This 28mm Turntable Is Fully Automatic and Glows Softly Like Mood Lighting

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Vinyl is having a moment that shows no signs of ending. Record sales have been climbing for over a decade, and turntables have found their way into living rooms, bedrooms, and home offices worldwide. The problem is that many still look like they did 30 years ago, big, chunky, and designed to occupy their own dedicated corner. For anyone keeping their space tidy and intentional, that’s a real trade-off.

The CoolGeek TS-01 tries to address that without asking you to compromise on either front. Its ultra-slim body measures just 28mm thick, sitting low and clean on virtually any surface you’d want to put it on. It doesn’t look like it’s trying hard to be noticed, which is exactly the point. It’s a turntable designed to feel like a natural extension of the room rather than an intrusion.

Designer: CoolGeek

Click Here to Buy Now: $219 $299 (26% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $152,000.

Part of what makes the TS-01 so comfortable to live with is how little it actually demands of you. It’s fully automatic, so the tonearm drops, plays, and returns on its own from start to finish. For anyone who’s been put off vinyl by manual cueing or the constant worry of a needle dragging across a quiet groove, that’s a genuinely significant shift in how the whole ritual feels.

There’s also a remote in the box, which might sound like a minor detail but changes things more than you’d expect from a turntable. You can play, pause, fast-forward, or rewind without leaving wherever you happen to be. It’s a small but thoughtful addition, especially when you’re settled in with a book, have guests over, or simply don’t want to get up every time a side ends.

Of course, the audio side isn’t an afterthought. The TS-01 runs on a belt-drive system with an aluminum die-cast platter, and sports a tonearm that’s lighter and yet stronger than the standard arms you’d find on most players in this range. It also ships with an Audio-Technica MM cartridge already fitted, so there’s no fiddly cartridge alignment to deal with out of the box.

On top of that, the TS-01 has six selectable lighting modes and a glow vinyl mat, which together do something unexpected for a turntable: they turn it into an ambient object. That might sound more like a lifestyle feature than an audio one, and honestly, it is, but there’s something genuinely pleasant about having your record player cast a soft glow across a room while a side plays out.

Connectivity covers both ends of the spectrum, whichever you prefer. Bluetooth 5.3 lets you pair it with a wireless speaker or headphones without running cables across the room, while the RCA output stays available for anyone already working with an active speaker or a home hi-fi setup. It’s the kind of flexibility that makes the TS-01 easy to fit into a surprisingly wide range of living situations and listening habits.

The TS-01 comes in Black and Light Gray, both neutral enough to blend quietly into most interior palettes. At 2.65kg and 398mm x 350mm x 94 mm, it’s genuinely compact for a full-size turntable. CoolGeek clearly had a certain kind of space in mind, the kind where a record player can sit on a shelf or credenza and look like it was always supposed to be there.

Click Here to Buy Now: $219 $299 (26% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $152,000.

The post This 28mm Turntable Is Fully Automatic and Glows Softly Like Mood Lighting first appeared on Yanko Design.

Die-Cast Cars Grew Up: Meet Parksible, The Ultimate 1:64 Smart Motorized Parking Garage by Fun-Tech-Lab

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Parksible is a premium, smart motorized display garage created by Fun-Tech-Lab specifically for 1:64 scale die-cast cars. It replaces standard acrylic display cases with an automated vertical lift, app-controlled parking, gallery-grade adjustable lighting, and built-in environmental sensors, making it the ultimate interactive centerpiece for high-end desk setups and car-themed man caves.

Die-cast car collecting has come a long way from the days of plastic-lidded shoeboxes and bedroom shelves. Today’s collectors are far more deliberate about how and where their miniatures live, treating their 1:64 scale cars more like curated objects than childhood toys. Desks and personal workspaces have become the new display floors, and the bar for what a good display solution should look and do has risen considerably.

Designer: Fun-Tech-Lab

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $528 (24% off). Hurry, only 377/500 left! Raised over $428,000.

That shift is exactly what Parksible is designed for. Built by Hong Kong-based Fun-Tech-Lab, it’s a motorized vertical garage for 1:64 scale model cars that combines automated parking, adjustable ambient lighting, app control, and environmental monitoring in a single desktop tower. It takes the hobby more seriously than most display solutions do, and the result feels genuinely new for collectors who’ve long outgrown ordinary shelving.

The core idea is surprisingly satisfying in practice. You place a car onto the entry tray, pick a parking slot from the app or the physical knob on the base, and let the motorized lift carry it into position. What used to be the mundane act of putting a model away starts feeling a lot more like parking a proper car in a proper garage.

To bridge the gap between physical collection and digital management, Parksible integrates several standout features:

Industrial Tower & Motorized Lift: Measuring 274mm x 400mm × 723mm, the transparent tower holds 14 cars on individual 90mm x 40mm trays. The permanently visible motorized lift mechanism turns the act of parking into a captivating desktop attraction.

Cinematic Gallery-Grade Lighting: Adjustable brightness lets the garage shift from a soft ambient glow to exhibition-grade illumination, providing cinematic lighting that perfectly highlights the paint details of your 1:64 collection without tacky RGB effects.

App-Controlled Digital Archive: The companion app turns your smartphone into a proper control panel. Assign parking slots remotely, switch display modes, and manage a digital counterpart of your physical inventory that you can browse from anywhere.

Parksible PRO Vision: The PRO model features a built-in recognition camera that identifies each model by shape as it’s being parked. It instantly syncs the car to your digital garage inventory and includes an exclusive 360-degree viewing feature.

Environmental Sensors & Local Control: Built-in temperature and humidity sensors monitor your valuable collection around the clock. Even without a phone nearby, a 2.79-inch on-device display and a physical control knob handle all operations locally, backed by power-loss protection to keep parked models perfectly secure.

At 723mm tall, Parksible is a substantial piece of hardware that’s meant to be seen rather than tucked away. Its 14-slot format works best as a rotating gallery of a collector’s current favorites rather than a comprehensive inventory solution. It’s an approach to model-car ownership that has a lot more in common with how people style a living space than how they fill a storage box.

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $528 (24% off). Hurry, only 377/500 left! Raised over $428,000.

The post Die-Cast Cars Grew Up: Meet Parksible, The Ultimate 1:64 Smart Motorized Parking Garage by Fun-Tech-Lab first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $20 Pen Is The Reason I Quit My Notes App

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There was a time when writing something down felt simple. You had a notebook, a pen, and a thought worth keeping. But somewhere along the way, that tiny ritual got interrupted. The notebook is in your bag, the pen is on your desk, and the idea, the one that felt sharp and urgent a second ago, is already slipping away.

It’s a small frustration, but a familiar one. The kind you barely notice until it happens again. A quick note you meant to save. A phrase that arrived at the right moment. A reminder, an observation, a sketch of an idea that felt important for all of five seconds before real life moved in and erased it. We talk a lot about creativity as if it lives in grand gestures, but most of it begins in quieter moments, and those moments will stay within reach when you have the Inseparable Notebook Pen with you.

That’s what makes this Inseparable Notebook Pen so compelling. It doesn’t promise to make you more creative. It just makes it much harder to lose the moment creativity shows up. Designed to attach seamlessly to your notebook, it turns one of the most common little frustrations in daily life into something smoother, quieter, and far more intentional.

The Pen That Changed How I Capture Ideas

At first, I thought the Inseparable Notebook Pen was just a well-designed pen with a smart magnetic clip. Sleek, compact, and clearly made to look good next to a notebook. But after a few days of carrying it around, I realized it had changed something more important than aesthetics.

  • I stopped patting down my pockets looking for a pen.
  • I stopped opening my notebook only to realize I had nothing to write with.
  • And I stopped trusting my memory to hold onto thoughts that deserved better.

Because the pen stays with the notebook, the whole act of writing feels uninterrupted. You open the cover, detach it in one quiet motion, and start writing. No searching. No delay. No break in thought. It turns out that the best writing tool isn’t always the one with the most prestige. It’s the one that’s there the exact second you need it.

Precision Craftsmanship for a Seamless Experience

  • Magnetic clip attachment: Keeps the pen securely connected to your notebook, always within reach.
  • Built-in silencer: Makes attaching and detaching feel quiet, refined, and unexpectedly satisfying.
  • Smooth gel ink flow: Delivers clear, precise writing whether you’re jotting a note or building an idea.
  • Minimalist form: Clean, understated design that feels like a natural extension of the notebook.
  • Comfortable grip: Easy to hold for quick thoughts or longer writing sessions.
  • Compact everyday carry: Small enough to disappear into your routine until the moment it matters.

This isn’t about adding another accessory to your bag. It’s about removing one small friction point that interrupts the entire process.

Desk scene with a black pen laid over light documents, a small Polaroid-style photo, and a calculator on a beige surface.

Why Readiness Still Matters

We live in a world where ideas often arrive faster than our tools can keep up. A note app can help, but it rarely feels as immediate or grounded as putting pen to paper. And a notebook without a pen nearby is really just a good intention waiting to be interrupted.

The Inseparable Notebook Pen fixes that in the simplest possible way. It makes the notebook feel complete.

That matters more than it sounds. Because when the tool is ready, you’re more likely to capture the thought, sketch the idea, write the reminder, or hold onto the memory before it disappears into the noise of the day.

Design That Reflects Restraint

There’s a quiet confidence to the Inseparable Notebook Pen that makes sense the longer you use it. Nothing about it feels overworked. The silhouette is clean. The clip is integrated rather than decorative. Even the silenced magnetic attachment adds a small layer of calm to an interaction most products would never think to refine.

It doesn’t ask to be admired on its own. It becomes meaningful because of how naturally it belongs with the notebook. That’s the power of thoughtful design. It doesn’t just look good. It makes the whole routine feel better.

Close-up of a black notebook with a rectangular clip on its cover, a black pen nearby, and part of a camera in the corner.

Who It’s For

  • Notebook Loyalists

For people who still trust paper more than a blinking cursor.

  • Creative Thinkers

A pen that stays ready for ideas before they disappear.

  • Minimalists

One clean, integrated tool that removes clutter instead of adding to it.

Black stylus pen with a looped cord on a beige textured surface, shown beside a slim black stand or holder.

Where Thought Becomes Capture

You don’t realize how many good ideas are lost to small delays until one object removes them. Most of us don’t need a better imagination. We need fewer interruptions between the thought and the page. That’s what the Inseparable Notebook Pen understands so well. It doesn’t turn writing into a performance or a productivity system. It just makes the act of capturing something feel available again.

And maybe that’s why it works. Because the best everyday tools don’t demand attention. They quietly earn their place by being ready, by feeling right, and by making a routine just a little more whole than it was before. The Inseparable Notebook Pen won’t write the next great idea for you. But it will make sure you’re ready when it arrives.

At the end of the day, it’s still a pen. But sometimes, the right one changes the entire ritual around writing things down. The Inseparable Notebook Pen is available now for $19.95.

The post This $20 Pen Is The Reason I Quit My Notes App first appeared on Yanko Design.

Iran’s Mirror Pavilion Turns a 400-Year-Old Craft Into the Future

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If you’ve ever been inside an Iranian shrine or palace, you already know the feeling. The moment you step into a space lined with mirror mosaic, you lose your sense of where the ceiling ends and the air begins. Fragments of light scatter in every direction, bouncing off thousands of hand-cut pieces of glass in a way that feels more like stepping into a living kaleidoscope than standing inside a building. That experience, rooted in a craft called Ayeneh-Kari, has shaped Persian architecture for centuries. Now, a studio called Ehsani Sharafeh Associates is doing something genuinely exciting: they’re rebuilding that feeling from scratch, using algorithms.

The Mirror Pavilion, located in Mashhad, Iran, sits inside a former industrial hall. That setup alone creates a tension worth paying attention to. The pavilion is a cubic structure inserted within the existing hypostyle framework, self-supporting and deliberately contrasting with its surroundings. From the base, the space feels restrained. But look up, and the whole thing shifts.

Designer: Ehsani Sharafeh Associates

The ceiling is where the real conversation happens. Rather than replicating a traditional vault, the team designed a three-dimensional sinusoidal surface formed by merging four pyramidal geometries. It’s a mouthful to describe, but the visual effect is anything but clinical. Hundreds of fragmented mirrors are arranged across this undulating surface through computational processes, catching light and redistributing it in ways that feel almost alive. Add stained glass into the mix, and the space starts producing color shifts that no static installation ever could.

Ayeneh-Kari became prominent during the Safavid period in the 16th and 17th centuries, when trade routes brought large Venetian mirrors to the Persian court. Many of them arrived cracked or broken from the long journey. Rather than discarding the damaged pieces, Iranian craftsmen cut them into smaller fragments and reassembled them into intricate decorative mosaics. Out of something broken came something extraordinary, and that origin story feels deeply embedded in what mirrors have meant to Persian design ever since. The craft was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2025, a recognition that feels both overdue and timely given projects like this one.

Ehsani Sharafeh Associates isn’t just borrowing the aesthetic of Ayeneh-Kari and wrapping it around a contemporary shell. The team, made up of Nasrin Sharafeh, Ali Ehsani, and Milad GholamiFard, is using computational design methods to genuinely reconsider how traditional Iranian spatial principles behave in a new context. The algorithmic approach isn’t a shortcut. It’s what allows the complex geometry and patterned arrangements of the ceiling to exist at the scale and precision they do, while still feeling like a faithful extension of a much older sensibility.

That balance is harder to pull off than it looks. A lot of design that claims to honor tradition ends up either being too faithful and feeling like a replica, or too abstract and losing the thread entirely. The Mirror Pavilion manages to land somewhere in the middle, where the history is legible but the result is clearly contemporary. You can feel the ancestry of the space without it ever feeling like a museum piece.

What also stands out is the decision to place this inside an industrial hall. The contrast between the raw, utilitarian structure of the existing space and the luminous, almost otherworldly quality of the pavilion isn’t accidental. It makes both things more interesting. The industrial hall gives the mirrors context. The mirrors give the hall something to reach for.

In Persian culture, mirrors and water have long represented purity, clarity, and illumination. Reflective interiors amplified natural light and reinforced ideas about enlightenment and divine presence, which is why mirror work appears so frequently in shrines and sacred spaces. The Mirror Pavilion carries that weight without announcing it, which might be the most impressive thing about it. Some buildings describe an idea. This one embodies it.

The post Iran’s Mirror Pavilion Turns a 400-Year-Old Craft Into the Future first appeared on Yanko Design.

A “Social Only” Smartphone inspired by the iPod lets you like, share, and scroll using hardware buttons

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Go ahead and open your screen-time and see what the most-used apps are. Mine, by far, are Instagram and YouTube. Tik-tok’s blocked where I live, so that’s probably the only reason I don’t have it there, but I log in at least 4-5 hours of scrolling and videos every day on my phone. I’m not saying it’s healthy, I don’t even recommend it. But it’s the reality and I’m sure there are a bunch of people just like me who use their phone predominantly for staying connected, and secondarily for productivity.

The “Threads Phone” by NARZ dives headfirst into that logic, offering a phone tailor-made to the social experience. Designed mainly for browsing, it borrows from another device that was tailor-made for browsing – the iPod. As much as the iPod was a music player, it was also insanely good at letting you browse through a massive collection of music. Thousands of songs in your pocket was quite literally Steve Jobs’ pitch, so it was important for the iPod to let you toggle through those songs effectively. NARZ simply took that logic and applied it to all of Social Media.

Designer: NARZ

The phone comes with a screen, but also sports actual controls to let you access and interact with social media posts. A jogwheel enables scrolling, the like and comment buttons are self-explanatory, and a repost button works best within Threads, X, Bluesky, or the Fediverse. There’s also an easy to access Back button so you aren’t reaching for the top of the screen like you would on most phones.

NARZ designed the phone especially for Threads use, which is a fairly non-confrontational way of saying it’s for X users too. Plus, given Threads is literally Instagram’s little sibling, the phone works fairly well with IG’s interface, allowing you to scroll using the jogwheel, while also tap on directions to slide between the different sections of the app, and click the center button to do things like open DMs, etc.

That doesn’t mean the touchscreen doesn’t work. It’s still a touch phone the way Blackberries are touch phones. However, the added benefit of social-ready hardware controls make the phone a breeze to use if you’re a bit of a social media junkie like I am. The concept doesn’t detail out the back of the phone, but it’s safe to assume that there’s a camera on there, making the Threads Phone just like your standard smartphone, just optimized for a certain type of use.

NARZ doesn’t stop there, though. On their Instagram, the designer also describes as the phone working as a Chromecast remote – an odd choice, but given that the jogwheels and buttons are already there, adding a set of features to the existing hardware sounds, well, deliberate. The device is currently in a concept stage, but it does make the case for hardware buttons on phones. Sure, we’ve seen companies go the Blackberry route by reviving QWERTY keyboards on devices (a la Clicks Communicator and Unihertz Titan 2 Elite), but I could see a device like this working too. After all, only a fraction of your time spent online actually involves typing text. The rest is still browsing and non-verbal interactions – so why not do what the iPod did so well? Browse?!

The post A “Social Only” Smartphone inspired by the iPod lets you like, share, and scroll using hardware buttons first appeared on Yanko Design.

Texas Instruments made a new flagship graphing calculator: the TI-84 Evo

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Texas Instruments graphing calculators have helped many a student with algebra, pre-calculus and upside-down anatomical slang. Now, the company is back with an upgrade for the modern world, the TI-84 Evo. The new device lets you get your math on with a faster processor, a new icon-based home screen and a redesigned keypad.

TI is marketing it as something akin to the Light Phone of calculators. Unlike calculator apps on phones or computers, the "distraction-free" TI-84 Evo is a single-purpose device "designed to do one thing exceptionally well — math." Without notifications, social media apps or even Wi-Fi, there's less to draw your focus away from the math problems at hand. (However, there will always be the sidesplittingly funny "58008" to relieve your boredom.)

Texas Instruments

The new model's processor is three times faster than its predecessor. It also adds 50 percent more graphing space, a simplified keypad and USB-C charging. There's also a new feature that lets you trace along a graph to find points of interest.

The TI-84 Evo is available now. Individual customers will pay $160. (School districts can contact the company for bulk pricing.) The calculator ships in a modern array of colors: white (the standard model), mint, pink, purple, teal, raspberry and silver.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/texas-instruments-made-a-new-flagship-graphing-calculator-the-ti-84-evo-201903438.html?src=rss

iOS 27 will reportedly come with new AI-powered photo editing tools

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Apple reportedly plans to fix bugs and expand the capabilities of Apple Intelligence with the release of iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 year, and it seems like tweaks to the company's AI could go beyond a more functional version of its Siri assistant. Bloomberg reports that this year's software updates will also include new AI-powered photo editing tools that will let users change things like the background and framing of images, too.

You can currently use the Photos app across Apple's operating systems to adjust things like saturation and contrast, apply filters, crop photos or use AI to remove objects with the Clean Up tool. Clean Up will apparently be one of several "Apple Intelligence Tools" after these new updates roll out, Bloomberg writes. Along with Clean Up, users will be able to use "Extend" to expand the background of the photo with generative AI, "Enhance" to automatically improve things like lighting and image quality and "Reframe" to shift the perspective of a photo after it's taken, primarily for Apple's spatial photos.

The new features, if released, will bring Apple's photo-editing tools more in line with competitors like Google and Samsung, though both companies still lap Apple in their willingness to create entirely generated images. Google's Magic Editor feature, which debuted in 2023, still takes the cake in terms of giving users leeway to radically add to and change their photos.

Other than new photo tools, Apple is reportedly also debuting its new version of Siri powered by Google's Gemini models, a standalone Siri app and AI-powered search inside its apps. Apple will likely introduce many of these new features during its WWDC keynote on June 8.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/ios-27-will-reportedly-come-with-new-ai-powered-photo-editing-tools-194119562.html?src=rss

Keen’s Zero-Glue Shoe Uses A Cord-Cage To Hold Itself Together, And Can Be Repaired By Swapping Parts

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The footwear industry runs on glue. Something like 30 billion pairs of shoes get manufactured globally each year, and nearly all of them rely on industrial adhesives to bond uppers to soles. Those adhesives contain solvents that create toxic fumes in factories, complicate recycling at end of life, and introduce a whole class of chemicals that workers and the environment would be better off without. It’s a manufacturing reality so fundamental that most people never think about it, which makes it a perfect target for redesign if you can figure out the engineering.

Keen just launched the Uneek 360, and the Portland-based brand is calling it their first solvent-free shoe. The design breaks down into four separate pieces: a knit upper made from recycled plastic bottles, an external cord cage that wraps around the structure, a drop-in footbed, and a hybrid rubber-foam outsole. Nothing is glued. The cords loop through the sole unit and lock with a toggle, creating a mechanical connection where adhesive would normally live. It’s a modular build that extends Keen’s decade-long Detox the Planet initiative from chemistry into construction itself, and it arrives with a $190 price tag and enough design confidence to make you wonder why this approach took so long to reach production.

Designer: Keen Footwear

The cord cage is downright clever. Keen has been refining cord-based construction since the original Uneek sandal launched back in 2014, a polarizing design that used two interwoven cords as the entire upper. That silhouette took three years to develop and became a cult favorite despite looking like something between a huarache and a fishing net. The 360 repurposes that cord expertise into structural engineering rather than aesthetics. The articulated cording moves on multiple axes, which means it adapts to foot shape dynamically while maintaining enough tension to hold the four components together under walking loads. Pull the locking toggle and the whole assembly comes apart in seconds, with each material cleanly separated for recycling.

This fits into Keen’s broader chemistry work, which has been unusually transparent for a footwear brand. Since starting their Detox the Planet program in 2014, they’ve invested over 11,000 hours and $1.2 million eliminating toxic chemical classes from their supply chain. They went fully PFAS-free in 2018, removing those forever chemicals from over 100 different shoe components, then open-sourced the process so competitors could follow the same path. Five of six targeted chemical classes are gone. Solvents, the ones embedded in adhesives, are the final holdout. The Uneek 360 represents a different approach to that problem: instead of reformulating the glue, eliminate the need for it entirely.

The modular construction creates some really smart end-of-life options. Most shoes become landfill material because you can’t separate bonded composites without industrial shredding, and even then the mixed materials have limited recycling value. A shoe you can disassemble by hand into distinct material streams (knit fabric, rubber, foam, synthetic cord) actually stands a chance of getting processed properly. Whether that happens depends on infrastructure and consumer behavior, but at least the design removes a fundamental barrier.

Keen launched the Uneek 360 in Black/Magnet and Vapor/Star White colorways, with men’s and women’s sizing available through their site and select retailers. At $190, it sits at the premium end of the casual sneaker market, which reflects both the recycled materials and the engineering required to make cord-based mechanical locking work at production scale. It’s proof that footwear assembly without solvents is manufacturable, not just a concept sketch, which matters if the industry is serious about moving beyond adhesive dependency.

The post Keen’s Zero-Glue Shoe Uses A Cord-Cage To Hold Itself Together, And Can Be Repaired By Swapping Parts first appeared on Yanko Design.

NVIDIA starts offering a 12GB version of the 5070 for laptops

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NVIDIA is releasing a new variant of its 5070 GPU for laptops. Nestled in a blog post about the latest version of its Game Ready Drivers, the company notes its partners will soon start selling 5070 laptops with 12GB of VRAM, alongside the 8GB model that NVIDIA has offered since the launch of the 50-series. 

"Demand for GeForce RTX remains strong, and memory supply is contrastrained. In order to maximize memory availability, we are releasing the GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU 12GB configuration with 24Gb G7 memory. This gives our partners access to an additional pool of memory to complement the 16Gb G7 supply that currently ships with most GeForce GPUs," NVIDIA said. 

The first 12GB 5070-equipped laptops are slated to start shipping sometime in June, with manufacturers like ASUS, Lenovo and MSI likely to offer the video card as an option in some of their models. NVIDIA has yet to confirm pricing, but outlets like NotebookCheck are reporting that 12GB 5070 laptops could cost as much as their 5070 Ti counterparts. Right now, a 5070 Ti-equipped PC like the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI can set you back as much $2,650, depending on the amount of RAM on offer. New 12GB 5070 laptops likely won't cost as much, given manufacturers will probably configure them with less RAM.

NVIDIA has yet to share the full spec list for the 12GB 5070, but as the company notes, it’s using 24Gb G7 memory, instead of 16GB G7 memory, for the new model. The two memory types are made using different manufacturing processes. The former uses 3GB memory modules, while the latter uses 2GB ones. Either way the company is tapping into a different supply of memory that, in recent months, Samsung and Micron have managed to produce more consistently at scale. That said, unless NVIDIA has redesigned the 5070 to equip it with a wider 192-bit bus interface, which seems unlikely in this case, the new model won't be able to access that additional memory as fast as the 5070 Ti and other models above it in NVIDIA's stack. For most games that shouldn't matter too much, but it does mean the new model isn't quite the upgrade it seems if you just look at the amount of raw VRAM.             

 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/nvidia-starts-offering-a-12gb-version-of-the-5070-for-laptops-180057515.html?src=rss

You Can Play Pokémon Gold on Your Wrist, Thanks to a 2-Year Build

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Retro gaming handhelds have had a genuine second life in recent years. Original Nintendo hardware has been cloned, shrunken, and reimagined into increasingly unhinged form factors by modders who see the Game Boy lineup as the most suitable canvas for this kind of project. The builds have become their own subculture, where the unofficial requirement is always constructing something that makes everyone else feel like they aren’t trying hard enough.

YouTube creator Chris Hackmann, known online as LeggoMyFroggo, took things further than most. He spent more than two years building the Time Frog Color, a Game Boy Color shrunk down to wrist-watch dimensions. From the start, he gave himself three non-negotiable rules: it had to use the original GBC CPU, it had to accept physical cartridges, and it had to keep time when turned off. No emulation, no shortcuts.

Designer: Chris Hackmann (LeggoMyFroggo)

Those three constraints drove everything that followed. Standard GBC screens are too large, so the display was scaled down to a 1.12-inch LCD. That screen can’t read the GBC’s parallel RGB output natively, so an RP2040 microcontroller was added purely as a signal translator. This created the foundation for a stacked PCB arrangement, with an LCD driver board on the bottom and the CPU board sitting just above it.

The cartridge requirement was its own puzzle. Standard Game Boy cartridge slots aren’t watch-sized, so Hackmann swapped the slot for an M.2 connector, the type normally found in NVMe computer drives. The custom cartridges that plug into it aren’t simple ROM cards; they’re full MBC3 flash builds with their own RAM, mapper chip, and a coin cell battery that keeps save files intact between sessions.

All of that stacking pushed the watch body to 15mm thick, noticeably chunkier than an Apple Watch at roughly 10 mm. There was no room for a battery inside, so it went into the silicone strap instead. A flexible PCB runs through nearly the entire band via overmolding, carrying power back into the main body. It’s a bizarre solution that also happens to be the only sensible one.

The watch body is CNC’d from 6061 aluminum and anodized purple, which reads as a direct nod to Nintendo’s color sensibilities. Controls are fitted into the sides of the housing, with four face buttons on one edge and a custom-machined rocker D-pad on the other, both backed by silicone membranes. The unit shown in the video doesn’t include a speaker, as the component missed the deadline.

Hackmann is upfront about the trade-offs. The Time Frog Color offers a “less than optimal playing experience” by his own admission, with battery life that won’t compare favorably against most wearables. It’s a thick, quirky device with controls tucked into the edges and a cartridge protruding from the back. But you can load up Pokémon Gold and play it on your wrist, which isn’t something most projects can claim.

The post You Can Play Pokémon Gold on Your Wrist, Thanks to a 2-Year Build first appeared on Yanko Design.