‘Ted Lasso’ returns with a stronger, more focused third season

I’ve always found the major criticism against Ted Lasso, that it’s too saccharine, to be quite unfair. This is a series in the Frank Capra mold, where the sunny skies and primary colors sweeten the bitter pills being handed out. For every scene of wish fulfillment designed to get you pumping the air, there are meditations on suicide, betrayal and emotional neglect. It’s also funny – enough that Emmy voters gave it Best Comedy two years in a row. Now the third and, far as we know, final season of the show will return to Apple TV on March 15th.

It picks up after the summer break, in the run-up to Richmond’s return season in the Premier League (EPL) after winning promotion by the skin of its teeth last time around. It’s been a long while since the second season aired, the longer gap attributed to behind the scenes issues. Jason Sudekis, who became co-showrunner this time around, reportedly ordered a ground-up rewrite after becoming dissatisfied with the original direction this season was taking. On the basis of the first four episodes, which Apple made available ahead of broadcast, our patience has been well-rewarded.

Such is the nature of Apple’s restrictive covenant on spoilers that I can’t talk about many specifics about the third season. The first episode is the weakest of the bunch, taking time to re-establish where everyone is after their summer break. (Are placeholder episodes necessary given the nature of streaming these days?) Keeley is finding the rigors of running her own business to be harder than expected, while Rebecca has taken Ted’s pledge of winning the league to heart. Ted, meanwhile, is feeling just as emotionally stunted as he has been previously, moreso after spending a summer with Henry, clearly having not dealt with Nate’s betrayal, or the contrived reasons behind it.

As part of Lasso’s evolution from a sitcom to a comedy drama, the runtimes of each episode are now firmly measured in hours, rather than half hours. The narrative has broadened out to cover the personal lives of many of the main footballers, as well as giving Keeley a whole new team to work with. We even get our first proper glimpse of Michelle and Henry back home in Kansas, not to mention the storylines featuring Sam and, of course, the dreaded Nate. That’s a lot for a show to handle, especially one that – similarly unfairly – was described as unfocused and messy in its second season. (Blame must go to Apple for that one, given its late-in-the-day request to add a further two episodes to the order.)

There are more threads in the storyline, but Ted Lasso has refocused its episodic structure around the Premier League season. And two parallel narratives come to the fore: Ted’s struggle to access his emotions in a healthy way, and the battle over Nate’s soul. Rupert, played with evil relish by Anthony Head, is the devil lurking on the wonder kid’s shoulder, dangling temptation before him at every turn. I probably can’t talk about [ACTOR] playing [CHARACTER], either, a condensed version of every mono-named prima-donna footballer that is often idolized and hated in equal measure.

I was interested to see how the show’s newfound embrace by the footballestablishment would alter its customary lack of grounding in reality. This season sees plenty of filming at some big name stadiums, even down to the retention of the sponsor walls for post-match interviews. But don’t go in expecting a new-found commitment to footballing verisimilitude, with the opposition teams all played by actors with little resemblance to their real-world counterparts. Just remember that this is still Ted’s world, we’re just lucky enough to spend a little time watching it.

Ted Lasso (Jason Sudekis) and Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammed) face off while Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head) lurks, evily, in the background.

reMarkable launches a gorgeous, if expensive, Type Folio for its e-paper tablet

I’ve always thought the folks at reMarkable were missing a trick by not offering a keyboard for their e-paper tablet. I’m a fan of portable, distraction-reducing writing machines, and when my brain gets too cluttered, I go stand by my window with a keyboard-equipped iPad in front of me. reMarkable’s community has already found ways to jerry-rig a keyboard to the machine, but I’d much prefer to get a finished package than something knocked together on the fly.

So I was excited to learn that the company is now launching its own keyboard, stand and cover accessory in the form of the Type Folio. It’s the company’s take on the cover-stand-keyboard unit offered for pretty much every other tablet on the market. But it’s also blessed with its own quirks, designed to ensure that it won’t ruin the skinny silhouette of the existing hardware.

For the uninitiated, reMarkable 2 is an e-paper tablet promising paper-like responsiveness, letting you read, amend and write documents with a stylus. Its low weight, long battery life and the stripped-down nature of its offering has earned it plenty of plaudits from its hardcore fans. But while it makes many of its (intentional) limitations into virtues, it is still quite niche. As my beloved former colleague Chris Velazco said two years ago, “This is a device for people who care about writing and reading to the exclusion of just about everything else.”

To get started with Type Folio, you just slide reMarkable 2 into it, connecting to a small chin on the slate’s left hand side/bottom. Unfold the case and the stand will hold it upright to expose the keys underneath, and once it’s clicked in, the tablet reorientates itself to landscape mode. Flip the tablet back down to cover the keys, and it’ll jump back into portrait mode, in a way that feels natural, and seamless.

reMarkable opted to make the letter keys full size, sat over rubber dome switches with 1.3mm of travel. The number and other keys are compressed to fill space left over, but while I expected to need some adjustment time, it all came together fairly instantly. I was also delighted that the arrow keys (vital when moving the cursor around) were left in space to help your fingers find them.

In fact, I think I probably made just two more errors writing the first draft of this piece on the slate than I would on my regular keyboard. The lack of autocorrect and spell check could be an issue if you enjoy, or need, the assistance offered by most normal systems these days. If you use this for nothing more than first and second drafts, before finishing things on a different screen, then I can’t imagine it being an issue.

And for people who need something a little more limited to help keep their minds focused, this is a delight. I could well imagine myself taking this, rather than my iPad, over to the window when I need to avoid the numerous temptations of the internet. I especially liked the ability to make live notes with the stylus when proofing the draft while sat eating lunch, too. It’s as close to being able to print out and amend your work as I’m likely to get until I finally give in and buy a printer again.

Type Folio comes in two faux-leather finishes, the Sepia Brown I tried and an Ink Black. It’s slim and light enough that it doesn’t feel like too much bulk has been added to the already pretty slender tablet. Given that you’re now able to do a lot more with it than you could before, it feels like there’s been very little trade off or sacrifice made here.

If there’s one place I feel compelled to take points off, it’s in the price, which fails the “would I spend my own money to buy this” test. The slate itself is $299, and only really works if you buy a stylus priced at either $79, or $129 if you opt for the built-in “eraser.” So it’s hard to swallow when the keyboard folio is $199, a full two-thirds of the price of the main hardware itself, as much as I think it’s a beautiful and well-engineered piece of gear. I do imagine that, for most would-be reMarkable buyers, price is less of a consideration than it is for other gadgets. But, in aggregate, the sticker gets close to the point where you start asking questions about how much you’d need this over, say, a 9th generation iPad and its own stylus and keyboard folio. By comparison, reMarkable remains a product that you’ll need to fall in love with before you start forking over that much cash, but mercifully, it’s also very easy to fall in love with.

Image of the reMarkable 2 as inserted into its Type Folio keyboard as it sits on a dark wooden table in front of a slate grey wall.

Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them

The following article contains spoilers for earlier Star Trek properties but doesn’t reveal specific spoilers about Star Trek: Picard season three, not that you should be watching it anyway.

It’s 2034 and Warner Bros. decides it needs to wring more cash out of Friends, the decade defining cultural juggernaut and sitcom behemoth. Imagine what that show would be like; A warm and cozy three-decades-later check-in on characters you know intimately well. After all, you probably spent your formative years watching them mature from young single New Yorkers to a series of families. Maybe it’ll tickle those nostalgia glands, reminding you of when you watched the show with your own family as a kid.

Unfortunately, the hotshot creator of the age decided they want to go in a different direction this time. This needs to be a dark and gritty miserycore grief orgy that better reflects our more rough-and-tumble times. After all, TV these days can’t be gentle or comforting, offer escapism or posit a better world, not since Trump, Brexit, Bolonosaro, January 6th and Ukraine. The creative team have got that quote on a poster in their office, the one about thetriumph of evil, and they’re not going to sit idly by, they’re taking a stand.

In the sequel, Rachel’s famous for her wellness TikTok that often makes allusions to “reclaiming” the US as a white ethnostate. Joey lost an arm while filming a movie and is now in prison after a failed heist to pay off his life-ruining medical debt. Monica’s got a crippling adderall addiction and slips away most nights to murder the neighborhood cats and dogs. Everything’s shot in ultra gloomy vision, and there’s no laugh track, jokes or a studio audience, just unrelenting misery.

This revival is dense with references to the Friends backstory as well as the broader Friends universe. Remember that Lisa Kudrow played Phoebe’s twin sister Ursula on Mad About You, right? If not, you better get yourself to Wikipedia to study up. I mean, it won’t be relevant to the plot, but it’s something you remember, so clap, go on, clap.

You might be wondering why such a project would be allowed to happen, given that it wouldn’t be fun for fans of the original series. Times change, characters age, but you can’t turn a cozy sitcom into Breaking Bad overnight and expect that to be satisfying. You’d hardly think it’d be a big pull for newbie viewers either, who’d probably steer clear if they weren’t already familiar with 236 episodes of intricate backstory. Nostalgia revivals don’t need to be slavish to their source material, but it’s hard to see the appeal for something so grim and unpleasant.

Apropos of nothing, let’s talk about the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard.

Trae Patton / Paramount+

Season three was sold as something of a course correction for Picard after its first two deeply unpopular runs. It ditched all but Raffi from the roster of original characters created for it, and instead pulled in the stars from Star Trek: The Next Generation. As well as the returning Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis and Brent Spiner, we’ll see LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn back in action. And, in the six of ten episodes I’ve been permitted to watch under strict embargo, I’d say only one of them feels like the character we know and love.

Unfortunately, while we have the other TNG stars, the creative team of Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman and showrunner Terry Matalas didn’t bother to grab any of that show’s lightness of tone. Picard remains a grimdark slog, shot on perpetually underlit sets and featuring a succession of increasingly-bleak setpieces. The plot is stretched so thin that the first four episodes turn out to be little more than an extended prologue for the rest. A prologue that could, I should add, have been an efficient, and possibly more enjoyable, hour. The story is so obvious, too, that you’ll be ahead of the characters pretty much non-stop as they stumble from one idiot plot to the next.

It’s maddening that we can see how much of the plot is blocking itself to ensure things can’t move forward too quickly. There’s a whole episode of gosh-isn’t-this-tense tension that could have been eliminated if anyone in Starfleet pulled out a tricorder and used it as God intended. In this utopian future, where science and technology really are advanced enough to look like magic, why does nobody employ the tools hanging from their waistband? Mostly because Paramount ordered ten episodes, and ten episodes is what we’re going to give them. Another episode has a time-filling punch fight runaround because it’s now somehow impossible for a serving officer to use a Federation ship’s intercom system to call the bridge and warn them of impending danger.

Picard is one of those series where you often find yourself shouting at the screen as the next stupid moment unfolds in front of you. Even worse is that the show’s creative team seem to think that it’s us, the audience, who are deficient in the thinking department. There is scene after scene in which characters repeat the same lines back to each other because the crew assume we’re not paying attention. Because of the limits on spoilers, I’ve re-written a scene to match the sentiment, if not the words verbatim, so you can get a sense of what to expect:

CREW 1: The ship is being pulled closer to the black hole’s gravity well.

CREW 2: We do not have enough power to pull ourselves away, sir.

RIKER: Are you saying that we’re dead in the water?

CREW 1: We will be passing the black hole’s event horizon in 17 minutes.

RIKER: We’re dead in the water and we’re sinking.

PICARD: We’re going to be dead in 17 minutes, Will, unless we can find a way to solve this.

RIKER: We’re sinking into quicksand, and there’s no time to grab a helping hand.

The irony is that this run is so thicket-dense with references that the show basically assumes that you’ve already seen pretty much everything produced during Trek’s gold, silver and bronze ages. But, to make sure nobody’s left behind, everyone has to speak in exposition so hamfisted that, now that this is over, I think Michelle Hurd deserves personal injury compensation. Raffi gets saddled with so many cringe-inducing lines where she states, and restates and re-restates the obvious that I started grasping fistfuls of my own hair to relieve some of my discomfort.

And as for the storyline, what can I say? It’s clear that Alex Kurtzman is only comfortable writing in a single register. His go-to is usually a militaristic, testosterone-fuelled paranoid Reaganite fantasy in which the real villain was our own government all along. He did it in Into Darkness, Discovery season two and even the first season of Picard – to the point where Starfleet is now so lousy with double agents that all of their schemes fail because the saboteurs are all too busy sabotaging each other’s plans instead of that of the wider Federation.

If Picard is nothing else, it’s nearly pornographic in its use and misuse of franchise iconography. I always felt that Jeff Russo’s Picard theme sounded more like the library music for a corporate advert than the makes-your-heart-soar theme a Star Trek deserves. And here, it’s been ditched in favor of Jerry Goldsmith’s sumptuous, nectar-for-the-ears score for First Contact. The first title card is a direct pull from Wrath of Khan, and pretty much every element therein is an elbow to the ribs, reminding you of older, better Star Trek movies and TV series.

An early scene has a character “hijacking a starship” under false pretenses while it’s in spacedock. You know, the mushroom-shaped megastation orbiting Earth from The Search for Spock onwards. And because we’re already going beat-for-beat for a sequence xeroxed from 1984, said starship even jumps to warp as soon as it’s past the exit doors. Despite the fact that the sort of hardcore Trek fans who would spot the reference would also note that you’re not meant to jump to warp while inside a solar system when there’s no urgent need to do so.

I’ll admit, this is postgraduate degree-level Star Trek nerdery, but you can’t have it both ways: If you’re trying to placate hostile viewers with the excessive fan service, you can’t then complain when they point out that you’re doing it all wrong.

The show’s teaser trailer already revealed we’re getting an overstuffed roster of villains to round out the run. Amanda Plummer’s captain of an enemy ship that shares a design with the Narada from Star Trek ‘09. Then there’s Daniel Davis’ holographic Professor Moriarty, as well as Data’s evil twin brother Lore. Both of these sorta make sense in the context, but there’s a hell of a lot of narrative scaffolding to explain away the fact that Brent Spiner is now 74 years old. (The dude looks good for it, but it’s hard to play an ageless android when time marches on and the de-aging CGI budget is spent on smoothing out Patrick Stewart’s face for a single flashback and the pointless needle-drops that open every episode.)

Now, before you scurry off to Memory Alpha to confirm that Moriartywas locked away in a holobox at the end of “Ship in a Bottle,” and Lorewas disassembled at the end of “Descent Part 2,” yes, they were. Try to remember that showrunner Terry Matalas and executive producer Alex Kurtzman treat Star Trek’s continuity less as something which informs storytelling and more as a series of shiny objects to keep us all amused when the plot sags or anyone has any time to think about what’s going on.

I’ll also add that the trailers and promotional material have very intentionally kept a lot of material back. There are more classic-era heroes and villains crowbarring their way into the story in the way that, if it were fanfiction, would seem excessive. But, if I’m honest, the second or third time someone, or something, familiar popped up, I wasn’t whooping and cheering, I was sighing. The Star Trek universe is vast and broad and deep, but Picard makes it feel like a puddle where everyone knows each other, and everyone under the age of 30 has grown up watching The Next Generation. If you’re serving in the US Navy, for instance, how likely is it that you’d know the ins and outs of every exploit of even the most well-traveled combat vessel?

Now, I don’t have the language or experience to discuss this properly, and I’m aware of others who do feel differently. This is just my opinion, but I think the depiction of drug and alcohol use in Picard has always felt off. And since I can’t talk about the third season, I’ll talk about the first, where something very similar happened and is just as vexing here as it was back then. Raffi deals with her son’s rejection by relapsing, but then mere hours later, she’s back at her station and advancing the plot. I don’t recall a sense that her use clouded her judgment and I don’t think it was discussed subsequently – so despite the portentiousness in the build-up, it was depicted almost like someone just having a bad day and knocking back some drinks. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because there are plenty of people who use drugs and it doesn’t impact their professional lives at all. (Read any Making-Of book about The Original Series and you'll notice how more than a few references to the production team's drug use.) But if you’re going to write a plot where scenes hang on the will-she-or-won’t-she tension of relapse, but it all turns out to be hunky dory straight after, what was the point of depicting any of this in the first place?

Then there’s the violence, and the casual way that it’s doled out, especially in the show’s numerous interrogation scenes. I’m not advocating for forced confessions, but given Starfleet’s advanced science, and the Federation has a planet of literal telepaths at its disposal, why are we always punching people in the nose with a butt of a phaser pistol? I mean, I know why: It’s a nerdy sci-fi show play acting as a muscular basic-cable drama, but that doesn’t mean it works. I’ve often theorized that many modern-day Star Trek creators would much rather be over the hall making their own Star War instead. Maybe I’m wrong, and the Picard crew is really nostalgic for the hamfisted Bush-era politics of 24.

Trae Patton / Paramount+

It was always going to be hard to pull Picard out of its creative slump that started back when the show was greenlit. If there was ever a character who we’d seen grow, change, mature and treat his own life with more kindness, it was Jean-Luc Picard. Some of TNG’s best episodes forced Picard to consider his own life, his history, his mortality, his motives, including the series’ grand finale. “All Good Things” isn’t just good Star Trek, it’s one of the best series finales ever made, encompassing the entire breadth and depth of The Next Generation in one glorious sweep. And between seven years of TV and four less essential but still important movies, he was done.

I wrote somewhere, I forget where, that a smarter idea would have been to center the action on a less-well served member of the Enterprise D crew. I’d have been second in line to watch a Geordi LaForge spin-off (behind uber fan Rihanna, of course), and there’s plenty to explore there. Or a Beverley Crusher spin-off, as she solves people’s problems as a simple country space doctor back on Earth or on some far-flung planet. Maybe a sci-fi version of In Treatment fronted by Marina Sirtis could have worked, and would have certainly cost less than this.

All of which would be preferable to what we got, which despite initially having a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist at the helm, was two years of go-nowhere, do-nothing bore-a-thons. Its brief moments of cleverness drowned out by the baffling character decisions, tin-eared dialog and ligneous acting. And both had plots which would have struggled to fill a movie stretched out across a painfully slow ten hour runtime.

And that’s before we get to the moralizing, which had characters pointing at a bad thing and saying “thing bad.” I don’t think the second season’s 26 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes is because the (inexplicably) conservative wing of Trek fandom was outraged that a show about happy space communists solving problems while remaining friends suddenly “got woke.” Good, old-fashioned Star Trek at least had the good grace to cloak its progressivism in allegory that could slide past the otherwise closed minds of some of its viewers. By comparison, Picard felt like the first draft of a high school theater production made the term after the teacher had explained agitprop.

Maybe that’s why I feel so annoyed by Picard, because all of the things that are wrong with the show, and its kin, are examples of amateurishness. Amateurish plotting, amateurish dialogue, a lack of thoughtfulness about the material, what it says, or what it’s doing. Just an endless parade of big, dumb, brash, po-faced melodrama used in place of some sort of maturity or integrity. I don’t expect Star Trek to be brilliant all the damn time, but I do expect a minimum standard of something to be upheld. And this falls so far below it, it’s hard to call it Star Trek. Some people will call that gatekeeping, but Star Trek can be anything it damn well wants to be, so long as it's competently made and halfway entertaining. 

The constant callbacks got me thinking about the period when Nicholas Meyer was, directly or indirectly, the major creative force behind Star Trek. It’s been 32 years since his 1991 swansong, The Undiscovered Country, and it remains a high-water mark of cinematic Trek. Drawing to a close the story of The Original Series crew, Meyer didn’t go for nostalgia, but savaged his characters, exposing their flaws, their bigotries, their failings. There was redemption, and heart, and it never needed Meyer to stage endless close-quarters phaser-fu fights in unlight rooms.

But that was a filmmaker with a clear vision, and the good graces to really drag his characters in the dirt before washing them clean. Imagine what would happen if Picard encountered any of the same level of subtext – they’d probably spend an hour running from it before beating it over the head with the butt of a phaser rifle and then spend the next hour feeling glum about it. If nothing else, I’d say don’t even watch Picard for ironic kicks, lest Paramount think it’s somehow a runaway hit and continue to produce crap like this.

Image from season three of 'Picard' featuring Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes in the USS Titan ready room.

Swytch Air expands your world for less than the cost of an e-bike

I’ve worked from home for twelve-plus years now, and between that, kids and COVID lockdowns I hadn’t realized just how much my world had shrunk. We have one car that my wife uses to go to work, so I spent my days getting around on foot, or using the local bike share scheme. But it was only when I started listing where I go, that I realized how small my world has become. These days, I’m limited to my office, the backyard, my kids’ school and the nearest, admittedly lackluster strip mall. I think I blinded myself to how small my horizons had become until I was given an excuse to probe beyond.

This, I should explain, came in the context of my 38th birthday, after deciding that I would try a ground-up rebuild of my bike. A 2005 Falcon Nomad, which had been sitting in a succession of sheds for the last 15-or-so years. I figured I’d ask for the tools, and a book explaining what to do, and then teach myself to strip and reassemble a bicycle as I went. This, friends, did not go very well, since the bike’s advanced age and poor state meant every repair I attempted, from paint job to brake replacement, went horribly wrong. (Maybe I should just concede that I'm not, and never will be, "good with my hands," and that when the apocalypse comes, my role will be to be hunted and eaten.)

Daniel Cooper

It also seemed the ideal moment to try Swytch, a product I’d been interested in for several years at this point. The company produces a retrofit e-bike kit that can be easily bolted onto existing bicycles, giving them a new lease of electric life. All you need to do is swap out the front wheel for a new one with a built-in 250W electric motor, which comes with a battery, pedal sensor and controller. Now, depending on your patience and budget, you can snag a Swytch kit for around £450 ($550 before tax), although it’s commonly more expensive. That said, a Swytch kit and an analog bicycle is often far cheaper than all but the most basic (and ugly) of new e-bikes.

(There’s also the longstanding point that millions of people have bikes in similar states of disrepair in their own sheds or garages. But a lack of confidence, or fitness, means that they won’t get them out and reacquaint themselves with cycling. If you could easily and cheaply add an electric motor to one, however, then most of those objections fade away pretty quickly.)

Buying a Swytch kit is more complex than just heading down to a store and snatching one up – you’ll need to let Swytch know the size of your existing bike and wheels. You’ll need to send them detailed measurements of your front forks, and the size of the gap into which a wheel can be inserted. Then, after some delay, it’ll send you a custom-sized wheel built to fit into the space, with all of the necessaries to get you up and running.

Daniel Cooper

The ads say that if you’re capable of changing a tyre, then you’re capable of installing Swytch, which is accurate. Even I, who couldn’t get my rear brakes to sit properly, was able to screw in the wheel and wire up the cable. Once you’ve done, it’s mostly self-explanatory, although I would have liked some more guidance as to best placement for the pedal sensor. You basically just use a hex key to bolt on the little OLED display, battery controller / mount and wire up the (color-coded) cables, using the cable ties supplied to keep everything tidy.

One tip – when you’re attaching the wheel of magnets to the crank arm and the Hall Effect sensor, leave your cable ties loose until everything’s lined up. That way, you can make finer adjustments, useful since every Swytch customer is entitled to a quick video call with a tech support person. They’ll survey your setup, and make sure that your installation has been successful, and offer any hints to improve your performance. (To be honest, I still don't think I've necessarily got mine in the best place, but imagine that my ability is very much the deepest floor and that most people will do much better.) 

Previous Swytch models required battery packs that were closer to purse sizes than anything more elegant. The new innovation with this generation of kit is the greatly reduced size, with the Air battery pack now small enough to fit into your pocket. Swytch Air’s 36V battery pack will run you around 10 miles of assist on Level 2 power, and is a little bigger than a beefy mobile power brick. The company has made a deal about the fact that Air is more or less “pocketable,” although you wouldn’t want to keep it in your back pocket for any serious period of time.

Daniel Cooper

More crucially, at 700 grams, or around 1.5 pounds, it’s light enough to toss into your bag when you’re parked up. Oh, for completeness’ sake, there is a larger version of the Swytch battery, Max, which has a quoted range of around just under 20 miles and is a little under twice the size and weight. Although both of these are on the conservative side, mostly because the kit won’t kick in if you’re cycling in flat, easy conditions. So you can actually expect that distance to run for quite a bit longer, good for days where you’ll be covering plenty of ground.

I had a fairly busy day last week, with a trip to two different medical centers on opposite ends of the city and the bank in between. The whole journey would have taken me about 20 minutes for each leg of the trip by car, or several hours if I’d taken the bus. But while I’ve not cycled 10 miles in a single go, on mostly major roads, for… decades at this point, I felt that the Swytch could help. After all, if the terrain was rough, I could kick in the assistance to help me, and I wasn’t worried about running out of energy for the same reason.

Daniel Cooper

The other thing a Swytch kit does is offer you the power that gives you the confidence to do the hard stuff. Like powering up a hill, or sitting between cars at the lights, knowing that you’ve got the electric power to not get chewed up when we have to start. Knowing that I can pretty easily kick up the assistance level and get my speed up to 12-or-so miles an hour before the driver beside me can put their foot down makes for a sturdier ride.

Now, there’s nothing that Swytch is doing that more technical-minded riders couldn’t do on their own. I’ve seen forum talk about saving money by opting for a third-party wheel kit and some hefty DIY, but I don’t think this applies here. Swytch isn’t charging mad money for the setup, and offers a cohesive, sealed package that offers you peace of mind and proper technical support.

There are downsides… obviously there are downsides. Bolting on the machinery for an e-bike onto one that wasn’t built for it is a little inelegant. It required a lot of fiddling, and I’m still not sure that I’ve got it set up as perfectly as I could do, but it’s certainly achievable. Taking up so much space on your front handlebars, too, means that you’re losing a lot of real estate to the battery mount and controller. If you’ve got bike lights that sit close to the bar, you might need to relocate them to the head tube, and then find it’s not as useful a place to stick them.

Daniel Cooper

As for pricing and availability, that’s a little complex: Swytch will charge you up to £999 (around $1,010 excluding the UK’s sales tax) for a kit if you want one as quickly as it can ship one to you. But it’ll also offer – at the very minimum – a 50 percent discount if you choose to wait for a later shipment from the factory, with that figure rising up to 60 percent depending on your patience. If you’re prepared to delay your gratification for long enough, you could snag one of these things for £450 (around $550 before tax), which as far as I’m concerned, is the price this thing becomes a no-brainer.

I’m sufficiently impressed by the Swytch kit to want to buy the unit currently bolted to my bike. The ability to quickly and easily add so much power, with all of the privileges that conveys, is pretty darn special. I can heartily recommend it to people with bikes rusting in their sheds, who want to get back on the road but are worried their fitness level won’t permit them to travel very far. Take it from me – it’s worth it.

Image of the Swytch Air Kit (2022)