Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case

Posted on by

Fingerprint readers are on phones, laptops, door locks, and gym lockers. They are on tablets, car dashboards, hotel room entrances, and even some credit cards. The one place you still cannot use one in Apple’s ecosystem is the watch on your wrist, and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is reportedly the device that might finally change that. Leaks suggest Touch ID could be integrated into the Action button or side button, bringing biometric authentication to the Apple Watch for the first time in the lineup’s eleven-year history. Apple is expected to announce the Ultra 4 at a fall event in September 2026, and the fingerprint sensor question is the detail that has dominated the pre-announcement conversation.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman expects no major design changes to the Ultra 4 this cycle, which would likely include a new biometric button, making the Touch ID rumor more aspirational than confirmed. MacRumors has flagged it as increasingly unlikely as a result. Gurman does foresee a chip upgrade, health and fitness improvements, and efficiency-driven battery gains from the same-sized cell. Other leaks sketch out a thinner titanium case, a redesigned rear sensor array with up to eight sensors, and watchOS 27 with a smarter Siri and new women’s health tracking. Touch ID may or may not make the cut, but the Ultra 4 is shaping up to be a meaningful update either way.

Designer: Apple

Apple Pay authentication on the Ultra currently requires a double-press of the side button, which is fine at a checkout counter and genuinely irritating mid-trail with trekking poles in both hands. A Touch ID sensor in the Action button would solve that in the most direct way possible. The Action button already handles flashlight toggling, workout starts, and dive computer modes depending on configuration, so adding biometric capability would make it the most densely functional physical control on any Apple device. Building a reliable fingerprint reader into a button that regularly encounters water, mud, and cold is the engineering challenge that may keep bumping this feature to a future generation. That tension between the obvious use case and the real manufacturing difficulty is likely why this rumor has had such a short lifespan in reliable reporting.

Current leaks point to as many as eight sensors on the back of the Ultra 4, compared to the existing array that handles heart rate, SpO2, wrist temperature, and ECG. The shift Apple appears to be making is away from software-compensated estimations toward hardware-grounded measurements, which matters most for use cases like altitude training and longitudinal hypertension monitoring. The chassis is also expected to get thinner, and that matters more than it sounds: the Ultra 3’s profile is comfortable during workouts and just present enough during overnight wear that some owners skip sleep tracking altogether. A slimmer build addresses that without touching the rugged character of the product. Together, the sensor overhaul and the thinner case are the two changes most likely to make existing Ultra owners seriously consider upgrading.

Battery life is expected to hold steady or extend slightly through chip efficiency gains rather than a larger cell, with the Ultra 3’s 42-hour standard and 72-hour Low Power Mode serving as the baseline to beat. watchOS 27 brings a more context-aware Siri with a dedicated watch app, Apple Intelligence across first-party apps, and new perimenopause and menopause tracking in Health. Apple is separately developing a more significant Watch redesign for a later generation, with reports pointing to a round case and a screenless fitness tracker. The Ultra 4 arrives before any of that. Touch ID would have made this generation an easy, quotable pitch; without it, the sensor upgrade, the thinner body, and the software stack carry the argument instead.

The post Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Georgian Residential Complex Rejects Straight Lines on its Floor Plan, Mimicking The Ocean

Posted on by

Straight lines are easy. Any architect can slap a rectangular tower on a plot and call it a day, and most beachfront developers do exactly that because straight lines are cheap, fast to build, and easy to sell off a brochure. Georgia’s Adjara coast just got a project that looked at that playbook and said absolutely not. Montemar Residential, a three tower complex rising in the seaside town of Gonio, ditches the grid entirely in favor of forms that ripple, curve, and cantilever like something dragged up from the Black Sea itself. It is the kind of building that makes you stop scrolling, then immediately want to know who signed off on it and how.

Designed by Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia of Alpha Architecture, the complex sits on a 10,000 square meter plot within a UNESCO listed stretch of coastline, right where Adjara’s oddly tropical microclimate runs into the Black Sea. Each of the three 16 story towers tops out around 48 to 52 meters and wears a dramatic aluminum crown that flares out over the roofline like a mushroom cap, or if you squint, a seashell caught mid opening. Parking for 300 vehicles sits tucked below grade, keeping the ground plane free for landscaping and plazas. It is a lot of building, and it wants you to know it.

Designers: Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia

The seashell inspiration shows up in how the facade behaves. The balcony edges do not stack in the usual identical, floor by floor grid you see on every coastal high rise from Miami to Marbella. Instead they undulate, staggering in and out like sediment ridges carved by tidal movement, which gives each tower a texture closer to a geological formation than a construction product. Aluminum embossed sheet cladding wraps the crowning terraces, catching light in a way that concrete or glass simply cannot, and it is the detail that separates Montemar from the generic curved tower trend that has been creeping through Gulf and Black Sea resort markets alike.

The space between the three towers is treated as public terrain rather than leftover setback, with green plantings, plazas, and communal zones designed to pull residents out of their units and into shared space. Panoramic apartments come with private terraces and jacuzzis angled toward the water, the kind of amenity that used to be penthouse exclusive and is now standard issue on any coastal development trying to compete for buyers. Whether that democratization of the infinity view holds up once the cranes clear out is the real test, since renderings are notoriously generous with light, weather, and empty beaches.

Gonio is a strange place for this kind of architectural swing. It is a historic town, not a resort capital, and Montemar is betting that sculptural ambition can coexist with a UNESCO designation next door rather than clash with it. If the finished towers deliver even half of what the renders promise, this stretch of the Adjara coast is about to become a lot more interesting to watch than its neighbors on the Black Sea.

The post This Georgian Residential Complex Rejects Straight Lines on its Floor Plan, Mimicking The Ocean 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.

Lando Norris’s New LEGO Helmet Is Weirdly Emotional to Build

Posted on by

McLaren just hit 1,000 Grands Prix, which in Formula 1 years is basically ancient royalty status. Only Ferrari has been around longer in this sport, and Ferrari acts like it too. So when a team crosses a milestone like that, you throw a party, you paint a special livery on the car, and apparently, you also get LEGO to build you a commemorative brick helmet with your driver’s face on the box.

That is exactly what happened with Lando Norris’s set, a 793 piece build that packs his signature yellow and black “blob” design (his words, not mine) onto one side of a papaya orange helmet shell. It is McLaren history and Norris’s personal branding smashed together into a display piece, and somehow LEGO made that combination look genuinely good instead of like a marketing fever dream.

Designer: LEGO Design Team, co-created with Lando Norris

What makes this one different from your average licensed tie in set is that Norris was actually in the room for it. This was not LEGO grabbing some reference photos and calling it a day. The drivers worked directly with LEGO’s design team to shape both the Norris helmet and its companion piece for teammate Oscar Piastri, and the real helmets both drivers wore trackside at Monaco were based on the LEGO designs, not the other way around. That is a genuinely rare flex for a toy company. Daniel Meehan, LEGO’s Creative Lead for F1, put it well when he said building organic helmet curves at this scale “presents exciting opportunities for exploring new building techniques and creative parts usage,” which is design speak for “yeah, this was hard and we are proud we pulled it off.”

And they did pull it off. The papaya orange half and the neon yellow squiggle half meet along a seam that somehow still reads as one continuous helmet, not two mismatched shells taped together. Printed tiles handle every sponsor logo along the brow, McLaren, Mastercard, Dropbox, OKX, all sitting exactly where they would on the real thing. The back of the helmet is where the emotional weight lives though. LEGO printed “1.000 GP” and “1963” across the rear in bold anniversary numerals, with a small nod to “Bruce / Mal Est. 1963,” a reference to Bruce McLaren founding the team over sixty years ago. “NEVER STOP RACING” runs along the base of the visor. It is a lot of history packed into a helmet the size of a grapefruit.

My favorite detail, though, is buried in the yellow side paneling where LEGO snuck in a tiny printed minifig head, smiling face and all, hidden right inside Norris’s own design pattern. It is such a small thing, but it is basically LEGO signing its own work, and it tells you the people building this actually cared about more than just slapping a logo on a shelf piece.

The set comes mounted on a black display stand with Norris’s number 1 and a printed signature plaque, plus a minifigure of Norris himself in off track team gear, reportedly the first time he has been rendered as a LEGO minifig. It also plugs into the LEGO Builder app so you can rotate and zoom your progress mid build, which is a nice touch if you like tracking your pit stops digitally.

This helmet drops right after LEGO built ten full size, actually driveable F1 cars for a stunt at last year’s Miami Grand Prix, so the brand’s relationship with the sport is clearly only ramping up. The Lando Norris McLaren Mastercard F1 Team Helmet (set 43023) is available now for $89.99 on LEGO.com and through McLaren’s official store, alongside the matching Oscar Piastri edition if you want the full garage set.

The post Lando Norris’s New LEGO Helmet Is Weirdly Emotional to Build first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Clear Acrylic CD Player Turns Your Music Collection Into Kinetic Art

Posted on by

The iMac G3’s translucent Bondi Blue shell sold 800,000 units in its first five months, which was Apple’s way of proving that exposing a computer’s internal geometry could be its single most compelling feature. Nothing put a transparent back on a phone in 2022 and made every other Android’s solid slab look like it had something to hide. Skeleton mechanical watches have been charging a premium for visible gear trains for centuries. Teenage Engineering turned exposed PCBs into a full aesthetic identity. The pattern is clear enough: when mechanisms are beautiful, hiding them is just a waste. CD sales have been quietly growing for four years now, physical music is back in force, and the SYITREN RM1 arrives to give CD players the transparent treatment they probably always deserved.

The RM1 houses its full CD mechanism inside a dual-layer ultra-clear acrylic frame, with precision metal corner pillars and the disc, optical pickup, and PCB all visible from the front. SYITREN, founded in 2017 and recognized by the MUSE, London, French, IDA, and A’ Design Awards, designed it with the CD’s own iridescence as a feature rather than a side effect. You press a disc onto the transport and suddenly there’s a spinning, light-catching object on your desk or wall that is also playing music. Audio routes out via Bluetooth 5.3 or 3.5mm AUX, with SYITREN leaving the speaker out entirely and trusting you to own one already. It measures 260 x 260 x 42mm, weighs 0.9kg, and starts at $89.

Designer: SYITREN

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $179 (45% off) Hurry, 62 of 1200 units left!

Dual-layer acrylic panels sandwich the CD mechanism between them, and the precision metal corner pillars at each corner read as structural jewelry rather than hardware fasteners. As the disc spins, its iridescent surface catches ambient light through the panels and scatters it differently depending on the label design, the printing, and the reflective surface underneath. Some discs glow gold under warm room lighting, others catch cool blue from overhead. A disc with a dense printed label plays completely differently as a visual object than a silver-surface one, which means every album in your collection has a slightly different personality in this frame.

A warm-yellow 2×8 LED matrix, visible through the acrylic from the front, shows track number, animated visuals, and volume level alongside a linear progress bar. The amber glow against the spinning disc creates what SYITREN calls a “visual rhythm,” and it’s a phrase that actually earns its keep here. Warm lighting and a slowly rotating disc at the center of a room does something to the quality of an evening that a Spotify queue on a phone simply cannot. It’s a mood object as much as an audio component. The choice of warm yellow over a cooler white or blue LED tone is clearly deliberate, positioning the RM1 alongside lamps and wood furniture rather than making it look like something pulled from a server rack.

SYITREN’s decision to ship the RM1 without a built-in speaker is both a nod to the Discman-meets-headphones culture, but also just fair common-sense engineering. Squeezing a driver into a 42mm-thick transparent frame would have produced tinny, directionally compromised sound that undermined everything else about the product. Instead, the RM1 connects to your existing speakers or headphones via Bluetooth 5.3 at a 10-meter range with a 95 dB SNR, or through a 3.5mm AUX jack for wired setups. For anyone who already owns a decent Bluetooth speaker or a bookshelf stereo, this approach makes the RM1 a source component and a visual object, which is exactly what it should be. It’s the same logic that drives high-end audio separates: source, amplification, and output each handled by the component built specifically for that job.

A built-in 16-bit DAC and 24-bit DSP sit at the core of the RM1’s signal chain, sampling at 8-48 kHz with a CD audio SNR of ≥85 dB and total harmonic distortion plus noise below 0.1 percent. Dynamic range lands at ≥70 dB, which is a respectable figure for a consumer portable at this price. Supported formats include standard audio CDs, MP3 discs, and WMA discs, which covers everything from your 2004 burned collection to freshly pressed albums. Playback modes offer repeat one, sequential play, and shuffle, with a remote control included in the box. The battery is an 18650 cell rated at 2000mAh, charging via USB-C in one to two hours and delivering six to eight hours of continuous playback.

Wall-mounting a CD player requires solving a problem that horizontal-tray consumer units have never had to worry about. CD optical pickups are designed to track a horizontally spinning disc, and tilting the whole assembly vertically introduces vibration and skip risks that would make most standard mechanisms unreliable on a wall. SYITREN addressed this with a 40-second anti-shock buffer for standard audio CDs and a 120-second buffer for MP3 discs, pre-reading and caching audio data so that ambient vibration or minor disturbances can’t interrupt playback. The optical pickup itself was also specifically engineered for vertical operation. Most people who buy the RM1 will probably never think about any of this, which is precisely where engineering and design blur together in the best way.

The RM1 ships with both a wall-mount system and a detachable desk stand, making the placement decision entirely yours and entirely reversible. Hung against a wall between picture frames, it reads as a kinetic art piece during playback and a minimal geometric object when the disc isn’t loaded. On a desk or shelf, the angled stand positions the disc facing you directly, turning the player into the kind of object your eye keeps returning to from across the room. SYITREN’s own imagery places it in apartments, studios, cafes, and living rooms, and the transparent form factor genuinely holds up across all of those contexts. At 0.9kg and 42mm deep, it’s also considerably lighter and thinner than photographs tend to suggest.

The RM1 starts at $99 and is available through SYITREN’s campaign, with the N200 Bluetooth speaker bundled together for a price of $139. The 18650 cell charges via USB-C in one to two hours and delivers up to eight hours of continuous playback, so the unit is genuinely portable if you want to move it between rooms. SYITREN doesn’t publish a formal warranty term in its current materials, so confirm those details directly before purchasing. The company has been manufacturing and shipping audio hardware since 2017, with distribution across more than 15 US retail cities and five global markets. At $99, the RM1 is the most considered CD player I’ve seen that treats the format as something worth displaying, and for anyone sitting on a collection of discs that hasn’t been played in years, that’s a genuinely compelling reason to dust them off.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $179 (45% off) Hurry, 62 of 1200 units left!

The post This Clear Acrylic CD Player Turns Your Music Collection Into Kinetic Art first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Built Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence Album Art as a Monochrome LEGO Diorama

Posted on by

There was a solid decade there where every other Tumblr blog, VSCO caption, and breakup playlist owed a spiritual debt to one woman in a bikini top and a fringe crop, staring off into the California haze like she’d just been dumped by a guy named Jim who drove a vintage Mercedes and never called back. That’s Ultraviolence in a nutshell. Lana Del Rey’s third album didn’t just soundtrack a generation’s melancholy, it basically invented the aesthetic language for it (moody filters, palm trees, cursive fonts, the works). Ten years later, the album still feels like its own little universe, and apparently one LEGO builder agreed hard enough to spend an unreasonable number of grey and black bricks recreating it.

That builder is ErfinderEdlerBenny, and their LEGO Ideas submission called simply “Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey” takes the album’s iconic black and white cover art and turns it into a full physical diorama, vintage car, palm trees, wrought iron gate, and all. No color anywhere. Just a wall of grayscale brick that somehow captures a very specific kind of heartbreak. It’s the kind of tribute that only makes sense if you’ve actually sat with the record, and honestly, that’s exactly the point.

Designer: ErfinderEdlerBenny

Zoom into the left side of the build and you land in a smaller vignette pulled straight from the “Ultraviolence” music video, the one where Lana wears a white dress and veil that reads somewhere between bridal and funeral, which, fair, tracks with a song about a relationship that hits like a kiss and also just hits. A wrought iron gate, a gnarled black tree, and a scattering of butterflies (some black, some ghostly white) surround the minifigure, and the whole corner has a quiet, almost gothic hush to it that a lot of official LEGO sets wouldn’t dare attempt. It’s a small scene, but it carries a surprising amount of mood for something built entirely out of grey bricks.

The right side flips that mood toward the ocean, borrowing imagery from the “West Coast” video instead, think hilly landscape silhouettes and a Ferris wheel motif tucked among a pair of tall black palm trees. It’s a clever way to fold a second song into a diorama technically named after the album’s title track, and it gives the whole build a sense of narrative pacing you don’t usually get from a static display piece. Two songs, two moods, one connected scene, and somehow it never feels cluttered or like it’s trying to do too much at once.

Piecing an entire album’s visual identity into LEGO form is no small feat, especially when you’re deliberately working without color as a crutch. Most builders lean on bright palettes to sell mood and depth. ErfinderEdlerBenny does the opposite, using texture, shading, and clever part choices (that basketball net style foliage, those stacked grey slopes for the skyline) to create contrast entirely through shape and shadow. It’s a genuinely tricky design problem, and the fact that it still reads clearly as “sad LA girl in a vintage car” from across a room says a lot about the execution.

As of writing, the project sits at 284 supporters with 422 days left to hit its first milestone of 1,000, so there’s plenty of runway left for the Lana faithful to show up. If you’ve ever screamed “West Coast” a little too loudly on a road trip, or know exactly which era of your life is tied to this record, this is the kind of tribute worth backing. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote. My one wish is that they somehow rig the sun piece to glow, because nothing says Ultraviolence quite like brooding in monochrome komorebi.

The post Someone Built Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence Album Art as a Monochrome LEGO Diorama first appeared on Yanko Design.

iPhone Ultra lands September 18 at $2,000 and kills the visible crease

Posted on by

Every foldable phone you have ever held has a crease in the middle of the display, and that crease has been the category’s most embarrassing open secret since 2019. Samsung has refined it, minimized it, and shot their devices in lighting specifically designed to hide it. Google’s Pixel Fold was a little better. The Honor Magic and Xiaomi Mix Fold each took their own runs at the problem. Seven years of collective engineering effort from the Android ecosystem later, the crease is still there, still catchable in certain light, still the thing reviewers mention in paragraph three of every foldable review. Apple has now looked at all of that and said, with characteristic confidence, that the iPhone Ultra has no visible crease.

Leaks from Fixed Focus Digital and Weibo sources describe a liquid-metal hinge from Apple’s Liquidmetal Technologies contract, but no publication has explained the actual engineering mechanism in any detail. The hinge manages bend geometry at the fold axis, paired with a display stack built to lie flat when open, eliminating the optical crease. Apple is announcing this at a September 8 or 9 keynote, with the device going on sale September 18 at a confirmed price above $2,000. That price is Ming-Chi Kuo’s floor, with his ceiling at $2,500. The design decisions behind the crease claim, the Touch ID placement, and the unusual 4:3 aspect ratio of the 7.8-inch inner panel add up to a product making several unusual bets simultaneously.

Designer: Apple

The liquid-metal hinge is the piece nobody has properly dissected yet, which is strange given how central the crease claim is to Apple’s entire design argument. Liquidmetal alloys are amorphous metallic glasses, meaning they lack the crystalline grain structure that causes conventional metals to deform plastically under repeated stress. A teardrop-shaped hinge cavity distributes the bend radius across a longer arc than a flat-fold design would, which is how Samsung has incrementally reduced crease visibility across Galaxy Z Fold generations. Apple’s version reportedly goes further, with the Liquidmetal alloy’s higher elastic recovery meaning the hinge springs back to a genuinely flat resting position. The inner display layer stack is engineered to match that geometry, reducing the optical ridge that ambient light catches and reads visually as a crease.

Touch ID came back on the side button, and it came back on Apple’s most expensive phone ever, inverting everything the fingerprint sensor stood for over the past several years. Since Face ID debuted on the iPhone X in 2017, Touch ID has been associated with the affordable tier: the SE, the iPad Air power button, the devices Apple built for people watching the price. The iPhone Ultra flips that because the physics left no alternative. The Face ID sensor stack requires a structured light projector, an infrared camera, and a flood illuminator, none of which fit inside a chassis measuring 4.8mm when open. The side-button Touch ID solution is actually more elegant for a dual-display device: one biometric input, two screen states, no awkward sensor positioning on either panel.

At 7.8 inches with a 4:3 aspect ratio, the inner display reads closer to an iPad mini than your average foldable. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 uses a 7.6-inch 22:9 inner panel, tall and narrow, better suited to scrolling than to content consumption. Apple’s near-square format is a deliberate software bet: iOS 27 developer betas already contain “foldState” and “angleDegrees” APIs, along with WWDC-previewed “app adaptability” tools designed for variable aspect ratios. The A20 Pro chip on a 2nm process, paired with 12GB of RAM, has the headroom to run genuinely iPad-grade app layouts on the open panel. Apple is essentially arguing that a foldable phone gets actually useful when its inner display is wide enough to run two apps side by side without either one feeling like a column.

Two thousand dollars is, give or take, what a MacBook Pro costs, and Apple is asking that for a phone. The design argument for that price sits across the four decisions above: a crease claim no Android foldable has credibly made, a liquid-metal hinge that actually supports it, a Touch ID side button that solves biometrics at 4.8mm, and a 4:3 inner display with the software infrastructure to back up the form factor. Supply at launch will be extremely limited, with Weibo leakers suggesting it could take three to five months for Apple to hit its 10 million unit production target. The September 18 on-sale date will be the easy part. Getting your hands on one before the holidays is the less certain proposition.

The post iPhone Ultra lands September 18 at $2,000 and kills the visible crease first appeared on Yanko Design.

Xiaomi Takes the IFA 2026 Spotlight as Samsung Makes A Quiet Exit After 35 Years

Posted on by

Imagine spending 35 years building the most recognizable booth at the world’s biggest consumer electronics show, then deciding one year to just… not. That is exactly what Samsung is doing at IFA 2026. The company is hosting its own event at the Humboldt Carré, a conference venue in central Berlin, eight kilometers from Messe, starting September 2, two days before the official show opens. Samsung frames this as a focused environment for media briefings, retail meetings, and product launches, following the same logic it applied at CES 2026 when it left the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Wynn Hotel. Doing it twice in the same year starts to look less like a pivot and more like a policy.

While Samsung manages its event across town, Xiaomi is inside Messe Berlin, confirmed for Hall 6.2, with a full ecosystem pitch and no obvious competitor stealing the spotlight. Xiaomi announced its IFA commitment at the official IFA Kick-Off on June 30, attaching a €7.4 billion AI R&D budget to the news, covering electric vehicles, robotics, and operating systems through 2028. Its IoT platform connects over 1.16 billion devices as of mid-2026, which gives the “Human x Car x Home” pitch real substance beyond the marketing copy. Samsung will sponsor the IFA Creator Hub, a content studio for influencers at Palais am Funkturm. But a sponsorship is a very different thing from anchoring a show floor, and Xiaomi is anchoring the show floor.

Photo Credits: IFA

At CES 2026, Samsung left the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Wynn Hotel and applied museum-style layout techniques to give visitors more time with each product. The Humboldt Carré plan at IFA runs on exactly the same idea, consolidating launches, tech forums, and partner meetings under one roof with dedicated space for hands-on AI appliance experiences. Samsung also has a footprint inside Messe Berlin as the main sponsor of the IFA Creator Hub, a content studio for influencers at Palais am Funkturm. It will run its own programming there throughout show week. But sponsoring a content studio is a different brand position from anchoring a product booth, and on the Messe floor, that position now belongs to whoever occupies it.

Photo Credits: IFA

Reports place the Galaxy S26 FE launch on September 4, the same day IFA officially opens, which means every journalist in Berlin will be writing about a Samsung phone from inside a building Samsung chose not to be in. LG, TCL, and Hisense all held their hall bookings and published their stand numbers months ago. Xiaomi is in Hall 6.2, a short walk from the main press areas. The reporters who glance up from S26 FE coverage will be standing next to Samsung’s biggest competitors. The brand generating the most ambient attention on the Messe floor will simply be the one that actually showed up.

Xiaomi’s pitch at IFA 2026 carries weight because the company has actually built the ecosystem it is selling. Its IoT platform connects over 1.16 billion devices as of June 2026, phones and laptops excluded, which gives the “Human x Car x Home” framing real shelf-stocking credibility for European retailers. The €7.4 billion AI R&D commitment for 2026 to 2028, spanning electric vehicles, robotics, and operating systems, is sized for institutional buyers rather than spec-sheet readers. Xiaomi landed on the Fortune Global 500 for the seventh consecutive year in July 2026, ranked 232nd. It arrives at IFA knowing exactly what it wants from a European room, and with the numbers to back that up.

Photo Credits: IFA

Samsung’s controlled-environment strategy has a clean logic that gets harder to apply the bigger the show it leaves behind. Moving off the floor eliminates accidental comparisons, crowded aisles, and competitor booths visible from your own press conference, but it also removes the organic brand visibility a trade show generates just by being a trade show. Xiaomi does not have that problem this year. It is physically present in the room where buying decisions happen, where retail partnerships get formed over product demos, and where IFA’s roughly 220,000 annual visitors walk through looking for the next big thing. If the floor plan is the argument, Xiaomi is winning it before the doors even open.

The post Xiaomi Takes the IFA 2026 Spotlight as Samsung Makes A Quiet Exit After 35 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

Narwal’s 31,000Pa robot vacuum has a flattened roller mop and a dock that looks like decor

Posted on by

There are two things robot vacuum brands rarely linger on for long, probably because neither one looks especially glamorous in a product keynote. The first is the dirty mop problem, where a machine starts with good intentions and ends up dragging around a damp record of everything it picked up ten minutes earlier. The second is the dock problem, which is easier to ignore in press shots than in real life, especially when that dock has to sit in your bedroom, hallway, or living room looking like a squat little appliance monument. Both of those problems have been present since the earliest robot mop launched, and both have been quietly shuffled behind flashier features ever since. For a category built on convenience, that has always felt like a pretty strange compromise.

The Narwal Freo 20 is interesting because it goes straight for those two pain points instead of dressing them up as side benefits. Its flattened Track Mop keeps cleaning itself in real time with hot water, pressure, and built-in dirty water extraction, which is a much more convincing pitch than the usual promise of “better mopping” with no explanation attached. Then there is the dock, wrapped in a woven texture that feels more like something designed for a home and less like a machine you are expected to hide behind a plant. That combination gives the Freo 20 a sharper identity than most robot cleaners. It seems tuned to the actual experience of living with one, mess, maintenance, decor, and all.

Designer: Junbin Zhang

Click Here to Buy Now: $849.99 $1,099.99 ($250 off, use coupon code “YANKOF20”). Hurry, deal ends soon! Amazon Link Here.

Sixteen precision nozzles spray 140°F water directly onto the Track Mop mid-operation, while a built-in scraper and high-pressure air pump strip the dirty residue out and route it into a separate tank. The mop itself is shaped differently from a conventional roller: its flattened structure creates a floor contact area up to seven times larger than a standard round roller under the same conditions, which means more even pressure distribution and stronger scrubbing per pass. When the system detects a stubborn stain, the mop rotates against the direction of travel and applies 12N of downward pressure, roughly the equivalent of pressing your palm firmly into the floor. Keeping a flattened roller tensioned, spinning, and self-cleaning all at once required Narwal’s engineers to develop a dual-axis internal structure that coordinates those movements with real precision. Without that mechanical control, the mop would lose consistent floor contact, and the whole self-cleaning loop would fall apart under normal use. First developed and introduced by Narwal last year, the technology was initially reserved for the brand’s flagship models, while both its design and manufacturing process have continued to be refined and improved over the past year. With Freo 20, the Track Mop is now being incorporated into the Freo series, marking a first step toward extending the technology to a broader range of price points.

NarMind Pro handles navigation and behavioral decisions using dual RGB cameras and a recognition library covering over 300 household objects with 99% claimed accuracy. The more interesting part of that system is how contextually it applies the recognition: pet zones trigger a suction boost, baby areas trigger quiet mode, and dirtier sections of floor get a different cleaning strategy rather than the same treatment as a clean stretch of hardwood. The 99% obstacle recognition rate also means better cord and furniture leg avoidance in practice, which matters more in lived-in homes than it ever does in a controlled demo. There is also a live video function built in, letting you check on the house or keep an eye on a pet while the machine works. That last feature earns more goodwill in daily use than most spec-sheet highlights ever do.

At 31,000 Pa, the Freo 20 delivers unusually strong suction for a product at this price tier, and the DualFlow Tangle-Free System handles hair pickup in a way that will matter more to most households than any lab benchmark. EdgeReach Technology extends the side brush or mop during wall-edge passes to improve coverage along baseboards and in corners, where a surprising amount of floor grime tends to accumulate undisturbed. The robot also handles threshold crossing up to 4 cm, covering the minor height differences between floor types that cheaper models tend to stumble on. Narwal claims 99% debris pickup on tile and 99% hair pickup in Super Powerful Mode, both from in-house lab testing. Those numbers come with the standard real-world-may-vary caveat, but the spec sheet is competitive across the board.

Narwal’s fabric-inspired woven-texture dock is described as an industry first in robot vacuum design, and looking at how the rest of the category handles dock aesthetics, that claim is easy to believe. Most docks are designed as if they will live in a utility cupboard, when in practice they spend their lives parked in the middle of a living space next to a couch or a side table. The woven finish gives the Freo 20’s dock a quieter presence, one that sits more naturally beside soft furnishings or wood surfaces than a glossy plastic tower would. Functionally, the dock handles auto-emptying, hot water mop washing, and hot air drying, stretching maintenance intervals to up to 120 days. The design and the function are making the same argument: the best home robot is one you eventually forget about.

The Freo 20 goes on sale August 20 at a launch price of $899.99 along with a free advanced kit, valid through September 3, before settling at its MSRP of $1,099.99. Code YANKOF20 gets you an additional $50 off through August 26 on both Narwal’s site and Amazon.

Click Here to Buy Now: $849.99 $1,099.99 ($250 off, use coupon code “YANKOF20”). Hurry, deal ends soon! Amazon Link Here.

The post Narwal’s 31,000Pa robot vacuum has a flattened roller mop and a dock that looks like decor first appeared on Yanko Design.