Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

This $120 Lumibricks Manga Shop Glows Like Cyberpunk Shibuya at Midnight

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Anyone who has wandered Tokyo’s Nakano Broadway knows the joy of a cramped shop stacked floor to ceiling with secondhand manga. Those shops smell like old paper and feel like treasure hunts, and Lumibricks has imagined what one might look like in a neon cyberpunk future. The Manga Shop is a 1,699-piece building block set where a wooden Japanese bookstore gets retrofitted with neon signs, exposed cables, and a robot raccoon on the roof. The tiled roof and lattice windows stay proudly old school while the billboard out front glows like a Shibuya crossing at midnight. It’s a street corner caught somewhere between the Showa era and a sci-fi anime.

In the set’s backstory, paper manga is nearly extinct, and a collector named Eiji Fushimi scans rare volumes with a vintage eye implant to keep the stories alive. He shares the shop with Akira Tachibana, a genius hacker, and Yuzu Kurose, an office worker who spends every free minute buried in manga. Two interior sections slide out, revealing a browsing aisle stocked with printed manga covers and a VIP reading room upstairs. The set also connects to Lumibricks’ existing Izakaya set, letting the two buildings share one power supply and form a glowing little street. At $119.99, it’s a pretty convincing excuse to start building your own Neoncity block by block.

Designer: Lumibricks

A translucent red torii gate frames the entrance, and above it hangs a NEUVA billboard whose printed anime artwork glows blue and magenta. A tall orange MANGA sign climbs the corner, while a pink ドキドキ neon (the Japanese sound effect for a racing heartbeat) sits over the lower eave. Up top, red and blue cables run from a dish on the tiled roof into the billboard, basically the set’s whole theme summed up in two tubes. Then there’s the raccoon, a heart-eyed robot sprawled across the roof with a fan bolted to its arm and a manga page in its paw. Street level gets a gashapon machine, an arcade cabinet, a red lantern, and a black cat guarding its food bowl.

Cyberpunk has always borrowed from Japan, going back to Ridley Scott filling Blade Runner’s Los Angeles with Japanese billboards and Katsuhiro Otomo drawing Neo-Tokyo in Akira. The Manga Shop flips that around by starting with a traditional Japanese shopfront and letting the future creep in through the wiring. The tiled gable, lattice windows, and wooden eaves look like a neighborhood store your grandparents might have shopped at. The neon and tech feel bolted on rather than built in, which is exactly the point of the story. It’s a smart bit of worldbuilding for a toy, and it gives the design a logic beyond simply piling on glowing bits.

The lighting runs off a single USB-C cable or a battery box that takes three AA batteries, though you’ll need to supply your own batteries or power adapter. Getting there takes patience, since Brick Fanatics scored the build a rough 3 out of 10 in its review, citing unclear instructions and tiny wire connectors. The wires thread between studs with the included tweezers, and one step asks you to apply a minuscule contact strip with copper markings the right way round. That’s an odd exception in a set that otherwise skips stickers entirely, using 81 printed pieces and 35 metallic spray-painted parts instead. Budget around eight hours, and maybe a snack.

At $119.99, the Manga Shop undercuts Lumibricks’ 2,227-piece Neon Tech Tower, which sells for $150, and buying direct currently adds a free 388-piece micro version of the Izakaya and Manga Shop while supplies last. Up to four compatible sets can share one power supply, so your Neoncity street has a natural cap before you need another plug. Brick Fanatics still found the finished model worth the cursing once the neon came on, and the photos make that easy to believe. My only real gripe is the three included figures, whose hands can’t hold any of the manga the shop is built around. For a store dedicated to paper, nobody inside can actually read.

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Finally someone made a ‘Rock Guitar’ out of actual rock… And it honestly sounds good!

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Almost every guitar ever made, acoustic or electric, comes from wood, which means the genre names have been lying to us the whole time. Rock guitar is not made from rock. Heavy metal is not made from iron ore. Somebody finally got tired of that gap between name and material, and a YouTuber going by BeBeau Builds decided the phrase “rock guitar” had the potential to be the greatest dad joke ever attempted with a table saw. So he sacrificed a perfectly good acoustic guitar, kept the fretboard, and built the rest of the instrument out of actual slate stone. It works. It plays. It is somehow real.

Repurposing the neck and fretboard from a donor acoustic, BeBeau built an internal armature to hold the stone in place, then pieced together individual slabs of slate into a guitar body that looks like the spiritual cousin of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Eighteen separate stone pieces went into the shape, cut and glued over a 3D printed skeleton, because free handing eighteen matching slabs by eye would have ended several friendships. The finished instrument weighs just under 49 pounds, which is closer to a car battery than a guitar. Somehow it still sounds like one.

Designer: BeBeau Builds

Slate was not exactly the obvious pick here, but it makes more sense for purely logistical reasons. The stone splits into clean, flat sheets naturally, which is exactly why it has been used for roofing tiles and pool tables for centuries, and that same property made it possible to cut consistent slabs for a guitar body instead of fighting a shapeless boulder. A tile saw got tried first and overheated almost immediately on material this thick, which tells you slate was never meant to be machined like plywood. The build leaned on 3D printed templates to keep eighteen individually cut pieces close enough in dimension to actually fit the internal skeleton. Even with that help, thickness varied enough across slabs that small angle errors piled up until the whole assembly stopped lining up, forcing a redo.

The first full glue attempt failed outright and had to be scraped clean by hand, a multi hour job that nobody signs up for twice. The fix was smarter the second time around, using hot glue as a temporary skeleton while construction adhesive filled the gaps and did the actual structural work over several days of curing. One piece of the soundboard cracked during shaping, which is the kind of moment that ends most builds, except a spare slab was on hand and it turned out to have even better tone than the original. Mineral oil went on at the end, both to protect the stone and to give it the same worn, wet look you would expect from a countertop rather than a guitar.

Here is the part that actually surprised me. Strummed unplugged, this thing sounds a lot closer to a normal wooden acoustic than a 49 pound rock guitar has any business sounding, trading off mostly in reduced volume and shorter sustain rather than some completely alien tone. Compare that to steel bodied resonators like the Dobro, which change an instrument’s voice dramatically even at a fraction of this weight, and slate starts looking less like a stunt and more like a real data point on how much a guitar’s material actually shapes its sound. The trade-off is obvious and unavoidable. Nobody is retiring their dreadnought for a slab of rock that weighs as much as a mini fridge shelf, and the neck angle on this build is slightly off, which stretches the strings sharp under fretting pressure.

Still, as a proof of concept, it lands. Burls Art has made a habit of testing whether guitars actually need to be guitar shaped materials at all, and we covered his cardboard guitar, built from laminated corrugated sheets and resin, which he engineered by studying the alternating grain structure of the Wiggle Side Chair to survive real string tension. Before that there was a fully functional bass built from 2000 LEGO bricks, and a guitar whose body was cast from 5,000 roasted coffee beans suspended in epoxy, so a rock guitar fits an established pattern of testing lutherie against materials that have no business holding a string. BeBeau’s slate build earns its place in that lineup by actually working as an instrument instead of just posing as one. A trained player still needs to put this through its paces before anyone calls the tonal verdict final. Until then, the dad joke holds up, and honestly, that might be the best review it needed.

The post Finally someone made a ‘Rock Guitar’ out of actual rock… And it honestly sounds good! first appeared on Yanko Design.

aulumu’s iPhone 18 Pro Cases Survive Drops, Glow In The Dark, And Auto Cool Your Phone

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Picking a phone case is one of the most low-stakes high-stakes decisions in consumer tech. The stakes are low because it’s a $40 purchase. The stakes are high because you’re going to look at it roughly 150 times a day for the next two years, and a wrong pick is the kind of thing that will quietly gnaw at you. The market that erupts around every new iPhone launch does not help, flooding storefronts with interchangeable shells that share dimensions and absolutely nothing else. aulumu’s A18 collection tackles that problem by running nine products across genuinely different design philosophies, from a 1500D aramid drop-protection case to a transparent polycarbonate case with a built-in glow-in-the-dark luminous array, all landing at once for the new iPhone Pro season.

aulumu has built its reputation by doing something the accessory market rarely bothers with: making sure everything in the catalog looks like it came from the same design brief. Their G03 magnetic wallet won the 2025 Red Dot Award, their A17 frosted case brought superconductive cooling tech to a category most brands treat as pure commodity, and their B01 sling bag pulled that vocabulary into carry gear entirely. The brand targets commuters, creators, and EDC enthusiasts who want things genuinely designed rather than manufactured to a price point. The A18 collection is that philosophy’s clearest expression yet, fielding four cases across four distinct material territories in one coordinated launch. The finish detail and surface craft running through the lineup is the kind of thing the September case flood never delivers.

A18 Armor Shockproof Case: Where 1500D Aramid Fiber and Drop Protection Finally Coexist

Aramid fiber is the same material in a bulletproof vest, which sounds impressive until you remember that a bulletproof vest will stop a bullet and do absolutely nothing for you if you fall off a ladder. The material is legitimately exceptional at being lightweight and stiff, and genuinely terrible at absorbing the kind of omnidirectional impact a phone takes when it bounces across pavement. aulumu’s AFT construction addresses that gap directly, combining 1500D aramid fiber with TPU in a single one-piece build, letting aramid carry the weight savings and refined texture while TPU handles the flex and cushioning. No separate layers to delaminate, no seams to work loose over eighteen months of daily carry. The result sits closer to a protective case than the ultra-slim aramid builds that look sharp and quietly terrify you every time the phone grazes a countertop.

A 2m drop rating headlines the protection claim, but the geometry tells the more interesting story. The screen sits behind a 1.36mm raised case edge, the camera system gets a 1.3mm raised frame, and full-wrap coverage extends across every edge with reinforced corners built to distribute directional impact. Corner drops are statistically the scenario that kills most phones, and the Armor treats that with structural reinforcement rather than optimism. For a case that still fits comfortably in the everyday carry conversation, the protection spec here reads like something that belongs in the rugged case category, which is a harder balance to land than it sounds.

Click Here to Buy Now: $79.98.

A18 Ultra-Slim Particle Aramid Fiber Case: Tactical Art That Weighs Next To Nothing

Particle structures and tactical technology aesthetics are not phrases that typically show up in a phone case brief, which is part of what makes the Particle Aramid Fiber Case such an interesting product to look at. The UV-treated gradient particle array across the aramid surface creates depth and movement that shifts with light and angle, producing a dimensional quality that a smooth polycarbonate case running the same finish could never replicate. The dense plain-weave aramid construction gives the particle array a textured foundation to sit on, and the two layers of visual information working together read closer to a topographic rendering than a fabric finish. aulumu calls it “Aramid Meets Digital Order,” which sounds like marketing copy until you actually look at the surface and realize the description is pretty accurate. Available in Black and Blue, both colorways lean hard into the tactical reference rather than softening it for a mainstream audience.

At 1.2mm thick from 27g, the carry weight is essentially a non-conversation. Full-coverage design extends across the edges and buttons with the same seamless enclosure that runs through the rest of the A18 family, so the visual drama does not come at any structural cost. The UV treatment is what separates the Particle Aramid Fiber Case from a conventional woven aramid surface, adding a gradient particle finish that feels genuinely considered rather than decorative. For a case sitting at this weight and profile, the amount of surface personality aulumu packed into it is a harder design problem than it looks.

Click Here to Buy Now: $69.98.

A18 Ghost Lumen Case: A Glowing Case That Steals The Spotlight, Even In The Dark

Premium transparent PC material that mimics the original metal and glass textures of the device, with a glow-in-the-dark cyberpunk aesthetic. That sentence describes a product that could very easily go wrong, and aulumu somehow stuck the landing. Optical-grade PC sheets with a light transmittance of 88-92% mean the phone’s hardware reads clearly through the case rather than disappearing behind a foggy plastic shell. The IML Laminating Luminous Array is what drives the glow effect, and the IML process keeps it long-lasting rather than fading out after a few weeks the way cheaper phosphorescent finishes tend to. It comes in transparent or lemon yellow, and lemon yellow is the correct choice, full stop.

The Ghost Lumen’s UV-resistant molecular formula protects against daily sun exposure, hand sweat, and heat-induced aging, which is the engineering answer to the single most common complaint about transparent cases. Nobody wants to spend money on a case that turns the color of old newspaper by spring. aulumu enhanced their molding process to create a fully enclosed PC case design without notches, keeping the one-piece aesthetic clean across every edge. As the most visually adventurous case in the A18 lineup, the Ghost Lumen sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Armor’s utilitarian brief, and the collection is considerably more interesting for having both ends covered.

Click Here to Buy Now: $39.98.

A18 Hyper Frosted Case: Yes, It Glows, and Yes, It’s Actually Cooling Your iPhone’s CPU

Phone cases do not typically come with a thermal engineering story, which is part of what makes aulumu’s CoolHyper Tech worth paying attention to. The A18 Hyper Frosted takes that signature technology and upgrades it with a bigger silicone thermal pad, repositioning the heat dissipation area closer to the phone’s CPU to achieve more efficient heat transfer. The result is a claimed 2 to 3 degree Celsius temperature reduction, which sounds modest until you consider that sustained heat is the primary reason flagship phones throttle performance during long gaming sessions or extended video work. A case that actively keeps the chip cooler is, in a subtle way, a case that keeps the phone faster. That is a genuinely different value proposition from anything else in the A18 lineup.

The frosted transparent TPU shell uses aulumu’s one-piece full-cover design, fully enclosed without notches, in Transparent Gray and Translucent White. At 43g it is the heaviest case in the collection, and that extra weight is essentially a direct accounting for the thermal hardware sitting inside. An IML Laminating Luminous Array adds the same glow-in-the-dark character as the Ghost Lumen, making the Hyper Frosted the only case that combines active cooling with a light-up finish. That combination is either exactly what you want or the detail that helps you rule it out, which is useful information either way. Ultra-strong MagSafe is built in for fast and stable attachment, and for people who push their phone hard through gaming, long video sessions, or navigation, this is the case designed with that use pattern in mind.

Click Here to Buy Now: $39.98.

The post aulumu’s iPhone 18 Pro Cases Survive Drops, Glow In The Dark, And Auto Cool Your Phone first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Mac mini Form Factor is So Perfect, Literally Everyone is Copying It

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Apple Mac mini at center surrounded by six lookalike mini PCs from ASUS, Slimbook, Lenovo, MSI, Geekom and AceMagic.

Apple’s Mac mini is a 127 by 127 by 50mm aluminum square, and the PC industry has spent 2026 rebuilding that square with different logos on top. ASUS’s ExpertCenter PN55 measures 130 by 130 by 34mm. Geekom’s A9 Max sits at 135 by 132 by 46mm. Japan’s Links LC3501 shrinks it to 100 by 100 by 34mm. Dell skipped the mini entirely and went for the Mac Studio, giving the XPS RTX Spark Desktop a dark gray boxy body with a removable lid underneath for the SSD. At this point nobody is even pretending.

The convergence gets funnier at the expensive end. Every RTX Spark mini PC shown at Computex 2026, from Dell, Lenovo, ASUS and MSI, turned up with four USB-C ports, one HDMI and 10Gb Ethernet in a near-identical gray box. ServeTheHome, which photographed all four on the show floor, reckoned Nvidia is keeping a heavy hand on the steering wheel and enforcing design requirements on its partners. Apple arrived at this shape through integration, drawing an enclosure around a chip it designed itself. Everyone else arrived by consensus, or possibly by memo. Same silhouette, wildly different reason for existing.

1. Geekom A9 Max

Geekom A9 Max Mini PC on a table

Geekom’s A9 Max lands at 135 by 132 by 46mm, which puts it within 8mm of the Mac mini on every axis, close enough that the tape measure tells its own story. The chassis is full metal with softly radiused corners and a flat top plate, carrying the visual weight along with the footprint, that sense of a machined block rather than a molded shell. Inside is AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with Radeon 890M graphics, up to 128GB of DDR5 across two SODIMM slots and a pair of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe slots, for around $1,000. Geekom has spent years positioning itself as the answer to Intel’s NUC line, which died in 2023 and left the reference shape unclaimed. Somebody was always going to pick it up.

The limits show up under load rather than on the spec sheet. Testers found the 890M and the memory ceiling holding back heavier creative work, and the fans announcing themselves during video editing, which is the cost of working inside Apple’s volume without Apple’s thermal budget. One review measured an NPU benchmark score less than half what the identical processor managed in a rival machine, a gap Geekom later traced to a UEFI bug and patched. Apple ships one firmware for one board while Geekom ships many, and that difference surfaces in software long before it surfaces in the aluminum. The metalwork is excellent, and the chassis is the part of this machine that needed no revision at all.

2. Minisforum AI X1 Pro

Minisforum AI X1 Pro Mini PC on a table

Minisforum built the AI X1 Pro around everything Apple leaves out, and the case swelled accordingly. You get three M.2 slots, dual 2.5GbE, two USB4 ports, Wi-Fi 7, an internal 135W power supply instead of a laptop brick, and an OCuLink connector for hanging a desktop GPU off the side. Configurations run from a Ryzen 7 H 255 up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, with sale pricing landing between $899 and $1,369 depending on memory and storage. The workmanship sits clearly above the class average, with properly machined surfaces rather than the painted-over castings this price bracket usually delivers. It is the most capable machine in this roundup and the least contained.

Reviewers logged what that ambition costs, noting that the swollen footprint makes it a harder sell against the M4 Mac mini, that it runs loud, and that the Wi-Fi needed attention out of the box. Every port is volume, every volume is airflow, and airflow is noise, which is the chain of consequences Apple sidestepped by declining to offer any of this in the first place. The AI X1 Pro is the honest version of the trade, and it tells you in cubic centimeters exactly what expandability costs. Anyone who has priced an external GPU enclosure knows OCuLink is the cheapest route to real graphics performance in a small box. You simply cannot have it inside a 127mm square.

3. ASUS ExpertCenter PN55

ASUS ExpertCenter PN55 Mini PC

ASUS measures the ExpertCenter PN55 at 130 by 130 by 34mm and 0.6kg, which is three millimeters off the Mac mini’s footprint in both directions and a full 16mm slimmer. The aluminum chassis carries finely etched lines across the top that run off the edge and resolve into the rear cooling vents, a detail doing real work by turning a functional grille into a graphic element. Inside is a Ryzen AI 400 Series processor with an NPU rated up to 55 TOPS, up to 96GB of DDR5, six USB ports and dual LAN, enough to drive four 4K displays. ASUS validated the whole thing to MIL-STD-810H for round-the-clock operation, which matters for the signage and kiosk deployments this line actually sells into. It was announced at CES 2026 and started shipping in Q2.

ASUS inherited the entire NUC program from Intel in 2023, which gives it more historical claim to the small desktop than anyone except Apple, and the PN55 still reads like a Mac mini that got a job in IT. Its own idea is the chassis mechanism, a hinged lever that pops the machine open for RAM and storage swaps without a single tool. That is a direct answer to Apple, whose 2024 redesign sealed the enclosure and turned memory into a decision you make once and live with for five years. An IT manager buying two hundred of these cares more about that lever than about anything else on the spec sheet. The footprint is borrowed; the service model is entirely its own.

4. Acer Veriton RI110

Acer Veriton RI110 Mini PC

Acer announced the Veriton RI110 at IFA in Berlin on September 2, making it the newest arrival in this convergence by a matter of days. The chassis measures 138.5 by 131.3 by 52.1mm and weighs 630 grams, so it sits 11mm wider than a Mac mini, 2mm taller, and marginally lighter at 1.39 pounds against Apple’s 1.5. Acer calls it a mini workstation, which is a lot of syllables for a box the size of a sandwich. Inside is Intel’s Core Ultra X7 358H with Arc B390 graphics, up to 96GB of dual-channel LPDDR5X and up to 4TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage, with 10GbE and 2.5GbE both fitted. Acer claims it will run AI models of up to 120 billion parameters locally.

Soldered LPDDR5X sets the ceiling here, because memory is fixed at the moment of purchase and stays fixed for the life of the machine, the same bargain Apple asks you to make. The OCuLink port is the counterweight, a PCIe 4.0 x4 link rated at 64Gbps that lets you hang a full desktop graphics card off the back, which is the most un-Apple gesture available in this form factor. That 120 billion parameter figure deserves a squint, since fitting a model that size into 96GB requires aggressive quantization Acer has not specified anywhere in its materials. North America gets it in Q4 2026, EMEA in Q1 2027, and no price has been announced. It is a Mac mini with a hole drilled in the back.

5. Links LC3501

Link LC3501 Mini PC

The Links LC3501 is 100 by 100 by 34mm, weighs 260 grams, and runs a four-core Ryzen 5 3501U that AMD shipped on the Zen+ architecture back in 2019. Scaling the square down to a 10cm footprint works visually, because the proportions hold and the thing reads as a deliberate object rather than a shrunken one. Japanese distributor Links sells it for ¥58,800 with 8GB of DDR4 and ¥64,800 with 16GB, roughly $367 and $404, with a 256GB SATA SSD and Windows 11 Pro preinstalled. It shipped in mid-September 2026 and is not coming to the US, so treat this one as evidence rather than as a purchase. The chip inside is seven years old and the case could not care less.

Putting a 2019 processor in a 2026 enclosure reads oddly until you look at where DRAM and NAND prices have gone, at which point the arithmetic makes sense. What the machine exposes is that the silicon has become the variable and the shape has become the constant. A 100mm footprint at 34mm tall is a genuinely lovely object, smaller than the Mac mini in every dimension, and the shape is doing considerably more of the work here than the hardware. Designers have a name for this moment, when a form outlives the constraints that produced it and carries on as pure style. The LC3501 is that moment, on sale now, for $367.

6. AceMagic F2A

AceMagic F2A Mini PC

AceMagic’s F2A measures 148 by 120 by 39mm in an all-plastic case, running a Core Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H with Intel Arc graphics, 32GB of DDR5 and a 1TB SSD for under $600. The proportions are a rectangle rather than a square, which changes the read entirely, because a square sits on a desk as an object and a rectangle sits there as a component. Plastic shifts it further, since much of the visual argument of this form factor rests on appearing to be a solid machined block. Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5Gb Ethernet are both fitted, there is a spare M.2 slot, and the ports are sensibly split across front and back. For the silicon on offer, the price is fair.

The port list is where the budget becomes visible, with no USB4 or Thunderbolt anywhere and every USB-A connector capped at 5Gbit/s. Dual fans get loud under sustained load, with no button or software toggle to bring them down. A plastic shell radiates far less heat than machined aluminum, so the fans work harder to compensate, which is a material decision producing an acoustic outcome. Apple’s aluminum enclosure functions as a heatsink that also happens to be a housing, and that double duty is the expensive part of this form factor. The outline is the cheap thing to reproduce. The substrate is not.

7. Slimbook ONE

Slimbook ONE Mini PC

Spanish builder Slimbook ships the ONE at 158 by 130 by 58mm in silver aluminum and black plastic, which is about as close to Cupertino as a color pairing can get without sharing a supplier. Configurations run to a Ryzen 7 H 255 or the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, with up to 128GB of RAM and up to 16TB of SSD storage, plus OCuLink, dual 2.5GbE, Wi-Fi 7 and USB4. Pricing starts at 649 € for the Hawk Point model, roughly $760, rising to 949 € for the Strix Point version. The order page is the real product here, because Slimbook preloads Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or Linux Mint for free and charges extra for Windows. There is no US retail presence, so buying one means ordering from Spain.

Putting a silver aluminum square on a desk and booting KDE Plasma on it is a small act of comedy, and Slimbook knows exactly what it is doing. The company built its identity on selling Apple-grade hardware to people who actively prefer Apple’s software stay out of it, which turns the shared shape into an argument rather than an accident. Its own spec sheet at one point listed the machine as 5.5mm tall, a decimal point slip that would have made this the thinnest desktop computer ever built. The real number is 58mm, which is 8mm taller than a Mac mini and precisely what fitting OCuLink inside costs you. Small Linux vendors rarely get the metalwork this right.

8. MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG Mini PC

MSI has been building this box since 2015. The original Cubi arrived with a Broadwell chip, curved edges and a choice of black or white, nine years before Apple’s square settled into its current proportions. The current model is the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG, announced at CES 2026 and shipping from May 1, measuring 119.6 by 115.2 by 37.5mm for a total volume of half a liter. That makes it smaller than the Mac mini on every single axis, which is an engineering result rather than a marketing one. Inside is an Intel Panther Lake chip up to the 16-core Core Ultra 9 386H, 32GB of DDR5, dual Thunderbolt 4, dual 2.5G LAN and Wi-Fi 7.

Matte black plastic and a fingerprint sensor set into the power button are the tells that this was drawn for an IT deployment rather than a display shelf, the finish flat and light-absorbing where anodized aluminum would catch an edge highlight. The compactness and the tool-free access to RAM and storage are the wins. The $1,999 price of a loaded configuration and the Xe3 integrated graphics are the limits, with barebones units starting at $569 for anyone supplying their own memory and storage. There is no USB-A connector anywhere on the rear panel, which anybody running a wired keyboard will notice on day one. MSI builds the chassis from post-consumer recycled plastics and ships it in FSC-certified packaging.

9. Lenovo ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2

Lenovo ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2 Mini PC

Lenovo aimed one product further up the Apple lineup here, because the ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2 is chasing the Mac Studio, and the aim is uncomfortably good. It measures 195 by 191 by 108mm against the Mac Studio’s 197 by 197 by 95mm, landing within 6mm of Apple’s footprint on both axes and standing 13mm taller, which is roughly the height of a graphics card getting its own way. Inside that 3.6-liter box sits a full desktop GeForce RTX 5060 with 8GB of GDDR7, an Intel Core Ultra 9 285 vPro, 64GB of DDR5, three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and a 350W internal power supply rated at 92% efficiency. Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI 2.1 are both present. It weighs 8.2 pounds, or roughly five Mac minis.

Stuffing a desktop-class graphics card into Mac Studio proportions is the one thing Apple has never attempted, and it is the entire reason this machine exists. The chassis leaves room to swap the graphics card, the storage and the memory, making it the most serviceable object in this roundup by a distance, and the vents running down its flanks are doing considerably more visible work than Apple’s concealed underside intake. The costs are a 12-month warranty, no memory card reader of any kind, and pricing that has turned volatile, with one UK buyer paying £1,510 in late 2025 for a configuration listing above £3,400 by February. Configurations run from $1,919 to $2,409, which is Mac Studio money for Mac Studio dimensions. The square is the marketing; the RTX 5060 is the argument.

The post The Mac mini Form Factor is So Perfect, Literally Everyone is Copying It first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s $1,999 iPhone Duo Costs the Same as a Budget MacBook, iPhone, Watch, and AirPods Combined

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Price comparison between the iPhone Duo, MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, Watch SE3, and AirPods Pro 3

Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo, costs $1,999 for 256GB. That same money also buys four other Apple products with change left over: a 512GB MacBook Neo at $799, an iPhone 17e at $699, an Apple Watch SE 3 at $249, and AirPods Pro 3 at $249. Add it up and you land on $1,996, which is three dollars short of one folding phone. I ran the numbers twice because it looked like a typo. It’s not a typo, it is Apple’s live price list as of September 2026, and the distance between the cheapest thing Apple makes and the most expensive thing Apple makes has never been this wide.

Nobody at Apple decided the phone should cost more than the computer. It happened the way most design inversions happen, one component at a time. Folding glass, a custom hinge, titanium, a second display and a 2nm A20 Pro stack up until you arrive at $1,999 and call it a flagship. Meanwhile the MacBook Neo shed Touch ID, MagSafe and a backlit keyboard to reach $599 in March, before creeping to $699 in June. One product was optimized upward until it became jewelry, the other was optimized downward until it became a school supply, and the two now sit in the same online store 1,300 dollars apart.

The Ladder Apple Built Backwards

The iPhone Duo, MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, Watch SE3, and AirPods Pro 3 placed on a wooden table, eye level shot

For most of the iPhone’s history, the price ladder ran in a predictable direction. Laptops cost more than phones, because laptops did more work and carried more metal, glass and cooling hardware. The first MacBook launched in May 2006 at $1,099, which is roughly $1,750 today after inflation, while phones were largely carrier freebies bundled into two-year contracts. That relationship held, loosely, for two decades. It just quietly broke, and the break happened inside a single product lineup rather than across the industry.

What makes the inversion worth dwelling on is that Apple built both ends of it on purpose. The MacBook Neo was engineered down to a price, stripped of the backlit keyboard, fast charging and MagSafe that would normally be standard on a $700 laptop, so that Apple could compete with Chromebooks and entry Windows machines. The iPhone Duo was engineered up to a price, layered with every expensive material Apple had available, and our own coverage of the Duo’s launch called it the biggest redesign of the iPhone since the home button disappeared in 2017. The Apple Watch SE 3, meanwhile, is the one product in this stack that got frozen in place, launched alongside the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 last September and left untouched at this year’s keynote entirely.

What $1,996 Actually Buys

The iPhone Duo, MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, Watch SE3, and AirPods Pro 3 placed on a wooden table.

Run the alternative stack and it holds together as a genuinely complete kit rather than a novelty math exercise. The 512GB MacBook Neo gives you a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, an A18 Pro chip, and up to 16 hours of battery in a recycled aluminum shell, for $799. The iPhone 17e covers the phone slot at $699, currently the cheapest new iPhone Apple sells after the rest of the lineup went up $100 on September 9. The Apple Watch SE 3 adds a wrist device with an always-on display and 18-hour battery for $249, and AirPods Pro 3 close the loop at $249 with active noise cancellation, a custom heart rate sensor, and live translation built in.

That is a laptop, a phone, a watch and a pair of earbuds, touching every screen size Apple makes, for three dollars less than one folding phone. It is worth being honest about what that stack gives up. None of those four devices fold, none of them run the A20 Pro, and the SE 3 skips the electrocardiogram and blood oxygen sensors that the pricier Apple Watch Series 12 carries. But as a snapshot of how far Apple’s floor and ceiling have drifted apart, it is hard to beat, and it is proprietary math nobody else appears to have bothered running.

The Hinge Is Doing the Expensive Work

The thing actually driving the $1,999 sticker is not marketing, it is the hinge, and Apple spent real engineering years proving it. The folding display uses a scratch-resistant coating, a polymer cover layer Apple says is up to 40% stiffer than materials used for similar applications, multiple layers of high-strength glass, and a titanium plate underneath, all wrapped around a custom hinge designed to minimize the crease that plagues rival foldables. That is a lot of material science stacked into one seam, and it is the primary reason a Duo cannot be priced anywhere near a Neo.

Apple paired that hinge with an A20 Pro built on a 2-nanometer process, its first chip at that node, delivering what Apple claims is 35% higher sustained performance than the iPhone 17 Pro thanks to a new cooling system built for a thinner chassis. None of that is padding. A folding OLED stack with a titanium frame genuinely costs more to manufacture than a fixed aluminum body, and first-generation folding hardware from any brand has always carried a premium while yields improve. The fair comparison is not Duo versus cheap Apple gear, it is Duo versus other folding flagships, and our own breakdown of what the Duo got right that Samsung still hasn’t found it costing exactly $100 more than the Galaxy Z Fold8’s $1,899.

Nobody Asked For a Missing Middle

What turns this from an interesting price gap into a strange one is what Apple left out of the September 9 keynote entirely. There is no standard iPhone 18, no iPhone 18e, no iPhone Air 2, all reportedly pushed to spring 2027. Anyone who wants a new iPhone before then chooses between $1,199 for the Pro and $1,999 for the Duo, with nothing built to sit between those two numbers this year. Apple has effectively removed the middle rung of its own ladder at the exact moment the top and bottom rungs drifted furthest apart.

That gap is where the $1,996 stack might just appeal to the Apple fan who has a strict budget to work with. It fills the space Apple’s own lineup left empty, assembling a complete household of devices for less than the price of the one device Apple actually wants you looking at this fall. None of that makes the Duo a bad phone, and folding glass this durable was never going to be cheap. It does mean that for one more season, the most interesting purchase decision at Apple has nothing to do with which iPhone to buy, and everything to do with whether you buy an iPhone at all.

The post Apple’s $1,999 iPhone Duo Costs the Same as a Budget MacBook, iPhone, Watch, and AirPods Combined first appeared on Yanko Design.

Delightfully Retro LEGO Art Deco Hotel Celebrates Vice City with GTA 6 Right Around The Corner

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Here’s a fun bit of trivia to drop at your next party and watch people’s eyes glaze over: LEGO made its own version of Vice City before Vice City existed. It was called Paradisa, it ran from 1992 to 1997, and it was basically an entire toy line built on pink bricks, jet skis, and mustachioed men serving cocktails poolside. Nobody remembers it because it got quietly discontinued and replaced with fairy castles, but the DNA never really left the company. Fast forward a few decades and GTA 6 is about to remind the entire planet why Miami pastels slap so hard, and wouldn’t you know it, a LEGO Ideas builder has basically resurrected Paradisa just in time.

The Art Deco Hotel is the result, a 2,600 piece love letter to Ocean Drive that reads like someone locked a LEGO fan in a room with old Paradisa catalogs and a Netflix trailer for GTA 6. It is not licensed, it will never be licensed, and honestly, that might be exactly why it works.

Designer: Distracted Builder

The guy behind this one is a certified LEGO Ideas veteran, a 10K Club member with a track record of digging up dead LEGO themes and giving them a proper send off (his previous project was a Samurai Castle tribute to the old 90s Ninja subtheme, so this is clearly his whole vibe). For the Art Deco Hotel, he says he’s visited Miami three times and fell hard for Ocean Drive in person, and that he wanted to bottle both the architecture and his love of 80s music into one build. He calls the model “a small tribute to LEGO Paradisa,” which is putting it mildly, because the finished hotel is basically wearing a Paradisa name tag. The vertical neon sign running down the central tower spells out P-A-R-A-D-I-S-A, with HOTEL glowing on a pink marquee below it, which might be my single favorite detail in the whole build. It is a tiny piece of branding doing three jobs at once: it nails the real Ocean Drive habit of stacking hotel names vertically so passing cars can actually read them, it winks at the LEGO theme that inspired it, and it just looks great lit up against all that turquoise trim.

Under the hood, this thing is a proper working hotel, not just a pretty face. The facade folds open to reveal a lobby with a reception desk and an elevator, guest rooms furnished with beds and cabinets, bathrooms with actual sinks and showers, and a staircase leading all the way up to a rooftop pool and bar. Add in the palm trees, the scooter parked out front, and a minifig sunbathing on the roof with a cocktail, and you’ve basically got a functioning slice of 1980s Miami sitting on your shelf, no felony charges required.

The best part is the timing nobody planned. LEGO did not get a call from Rockstar, Distracted Builder is not secretly working for Take-Two, this is just what happens when good design instincts and good taste in vacation destinations collide. The Art Deco Hotel currently sits at 2,505 supporters on LEGO Ideas, with the next milestone at 5,000 and 558 days still on the clock, so there’s plenty of runway left. If you want to help push this pastel dream toward an actual box set, you can head to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote. And if LEGO’s design team is somehow reading this, do the sign in light bricks. This hotel deserves to glow at sundown just like the real ones do.

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MagSafe Drone Lets You Attach An iPhone For Perfect Hands-free Selfies And Videos

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Flying Gimbal Drone concept with an iPhone mounted on it

Google’s Add Me is one of the stranger things a phone has ever done. Introduced on the Pixel 9, it takes a photo of your family, then hands the phone to somebody in that photo, who takes a second shot of you standing where the gap was. The phone stitches the two together and produces a group picture that never existed, of a moment where everybody was never actually in the room at once. It works remarkably well. It is also, if you think about it for longer than four seconds, deeply odd, a family portrait assembled in post like a Marvel crowd scene.

Flafa proposes the analog answer to the same question. A concept from Kaiyuan Liu and four classmates at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, it’s a small quadcopter that carries your phone into the air so the camera can hold its own position while every human stays put. The phone snaps onto a magnetic pad below four fully enclosed rotors, hangs face-out, and records while the drone flies itself. It won its category at the 2025 European Product Design Award. Same problem, opposite philosophy: Google removes the photographer with software, Flafa removes them with lift.

Designers: Kaiyuan Liu, Qiushi Wang, Yan Wang, Shiqi Liu & Xiaoyi Chen

Family posing in front of a drone with an iPhone mounted on it

Selfie drones have failed so many times that the category has a graveyard. AirSelfie tried in 2017. Snap’s Pixy launched in 2022, died four months later, and was recalled in 2024 because the batteries caught fire. They all lost for the same reason. A drone light enough to fly indoors cannot carry a camera that beats the phone already in your pocket, so you buy a flying camera, fly it twice, and quietly retire it to a drawer. Flafa declines that fight entirely by bringing no camera at all.

Mounting an iPhone onto a Drone Gimbal using MagSafe

Two small sensor windows sit on the front propeller shrouds, giving the drone its own eyes for navigation while your phone dedicates itself to recording. That division of labor is the smartest thing in the whole project. Most flying cameras ask one sensor to handle obstacle avoidance, subject tracking, and image capture simultaneously, and it shows in the footage. Here the quadcopter worries about the ceiling fan and the phone worries about your kid’s face, which is roughly how you’d split the job if you had two people.

Somebody on this team understood that a drone meant to hover near a toddler cannot look like drone. The renders show warm oat cream, soft radii, matte surfaces, and not one visible screw, putting Flafa closer to a Muji humidifier than to anything DJI has shipped. Consumer drones are almost universally styled for a man in sunglasses on a cliff, all black plastic and angular vents. That grammar makes sense in a camera bag. It makes none in a living room during a birthday party.

The mount deserves credit for paranoia. A magnetic puck holds the phone, and a hinged brace folds along the handset’s edge as mechanical backup, which suggests the team thought hard about a thousand dollars of glass becoming a lawn dart. That said, the physics remains the open question. An iPhone Pro Max weighs around 233 grams, heavier than an entire DJI Neo, and hanging that mass below the center of lift makes a pendulum. The project is called a flying gimbal, but the renders show a hinge rather than an actuated axis.

Student concepts are allowed to be ahead of their batteries. What Flafa gets right is the framing of the problem, and that part is free. Every family album has one person missing, and it’s whoever picked up the camera. Google’s answer is to invent them back in afterward. This one just sends the camera upstairs for a minute.

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A Designer turned Xiaomi’s Logo into a Multi-Utility Vehicle Concept

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Side profile of the Xiaomi Horizon concept MPV in blue-to-lavender paint, parked on a white platform above still water.

You know that little rounded square Xiaomi uses as its logo? The one a Japanese design legend spent actual months tuning with a math equation just to get the curve right? Lucas Angelo looked at that shape and thought, sure, why not build a car out of it. The result is the Xiaomi Horizon, and I mean that almost literally. The tailgate is one giant glowing squircle. The wheels are squircles. The whole rear end reads like someone blew up an app icon to the size of a minivan.

It sounds like a gimmick until you remember Xiaomi’s entire EV strategy is basically “make our products feel like they all came from the same brain,” and a car shaped logo is honestly not the dumbest way to pull that off. Whether it should be a Multi Purpose Vehicle or something else entirely is a separate question, and we will get to it. But credit where it is due, this thing has more brand DNA baked into its sheet metal than most concepts manage with an entire mood board of heritage references.

Designer: Lucas Angelo

Front three-quarter view of the Horizon against a tall black louvered wall, with mountains visible in the background.

Rear three-quarter view of the Horizon at dusk, showing its illuminated red squircle taillight and the Xiaomi wordmark.

That squircle obsession is not Angelo inventing a bit for fun. Back in 2021, Xiaomi hired Kenya Hara, the design legend behind MUJI’s whole visual identity, to redraw its logo. He landed on a superellipse formula, dialed to a value called n equals 3, which is the mathematically precise sweet spot between a perfect square and a perfect circle. People online mocked it as three hundred grand for rounded corners. Angelo apparently took it a lot more seriously than the internet did, because Horizon’s entire rear fascia is basically that formula rendered at automotive scale, ringed in individually lit LEDs so it glows like a screensaver whenever the car is parked.

Front three-quarter view of the Horizon showing its illuminated Cascade Grille and squircle wheel hubs.

Straight-on rear view of the Horizon on a salt-flat-like surface, with its glowing red squircle taillight centered.

The front end plays a similar game with something Xiaomi calls the Cascade Grille, a full width lattice of tiny illuminated squares that fade in a stepped pattern across the nose. It is not a functional intake so much as a light show, which tracks for a brand that made its name on phones and smart speakers before it ever touched a chassis. Xiaomi’s actual head of automotive design, Li Tianyuan, cut his teeth on the BMW iX and the i Vision Circular, a concept that turned BMW’s kidney grille into a digital display. Angelo landing in almost the same conceptual neighborhood, independently, says his instincts are pointed in a direction the real design team already validated once.

Side view of the Horizon parked in front of a spiked black wall, taillight lit, with snowy peaks behind it.

Here is where things get spicy. China’s premium electric MPV segment has a body count, and the most famous casualty is the Li Auto Mega, a smooth, curvy one box people mover that the internet immediately nicknamed the hearse. One owner slapped high speed train decals on his because the jokes wrote themselves, and Li Auto’s own design chief was still publicly defending the car more than two years later. A big blank slab of a rear end on an MPV is basically an invitation for the internet to decide what it looks like for you, and it is never flattering.

The Horizon driving down a city street past a billboard

This is exactly the trap Horizon’s illuminated tailgate sidesteps. Instead of a flat dark void back there, you get a glowing signature the size of a barn door, something to actually look at instead of squint at. Whether Xiaomi ever builds anything like this is unlikely, especially now that the real Xiaomi has already picked its answer to the family hauler question with the SkyNomad, an EREV SUV with a fridge and a bed mode rather than a sliding door MPV. But Horizon is a fun reminder that sometimes the best way to honor a brand is to take its smallest, most mocked design decision and blow it up until everyone has to take it seriously.

The post A Designer turned Xiaomi’s Logo into a Multi-Utility Vehicle Concept first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple is Working on Two iPhone Game Controllers Under its Beats Brand

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Concept Beats branded iPhone game controller, close-up on the right grip showing X, Y, A, B face buttons, thumbstick, and red Beats logo, with the clamped iPhone home screen visible at left, lit in red.

Apple and the gaming crowd have always had one of those relationships where you nod at each other across a party and never actually walk over. Apple makes the chips, brags about them beating a PS5 in some benchmark slide, then goes right back to talking about spreadsheets and stargazing apps. Gamers, meanwhile, buy a Steam Deck or a Switch and never think about the iPhone in their pocket as a gaming device at all. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman just reported that Apple wants to finally cross the room, having spent over a year quietly developing its own gaming controllers for the iPhone. The bigger twist is who gets to wear the name tag. Rather than an Apple logo, the hardware is reportedly launching under Beats, the audio label Apple has been slowly turning into its lifestyle catch-all since buying it in 2014.

Code unearthed in a leaked macOS 26.7 build gives the rumor real teeth, naming two unreleased devices, T6502 and T1057, each carrying its own dedicated controller profile instead of placeholder code. Both come with the standard gamepad vocabulary, sticks, triggers, a D-pad, face buttons, the stuff every controller on the planet already has. T6502 keeps things simple and wired. T1057 adds Bluetooth, motion sensors, and a noticeably different haptic engine, suggesting more than one idea is being tested at once. Nothing is priced, dated, or confirmed, but the code alone says this has moved well past a mood board.

Designer: Apple

Concept Beats branded iPhone game controller shown fully assembled with an iPhone clamped in the center, both grips visible with D-pad, thumbsticks, and red Beats logos, set against a dark background with a large red Beats logo behind it.

Gurman’s sourcing on the branding is the part I keep chewing on. He says Beats executives are leading both the engineering and the product concept, not just slapping a logo on something Apple’s industrial design team already finished. His reasoning is that the culture and lifestyle around gaming controllers fits Beats better than it fits Apple, and that the sub-brand gives the company room to use cheaper materials and a louder design without dragging down the premium finish people expect from anything wearing the actual Apple logo. Read between the lines and that is Apple admitting its own aesthetic has a ceiling. Titanium and glass photograph beautifully, but nobody wants to grip a cold slab for a three-hour Genshin Impact session. Beats, with its glossy plastics and its very unserious relationship with color, is a far more honest home for an object designed to be squeezed, dropped, and thrown in a backpack pocket.

Concept Beats branded iPhone game controller in two separated halves with the iPhone floating above, left grip showing D-pad and right grip showing face buttons, both with red Beats logos, resting on a dark reflective surface.

There is a decent trade-off lurking here too, and it is worth naming before anyone gets too excited. T6502, the wired one, is basic by design, which means it will likely be the cheaper, more disposable option with none of the motion sensing or richer haptics that make a controller feel alive. T1057 sounds like the one worth wanting, but Bluetooth controllers introduce pairing friction and battery anxiety that a simple USB-C plug-in never has to deal with. Apple will have to pick a lane, or price the two far enough apart that the choice makes sense, and so far there is no signal on either price or release window. History also isn’t fully on Apple’s side. The company has floated controller ideas for years without shipping one, and it once required developers to support the Siri Remote’s accelerometer as a de facto gaming input before quietly dropping that mandate. A leaked profile in a beta build is not a keynote slide.

Close-up of the left grip of a concept Beats branded iPhone game controller, showing the D-pad, thumbstick, and red Beats logo, with the clamped iPhone visible in soft focus behind it.

Where this actually matters long term is the software Apple has already built around it. iOS 26 shipped a dedicated Games app that pulls your library, your Game Center friends, and Apple Arcade into one hub across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, and Arcade itself has quietly grown past 250 titles for $6.99 a month. A first-party controller, even a scrappy Beats-branded one, gives all of that infrastructure something physical to plug into, which is a very different goal from just selling more hardware. It also puts Apple in the odd position of competing with its own shelf space, since the Apple Store already sells the Backbone One and the SteelSeries Nimbus, and we covered how Backbone’s own Pro model already chases full-size ALPS sticks and forty-hour battery life at a premium price. Razer’s brand new Prio takes the opposite approach entirely, folding down to credit card size for people who would rather not carry a controller-shaped commitment at all. Apple showing up now, later than everyone, wearing someone else’s logo, says less about gaming and more about how Apple treats every category it enters late. Quietly, sideways, and only once it has found a version of itself that does not feel like Apple at all.

The post Apple is Working on Two iPhone Game Controllers Under its Beats Brand first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Supercharged Grand Tourer Was Built Using a 90-Year-Old Metal-Shaping Tool

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The GTX in Riviera blue, all splitter, vents, and a rear wing that towers over the roofline.

There is a tool called an English wheel that has been shaping aluminum car panels since roughly the 1930s. It is a big metal hoop with a roller in the middle, and you push sheet metal through it by hand until it curves the way you want. It sounds like something you would find in a blacksmith’s shed, not in the workshop of a car aiming for 1,200 horsepower. Yet that is exactly the tool Coventry Metalcraft used to hand-form the body of the new Jensen Interceptor GTX, alongside laptops running computational fluid dynamics software. Old-world muscle meets new-world math, and somehow both sides showed up to the same car without arguing.

Jensen International Automotive unveiled the GTX in early September, and it is a strange beast by design. It is Jensen’s first ever clean-sheet car, built to preview a whole new Interceptor lineup, and it gets there using ten English wheels worked by more than 30 artisans, alongside digital design data from studio Avant Design and mixed-reality checks nobody in 1966 could have dreamed of. The result is a 960 bhp supercharged V8 grand tourer wearing hand-beaten aluminum panels shaped partly by algorithms. Britain’s oldest car-forming trick just got a very modern wingman.

Designer: Avant Design

Under the hood: a 6.8-liter supercharged V8 from Late Model Engines, wrapped in carbon and gold foil.

Long bonnet, fastback roofline, and a wing that ruins the original Interceptor's silhouette on purpose.

Avant Design, based out of Royal Leamington Spa, is the studio responsible for translating the original 1966 Interceptor’s proportions into something that reads as contemporary rather than costume. The long bonnet survives, the tightly drawn greenhouse survives, and the wraparound rear glass that made the original such a distinctive shape is still there, even if a towering rear wing now partially blocks the view of it. What is new is the front end, with slim horizontal LED lighting and enormous carbon intakes replacing the old car’s chrome-heavy face. Interestingly, this is not Avant’s first crack at reimagining this exact silhouette. Back in 2023, the studio quietly published a concept called the E-Ceptor, an electric take on the Interceptor with reworked rear glazing and a fresh grille graphic. The GTX effectively took that speculative sketch and gave it a supercharged V8 instead of a battery pack.

Diffuser, quad exhausts, and a wing built for lap times.

A full-width taillight and a wing pulled straight from GT3 territory.

The aluminum decision, both for the chassis and the body, was not driven by sentiment. David Duerden, Jensen International’s managing director, put it plainly when explaining why the GTX skipped carbon fiber entirely. He does not want the car riding like “a skateboard,” which is a fair concern given how punishing a stiff carbon tub can feel on a road built for a Sixties grand tourer, not a modern track special. Aluminum chassis structures are also considerably cheaper to produce in small batches, since they avoid the expensive tooling that carbon fiber demands before a single panel gets made. For a car expected to sell in the dozens rather than the thousands, that economic math matters more than bragging rights about carbon weave.

No screen, just a MoTeC dash, roll cage, and switchgear built for business.

That economic logic is exactly why the English wheel earns its keep here. Hand-forming panels sidesteps the tooling costs that would sink a low-volume carbon fiber program before it ever reached a customer. Coventry Metalcraft’s artisans still shape every piece the old-fashioned way, but they are working from digital surfaces that Avant Design refined using CFD modeling, chasing the 350 kilograms of downforce the GTX needs to behave itself at speed. It is a genuinely odd combination of a seventy-year-old forming technique and simulation software that did not exist when the original Interceptor left the Kelvin Way factory. Jensen is betting its entire comeback on that combination holding together, and so far, from what we have seen, it seems to be working rather beautifully.

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