Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

After 15 Years, Patek Philippe Returns With a Hand-Wound Chronograph That Stores Energy Like a Bow

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Perpetual calendar chronographs are Patek Philippe’s version of a solar eclipse. They do not happen often, and when they do, everyone stops what they’re doing to look up. The last one arrived back in 2011, which in watch years is basically a geological era.

The wait is over, and Patek did not play it safe on the comeback. The new Ref. 5978P-010 is the first watch to combine the brand’s hand-wound chronograph movement with an instantaneous perpetual calendar, a mechanism usually reserved for its most serious grand complications, where every calendar display jumps simultaneously in under 30 milliseconds instead of dragging itself forward at midnight. It debuted at Patek’s seventh Watch Art Grand Exhibition in Milan, limited to 120 platinum pieces at $337,585 each, with a navy dial, red chronograph hands, and calendar text printed in Italian for the occasion. Rare watch, rare city, apparently rare patience too.

Designer: Patek Philippe

The new caliber inside the 5978P-010 is called the CH 29-535 PS QI, a hand-wound movement built from 500 parts. Patek fused two things it already had, the CH 29-535 PS chronograph base from 2009 and the instantaneous calendar module developed for the R CHR 27 PS QI inside references like the 5207, 5308, and 5208. The result is a watch where the day, date, month, leap year, and day and night indicators do not creep forward through the night. Instead, they wait, then snap into their new position together in roughly 30 milliseconds. Even the chronograph’s 30-minute counter gets the same instantaneous treatment, jumping to its next position in one clean motion rather than crawling minute by minute.

Rather than letting a spring slowly push the calendar discs forward, the movement spends hours steadily storing tension, then releases it all at once like a drawn bow. A progressive perpetual calendar can leave a date disc caught mid-flip for a few minutes around midnight, which looks fine until you actually need to read it. This one simply will not do that. The caliber beats at 28,800 vibrations per hour on a Breguet balance spring, and because it is hand-wound, there is no rotor blocking the view, so the full chronograph architecture sits exposed through the sapphire caseback.

The 42mm (1.65 inch) platinum case measures 14.24mm (0.56 inch) thick, with a concave bezel and scalloped lugs lifted from the Calatrava-style cases of the 5208 and 5205, a departure from the ornate shapes Patek usually reserves for this complication. A single diamond sits at 6 o’clock, the hallmark Patek adds to every platinum watch in its catalog. The sunburst navy dial fades into a black-gradient rim around a textured center, with white gold faceted markers and dauphine hands finished in white luminescent coating. Red varnished hands carry the chronograph and small seconds, the only flash of color on the dial. Calendar apertures ring the top of the dial between 10 and 2 o’clock, with the moon phase sitting at 6 and the instantaneous 30-minute counter opposite it at 3.

Patek’s own marketing describes the 5978P-010 as a sporty look timepiece, which is a strange way to describe a platinum perpetual calendar chronograph until you look at it. The navy and red color scheme, paired with a composite strap finished in a fabric weave rather than alligator, borrows more from the Aquanaut than from anything in the formal grand complications catalog. It is not the first time Patek has let its sportier instincts bleed into serious territory. We covered the Cubitus back when it launched, a watch that took the Nautilus’s DNA and reshaped it into something squarer and more divisive. The 5978P-010 is a subtler version of that same impulse, applied to a complication that has spent 85 years dressed for black tie.

The calendar windows on the 5978P-010 are printed in Italian, so Saturday reads SAB instead of SAT, a detail that only makes sense once you know this watch was built for Milan. The strap repeats the gesture in miniature, with a stopping point stitched in the colors of the Italian flag just before the clasp. Patek built the watch for its seventh Watch Art Grand Exhibition, which opened October 2 inside Milan’s CityOval and runs free through October 18. It is one of seven limited editions made for this stop on the tour, a group that also includes enamel-dialed World Time minute repeaters and three carbon-patterned Calatravas in the same tricolore palette. Altogether those seven references add up to 685 pieces, a genuinely small run by Patek’s standards.

There is a catch for anyone outside Italy who wants this watch: all seven Milan editions, including the 5978P-010, sell exclusively through Patek retailers inside the country. Buyers elsewhere wait for one to surface at auction, where past exhibition pieces have historically carried a premium over retail. At $337,585, this was never going to be an impulse buy, and the exclusivity only adds to that. What sticks with me is not the price, it is the choice to dress the brand’s most formal complication pairing in a strap that would not look out of place on a dive watch. Eighty five years after the 1518 started this lineage in stern black and gold, Patek just sent its most serious watch out wearing red sneakers, and somehow it works.

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Hilariously Practical USB-C Cable Looks Exactly Like a Construction-Site Extension Cord

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There are exactly zero USB-C cables that anyone has ever called beautiful. They come in black, white, or occasionally braided grey, and they all look identical regardless of who made them or what they cost. Pick any of them out of a drawer at random and there is no way to identify the brand without hunting for a logo. They are just cable, featureless and anonymous, which is fine if everything else on your desk is equally low-key. But once you are running a 160W GaN charger that looks like it belongs in a server room, the cable situation starts to feel like it is letting the whole setup down.

Matty Benedetto has been inventing things nobody asked him to invent since 2019, and this one might be his most wearable idea yet. The Extension-C looks exactly like what the name implies: a proper orange extension cord, right down to the rectangular housing on each end, scaled to USB-C. Ten feet long, rated for 60W charging and data transfer, available in safety orange, outdoor green, and stealth black for $25. Yanko Design has been tracking Benedetto’s work since Unnecessary Inventions first went viral on Instagram, and this is probably the first of his creations where the joke and the product exist in exactly equal measure. It is funny. It also ships.

Designer: Matty Benedetto (Unnecessary Inventions / MATTY)

Each end of the cable is a chunky rectangular housing that calls back to the three-prong outlet plug of a classic American extension cord, scaled down to something that slots into a laptop port but keeps all the visual bulk of the original. The ribbed strain relief detailing running down each housing mirrors what you would expect on actual job-site gear, and it reads as a deliberate design choice rather than ornament. “MATTY” is embossed on each connector cap, and it works because it looks like a certification stamp on real equipment rather than a tech brand inserting itself into the aesthetic. The orange body is thick enough to sell the illusion convincingly. At 10 feet, the cord has actual room to coil the way a real extension cord does, and a 3-foot version of this bit would have landed very differently.

Benedetto has been running Unnecessary Inventions out of his Burlington, Vermont studio since 2019, and the archive now sits at 471 entries. Not every invention makes it to MATTY, the retail arm where purchasable products actually live. The ones that do have typically proven themselves with audiences first and shown enough genuine demand to justify manufacturing. The Extension-C making that cut is a meaningful signal about where Benedetto himself rates this one. We covered his work through several roundups in 2019 and 2020, and revisited it in 2022 when he built a clever fix for the Apple Magic Mouse charging problem. His track record for making absurd things that people genuinely want to own is the most consistent thing about him.

The 60W rating handles most phones, tablets, controllers, and lightweight laptops at full charging speed, covering the realistic daily load on any serious desk setup. Pair it with a 160W GaN charger and the combination has a visual logic that is genuinely satisfying: the charger looks like heavy-duty hardware, and the cable finally looks like it belongs beside it. Safety Orange is the obvious pick for anyone committing fully to the construction-site bit. Outdoor Green makes more sense for a balcony or garden setup where orange would look out of place. Stealth Black drops the gag and keeps the form, and I will predict right now it ends up being the best-seller of the three.

The Extension-C sits at $25, which puts it above the no-name cables that come in 5-packs on Amazon but well below the premium braided options from Anker or Belkin. For what you get on the design side, that is a pretty reasonable trade. There is a broader point buried here about what Benedetto has figured out that most accessory brands have not: cables are so visually forgettable that even a small act of design intention reads as remarkable. The Extension-C is his 471st Unnecessary Inventions entry, and it might be the one where unnecessary and useful finally land in the same sentence without any friction between them. Grab one at thatwasmadebymatty.com, preferably in orange, because going halfway on a bit this committed would be a waste.

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A 1908 New York building’s discarded fragments got turned into furniture instead of being demolished

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A renovation across the street from Rafael Prieto’s studio offered an unusually good view of his next project. As decorative pieces came off the facade of a Tribeca building, he arranged to save sixteen that were headed for disposal. Most of us would have watched the scaffolding go up and returned to our emails. Prieto, a Mexico-born designer and creative director based in Tribeca, had other ideas. The result is a furniture exhibition that keeps the building’s ornament alive in some very unexpected forms.

Prieto spent time with the fragments before turning them into the starting point for tables, chairs, and sculptural objects. Weathered ornament sits against painted birch, sometimes tucked inside a crisp new frame. The resulting furniture keeps its New York address close, even when its shape heads somewhere unexpected. Some pieces carry the actual stone; others borrow only its curves, grooves, and proportions. It is a show that rewards looking twice.

Designer: Rafael Prieto

The building across the street is 366 Broadway, now known as Collect Pond House, a twelve-story Beaux-Arts structure designed by Frederick C. Browne in 1908. It was once home to the Royal Typewriter Company, then became a residential co-op in 1979. The facade is densely ornamented: copper cornices, Greek key detailing, marble columns, and keystones carved into bearded faces that have been watching Tribeca change for over a century. A recent multi-year restoration replaced and conserved 65 terra cotta units. A handful of the pieces removed during that process did not make it back onto the building.

Before cutting anything, Prieto lived with the fragments in his studio for roughly a year and a half. He photographed and scanned each contour and ornament, then layered those images to pull out shapes and combinations that could inform new work. That process produced a design vocabulary rather than any direct copy of the originals. The stepped, ribbed profiles that climb the legs of the red lacquered chair came directly from this translation, somewhere between column fluting and abstracted skyline. It is a method closer to archaeology than furniture-making.

One of the standout pieces has a large carved stone cornice block sitting below a flat black painted tabletop, doing actual structural work. The stone is pale, dense, and loaded with repeating scroll forms, carrying roughly a century of New York weather on its surface. Another piece cages a smaller fragment between vertical black bars inside a cube-shaped form, the stone visible through the gaps like something on display. The medium listing for several works at the gallery confirms “Architectural Fragment” as a named material alongside painted birch. Not every piece carries original stone; some borrow only its shapes.

The all-red lacquered chair is the most confident piece in the show, its legs built from stacked, stepped planes that scanning and layering pulled from 366 Broadway’s fluted piers and molded profiles. Its natural birch counterpart deploys the same vocabulary in warm wood, swapping lacquer for grain and adding red geometric arm brackets at the joints. A console table makes the argument most literally: one end sits on a fabricated red plinth, the other rests on an actual salvaged Ionic stone volute, intact and weather-stained. The two supports are not supposed to match. The gallery describes this contrast as the central thread: the hard and the soft, the historic and the contemporary, running through every piece.

Several of the original keystones sit on the gallery floor unaltered, including one carved bearded face in a plumed helmet still stained with moss and a century of city air. Prieto’s analog photography wraps the walls in large-scale architectural murals, produced in collaboration with Wallpaper Projects. The room ends up feeling closer to a photographed ruin than a white-cube gallery, which is entirely the point. He told Family Style that “New York is its architecture,” and that most people talk about the skyline but “don’t look up.” The show does the looking for you.

‘The Future of the Past’ is Prieto’s second solo show with Emma Scully Gallery and runs through December 12 at the Upper East Side location, open Wednesday through Saturday. Pricing and availability are through the gallery directly. The question the collection keeps circling is whether furniture shaped by a building’s discarded ornament carries any of that building’s memory with it. Prieto does not seem interested in settling that question cleanly. The bearded face on the gallery floor looks like he has made his peace with the whole situation.

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AirTag-sized EDC lighter packs a Zippo-style flame into a 1.4-inch tall Titanium body

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An AirTag is 32mm in diameter, and the whole appeal is forgetting you put it there. MR.GADGET apparently thought this was the right template for a lighter. The Pyra measures 36mm (1.42 inches) tall and 15mm (0.59 inches) across, which means it is, quite genuinely, just four millimeters taller than an Apple AirTag. A complete mechanical lighter in a form factor you’d otherwise associate with tracking your lost dog. MR.GADGET is a Boston-based product design studio, and Pyra represents exactly the kind of object they seem to enjoy building: small, precise, and maybe slightly unnecessary in the best possible way.

Behind the compact titanium body is a fully mechanical ignition structure. No electronic ignition. No battery. No charging port. A CNC-machined hammered texture, inspired by meteorite surfaces, gives the titanium body a distinctive tactile character. Four symmetrical grooves provide natural grip, while a contrasting copper/brass ring adds a warm metallic accent. At just 0.63 ounces (17.8 grams), Pyra is small enough to carry almost anywhere without becoming another bulky object in your pocket. That’s lighter than most coins or USB drives rattling at the bottom of your bag.

Designer: MR.GADGET

Click Here to Buy Now: $49 $65 (25% off) Hurry! Only 55 of 100 left.

The ignition system inside that 36mm shell contains 13 discrete components, each with a specific job. Rotating the upper shell open reveals the mechanism, then you spin the flint wheel, metal meets flint, a spark appears, and the flame follows. Every component is precision CNC machined to work within the compact body, from the internal mechanism to the threaded connection. The precision threads give every rotation a distinct mechanical feel, ending with a precise mechanical lock. The component list reads like a miniaturized Zippo: spring, flint wheel, flint, fuel chamber, and O-ring, all organized so that every millimeter has a job.

Pyra is machined from Grade 5 Titanium, or Ti-6Al-4V if you prefer to sound intimidating at dinner parties, an alloy roughly 2 to 2.5 times stronger than commercially pure titanium and the same material used in aerospace components, carabiners, and precision knife hardware that gets used hard. MR.GADGET chose it for the combination of low weight, high strength, durability, and premium tactile feel. The compact body serves as the structural backbone that keeps the whole object compact, rigid, and carry-ready. That CNC-machined hammered texture does double duty: it gives the titanium visual drama and provides genuine grip. The four symmetrical grooves give your fingers something to find naturally, and the copper/brass accent ring breaks the all-titanium aesthetic with a warm, almost handcrafted quality that photographs beautifully.

Inside Pyra is a dedicated fuel chamber, and when closed, the precision threads and O-ring sealing structure reduce the entry of air, moisture, and dust. That sealing is a meaningful detail: the classic Zippo has no equivalent and is notorious for losing fuel to evaporation in storage. The flame stays lit when the wind picks up and keeps burning through the rain. Pyra has been tested across extreme temperatures from -20°C to 50°C, covering nearly every scenario outside of volcano tourism. The fuel load delivers approximately six minutes of continuous burn time, ample for lighting candles, starting camp stoves, and the occasional dramatic effect.

Pyra carries two different kinds of light: a real flame created mechanically when you need it, and tritium, a self-luminous element integrated into the body to provide a small glow without batteries or charging. Two 1.5 × 6mm tritium slots are built directly into the shell, and this is honestly one of my favorite details on the whole design. In daylight, the vials become part of the design. In darkness, they become a subtle point of light, turning Pyra into something you can locate by feel or by glow at 2am. The vials come in a variety of colors and are available as an add-on, and they genuinely elevate the whole object into small-artifact territory.

Pyra’s compact cylindrical form fits naturally into an EDC setup, riding in your pocket at only 36mm, and the attachment hole gives the option of keyring or lanyard. A necklace chain add-on is also available, turning Pyra into pendant carry if that’s your angle. The flat bottom gives Pyra another small but intentional feature: it stands. That’s one of those quietly considered design decisions that makes an object feel genuinely thought through. The mechanical structure is designed with maintenance in mind, the flint is replaceable, and the whole approach rejects the idea that a lighter should become disposable just because one small component wears out.

Pyra is available at a discounted $45 per unit with free worldwide shipping, and the add-on catalog is surprisingly comprehensive for a lighter. A black anodized finish adds $15, personalized engraving is $12, a titanium quick-release keychain is $15, and a spare flint kit of 30 runs just $5. Tritium vials are $30 for a pair, with glass luminous vials at $6 for those who want the ambient glow without the premium. Multi-unit bundles bring the per-unit cost down considerably, with a two-pack starting at $85 and a four-pack at $159.

Click Here to Buy Now: $49 $65 (25% off) Hurry! Only 55 of 100 left.

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You can buy a Server Rack plush toy that actually emits Data Center noise when you hug it

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It’s 2026, and there’s a fair chance any kid born in the next 10 years will see more server racks than they will actual bears. An incredibly twisted reality, but a reality nonetheless… so much so that Rajeev Basu decided to poke fun at this predicament in a way that only artists with a dark sense of humor know how. Meet Bezzy, a stuffed plushie that’s actually a server rack, not a teddy bear. Squeeze it and it emits an incredibly annoying hum, captured from actual data centers around USA.

Bezzy would be cute if it weren’t so pathetic. The toy’s thinly veiled satire on the fact that our AI CEO oligarchs want us to think of their world-ending water-sucking creations as anthropomorphic harmless beings. Meta unveiled Muse, a seemingly cute avatar that hides the fact that it’s selling your data to governments and marketers. OpenAI unveiled Dots, an adorable set of AI assistants that definitely don’t want you to think about the fact that the company’s AI bots have been routinely hacking into organizations, governments, etc. To that extent, Bezzy might be too effective in making AI seem cute. That’s until you hug the thing.

Designers: Big Data & Basura

Take a close look at Bezzy and you start appreciating how much thought went into making him look so deliberately unstudied. The gray sherpa fleece, the floppy limbs, the googly eyes, and that little smile are all pulled straight from the visual grammar of the charity adoption plushie, specifically the kind WWF used to send you after you donated to save a panda. His torso, though, is a different story: a black textured panel with rows of blue LED dots running down it, server-rack iconography dressed up in fur. All 20 were handmade in the US, and the design intentionally avoids looking polished or new, going instead for that lived-in quality of a toy you might find at the bottom of a thrift store bin. The yellow tag dangling from his chest, screaming “HUG ME FOR EAR PIERCING FOREVER HUM,” is doing most of the heavy lifting.

The toy is the physical centerpiece of a bigger satirical project called Adopt A Data Center, which Basura designed to look exactly like a charity adoption portal. Hit “adopt now” and instead of a certificate, you get a page of citations and journalism covering data center noise complaints, water consumption, land use, and the tax incentives that make communities such convenient targets for developers. Stickers in the campaign read “Open your heart. And your power grid.” The tagline for the whole thing is “All they ask for is everything,” which is honestly one of the better lines written about the AI era.

The duo behind the project is a pretty inspired pairing for something this arch. Rajeev Basu runs Basura, a New York studio with a resume that includes stints at Wieden+Kennedy, Spotify, and Maximum Effort, where he wrote for Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. His previous projects have the same DNA as Bezzy: the Hinge Phonebook was a phone-shaped book filled with ideas for getting off your phone that sold out in 24 hours, and the Yerba Madre Dirt Shoes literally crumbled apart mid-walk to spread wildflower seeds. His collaborator is Alan Wilkis, who makes music as Big Data, a project he started in 2012 explicitly to comment on how the internet was mining and monetizing personal data. Bezzy launches alongside Big Data 4.0, Wilkis’s first album in seven years, and a new single called “Rabbit Hole,” which honestly tracks.

The hum inside Bezzy wasn’t recorded in a studio. It was captured by a woman living next to a data center in Virginia and handed over during Basura’s research process, part of six months of conversations with people across the US who live beside these facilities. Northern Virginia alone hosts over 500 data centers handling as much as 70% of the world’s internet traffic, and residents there have been filing noise and health complaints for years with very little relief. A 2026 UN University report found that data centers could consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity annually by 2030, while AI-related water use could equal the domestic needs of 1.3 billion people. Bezzy, all 20 of them, at $99 each, won’t fix any of that. But he’s a pretty hard thing to ignore while he’s screaming.

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An S-Pen for the iPhone Duo? Yes please!

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I’ll give Apple its props by saying that it’s genuinely remarkable they built Apple Pencil compatibility into the iPhone Duo. Yes, it’s a welcome move because it’s a step above what Samsung did by nuking S-Pen support for their Galaxy Z Fold8 series, but it’s also sort of stupid that they didn’t build the compatibility in right away. The iPhone Duo is announced to be compatible with the Pencil on a future date. It’s something Apple announced you’ll get, but in the words of MKBHD, don’t ever buy a product on a promise of future upgrades.

I appreciate Apple trying though, but there’s one problem Apple never accounted for – the Apple Pencil is longer than the iPhone Duo. Unlike the S-Pen, which is mobile-sized, the Apple Pencil measures 6.43″ long. That’s almost 2 inches taller than the iPhone Duo which sits at 4.64″ in height. There’s no realistic universe in which anybody is carrying an Apple Pencil along with the iPhone Duo – they might be compatible but they’re not built to be a cohesive design solution… so Eslam Mohammed invented one. Meet the Pencil Duo – a stylus specially designed to be the iPhone Duo’s loyal sidekick.

Designer: Eslam Mohammed

The regular Apple Pencil’s design was informed by the device it was supposed to pair with. A simple all-white design, a circular grip, and one single chamfered edge to let the Pencil snap to the edge of the iPad to charge. The Pencil was also sized to just about fit the iPad mini, showing how much Apple had thought about the integration between the two products. So when Mohammed built the Duo, he basically approached it from the ground-up. No chamfer, no awkwardly long stylus.

The Pencil Duo is a perfectly cylindrical stylus, albeit with a silver detail running along its edge. Inspired by the iPhone Duo’s silver hinge which punctuates its design, the Pencil Duo sports that running metallic detail too, paired with a button that works just the way the button on the S-Pen does with Samsung’s phones. Mohammed doesn’t explicitly detail what the button does, but one can assume it helps with highlighting text, opening shortcuts, working as a shutter button, etc.

No snapping to the iPhone’s edge means there’s no chamfer. This gives the Pencil Duo a design that feels a lot cleaner in my opinion. The reason why snapping wouldn’t work is because it would prevent you from being able to open your phone. Instead, the Pencil Duo sits at the back of the phone, thanks to a special case that lets you dock the pencil.

The pencil neatly tucks into the back, occupying the empty space left behind by the camera bump, which doesn’t extend all the way to the end (the way the Pixel Fold did in the past). It’s a neat arrangement, and I’m sure Molly Anderson would approve. Who’s Molly Anderson, you ask? Well just the VP of Industrial Design, but Apple’s never really had a design lead in the limelight after Jony I’ve left.

The Pencil Duo measures roughly 4.3 inches in length, and a tad bit narrower than its predecessor. Sort of just like how the iPhone Duo is so much slimmer than its other counterparts. There’s no mention of how this pencil would charge, although I’m sure wireless charging is on the table. You’d probably need a special cradle to charge the device, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to invent one.

Mohammed has, however, detailed a few other things, like the Pencil Duo having haptic feedback, the Hover Preview feature, and obviously angle and pressure sensitivity. The only real problem here is that this entire stylus is conceptual… but I wouldn’t put it past third party designers from making iPhone Duo styluses that work using capacitive touch and have Bluetooth pairing so that the button on the stylus actually packs a few features. Maybe long-press for Apple Intelligence too!

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This $249 Player Brings Back the iPod Wheel, and With It, the Lost Art of Owning Your Music

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Tangerine Sudo music player shown from front and back, with playlists menu on screen and tactile wheel below

Vinyl came back. Film cameras came back. Flip phones came back, and somehow so did wired earbuds, which I personally never stopped defending. The pattern underneath all of it is the same: we are worn out by devices that do everything, and we are rediscovering objects that do one thing properly and then leave us alone. Somewhere in there we also stopped feeling anything for a rented file sitting on a server in Virginia, billing us monthly for the privilege of maybe still having it next year. New Matter’s Instagram account follows exactly three others, two of which are Teenage Engineering and MSCHF, so you already know which shelf the company wants to stand on.

Sudo plays your music and does nothing else, which in practice means it plays your music without also delivering a Slack ping, an Instagram DM, a text from your landlord, and a reminder that standup started four minutes ago. The whole pitch is a return to a library you actually hold onto instead of one you rent by the month. A tactile wheel handles navigation under a small touchscreen, there is a 3.5mm jack for people who still care, and the thing charges over USB-C like it was born in this decade instead of just dressed for the last one.

Designer: New Matter

Silver Sudo music player held in one hand, thumb resting on the tactile wheel

I was today years old when I realized how much of my brain was still fluent in click wheel, which is the thing Sudo is actually banking on. Put that ring back under my thumb and twenty years of muscle memory wakes up instantly, skip and back and play exactly where they always lived, no glancing down required. That was always the trick Apple’s industrial design team pulled off and nobody since has bothered to chase, because a touchscreen is cheaper to spec and nobody in a boardroom can put a line item on “it feels right.” Stacking an actual touchscreen above the wheel here is a slightly confused hedge, the one place Sudo seems unsure which decade it belongs to, but it is still the first device in ten years willing to bet that a dial beats a tap.

Flip it over and the hardware starts talking like it means it. Visible hex screws at each corner is a tell I always trust, because a company hiding its screws is usually hiding how little you are meant to open the thing, and a company showing them off is telling you this was built to be serviced, not sealed. The logo on the back is a tidy little glyph, confident enough to sit off center and small. Four colors are on the table, although the Tangerine variant is clearly their highlight product. Personally, it gives me Rabbit R1 and iPhone 17 Pro, so maybe it’s time we move on from that hue.

Three silver Sudo players side by side showing the menu, a song list, and the now-playing screen

The software here is simple, in all the right ways. A flat list, playlists, artists, albums, songs, nothing algorithmic elbowing in to suggest what you should be listening to instead. Tagging a Radiohead track as lossless in the corner of the now-playing screen is a small, specific flex, aimed at exactly the audience that still argues about bit depth in forum threads nobody else reads. Letting the album art bleed and smear behind the menu is the one flourish the original iPod never attempted, because in 2004 nobody needed their MP3 player to have a mood. Whether that mood survives contact with a real shipping product is the actual question, not whether the renders look good, because renders always look good.

Nothing here guarantees Sudo ships the way its marketing promises, and renders have broken plenty of hearts before mine. But the instinct underneath it is correct regardless of how the hardware turns out. We spent a decade building devices engineered to never let us finish a thought uninterrupted, and somebody finally looked at that and decided the fix was a machine that simply cannot interrupt us. Whether or not Sudo is the one that pulls it off, it is asking the right question at exactly the right moment, and that alone is worth more attention than another iPod clone deserves on paper.

Four Sudo music players in a row showing Silver, Basalt, Forest, and Tangerine colorways from the back

The post This $249 Player Brings Back the iPod Wheel, and With It, the Lost Art of Owning Your Music first appeared on Yanko Design.

The VIVIFoCAL S1 Glasses Focus Themselves So Your Eyes Don’t Have To

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Your phone focuses by firing an invisible laser pulse at whatever you’re aiming it at, timing the bounce, and telling a tiny motor to move some glass. The whole loop finishes in a few hundredths of a second and nobody has thought about it since roughly 2017. VIVIFoCAL has taken that identical hardware recipe, a time of flight sensor, a microcontroller and an actuator, and bolted it onto a pair of glasses pointed at the world instead of at your brunch. The S1 measures how far away the thing you’re looking at is, works out the optical power your eyes need, and mechanically shifts the lenses into position in under 0.1 seconds. It’s autofocus, except the sensor is on your face.

Dr. Zhao, who earned his doctorate at a world-leading university and previously ran an optical R&D laboratory at a major optics company, built VIVIFoCAL around a piece of physics that has not yet been widely adopted by the general public. The S1 uses Alvarez lenses, two complementary freeform elements that change optical power when one slides sideways across the other. Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez patented the principle, and it was then stranded for decades because somebody had to do the sliding. A motor does it now. The result covers 8 inches to infinity in a 40 gram frame, and it launches with VIP pricing from $289.

Designer: VIVIFoCAL

Click here to Reserve Now: $10 (VIP pricing from $289).

A laser, a motor, and the 1967 patent working in the background

Three sensors do the work rather than one. A time of flight laser reads distance, a G-sensor tracks head posture, and an infrared wear detection sensor tells the glasses whether they’re on a face at all, which is how the battery survives being pushed up onto your head mid-conversation. The microcontroller sits between them, converting a distance reading into a lens position and commanding the motor in a single pass. The lenses simply change optical power to match whatever distance you’re looking at, the same job your eyes handle on their own before presbyopia kicks in. VIVIFoCAL calls that loop Instant Focus, and the same time of flight hardware we’ve watched migrate into phones, robot vacuums and door locks is what makes it affordable in eyewear.

Fitting a moving lens assembly, a rangefinder, a motion sensor, a microcontroller, a motor and a battery into something that still reads as eyewear is the harder half of this product. VIVIFoCAL has pushed the electronics into the brow bar and the temple arms, keeping the optical stack shallow enough that the frame sits on a face instead of announcing itself as hardware. The 160.5 x 160 x 43.5mm envelope is ordinary spectacle territory, which is the entire argument. Every packaging decision is downstream of one goal, helping the wearer see clearly across distances without thinking about the machine doing it.

Progressive lenses ask you to tilt your chin… this doesn’t

Presbyopia is projected to affect 2.1 billion people by 2030, and the standard answer for most of them is a progressive lens with three prescriptions blended into one lens, near at the bottom, distance at the top, intermediate smeared between. Finding the right part of the glass means tilting your chin, and the tradeoff is the narrow tunnel vision that progressive wearers describe, with softness creeping in toward the edges. VIVIFoCAL calls its answer Full-Lens Clarity, where the Alvarez lenses deliver one consistent optical power across the whole lens at every setting instead of splitting it into zones. There is nothing to hunt for and less peripheral distortion to work around. I’ve watched that chin-tilt dance play out for years, so the appeal is obvious.

Progressive glasses are generally built around everyday reading tasks, and for closer or more detailed work plenty of wearers still reach for a second pair or a magnifier. S1’s focusing range starts at 8 inches, which brings fine detail inside the same lens handling everything else. VIVIFoCAL demoed the glasses at WonderFest 2026 against a 1/35 scale miniature, the sort of precision hobby work that has kept optical visors and loupes in business for a century, and the testers who work with their hands responded the way you’d expect. One early tester shared that using S1 in a data center was a productivity gain and a huge plus, because he could walk past equipment and read tiny serial numbers without interrupting his workflow to take out extra readers, switch to other glasses, or use additional visual aids. He no longer carries multiple pairs when he leaves the house.

Forty grams, three nose pad sizes, and all-day power

VIVIFoCAL designed around the fact that head sizes and nose bridge heights vary far more than eyewear brands usually admit, which is why S1 ships with flexible spring hinges and three sizes of interchangeable nose pads to adapt across face shapes. The frame lands at 40 grams bare and 50 with the magnetic front clip, built on TR90 temples, the same material that has quietly taken over lightweight frames and wearable arms across the industry. Those numbers matter because forgetting you’re wearing them is the whole point of automating focus in the first place. A 250mAh battery holds up through 8 hours of constant refocusing and refills over USB-C in about an hour, with normal use stretching to a full day. Glasses that can run flat is still a new idea to make peace with.

A separate pair of lenses attaches behind the Alvarez elements, so one pair carries your prescription to see near and far. Magnetic polarized sunglass lenses snap onto the front for outdoor use with adaptive focus still running underneath. The polycarbonate lenses carry anti-reflective and anti-smudge coatings, transmit more than 90 percent of light, and sit inside a field of view above 110 degrees. The app adds a ±0.5D fine-tuning range on top of the automatic correction, which is how the glasses absorb the slow drift of a presbyopic prescription instead of being replaced. Presbyopia correction tops out at 3.5D, so the deepest cases fall outside what S1 can currently handle.

The bet VIVIFoCAL is making on moving glass

The company isn’t chasing this idea alone. Other teams are working on adaptive focus through liquid crystal lenses or eye tracking instead of a mechanical shift, and the category is young enough that the approaches are still diverging. VIVIFoCAL is betting on the refractive route, real glass moving to change optical power rather than a pixelated layer simulating it, and that bet buys the two things that matter most in eyewear you keep on your face all day. S1 holds above 90 percent light transmittance and a field of view past 110 degrees, which is why the image through it behaves like a lens instead of a screen.

Alvarez lenses have been a lab curiosity since 1967 for one reason, which is that the sliding had to be automated by something small enough to live inside a temple arm. Sensors, motors and microcontrollers have finally shrunk far enough to make that trivial, which makes S1 a triumph of packaging, and packaging is where most wearables actually get decided. Autofocus earned its invisibility in cameras by working so fast nobody noticed it, and 0.1 seconds across 8 inches to infinity puts the same disappearing act in front of your eyes. S1 ships with a 1-year warranty, and a refundable $10 deposit locks in VIP pricing at $289 ahead of the official launch, with either the prescription lens service or the sunglass lens bundle included depending on which one you need. Sixty years is a long time for a good idea to wait for its motor.

Click here to Reserve Now: $10 (VIP pricing from $289).

The post The VIVIFoCAL S1 Glasses Focus Themselves So Your Eyes Don’t Have To first appeared on Yanko Design.

Designers Already Prototype Hardware – Now They’re Prototyping Demand Too

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Every product that finds its way onto these pages eventually meets the same crossroads: the moment a designer takes the thing public. For physical product creators chasing something original enough that established retailers won’t touch it, Kickstarter remains the most democratic proving ground available. The platform has hosted more than 654,000 campaigns since 2009, drawing over $8.5 billion in pledges from more than 23 million backers, with 2025 marking its strongest year on record. That momentum creates a seductive and specific trap: creators see the platform’s gravity and assume a beautiful product with a compelling story will naturally convert into backers. A crowdfunding agency called TCF (The Crowdfunding Formula), which holds Kickstarter Premier Partner status and has facilitated more than $520M raised across campaigns, has spent years watching that assumption fail in real time, and what they built to counter it is one of the more disciplined pre-launch processes in the business.

TCF’s methodology, recently published in full detail, centers on a single observation that most campaigns never act on: interest and purchase intent are not the same signal. Emails, follows, and comments cost nothing to give, which is why none of them predict whether a product sells. Validation asks for money, not opinions, and a small deposit on a product that does not exist yet is the closest available proxy for a real backer, because the act of paying is what carries the information, not the amount. The resulting data resolves three decisions most creators make by guesswork: the price, the positioning, and the audience, all settled before a campaign page exists, before ad spend, and before the outcome is locked in, because those are the three things most likely to break a launch and the three most often decided by assumption. It is a design methodology applied to the market, and it deserves the same respect that designers already extend to physical prototyping.

Circular Ring 2

How a $2 Deposit Separates the Buyers from the Browsers

The process runs on Prelaunch.com. A product page goes live showing the product, the visuals, what it does, how it works, and the characteristics that make it different, with no price. Visitors who want to know more leave their email address, which is the interest signal and only that. A second page then opens, presenting the price alongside an offer: put down a deposit today and receive a discount when it launches. Someone who pays has moved from liking the product to paying for a product with no campaign page, no ship date, and no reviews. Someone who does not pay is interested but not convinced, and that is a result too.

The pushback the deposit mechanism reliably attracts is predictable: does $2 actually prove anything about future purchase behavior? The deposit is the part people push back on, but the $2 is not the point. The act is the point. Getting up, finding a card, and typing the numbers in for something with no campaign page, no ship date, and no reviews is a different order of behavior from tapping a heart, and the people who do it are the closest thing to your future backers that exists before you have any. The Circular Ring 2, a smart health ring, funded in just four minutes and crossed $2.5 million in pledges in under 40 days. Products that open with that kind of velocity tend to do so because the audience already knows it wants the thing, and that certainty is built long before a campaign goes live.

Image Credits: TCF

The Rejection Data Is the Brief

The survey is where validation stops being a scoreboard and starts being useful. From the people who reserved, you learn what actually moved them: whether it was the color, the form, a specific function, the price, or the promise, and which features are carrying the product versus which ones you have been overselling. From the people who left an email and then did not pay, you learn something you cannot get anywhere else: exactly where you lost them, and what would change their mind. The color they wanted was not there. The shape was wrong. It looked too heavy. The price was too high. These are the people who were close enough to care and honest enough to walk away, and their answers are a list of things you can fix before the fix costs anything.

This is co-creation in the most literal sense: meeting your potential buyers before you launch, and letting them tell you what to build. A creator who learns that 60% of their non-converting subscribers balked at weight has a design brief, not a marketing problem. A creator who discovers that two colorways were widely expected but absent has a specification list, not a gap in their ad copy. The survey turns a theoretical audience into an actively contributing one, delivering feedback while the product can still absorb it. Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns tend to share that structure: they do not open to strangers, they open to people who were already consulted.

BB-777 Boombox

Why Validation Doesn’t Always Mean Lowering Your Price

Creators tend to assume validation exists to talk them down. It does not. One agency ran validation on a pet product priced at $30 a unit, and the data showed the right price was $40. The creator had been leaving money on the table, and no amount of instinct would have told them that, because instinct in that situation almost always argues for the safer, lower number. No stated-preference survey, no focus group, and no amount of social engagement would have surfaced it, because stated preference and paid behavior are different instruments measuring entirely different things. Validation is where you settle positioning and audience rather than guessing at them, running price variations, testing different messaging, and finding which audience responds before you have committed to a single frame of campaign video. The point is to find the price, the position, and the audience that let the product reach its full potential, and then launch into that.

The validated price sets reward tiers, and the early discount tested during validation is a trigger that has already been watched working, rather than one you hope will. The reserver surveys told you which characteristics did the persuading, which decides your headline, your hero shot, and the order of your video. You are not inventing arguments for the product; you are repeating the ones your buyers already made. Running price variations and messaging tests before a single production decision is committed changes the campaign from a bet into a brief. The learning does not expire when the campaign closes. A validated price, position, and audience are the same three things an e-commerce store runs on, which is what lets a product keep scaling after the campaign instead of peaking with it.

Kode Dot

The Designer’s Instinct Problem and Why Demand Needs Its Own Prototype

The design process and the validation process ask for decisions in different orders, and that difference matters more than it first appears. A designer who arrives at a product through material, form, and function is not naturally thinking about reservation rates. Validation is the design loop pointed at the three things a physical prototype cannot test: what people will pay, how the product should be framed, and who it is really for. Designers already accept this discipline everywhere else; nobody tools up an injection mold without a prototype. A “do not launch” result from this process is a success, saving a creator a year, a production run, and the damage of a public failure. A careful launch protects more than the person running it; it protects the shared resource of backer trust, which every quiet project erodes.

The question worth answering before a launch is not how big a campaign you can build. It is what you can prove before you build it. Whether that discipline becomes standard practice across the crowdfunding ecosystem or remains the habit of the more methodical subset of creators, the underlying argument is one any designer can recognize. You do not ship a mechanism you have not tested. Treating the market as the final untested component, rather than an assumption baked into launch day, is the shift the methodology is asking for. Across hundreds of millions of dollars raised in crowdfunding projects, the cases where testing these three things costs more than getting them wrong are functionally nonexistent.

The post Designers Already Prototype Hardware – Now They’re Prototyping Demand Too first appeared on Yanko Design.

Would you pay $14,000 for an iPhone Duo without any cameras?

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Imagine sitting at a table with friends and whipping your phone out. Your friends see it’s a foldable… then as you unfold it, the animation looks suspiciously like the iPhone Duo. Your friends are impressed, they designate you as the group photo taker… and you tell them regrettably that your iPhone Duo has no cameras. Then you add… not only does it not sport any cameras, it also costs fourteen grand.

To be honest, that scenario is entirely imaginary. Mainly for a bunch of key reasons. Caviar built this version of the iPhone Duo for privacy, championing what they call “Privacy, Minimalism, and a Refined Masculine Style.” Someone who sees truth in that ethos isn’t designated photographer material. And if they were, shelling 14k on a phone means you probably have a few extra grand to hire a photographer wherever you go. The only reason someone buys this hare-brained version of the iPhone Duo is because they can. Plain and simple.

Designer: Caviar Global

Removing the camera stack from the back of the iPhone Duo does something unexpected: the phone becomes genuinely beautiful. That rear panel, normally dominated by the triple-lens module, turns into a single flat sheet of satin-finished black titanium. No bumps, no rings, no glass circles competing for visual real estate, just one uninterrupted surface that shifts character depending on the light hitting it. Caviar calls the inspiration “supersonic aviation aesthetics,” which sounds like marketing speak until you actually look at the product photos. A blacked-out Apple logo sits flush in the titanium, the Caviar crown marks the opposite panel in a swept fabric-like texture, and the whole thing looks less like a phone and more like a prop from a very expensive spy film.

Apple’s decision to use Touch ID for the iPhone Duo, abandoning Face ID, turns out to be what makes Caviar’s camera-free execution actually hold up. A Face ID phone needs its front camera array to function as a biometric sensor, so pulling that out would mean a very pretty device that cannot unlock. Touch ID lives in the frame rather than behind the screen, so Caviar could strip the entire camera stack, front hole-punch and rear module both, without breaking anything fundamental. Based on product images, the inner display on the Ultimate appears completely clean, no hole-punch interrupting the screen, which makes the inside as seamless as the outside. Two separate design decisions from two separate companies ended up fitting together better than either could have planned.

Caviar made 19 of these total. Each unit ships in a custom lockable black luxury box, presented the way a jeweler presents a watch rather than the way Apple ships a phone. A smaller gold-colored wooden case inside holds what appears to be a gold-plated commemorative coin, the kind of object that exists purely to make the unboxing feel like a ceremony. The side of the phone is engraved with a serial number too, for exclusivity. Caviar knows exactly who they are selling to, and made sure the packaging matches the energy.

Caviar has been doing this for years, taking flagship Apple hardware somewhere Apple would never go, for clients who appreciate the gesture. The formula is consistent: start with the most premium Apple product on the market, make it rarer, make it more dramatic, and let the price be the final statement. We have covered their gold-plated and titanium iPhone builds here before, and none of them committed this hard to stripping features as a form of self-expression. At $13,990 for 19 units (mind you, that’s just the 512GB variant), the Ultimate is the purest version of the Caviar argument: a phone that costs seven times its base price because it does less, and somehow makes that sound like the point.

The post Would you pay $14,000 for an iPhone Duo without any cameras? first appeared on Yanko Design.