s main website, download center or support pages. VIA wouldn’t properly recognize the keyboard without it, so I spent the better part of a day searching before contacting Lofree. The company eventually sent me the file directly.

Lofree now provides some Flow 2 configurator resources through individual regional and product pages, but they remain surprisingly difficult to locate through its central download page. A keyboard advertised as supporting VIA shouldn’t require buyers to know which obscure corner of the manufacturer’s website contains the missing ingredient.

VIA works well enough once configured, although the Fn key still can’t be customized. I wanted to reconfigure it while using the Flow 2 with Windows, but that limitation made switching layouts less flexible than expected.

I eventually kept the keyboard connected mostly to my Mac, where the native layout made sense and I could concentrate on writing instead of managing the thing I was writing with.

Should you buy the Lofree Flow 2?

The Flow 2 is worth buying if typing quality, construction and appearance matter more to you than seamless customization. It feels refined immediately, so enthusiasts may be surprised by how little they want to modify. More casual buyers can get an excellent mechanical typing experience without surrendering a weekend to foam, tape and switch research.

It’s less convincing if you frequently switch operating systems, expect VIA to work without a scavenger hunt or regularly carry the receiver between desks. Mac users who intend to leave it in one place will encounter fewer of its rough edges.

Anyone indifferent to the precise woodland noise made by a space bar may simply see an attractive aluminum keyboard that pairs nicely with the MacBook Neo colors.

I still occasionally trigger the touch strip, and the receiver remains in protective custody inside the box. Yet I keep returning to the Flow 2. I thought it merely made me feel faster, but Monkeytype says otherwise. Apparently, the keyboard tested my patience and improved my typing speed at the same time.

Why WIRED recommends: The compression and vibrating pairing is therapeutic, to say the least; it consistently left my legs feeling less stiff after workouts. Everything is controlled from an LCD screen built into the lead boot, so there’s no separate controller to keep track of. You can tailor every session to your preference, with durations ranging from 10 to 60 minutes in five-minute increments and manual controls to adjust both pressure—measured in millimeters of mercury (mmHg)—and vibration intensity. You can also choose from four compression modes and eight preset routines.

The trade-offs: Therabody doesn’t publish key specs about the LEDs, and I didn’t notice a significant difference in my post-workout recovery that I could attribute to the infrared light therapy. The boots also don’t connect to the Therabody app, which may disappoint some users, but I didn’t find it necessary. At $1,150, these are also among the priciest compression boots on the market.

Buy if: You want the most premium, customizable recovery system available and don’t mind the splurge. They’re especially suited for athletes and anyone who exercises regularly, or for people managing conditions like lymphedema, deep vein thrombosis (DVT), or chronic venous insufficiency (CVI).

Best Entry-Level Compression Boots

If all you want is effective pneumatic compression, the Therabody JetBoots Prime delivers the essentials at a more affordable price point.

Why WIRED recommends: For half the cost of the JetBoots Pro Plus, the Prime skips the vibration and infrared LED therapies but still offers four compression levels (25, 50, 75, and 100 mmHg) and three session lengths (20, 40, or 60 minutes), all controlled from a built-in panel on the boot. They’re wireless compression boots, offer up to three hours of battery life, and can even be used while charging. Weighing about 6 pounds, they’re surprisingly portable and fold down into the included drawstring backpack.

Framework, a company best known for producing modular, highly repairable and customizable PCs and laptops, has suffered a large data breach, which has compromised customer information, according to multiple media outlets and an email from the company that has been shared online. The stolen information includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, login IPs and physical addresses. In the emails some customers have received, the company says that order and payment information wasn’t accessed in the breach.

A Framework representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to TechCrunch, Framework spokesperson Eric Schumacher said that all customers were affected, without specifying an exact number.

The breach appears to have been caused by a Metabase Cloud vulnerability using a zero-day exploit, a previously unknown security flaw in the software. In a blog post, Metabase says the vulnerability has already been patched but warns that those self-hosting may still be vulnerable and should upgrade to the latest point release.

These types of breaches aren’t uncommon, even for large companies, and they hit across the industry. CNET reporting has shown that data breaches are becoming increasingly widespread and severe, while companies are often providing less transparency about the scope of the compromised information and the methods attackers use to gain access.

If you’ve been affected by the Framework data breach, there are some measures you can take to minimize the damage. Change any exposed and reused passwords, enable two-factor authentication if you haven’t already, keep a close eye on any payment cards linked to that account, and revoke access to services you no longer need.

Framework has been hit hard by the ongoing memory shortage and has raised prices twice this year. The cost increase for the memory modules was so significant that it actually pared down the RAM loadout on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, despite the product already being offered for preorder. The latest breach may further challenge consumer confidence at a time when the company is already navigating pricing pressures and supply chain challenges.

Ajay has worked in tech journalism for over a decade as a reporter, analyst, product reviewer, and editor. He got his start in consumer tech, breaking Android news at Newsweek before going to PCMag, where he reviewed hundreds of smartphones, battery packs, and chargers as a Mobile Analyst. He also worked at Lifewire, a Dotdash Meredith brand, as a Tech Commerce Editor, putting together tested best-of lists and assigning product reviews across categories including smart home, uninterruptible power supplies, generators, and automotive tech.

Most recently, he was Section Editor, Mobile at Digital Trends, spearheading his team’s coverage of breaking news, features, reviews, roundups, deals, and more across a variety of mobile products, including phones, wearables, VR headsets, batteries, and chargers. If you want Ajay’s advice about anything tech, especially solar panels, UPS, batteries, EVs, and charging technology, you can reach him at ajkumar@cnet.com.

See full bio

Advertisement

I use ChatGPT pretty much every day, but somewhere along the way, I’ve also developed a habit of poking around and looking for features I haven’t tried yet. Some discoveries are genuinely useful, while others are the kind I’ll probably remember once every six months.

Every once in a while, though, I stumble across something that actually changes how I use ChatGPT. That happened recently with three features I’d somehow been overlooking. I’ve started using all three regularly now, and if you spend a lot of time in ChatGPT too, I think you’re missing out by not giving them a shot.

I let ChatGPT figure out my mornings

One feature I’ve started relying on a lot is scheduled tasks. ChatGPT can now run these for me automatically every day in my local time zone, which means I don’t have to remember to come back and ask it the same thing every morning. I’ve set mine up as a daily work brief. Since a lot of my work happens across Slack and Gmail, I connected both and asked ChatGPT to pull together the things that actually deserve my attention. Once everything is connected, it can read across those sources and immediately build a brief using what’s happening there right now. And this is where it becomes genuinely useful for me. Every morning, I get a short list of around three to five things that are most likely to need my attention that day. ChatGPT tells me what each one is about, why it matters, how urgent it seems, and what I should probably do next, along with a link or citation so I can jump straight to the original message.

Instead of opening Slack, then Gmail, and slowly figuring out what needs to happen first, I already have a pretty good idea of how my day looks. I can tackle anything urgent first and plan everything else around it. I’ve even asked ChatGPT to send the brief when absolutely nothing important is waiting for me. On those glorious mornings, all I get is a simple, “No urgent items found.” Quite frankly, that might be my favorite version of the brief. ChatGPT uses Codex to help set this workflow up, so you’ll need a Pro subscription to use it this way. Pro comes with plenty of other perks as well, and considering how much I use ChatGPT throughout my workday, I’ve found the subscription easy to justify. The whole idea reminds me quite a bit of the Daily Brief experience you can get with Gemini. The result isn’t dramatically different: both are trying to save you from manually digging through everything before your day has even properly started. But ChatGPT has become the AI tool I naturally reach for first, so having my morning brief live here fits my workflow better.

I moved in without unpacking everything again

I’d be lying if I said I’ve always been a ChatGPT person. Before making the switch, I relied pretty heavily on Claude, and for a long time, it simply fit the way I worked better. Naturally, that also meant Claude knew quite a bit about me and how I liked to get things done. That was actually my biggest hesitation when I decided to move over to ChatGPT. I wasn’t worried about learning a new interface or figuring out where everything lived. I was worried about starting from scratch. Thankfully, ChatGPT now has an Import from Claude feature, and it made that switch a lot less painful for me. Instead of manually rebuilding all that context conversation by conversation, I could bring my existing Claude data over and give ChatGPT a much better starting point.

For example, if Claude already knew how I preferred my research to be like, the kind of work I regularly do, or other details I’d previously asked it to remember, I didn’t have to sit down and feed all of that information to ChatGPT again. It might sound like a small convenience, but if you’ve spent months building up context with another AI assistant, you’ll know just how annoying starting with a completely blank slate can be. ChatGPT can also keep connected sources up to date by syncing new or changed content, so the information it can work with doesn’t necessarily stay frozen at the moment you connect it. For me, it meant switching AI tools without having to introduce myself all over again.

I can finally take my work with me

It gets even better from here because ChatGPT also lets me download the work I create inside it. This sounds like such a basic feature until you actually need to move something out of ChatGPT, and then you realize how useful it is. I run into this quite often with my study projects. If I’m working on something for my psychology thesis, for example, I might spend a long time inside ChatGPT brainstorming ideas, organizing my research, cleaning up notes, or turning a messy collection of thoughts into something I can actually work with. Once I’m happy with it, I can download the finished work as a Markdown file, PDF, or Microsoft Word document and continue working on it wherever I want.

That’s a much nicer experience than what I was doing before. I’d finish something in ChatGPT, open Word or another app, copy everything over, fix the formatting that inevitably went wonky somewhere along the way, and then continue working. It wasn’t difficult, but doing it repeatedly got very boring and time-consuming. Now, I can keep ChatGPT as the place where I brainstorm and build something, then simply download the result when I’m ready to take it elsewhere.

Your turn to give them a try

If you use ChatGPT regularly, I’d definitely recommend giving these features a try. I’ve been having a genuinely good time discovering new ways to use ChatGPT, and clearly, I have no intention of stopping anytime soon. So, if I stumble across another feature that makes my day a little easier, you can bet I’ll be back to tell you about it. Until then, give these three a shot. Your ChatGPT routine might just get a little better.

Apple quietly killed the ceramic Apple Watch in 2020, and for the fans of the fancy material, it has been an inexplicable absence ever since. For those catching up, ceramic was the lineup’s most premium material option. 

It was smooth to touch, scratch-resistant, and had that distinct non-metallic appearance, a characteristic of all titanium and aluminum frames. Now, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is actively planning its return.

Why does the ceramic case’s return actually matter?

While it isn’t mentioned clearly in the report, Apple could re-introduce a ceramic version of the Apple Watch with either the Series 12 in September or in 2027. “It will also offer new colors and bands, and a series of new health and fitness-related upgrades,” the report mentions.

For those catching up, ceramic is harder than stainless steel and retains its polish far longer. Basically, it’s the perfect blend of a luxury and a sporty finish. It’s the kind of materials upgrade that could serve as a major marketing campaign for the lineup without changing a single feature. 

For anyone who missed it the first time, or who has been wearing a titanium Ultra and doesn’t like the finish, the ceramic version could be the way to go. Fair warning: the Apple Watch could get fairly expensive with the ceramic case.

What else is Apple changing with the Series 12 and Ultra 4?

Bringing back ceramic is a smart way to restock the premium end of the Apple Watch lineup, but in my opinion, it will buy the company some time to figure out what the smartwatch will look like over the next decade: Apple’s yearning for a major Watch overhaul. 

Quite a bit, actually. Beyond the ceramic case option, both the Series 12 and the Ultra 4 are getting their first meaningful performance bump in years. The performance upgrade could be accompanied by new colors, updated band options, and a bunch of new health and fitness-related features.

Together, the performance upgrade on the Series 12 and Ultra 4 and the potential arrival of a ceramic case version suggest Apple wants to ship a comprehensive Watch lineup this year.

The takeaway: Memory prices have been trending upward for more than a year, with many analysts predicting further increases in the near future. A prominent GitHub developer has now published a series of graphs and charts showing just how quickly prices have surged to 2007 levels on a per-unit basis, effectively undoing two decades of progress in making PC hardware more affordable for consumers.

According to computer science researcher and software performance expert Daniel Lemire, skyrocketing memory prices are a “historical anomaly,” with the unprecedented increases effectively erasing decades of steady, exponential cost reductions.

He believes that for prices to normalize, either software developers will have to find ways to build AI systems that require less memory, or the hardware industry will need to increase production capacity.

Driven largely by rising demand from the AI sector, global memory prices have surged dramatically over the last two years, with a recent J.P. Morgan report estimating an increase of more than 400% since the start of 2024. Unfortunately for consumers, the surge isn’t limited to DRAM chips, as an acute manufacturing shortage in flash memory has also pushed up prices for SSDs, flash drives, memory cards, and external storage.

– Daniel Lemire (@lemire) August 5, 2026

According to industry reports, contract and retail prices for NAND flash have risen between 50% and 100% since the start of the crisis, triggering price increases across a broad spectrum of consumer electronics, including laptops, desktops, graphics cards, smartphones, and video game consoles. While brands such as HP, Dell, and Apple have raised prices for their laptops and MacBooks, Sony and Nintendo have also raised prices for the PS5 and Switch 2, respectively.

Ominously for consumers, South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix has predicted that the global memory crisis is far from over. According to CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, 2027 will be the worst year ever for the industry, with demand continuing to outstrip supply even beyond 2030.

However, whether these predictions materialize will depend in part on the health of the AI industry, amid growing fears that speculative investment in the sector is creating a bubble that could burst at any time.

[Jan] of [Roetz 4.0] has a unique approach to multi-material 3D printing: he’s designed an extruder which takes two different materials and extrudes one as a shell around the other. This opens up some interesting possibilities, such as a conductive filament surrounded by an insulating shell; [Jan], however, didn’t have an immediate use for the process, so he moved on to a related technique: extruding plastic tubes with a compressed-air core.

The extruder he used for this was a variation on the dual-material extruder; it takes in two strands of filament, melts them, and extrudes them as a shell around the outlet of a compressed-air line, which was controlled by a high-precision pressure regulator. During testing with PLA, it seemed capable of extruding airtight tubes of filament, though it had a tendency to blow bubbles and form tubes with inconsistent diameters. The low thermal conductivity of the stainless steel extruder also proved problematic; coupled with the cooling effect of the compressed air, filament sometimes solidified inside the extruder.

[Jan] found it almost impossible to get consistent results using only pressure-based control; as the layer of molten plastic around the air gets thinner, it provides less resistance to further ballooning, leading to continuous expansion until the bubble bursts. Controlling the volume of air extruded provided much more consistent results, and in a second video, he built a peristaltic pump to do just that. He also switched to using TPU filament, which greatly improved layer adhesion. When inflated with compressed air, the finished TPU structures expanded slightly, though there were still air leaks. The results look promising, and TU Darmstadt has already carried out some research in this area.

In a separate research project, we’ve seen a similar multi-material co-extrusion approach used to print pneumatic channels. For more on the history of [Jan]’s multi-filament extruder, check out his Minuteman printer.

Thanks to [Tix] for the tip!

There are a few different ways to keep apps under the radar.

The primary method for hiding iPhone apps

Mr.Mikla/Shutterstock

Hidden apps aren’t totally invisible

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Other methods to keep apps under control

Tada Images/Shutterstock

The Apple Watch will see a revamp in the coming years, as Apple is reportedly in the middle of a shake up its wearables formula to meet an ever-changing market.

The Apple Watch has retained the same core design of a square display on a watch band, but it has evolved over time. While it has become thinner, larger, and more rugged in the Apple Watch Ultra, it can potentially do more.

In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman writes that the Apple Watch is ready to get overhauled into something new. The company’s industrial design team has been rethinking smartwatches in general over the last year, and it’s considering new directions to go in.

The team hasn’t quite decided what to actually do with the Apple Watch yet, but it is mulling the problem over.

These changes apparently include switching the square display for a circular version of various sizes. There’s also the possibility of removing the display altogether, to match the growing market for wearables without screens.

Smart rings are also seeing a rise in adoption, which gives Apple another wearable avenue to explore. It has repeatedly filed patents in the field, but an Apple Ring release continues to elude the company.

Sooner changes

Whatever new direction the Apple Watch takes, it won’t be anytime soon. The expected Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 will be largely performance-based updates.

Health and fitness changes are said to be included. Despite previous rumors, there are no major design changes in 2026 for the main Apple Watch body.

There is, however, a rumor that Apple will be introducing a new band attachment method for the 2026 model. If correct, it’s a change that will probably make earlier Apple Watch bands incompatible with the new model.

That said, it’s a rumor that we have heard on and off since 2022. It may happen, but it could be better suited as part of a larger overhaul.

I was fourteen or so when I went to the Gadget Show Live (once a big tech event in the UK which showed off the latest technology) in 2016 as a punter and overheard someone on a stand I’d visited mention they’d spent £1,000 on a custom gaming PC.

A thousand pounds. On a computer. I remember turning that figure over in my head (it’s roughly $1,400) and not quite being able to make sense of it, not necessarily because I couldn’t fathom how much money that was, but because at the time, it seemed like a lot of money to spend on a PC without any frame of reference as to what that price got you.