Mattel’s 1:1 brick-built Xbox is a 3,509-piece tribute to gaming’s early 2000s era

Posted on by

The original Xbox is turning 25, and Mattel is marking the occasion with a collector’s piece that transforms Microsoft’s first gaming console into a 1:1-scale building set. Created under the premium Mattel Brick Shop, the Microsoft Xbox Building Toy Kit recreates the chunky 2001 console from 3,509 pieces, complete with its oversized Duke controller and a surprisingly elaborate interior.

At first glance, the model is designed to look remarkably close to the original hardware. The familiar black rectangular body, recessed side grilles, front controller ports, X-shaped top panel, and central green Xbox logo are all recreated in brick form. The accompanying Duke controller is also buildable and connects to the console, with working buttons, a D-pad, and movable analog sticks. It is a display model rather than a functional gaming machine, but the physical interaction is part of what makes the set more than a static replica.

Designer: Mattel

The set also follows a growing interest in turning gaming hardware into physical building objects. A few years ago, we covered a LEGO Xbox Series S concept that treated the console itself as a customizable canvas for brick-built artwork. Mattel’s new creation takes a detour from the conventional brick-building approach, though, as it employs bricks to personalize a console, using thousands of them to recreate an entire piece of gaming history.

The more interesting details are hidden inside the console. Opening the model reveals three removable dioramas inspired by some of the original Xbox’s most recognizable games: Halo: Combat Evolved, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Psychonauts. Each scene comes with small NanoWorld figures representing characters from the games, with 12 figures included across the set. The dioramas can also be removed and displayed independently, giving the enormous console a modular quality rather than making its interior purely decorative.

Mattel has also given the model a modest interactive layer. Pressing buttons on the connected Duke controller activates four different light-and-sound sequences, including the original Xbox opening sequence and effects associated with the three game-inspired scenes. A concealed button combination triggers an additional lighting sequence, adding a small Easter egg for builders who spend time exploring the finished model.

The choice of games is particularly evocative. Halo helped define Xbox as a gaming platform, while Morrowind and Psychonauts represent different sides of the console’s early library. Rather than simply reproducing the hardware, Mattel has effectively turned the console into a compact museum of its formative years, with the games physically embedded into the machine they helped make memorable.

For anyone who remembers the original Xbox as a piece of hardware rather than simply a platform, that distinction is significant. The finished model is essentially a life-size nostalgia object, one that preserves the proportions and visual language of Microsoft’s first console while hiding miniature worlds from its games inside.

The set is intended for builders aged 17 and above and is positioned firmly as a premium collector display rather than a conventional toy. It is currently available for preorder through select retailers, with a US price of $324.

The post Mattel’s 1:1 brick-built Xbox is a 3,509-piece tribute to gaming’s early 2000s era first appeared on Yanko Design.

CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks

Posted on by

If you have ever charged a Xiaomi phone with the bundled brick, there is a decent chance CUKTECH’s engineers had a hand in it, even though the name never made it onto the packaging. The company started in 2016 as a straight up OEM, building chargers behind the scenes for Xiaomi and other big players, before merging with ZMI in 2022 and finally launching products under its own name. It is the classic story of a supplier deciding it was tired of being invisible.

That decision has paid off. The CUKTECH 30 Charging Station Ultra just picked up two wins at the European Product Design Award, one for computer accessories and one for office appliances, thanks to a 300W GaN powered design from Chong Wang and Ziyao Wang. We have followed the brand’s climb as its power banks and chargers kept getting screens, better materials, and sharper industrial design with every release. This latest charging station, with its five ports and a live readout of exactly what your gear is pulling, is the moment the sleeper brand stops sleeping.

Designers: Chong Wang & Ziyao Wang

Three USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and a dedicated DC output share the front face, and together they can push out up to 300W total. The two primary USB-C ports handle up to 140W each under PD 3.1, which covers most modern laptops without breaking a sweat, but the real number only shows up when you route power through the DC port. That single line is built to talk directly to compatible laptops and can hit the full 300W ceiling on its own, essentially replacing the oversized proprietary brick that usually ships in the box. I have three of those bricks sitting in a drawer right now doing absolutely nothing, and a single box that can outmuscle all of them at once is exactly the kind of consolidation I did not know I needed.

Third generation GaN sits at the core of the whole system, paired with what CUKTECH calls a PFC plus LLC dual architecture, a combination chosen specifically to keep five simultaneous charging sessions stable without the unit turning into a space heater. Gallium nitride has become the default material for anyone chasing high wattage in a small footprint, since it switches more efficiently than older silicon designs and sheds heat faster under sustained load. Thirteen fast charging protocols are baked in, including PD 3.1, PPS, Xiaomi’s own 120W standard, UFCS, Huawei SCP, and both QC and AFC, which is a genuinely broad net for a single charger to cast. Intelligent power allocation reads what is plugged in and redistributes wattage on the fly, with specific tuning for handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally that tend to confuse less sophisticated multi port chargers.

A 1.83 inch IPS display sits front and center, color coded per port, tracking wattage, voltage, and current across all five connections in real time, with a small running graph of total load underneath. Most chargers ask you to trust a single LED and hope for the best. This one just tells you, continuously, which is a small shift that changes how the object feels to live with on a desk. Nine layers of protection cover temperature, over-voltage, and over-current scenarios, which matters more than usual given how much power is moving through a chassis this size.

The form itself leans minimal, angled slightly on a magnetic tilting base so the screen stays readable without craning your neck, and finished in a two tone silver and black that reads more like studio monitor than power strip. A right angle DC cable keeps the desk tidier than the usual straight jack, and the grounded three pin AC cable is a small nod to safety that a lot of competitors skip to save a few cents.

None of this would matter much if the pricing did not make sense, and at $159.99 it lands right where a serious desk upgrade should, undercutting rivals capped at 140W or 200W while offering meaningfully more headroom. CUKTECH spent a decade building other companies’ chargers before it ever put its own name on a box. Two design award wins later, it is clear that decade taught them exactly which details actually matter.

The post CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple is Building a Short, Wide iPhone Ultra… Now It Owes Us an Actual iPhone Mini

Posted on by

I have a friend who still uses an iPhone 13 mini held together by a case and pure spite, and every single time a new iPhone launches, she asks me the same question. Is it small yet. It never is. Apple has spent years telling us, implicitly, that small phones do not sell, that the market has spoken, that everyone wants a bigger canvas for videos and games and doomscrolling. Fine, sure, the sales numbers backed that up in 2023. But sales numbers do not mean the desire disappeared, they mean the alternative was not good enough to fight for.

Which brings me to the iPhone Ultra, Apple’s rumored first foldable, expected to close into a short, squat, almost passport-shaped little brick before you unfold it into something the size of an iPad mini. That folded shape is the closest thing to mini energy Apple has shown in years, and it is buried inside a two thousand dollar folding phone nobody asked to be the delivery method. My friend does not want an iPad mini that folds. She wants her 13 mini, but new. Apple already built the shape. It just built it around the wrong phone.

Designer: Apple

The Air existed to answer a question almost nobody was asking at checkout, namely how thin can a phone get before the internals start filing complaints. It was a genuine engineering flex, the kind of thing that looks incredible in a teardown video and slightly pointless in daily use. I understood what it was trying to prove. I just never needed it proven to me personally, and I doubt I was alone in that.

The Ultra is rumored to repeat that exact flex, except this time the thinness gets folded in half, closing down to somewhere between 9 and 9.5mm shut and reportedly as thin as 4.5mm open, according to recent leaks. That is a genuinely wild number for a phone with a hinge in it. Apple is once again proving it can do the hard, borderline unnecessary engineering thing. The difference is that this time, buried inside that flex, is an actual shape people have been begging for since 2023. Apple just does not seem to have noticed it yet.

Go back and look at what the 13 mini actually was for a second, because I think people forget how unremarkable the compromise really was. It measured 131.5mm tall, 64.2mm wide, weighed 141 grams, and ran the exact same A15 chip as the standard 13. You gave up battery life and screen real estate. You did not give up the flagship experience shrunk down to fit an actual hand. Compare that to where the standard iPhone lineup sits today, regularly north of 6.1 inches before you even get to Pro Max territory, and the gap the mini used to fill has only gotten wider and lonelier.

Now put the Ultra’s folded footprint next to that. Reports point to a 5.5 inch cover display when shut, in a short, wide, passport style shell that is about as close to mini adjacent proportions as Apple has shipped since the mini died. The catch is that this compact shell only exists as a doorway into a 7.8 inch, 4:3 inner screen and a starting price rumored to land somewhere between 1,999 and 2,499 dollars. Nobody buying that phone is buying it to have something small in their pocket. They are buying an iPad mini that happens to fold shut, which is a completely different pitch than the one my friend has been asking me about for three years running.

There has been some loose speculation, mostly a 9to5Mac piece from last year, that Apple’s new staggered launch schedule could theoretically clear a runway for a smaller phone somewhere down the line. Even that piece called the odds slim to none, and nothing currently on Apple’s roadmap for the 18, 18e, 18 Pro, or Ultra includes a mini in any form. Samsung, for what it is worth, has stuck with its Z Flip clamshell as its own answer to compact, so the appetite for small has not vanished industry wide, it has just gone unanswered on Apple’s side of the fence for a while now.

So here is the pitch, and it is not a complicated one. Apple has now proven twice, once with the Air and once with the Ultra’s folded shell, that it can engineer real compactness without breaking anything important. Skip the fold. Skip the tablet trapped inside a phone shaped envelope. Take that exact short, wide, passport sized footprint and wrap a single, non folding screen around it, call it a mini, and ship it. Apple does not need a new idea here. It already built one. It just keeps hiding it inside features nobody was asking it to attach to.

The post Apple is Building a Short, Wide iPhone Ultra… Now It Owes Us an Actual iPhone Mini first appeared on Yanko Design.