Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Sennheiser’s New TWS Earbuds Have a Battery You Can Actually Replace Yourself

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Sennheiser is shipping a screwdriver in the box with its new flagship earbuds. That’s not a gimmick, it’s the entire pitch. The MOMENTUM True Wireless 5 has user-replaceable batteries in both the earbuds and the charging case, something almost nobody in this category bothers to offer. Most premium earbuds are built to be assembled and never opened again, only thrown away. It’s something Apple pioneered, and everyone just accepted. Sennheiser looked at that premise and said “Hold my screwdriver…”

Announced August 20 and landing September 3 for $299.95, the True Wireless 5 arrives in five metallic colorways, graphite, cream, copper, denim, and lavender, with Dolby Atmos head tracking, Bluetooth 6.0, and a redesigned IP54 rated shell. All good upgrades, none of them the real story. The real story is that when the battery eventually degrades, you pop it open and swap it yourself instead of retiring the whole product. Most premium earbuds treat that as impossible. Sennheiser just proved otherwise, screwdriver included.

Designer: Sennheiser

Sennheiser sculpted the new housing using data pulled from thousands of ear scans, chasing a fin-less, “barely there” silhouette that its own testers rated more comfortable than the outgoing MOMENTUM True Wireless 4 by a 73 percent margin. A micro-perforated acoustic mic plate handles wind turbulence so gusts do not wreck call quality or trip up the noise cancellation. The case got the same attention, trading bulk for a narrower, low-friction shape that slides into a pocket instead of fighting it. None of that reads like a company that treated repairability as a compromise. It reads like a company that treated it as a design brief.

Getting inside without wrecking the seal, while still holding an IP54 rating, is genuinely impressive. Sealed adhesive construction has always been the industry’s excuse for why earbuds cannot survive sweat and also be opened by a human being with a screwdriver. Sennheiser just did both at once, and did it on a product this compact, packed with a 7mm TrueResponse driver, an eight sensor call array, and enough silicon to run Dolby Atmos head tracking. The battery swap itself is supposedly a few minute job, not a surgery. That distinction matters more than any spec bump on the sheet, because a spec bump gets outdated in a year and a battery you can replace keeps the product alive for as long as you’re willing to keep unscrewing it.

In July, EU regulators exempted wireless earbuds out of the incoming battery replaceability law entirely, citing water exposure and the risk of a normal person mangling a lithium cell the size of a coin. It was a reasonable enough excuse, and one the industry itself lobbied for. Sennheiser announced a product a few weeks later that quietly makes the excuse look thin. Fairphone got there first with its Fairbuds back in 2024, proving the concept was possible even in a startup’s budget hardware. A flagship brand with an 80 year audio pedigree doing the same thing at premium pricing is a louder statement, and one the rest of the industry will have a harder time waving off as a niche experiment from an ethical hardware outlier.

What happens next is the part nobody has answered yet. A replaceable battery only means something if the replacement itself stays cheap and available for years, the way Fairphone sells its cells for a few dollars with a published guide. Sennheiser hasn’t said what a spare battery will cost or how long it plans to keep selling them, which we’ll wait and watch. The screwdriver is a promise. Whether Sennheiser makes that screwdriver still useful even after 3-4 years is something worth keeping tabs on.

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Xiaomi Now Sells Coffee Machines, and This One Costs Just $121

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Xiaomi sells phones, electric cars, rice cookers, robot vacuums, air fryers, and now a capsule coffee machine, which means the company has quietly built a catalogue capable of furnishing your entire apartment and then driving you out of the garage. The playbook has not changed since: pick a category ruled by expensive Western brands, strip it to the essentials, price it like a provocation, and make it look far better than the price suggests. The Mijia Capsule Coffee Machine has been a China exclusive since February 2025. It just went international at €104.90 ($121 USD), sold directly by Xiaomi.

Xiaomi designed it in-house under the Mijia sub-brand with no external studio credited, and the object measures 33.2 x 9.0 x 21.2cm, roughly an A4 sheet standing on its edge. Inside sits a 19-bar ULKA pump from Italian manufacturer CEME, the same pump family Nespresso machines have used for years, alongside a 650ml removable tank and a 25-second preheat. The detail that actually matters is a magnetic capsule rack holding 20 capsules, sitting flush against the machine’s flank or clipping straight onto your fridge door. At ¥499 in China, this thing was a weapon. At €104.90 it lands in Nespresso Essenza Mini territory, which makes the argument far more interesting.

Designer: Xiaomi

Most capsule machines are wide and squat, built to disappear into a corner counter next to the toaster. Xiaomi went the other direction and made this one narrow enough to stand like a book on a shelf, which is exactly how the brand shot it for launch, next to a picture frame rather than a fruit bowl. The front is split into a rounded brew head sitting above a column of fine vertical fluting, with a smoked panel at the back revealing the water level. Nothing here is flashy. It is the kind of quiet, considered grey object that photographs better than it has any right to, and Xiaomi clearly knew that when it wrote “extraordinary craftsmanship” into the marketing copy.

The rack is the smartest move in the whole design. Instead of selling capsule storage as a separate accessory the way Nespresso does, Xiaomi built it into the silhouette, a slab of twenty vertical slots that clips onto the machine’s side or peels off entirely to stick on a fridge door. It also happens to be the only place color shows up on the entire product, since every capsule you load is a small bright object against an otherwise monochrome machine. That is either genuinely clever industrial design or the tidiest lock-in mechanism I have seen on a kitchen appliance in a while, and honestly it can be both at once.

The internals are competent rather than flashy, which is fine, because this machine was never going to out-engineer a Breville. A 19-bar ULKA pump built by CEME S.P.A. in Italy handles pressure, paired with an NTC sensor and PID algorithm for temperature control, plus a 1400W heater and a 650ml tank you can pull off and rinse at the sink. Two cup sizes come preset at 40ml and 110ml, and both are adjustable by holding the button and tapping again once you hit your preferred pour. Xiaomi rates the whole thing at 55dB(A), quiet enough that it will not wake anyone sleeping down the hall. None of it screams for attention, and that restraint is sort of the point.

The internals are competent rather than flashy, which is fine, because this machine was never going to out-engineer a Breville. A 19-bar ULKA pump built by CEME S.P.A. in Italy handles pressure, paired with an NTC sensor and PID algorithm for temperature control, plus a 1400W heater and a 650ml tank you can pull off and rinse at the sink. Two cup sizes come preset at 40ml and 110ml, and both are adjustable by holding the button and tapping again once you hit your preferred pour. Xiaomi rates the whole thing at 55dB(A), quiet enough that it will not wake anyone sleeping down the hall. None of it screams for attention, and that restraint is sort of the point.

Worth saying plainly: Xiaomi never claims Nespresso compatibility. It lists four capsule diameter ranges instead and lets you do the math yourself, which is a neat bit of legal sidestepping dressed up as a spec sheet. It is also worth remembering that capsules cost more per cup than ground coffee and are harder on the planet, no matter how good the machine holding them looks. The bigger question is what happens to the price argument now that it has left China. At ¥499 this machine undercut everyone. At €104.90 it is going toe to toe with Nespresso on cost and betting the design carries the rest. Given what is actually sitting on that shelf, I would not bet against it.

The post Xiaomi Now Sells Coffee Machines, and This One Costs Just $121 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Here’s What You Get When You Combine A Beanbag With An Inflatable Chair

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As a millennial with lower back issues, my biggest complaint with a beanbag is that it doesn’t provide enough stability. And my complaint with inflatable furniture is that it’s never looked classy. Carlo Livaja managed to hit two birds with one stone with his Sonnet Chair.

With the aura of a beanbag and the inner workings of an inflatable chair, the Sonnet is just a clever bit of furniture design, relying on an inflatable fabric ball that’s restrained/shaped by a bent stainless steel pipe. The result is something eye-catching and intriguing enough to make you want to sit down, while the Sonnet supports you perfectly in all the right places.

Designer: Carlo Livaja

You get the lower support from the fact that the Sonnet’s base is a defined tongue-shaped seating element, while the backrest inflates into you, giving you enough “lean-back resistance” (I coined that term) just like an inflatable would. All this, while looking like a beanbag went and did a Masters in Design from Milan. It has the spiritual appeal of a beanbag without any of the collapsibility.

One’s immediate question is whether the metal pipe actually obstructs your seating, and my gut reaction is that it probably won’t. As long as you don’t jump into the chair, the Sonnet respects you back. Don’t lean back like you would in a recliner and your neck won’t hit the pipe at the back. It’s a chair built on clever compromise… clever being the more operative term there.

The beauty of the Sonnet (especially if you see its video on Instagram) lies entirely in its transformation. The fabric cover sits like a heap, gaining shape as air is blown into it. Immediately as it hits the frame restraining it, the chair begins taking its true shape, and stops once it can’t accept any more air. In essence, it’s a lot like IKEA’s inflatable chair showcased at Milan this year – rely on a rigid element to restrict the inflatability of your design and you’ve got something that’s constrained yet comfortable.

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Google’s Pixel 12 Could Get Cheaper as Production Leaves China for India and Vietnam

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A phone’s country of assembly used to be a footnote on the back of the box. It now shapes the spec sheet, the retail price, and which storage tier survives the year. Google confirmed the Pixel 11 at $899, up a hundred dollars from the Pixel 10, with the Pro, Pro XL, and Fold each taking the same hundred-dollar step across the board. Component costs got the blame, and the blame is largely earned. Six days after launch, Nikkei Asia reported the other half of the story.

Google has told suppliers it intends to have every Pixel smartphone, watch, and wireless earbud produced outside China starting next year, with production shifting to Vietnam and India. The move follows a Pixel 11 production run in Vietnam that gave Google the confidence to commit to the full transition. The company is targeting Pixel shipments up 8 to 10 percent this year from roughly 12 million units in 2025, using the hardware as the delivery vehicle for Gemini. Manufacturing geography has become a design constraint, not a footnote.

Designer: Google

The mechanism behind the price increase is a supply war Google didn’t start and can’t fully escape. AI accelerators run on high bandwidth memory, and that memory is manufactured on the same production lines as the DRAM that goes into a phone. Mobile LPDDR5X pricing climbed 78 to 83 percent quarter over quarter this spring, according to TrendForce, and memory now accounts for 30 to 40 percent of a phone’s bill of materials, up from 10 to 15 percent in prior years. Gartner projects a 130 percent combined surge in DRAM and SSD pricing by the end of 2026, enough on its own to explain most consumer electronics price movement this year.

Google’s response to that pressure shows up as a storage decision rather than a straightforward price hike. The 128GB tier has been eliminated across the entire Pixel 11 lineup, so every model now starts at 256GB, which absorbs the increase into a spec upgrade rather than a naked price jump. It’s a smarter move than what several budget Android brands have done this year, quietly cutting RAM or downgrading displays to protect a price point. Google chose to hold the line on the experience and let the entry price move instead, which is the correct call for a flagship, even if it doesn’t change what the phone actually costs you at checkout.

Leaving China is a materially easier decision for Google than it is for Apple or Samsung, and that’s what makes the 2027 timeline credible rather than aspirational. Google sells almost no Pixel devices inside China and carries a small domestic user base there, which removes the demand-side complications that would slow down a company like Apple. Vietnam already has a mature phone manufacturing ecosystem built by Samsung, and Google is stepping into infrastructure rather than building it from zero. India, meanwhile, overtook China as the top source of US-bound smartphone shipments in 2025, a shift with obvious tariff logic behind it.

None of that repositioning fixes the underlying cost problem, though, and it’s worth being direct about that. Standing up the Vietnamese line for the Pixel 11 required new testing equipment, new tooling, and a validated production process built from scratch, none of which is free. PhoneArena’s assessment that stable pricing is the realistic outcome, rather than an outright reduction, tracks with how manufacturing transitions actually play out. Relocating a factory reduces exposure to trade policy. It does not negotiate down a DRAM contract.

The report itself carries real gaps that are worth naming rather than smoothing over. Nikkei gave no month within 2027, no sequencing across the phone, watch, and earbud lines, no cost figure, and no named contract manufacturer in either country, and Google has neither confirmed nor denied the plan. The timeline has also moved before, a January report had most of this exit happening during 2026, and Pixel production has been drifting toward Vietnam since 2019. Seven years into an exit, the finish line keeps resetting.

The real tension in this story is structural, not incidental. Google raised Pixel prices in part because AI infrastructure consumed the memory supply chain, in order to sell a phone whose entire pitch rests on AI. Whether a new factory address in Vietnam or India can hold the line at $899 is what the Pixel 12 will actually answer.

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Garmin’s Tacx Neo 2T Turns Your Existing Bike Into a Connected Gym, No Extra Setup

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You know that bike sitting in your garage, judged by cobwebs, wondering when you’ll finally take it out again. Garmin just gave it a second career. The Tacx Neo 2T with Zwift Cog and Click, out August 21 for $1,099, clips onto pretty much any bike with 8 to 13 gears and turns it into a full smart trainer, complete with power tracking, cadence data, and a straight line into Zwift and Rouvy. No cassette swap, no calibration ritual, no YouTube tutorial at 11pm trying to figure out why your bike won’t pair.

Basically, Garmin looked at the whole “buy a $2,000 smart bike” trend and said, why not just use the one you already own. You bolt the trainer on, plug in the included remote for virtual shifting, and you’re pedaling through a Zwift climb before your coffee gets cold. It is less a new machine and more a software upgrade for your legs.

Designer: Garmin

The actual hardware here is not new, and Garmin is not pretending otherwise. The NEO 2T shell, that angular black and blue wedge with the vent slots, has been around since 2019. What changed is what sits inside the flywheel. A bright orange Zwift Cog now stands in for your entire cassette, and it is compatible with almost any 8 to 13 speed bike, no tools required beyond whatever it takes to bolt your bike onto the trainer itself. Pair it with the Zwift Click, a small handlebar remote that handles shifting, steering, and menu navigation, and the whole “getting started” phase collapses into about ten minutes.

What you actually get for your money is the boring but important stuff. Power and cadence accuracy within 1 percent, dynamic resistance that adjusts for weight, speed, and incline, and enough quietness that you will not wake up the rest of the house doing intervals at 6am. Buyers who are new to Zwift also get a free membership offer, though Garmin has not said how long that lasts.

For years, the trend was building bikes that look like sculptures, cabinets that hide a Peloton, frames designed to disappear into a living room. Garmin is taking the opposite route. Instead of hiding the machine, it is shrinking the amount of machine you need in the first place. Your actual bike stays your actual bike. The only thing that changes is what happens once you clip it in.

You do not need a second bike, a dedicated smart frame, or a spare room that quietly becomes “the cycling room.” You need the bike you already own and about ten minutes on a Wednesday afternoon.

The post Garmin’s Tacx Neo 2T Turns Your Existing Bike Into a Connected Gym, No Extra Setup first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Foam-Free Eco Packaging Is Made From Compressed Rosemary Waste, And It Carries The Aroma Too

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Expanded foam or polystyrene has had a good run as the default packaging filler, mostly because it’s cheap, light, and nobody was really committed to sustainability for the last half century so the industry is pretty set in its ways now. Expanded foam does not decompose, it does not do anything useful once you rip it out of the box, and it has spent decades sitting quietly in landfills being extremely unbothered by the concept of consequences. Designers have been chipping away at its throne for years, swapping in mushroom mycelium, seaweed film, pressed pulp, whatever grows fast and decomposes faster. Scentra joins that lineup with a twist nobody else has really tried. Rosemary.

Instead of growing a material or pulping something into a smooth foam substitute, this one compresses actual rosemary waste, stems and all, into a block held together with a seaweed binder. The result looks rustic rather than manufactured, and it carries the plant’s natural scent right there in the fibers. Crack the box open and rosemary hits you before the product does. Foam never managed that trick, and honestly, it never tried.

Designers: Zhixi Dai, Zhou Yun, Wang Zhan

The rosemary itself comes from an organic farm in Guizhou, China, run under Omni Biotech’s AOLUX line, where trimmings that would normally get swept up and discarded are collected instead. The farm also employs local workers from low income families as part of a rural revitalization push, so the sourcing story has a human angle sitting quietly underneath the material one. Designer Zhixi Dai led the project with Zhou Yun and Wang Zhan rounding out the team, and between them they turned a farming byproduct into something structural enough to actually protect glass.

The block is cut with a cavity shaped exactly like the essential oil bottle it holds, silhouette and all, so the packaging reads almost like a little doorway with the product framed inside it. Pull the bottle out and you are left holding a chunk of compressed herb that still smells like the plant it came from. Set it on a shelf, add a few more drops of oil when the scent fades, and it keeps working as a passive diffuser. No batteries, no wiring, no porcelain filter to keep clean. Just plant matter doing what plant matter does.

We have seen versions of this waste to material pipeline before. Beer mash has been pressed into leather, spent grain has been molded into stools, rice husk has been packed into furniture. What usually happens in those stories is the waste becomes inert once it is shaped, useful for its structure and nothing else. Scentra skips that step. The rosemary does not stop being rosemary just because it got compressed into a block. It keeps its oils, its texture, its smell, all the things that made it worth growing in the first place.

That is really the whole pitch here, and it is a good one. Most eco packaging asks you to feel good about something you cannot see or verify, a recycling percentage or a compostability claim buried in fine print. This one just smells like rosemary. You do not need a certificate for that, though it has one anyway, having picked up the Best Eco Design win at the European Product Design Awards.

The post This Foam-Free Eco Packaging Is Made From Compressed Rosemary Waste, And It Carries The Aroma Too first appeared on Yanko Design.

This electric beach wagon tackles soft sand with balloon tires, hub motors, and a foldable frame

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The walk from the car to the shoreline is, depending on your beach setup, a mild inconvenience or an actual workout. You’ve got the cooler, the chairs, the umbrella, the bags, the kids, more bags, a fishing rod you almost forgot, and at least one child who stopped walking because they spotted a crab. Standard wagons help, up until the pavement runs out and soft sand begins, at which point the wagon becomes dead weight with wheels. The sand wins every time. LITEFAR’s B1 Beach Edition is a direct answer to that exact moment, a foldable electric wagon built specifically for the terrain where ordinary carts tap out.

LITEFAR has been building smart electric wagons for a few years now, starting with the remote-controlled Orion and the handle-assisted H1, and the B1 is the most beach-specific product the brand has made. Dual 600W brushless hub motors sit inside the rear wheels, wide 10-inch low-pressure balloon tires keep the load from sinking into soft sand, and the cargo bed handles up to 220 lbs across 150 liters of space. The removable 24,000mAh A24 battery powers the drive system and doubles as a 100W USB-C power bank for phones, cameras, and laptops. A modular accessory system, a telescopic light, three control modes, and a swappable wheel system for off-beach terrain round out the package. It starts at $599, with global shipping expected between October and November 2026.

Designer: LITEFAR

Click Here to Buy Now: $599 $999 (40%off). Hurry, only a few left!

The design intelligence starts with weight distribution, not wattage. Narrow wheels concentrate load into a small contact patch, sand gives way, and traction disappears. B1’s 10-inch low-pressure balloon tires spread the load across a wider footprint, keeping the wagon on top rather than cutting through. The dual 600W brushless hub motors are mounted directly inside the rear wheels, with no exposed drivetrain or chain for sand to clog, and push forward with up to 36 N·m of torque once the tires have already won the flotation battle. It’s a tidy design sequence: solve the physics problem first, then add power.

B1 runs on three control modes. The smart handle responds to your movement and applies motor assist as you walk, preserving the feel of guiding a wagon while removing most of the effort. Cruise control lets you set a steady speed and keep moving without constant pulling, useful for longer beach walks with a full load. The LITEFAR app handles settings, battery status, and OTA firmware updates remotely. Cruise control is the sleeper feature here, the kind of thing that sounds minor until you’ve dragged 150 lbs of gear across 400 feet of loose sand and your arms give up before the water is even visible.

An optional remote controller takes things one step further, and on a wide-open beach with few obstacles, it is genuinely a little ridiculous how easy the whole operation becomes. Send the loaded wagon ahead of you, guide it alongside while you carry the board, or just let it roll while you keep both hands free for literally anything else. There is no wrestling with the handle, no leaning forward into the weight, just a loaded cart moving across soft sand while you walk next to it unbothered. Adults will appreciate the practicality of it pretty quickly. Kids will see it and immediately want a turn, which is either a bonus or a problem depending on how protective you are about your cargo.

The 6063 aluminum frame folds flat into pickups and larger SUVs without needing a trailer or roof rack. Unfolded, it delivers 150 liters of cargo volume and a dynamic load capacity of 220 lbs, with a static capacity of 440 lbs as a stationary platform. Teslin mesh fabric lines the bed, tough and easy to rinse down after a day in the sand. The rear section opens outward for longer items that don’t fit in a conventional cargo area, folded canopies, fishing rods, mats, and oversized gear. At 53 lbs and 40 by 24 by 21 inches folded, it’s real-world manageable.

Once B1 arrives at the shoreline, it transitions from hauler to base camp. The modular accessory system supports a tabletop for food and drinks, rod holders for surf fishing, a portable folding seat, umbrella support, and additional storage add-ons. Depending on who you are and what you brought, this becomes either a family beach station, a camera gear organizer, a fishing platform, or a powered outdoor workspace. Most motorized wagons stop being useful the moment they stop moving. This one keeps working after the walk is done, which is the design detail that genuinely sticks with me.

The 24,000mAh A24 battery is removable and does double duty. Pull it from the wagon at the beach and it functions as a standalone power bank, with a 100W USB-C input/output port and 30W USB-A output covering phones, laptops, cameras, and drone controllers. It fully recharges in 1.5 hours and is swappable in seconds if you bring a spare. An optional 50W solar panel adds off-grid flexibility for camping and fishing trips. B1 also includes a telescopic light that rises above the wagon frame, useful for sunset fishing setups and the walk back when the beach day runs longer than expected.

The standard 10-inch PVC balloon tires cover soft sand, but the wheel system is removable and upgradeable. Optional 11.5-inch PU balloon tires offer more cushioned flotation for heavy beach days, while 10-inch airless honeycomb rubber tires handle off-road trails, gravel, and campsites where puncture resistance matters more than flotation. All three share the same hub interface for fast, tool-free swaps, making B1 genuinely multi-season rather than a summer-only commitment. The LITEFAR B1 Beach Edition starts at $599 against an MSRP of $999, with wheel upgrades, the optional 50W solar panel, and modular accessories available separately. A non-motored version is available for $299 too. Global shipping is scheduled for November 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $599 $999 (40%off). Hurry, only a few left!

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Someone Built A 1,064-Piece LEGO Super Saiyan Goku And It Looks Stunning

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For most of its existence, LEGO acted like anime didn’t exist. Star Wars, sure. Marvel, absolutely. Batman, SpongeBob, even the Titanic, all fair game. But anime sat in a weird blind spot for decades, despite fans on LEGO Ideas practically begging for a shot at Naruto, Totoro, or literally anything with a Kamehameha wave in it. Then One Piece happened in 2025, technically through Netflix’s live action version rather than the actual anime, and the door creaked open just enough for people to start hoping.

Enter tulodici, a LEGO Ideas builder who decided to test exactly how far that door swings with a full brick-built Super Saiyan Goku. It is dramatic, it is articulated within an inch of its life, and it uses a hair building trick borrowed from LEGO’s botanical sets, which is the kind of crossover I did not know I needed. Whether Bandai and Toei ever let this happen is a different question. But the build itself deserves the spotlight regardless.

Designer: tulodici

The build recreates Goku’s Namek transformation scene, mid Kamehameha charge, standing on a cracked chunk of alien terrain with translucent yellow aura shards erupting around his feet. It runs 1,064 pieces, and tulodici notes almost everything used is already in production, only eight colors would need to be newly molded, which is a genuinely reasonable ask by LEGO Ideas standards. The whole figure is built on ball and turntable joints, so it holds a proper dynamic fighting stance rather than the stiff, glued-in-place look a lot of big display figures fall into.

My favorite detail, though, is the hair. Anime hair is notoriously the hardest thing to replicate in bricks, all sharp angles and gravity defying spikes, and tulodici solved it by clipping yellow wedge pieces onto two stacked steering wheel elements, a technique he pulled from LEGO’s modern botanical plant sets. It is a smart piece of cross pollination, using a flower-building trick to fake spiky hair texture while keeping the whole thing structurally sound underneath. Elsewhere, spoiler pieces form the Turtle School gi’s shoulder pads without restricting arm movement, and mudguard pieces shape the boots. There is even a companion minifigure with a display stand and swappable hair, black for base Goku, yellow for Super Saiyan, so you can flex between forms depending on your mood that day.

As tulodici puts it, “turning this set into reality is going to take OVER 9000 supporters,” which, yes, is the joke you think it is, and I respect the commitment to the bit.

The bigger question is whether LEGO would ever greenlight this even with the votes. Dragon Ball’s license sits with Bandai and Toei, a much tougher door than the Netflix deal that got One Piece through. For context, Naruto’s Ichiraku Ramen build cleared 10,000 supporters and got pushed to LEGO’s Parking Lot stage this year, while two Avatar: The Last Airbender projects hit the same milestone and got rejected outright. So the votes matter, but they are not the whole battle.

Right now this Goku sits at 917 supporters with 405 days left to hit the first 1,000 milestone. If you want to see Namek rendered in ABS plastic, head over to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote.

The post Someone Built A 1,064-Piece LEGO Super Saiyan Goku And It Looks Stunning first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Bulgarian Bank Branch Looks Like You’re Sitting Inside a Crystal

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Walls, generally speaking, have one job. Stand there, hold up the ceiling, maybe hide some plumbing, and stay out of everyone’s way. DA Architects looked at that job description for the DSK Bank flagship branch in Sofia and decided it was criminally boring. So instead of a wall, they built a single continuous folded surface in punchy olive green that runs the length of the branch and somehow moonlights as a bench, a desk, an ATM housing, a screen bezel, and a light fixture, all without changing material once.

The trick is genuinely clever once you notice it. Every fold in that green ribbon is doing structural or functional work, not just decorative flexing, and the surrounding white louvers exist mostly to give the whole thing a clean edge to disappear into. Sit inside one of those angular little niches and you are basically perched inside a piece of the wall itself. It is origami logic applied to interior architecture, and it turns a routine bank visit into something closer to sitting inside a crystal.

Designer: DA Architects

The branch sits inside The Mall on Tsarigradsko Shose in Sofia, and it was built out between October 2016 and early 2017 as the pilot for a much bigger idea. DA Architects had won a competition to redesign DSK’s entire branch network, and this space was the proof of concept, the one location that had to sell an entire bank on going full geometry. At roughly 270 square metres, it is not a massive footprint, but the design punches well above it by refusing to waste a single wall surface on doing nothing.

Old-school bank branches keep everything locked in the center, tellers, machines, security, and make customers orbit around the edges like they cannot be trusted too close to the cash. DA Architects flipped that completely, pushing every functional unit, screen, and device to the periphery and leaving the entire core of the room open. It is the kind of move that only makes sense once you realize digital banking already killed the old security logic, most people just never bothered to redesign the room to match.

The material choices back up the concept instead of just decorating it. MDF louvers and mirror-polished stainless furniture handle the hard surfaces, while the green strip itself splits into solid panels where devices are built in and softer upholstered ones where people actually sit, a small distinction that keeps the whole thing from feeling like one giant showroom prop. Behind the louvers and green niches, the studio tucked away cabling and services, so the geometry reads as intentional rather than as a skin bolted over a normal room.

Tucked at the back is a private consultation room sealed off by a switchable glass wall, milky one second, fully transparent the next, once you run current through it. It is a small gesture buried at the end of a much louder design, but it says a lot about the studio’s instincts. They know exactly when to let geometry do the talking, and exactly when to go quiet.

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Your Dead Computer’s CD-ROM Drive Can Become a Real Audio Player Thanks To This Upcycled Project

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Every household has one drawer nobody wants to open. It’s full of cables that match nothing, a phone charger for a handset you haven’t owned in a quarter century, and somewhere near the bottom, a beige CD-ROM drive that hasn’t spun a disc in about the same amount of time. We keep this stuff out of guilt, not usefulness. Throwing away hardware that still technically works feels like a small betrayal, so it just sits there gathering dust and doing nothing for anyone.

Korean studio das_POD looked at that exact drawer and decided the guilt was solvable. Their answer is CD-ROM PLAYER 01, a build-it-yourself audio kit that turns your dead PC’s optical drive into an actual, functioning CD player again. You supply the drive, they supply a laser-cut aluminum shell, a control board, and instructions that skip the soldering iron entirely. The result looks intentional on the outside and slightly chaotic on the inside, which is probably the most honest metaphor for building your own tech that I’ve come across all year.

Designer: das_POD – Seong Heum Na

Nobody hands you a finished object here. The kit ships with laser-cut aluminum panels, an IDE controller board, a power PCB, a remote, and a bag of cables and hardware, but the actual CD-ROM drive isn’t included. You go find one yourself, from an old tower in the garage, a recycling center, or das_POD’s own stash of refurbished drives running $10 to $40. Assembly needs nothing more exotic than a multi-bit screwdriver, takes somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, and every completed unit ends up looking slightly different depending on which drive you fed it.

The design decisions live in what das_POD chose to control and what it deliberately left alone. The enclosure comes in three finishes: a shot-blasted semi-gloss anodized version at $220, and matte black or orange powder coat, both at $190. The front panel keeps it simple, a small dot-matrix display for track number and time, five buttons for eject, play, stop, and skip. None of that hides the drive itself, which juts out below the panel wearing whatever branding it came with. That contrast, polished metal above, scuffed beige plastic below, is doing all the storytelling here.

We wrote about Teenage Engineering’s computer-2 last year, a PC case built from one folded sheet of plastic that the company gave away for free, purely to prove a case didn’t need to cost anything. das_POD is running the exact same playbook in reverse. Same bring-your-own-hardware logic, same flat-pack, screw-light assembly, except here you’re paying $190 to $220 for the shell and providing the part that actually plays music. One company treats the enclosure as a marketing stunt. The other treats it as the entire product. Neither is wrong, but it’s a funny thing to watch happen twice in one year.

There’s a built-in expiration date worth naming honestly. CD-ROM PLAYER 01 only works with older IDE drives, not the SATA ones from the last fifteen years, because IDE drives carried their own analog audio output, and that’s what makes the whole circuit work without extra decoding hardware. Which means the supply of compatible drives only shrinks from here. Kind of poetic for a project built entirely around giving old junk a second act.

The post Your Dead Computer’s CD-ROM Drive Can Become a Real Audio Player Thanks To This Upcycled Project first appeared on Yanko Design.