The Perfect Gift for the Person Who Has Every Gadget

From your gadget-obsessed sister (who lives for her iPad) to your garden-obsessed uncle (who thinks apple is a fruit) A special report

You may know this person. She's got a huge flat screen TV. She's got a PS3 and an Xbox 360 and a Wii. She's got an iPad 2 and a Macbook Air and a Linux box. She's got a projector and a Kindle Fire and a delightful sound system. She's got a great DSLR camera, a micro four-thirds workaday camera, and a little Canon she carries around for snapshots. Wracking your brain to find some kind of gadget for this person, you would be forgiven if you gave up and resorted to a large stuffed wombat and a Snuggie.

But don't give up! I have the perfect gift for the gadget obsessed that turns their gift-receiving weakness (having everything) into a strength. Buy them HDMI cables. Think about this way: the more stuff you have, the more stuff you need to connect, and that means you need more cables. You can really never have too many. What kind should you get? Our friends at The Wirecutter, which aims to only recommend a single good product in a category, recommend the Monoprice cables that cost a mere $8. So, you could pick up three of them for less than the price of a decent iPad case.

Alexis C. Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More

The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.