We separate the signal
from the noise.

Ultra Updates started in October 2013 as one person writing about whatever seemed worth writing about. There was no plan for what it would become — just a habit of noticing something interesting and explaining it to whoever would read.

Over the years that habit turned into an archive. We wrote about technology, but also about design, business, travel, and dozens of things that had nothing to do with each other except that they seemed worth covering at the time. That range taught us a lot about writing for real people — but it also meant we were not particularly good at any one thing. A magazine that covers everything ends up being the first place nobody thinks of for anything specific.

In 2025 we made a deliberate choice to narrow back down. Not because the rest wasn’t worth writing — some of it still is, and it stays published — but because technology is the thing we actually want to be known for. Phones that cost more than a month’s rent. AI tools that promise the world and deliver a worse version of what you already had. Design resources that are free in theory and unusable in practice. Someone should be checking these claims properly, in plain language, without an affiliate link deciding the verdict before the review is written.

That is what we are trying to be now: smaller in scope, more useful per article, and honest about the difference between what we have tested ourselves and what we are reporting on someone else’s word. We built our own free tools for the same reason — it is one thing to write about technology, and another to ship something people actually use.

Thirteen years in, we are still a small team. That is by choice — it is the only way we know to keep a name on every article and mean it.