I can’t be the only person who needs fewer gadgets in his life.

Over the last decade, my home has turned into an electrical outlet battle zone, with family members bouncing one another off the power grid so they can charge their Kindles, iPhones, Android phones, laptops, iPods, iPads, Bluetooth headsets and a flip phone or three.

Some ingenious 14-year-old will soon make a fortune designing a tabletop nuclear reactor with a USB port, or maybe a powerstrip the size of a Cadillac Escalade.

Until then, I will put a fat checkmark next to tech items that let me move one step closer to single-outlet nirvana. Actually, the first such device just hit my hands, and if my eyes did not deceive me, this baby did not come from the Company That Invents Products You Didn’t Know You Needed, otherwise known as Apple.

Instead, it came from Microsoft. The device is the Surface 2 ($450 for the 32-gigabyte version), a tablet/laptop hybrid that, unlike its predecessor and competitors, may put a dent in the demand for powerstrips in my house.