Gadget roundups are usually a mixed bag, but Stuff's monthly collection actually earns the "weird" in its title. The headline grabber is the Sonos Beam Ultra, which finally fills the awkward gap between the compact Beam and the enormous Arc Ultra. That middle slot has been empty for ages, and if you've ever tried to fit an Arc Ultra under a 55-inch TV you know exactly why it needed filling.

The pitch with the Beam Ultra is simple: flagship-adjacent sound in a box that doesn't demand its own zip code on your media console. Sonos has always been good at squeezing real acoustic engineering into small chassis, and this looks like more of the same. I haven't heard it yet so I can't judge the actual sound, but the category alone makes sense. Plenty of living rooms don't want a soundbar the length of a canoe.

Then it gets weird, in the best way. A toothbrush with a camera. A dartboard with cameras, plural. The dartboard is the one I keep coming back to, because a board that tracks where every dart lands and presumably scores itself sounds like a parody of smart-home excess right up until you imagine never arguing about whether that was a triple 20 again. It's computer vision applied to the least urgent problem imaginable, and I mean that as a compliment. Half the fun of embedded vision getting cheap is watching it colonize objects nobody asked it to.

This is the same trend I've been tracking all year in more serious contexts: sensors and small compute modules are now cheap enough that putting a camera and a chip into a random household object costs pocket change. When the same hardware powers fruit-tracking agricultural AI and self-scoring dartboards, the component economics have fully gone sideways in the consumer's favor.

The rest of the roundup runs the usual spread: fitness gear, audio oddities, and a few things that exist purely because someone in a product meeting said "what if." Stuff does this feature monthly and it's worth a regular read just to keep a pulse on what consumer tech companies think we'll buy. Sometimes they're right, and sometimes you get a camera toothbrush.

The Beam Ultra is the one with actual staying power, I suspect. The camera-stuffed stuff is delightful, but a soundbar that solves a real sizing problem is the gadget that ends up in living rooms instead of drawer purgatory. Elizabeth covers the audio side of things more than I do, so I'll be curious whether the Beam Ultra shows up in her column once reviews land. My bet: it becomes the default recommendation for mid-size TVs by October.