Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Samsung and Google Are Trying Smart Glasses Again, at the Worst Possible Time

Posted on by

“Glasshole” entered Urban Dictionary as word of the day in March 2013, which tells you roughly how long it took society to make up its mind about face-mounted cameras. Google Glass had barely reached early users when bars, restaurants, and theaters started banning it. The device died from a social verdict so decisive it became a punchline. A decade later, Google is back. At Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked in London today, the company helped reveal a new generation of AI-powered smart glasses, co-engineered with Samsung, dressed up in Warby Parker frames, and powered by Gemini. Same idea. Different fonts.

The climate into which these glasses arrive is not quiet. Meta spent the better part of 2026 trying to convince the public that AI glasses are aspirational, recruiting Kylie Jenner for the Meta Starfire Kylie Edition at $399 and positioning it as a style statement. What followed was a wave of coverage about covert recordings, a social media tutorial on disabling the LED light meant to prevent covert recording, and a protest campaign near Meta’s headquarters branding the glasses “fascist.” Some owners are reportedly now reluctant to wear them in public, having learned that the street name for their $399 fashion statement is “pervert glasses.” Google could not have picked a stranger moment to try again.

Designers: Samsung, Google, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster

So what exactly did Samsung and Google show up with today? The glasses, branded Intelligent Eyewear, come in two designs: a slim black frame from Gentle Monster with a refined, fashion-forward silhouette, and a rich brown Warby Parker edition with a subtly upswept brow line meant for everyday wear. Under the hood, the Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip handles the processing, the same silicon inside Ray-Ban Meta’s glasses, which is either reassuring or ironic depending on your mood. Gemini runs as the AI assistant on Android XR, the platform Samsung and Google co-developed, delivering information spoken into your ear rather than displayed on a screen. Battery life sits at nine hours, with a charging case that carries up to seven additional full charges. There is a built-in camera. There is always a built-in camera.

The positioning is reasonably clever and deliberate. By going audio-first with no display, Samsung sidesteps the cyborg-visor aesthetic that made Google Glass so alienating, and by partnering with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, two brands with genuine fashion credibility, they are betting that good frames can do what celebrity endorsements and $400 price tags couldn’t for Meta. The glasses also pair with both Android and iOS, which removes the ecosystem friction that would otherwise halve the addressable market before a single unit ships. On paper, this is the most considered entry into smart glasses anyone has made.

The paper, unfortunately, has to reconcile with the sh*tstorm that is Meta and Kylie’s brand collab. Kylie Jenner’s job in the Meta Starfire campaign was to make AI glasses feel safe and aspirational, particularly for women. She wore them, posed with them, starred in content shot from the glasses’ own point of view. What nobody at Meta apparently modeled was the possibility that Jenner’s involvement would become the story, and the story would be unflattering. Lorde publicly called the glasses “not sexy.” Women across Brussels and beyond reported being filmed without consent by men wearing the exact product Jenner was paid to glamorize. Meta had to patch their own hardware to stop people from disabling the recording indicator light. The fact that a patch was required is its own headline.

Samsung and Google have built in visible recording indicators and user-controlled privacy settings, which they are smart to advertise loudly. But the problem Meta created for the entire category goes deeper than indicator lights. The public now has a fixed mental model of what a camera on someone’s face means, and it was not built by reading spec sheets. It was built by watching someone get filmed on the bus, by the NameTag story, by “pervert glasses” becoming the phrase that stuck when “Intelligent Eyewear” didn’t.

Google killed Glass in 2015 because society rejected the behaviour the device enabled before the technology even had a chance to mature. Everything Samsung unveiled today is genuinely more refined, more considered, and more fashionable than anything Glass ever was. The question is whether any of that is the actual problem. Going by recent evidence, the frames were never really the issue.

The post Samsung and Google Are Trying Smart Glasses Again, at the Worst Possible Time first appeared on Yanko Design.

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Ultra2 Is Now Thinner Than the Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Its Battery Still Grew 35%

Posted on by

I’ve tried on almost every rugged smartwatch worth talking about at some point, Garmin’s Fenix line, the Coros Vertix, Apple’s Watch Ultra, a few G-Shocks that technically count as smart now. And every single one turned my wrist into a doorstop. Titanium and steel cases solve durability by adding mass, and mass has a way of showing up as thickness, the one spec nobody brags about in a press release. Samsung’s original Galaxy Watch Ultra fit right into that pattern, a genuinely capable watch that still felt like strapping a hockey puck to your arm. So when Samsung says the Galaxy Watch Ultra2 shed 12% of its case height, that’s worth a second look, because that number usually comes at the cost of battery, and Samsung didn’t make that trade this time.

The new Ultra2 measures 10.7mm thick, down from 12.1mm, while its battery grew 35% to 800mAh. For comparison, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 still ships in the same 14.4mm case Apple has used since 2023, meaning Samsung’s rugged flagship is now meaningfully thinner than Apple’s. It comes in one 47mm size, priced at $699.99, up for preorder now with an August 7 release. The case shape hasn’t changed though, and that squircle silhouette is, well, it’s something.

Designer: Samsung Electronics

The trick isn’t hiding in the tooling, it’s in what Samsung tore out of the motherboard this year. Swapping the in-house Exynos W1000 for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite isn’t just a performance story, it’s a real estate story, since a different chip package almost always means a different board footprint underneath the display stack. Shrink or flatten that board and you free up vertical space for exactly the two things Samsung actually wanted more of, glass and battery. That’s likely how a watch gets thinner and holds 35% more charge in the same breath, a trade that usually isn’t available to engineers. The one wrinkle is that the Ultra2 is about a gram heavier than before, which tells me some of that freed space went right back into denser cell chemistry rather than thinner titanium.

Every hands-on published this week reaches for the same word to describe that flat-topped case, polarizing, as if refusing to be a circle is some kind of design crime. I’d push back on that read, because the squircle is doing real functional work, not just standing out at a Samsung keynote. A flat bezel lets Samsung etch actual hour numerals into the metal for a glanceable readout, something a curved rotating bezel can’t do nearly as cleanly. It also gives the sapphire front a flush, uninterrupted seal against the frame, which matters more once you’re strapping this thing on for a dive. Casio figured this out decades ago with the square DW-5600, a shape divers and soldiers kept buying long after round watches became fashionable again.

That instinct pays off literally underwater this year, since the Ultra2 is the first Galaxy Watch to earn EN13319 certification for dive instruments, alongside IP69K and 10ATM. Professional dive computers from Suunto and Shearwater have never been round for the same reason Samsung’s case isn’t, a flat face reads better through a mask and seals better against water pressure. The watch auto-detects submersion and logs depth, time and temperature on its own, while a dedicated Mares app arriving later this year unlocks ascent tracking and safe dive limits. Samsung says that partnership stays exclusive to the Ultra2 for two years, which is a long runway on Wear OS. All of that ships for $699.99, a full $100 under Apple’s Ultra 3, in a case that’s now thinner than Apple’s too.

None of this makes the Ultra2 a subtle watch, and it was never trying to be one. What it proves is that Samsung finally stopped treating “rugged” as a synonym for “thick,” which is a harder engineering problem than adding another millimeter of titanium ever was. Whether the Mares app actually delivers a usable dive computer later this year will decide if that squircle earns its keep beyond marketing slides. Until then, the case shape stops looking like a stubborn styling choice and starts looking like the reason the rest of this watch works at all.

The post Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Ultra2 Is Now Thinner Than the Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Its Battery Still Grew 35% first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 5 Details Every Great EDC Design Shares in 2026

Posted on by

Cheap knives and great knives can share a steel type, a similar price bracket, and even a similar silhouette, yet one gets carried every day for years while the other sits in a drawer after a month. The difference rarely comes down to one dramatic failure. It comes down to five small decisions that most buyers never learn to check for, decisions about lock geometry, screw heads, pivot bearings, dimensional proportion, and low-light findability. Spend enough time with a stack of 2026 releases side by side and the pattern gets impossible to unsee.

I spent the better part of last week breaking down those five decisions using five knives currently earning their keep in pockets around the EDC community, each one chosen because it executes a single detail without compromise. None of these are the flashiest releases of the year, and none needed to be. What ties them together is a kind of restraint, the willingness to spend real machining time and material cost on a part of the knife most buyers never think to inspect. A locking mechanism gets tuned for years of one-handed use rather than a flashy debut video. A screw gets sized and disclosed rather than hidden behind a proprietary driver. That restraint is expensive to execute and easy to skip, which is exactly why so few knives manage all five at once.

1. The Lock: Why Button and Crossbar Mechanisms Made the Liner Lock Feel Dated

Liner locks and frame locks have one quiet flaw nobody talks about until they’ve sliced a thumb pad on a fast close. To fold the blade back down, your fingers have to reach across its path and nudge the lock out of the way, which is fine ninety nine times out of a hundred and a genuine hazard on the hundredth. Button locks and crossbar locks solve this by moving the release off the blade’s line entirely. Press a button or pull a bar mounted on the spine, and the blade drops shut without your fingers ever crossing the edge. It sounds like a minor ergonomic tweak until you realize it’s the same logic that made Benchmade’s AXIS lock a cult favorite for two decades, just freed up for everyone else to build on now that the patent has expired. That single expiration is why crossbar and button locks have exploded across mid-tier knives in the last two years, and why a lock type that used to signal premium exclusivity now signals a maker who’s simply paying attention.

Tekto’s F4 Echo, a collaboration with Zastava Arms USA that leans hard into the gunmaker’s rifle heritage, runs exactly this kind of button lock, and it’s tuned well enough to matter. Press the button and the CPM S35VN blade drops free with none of the mushy half-engagement that plagues cheaper button locks, then a flick of the flipper tab snaps it back open with the same crisp confidence. Closing it is a one-handed motion, thumb on the button, palm rolling the spine shut, no crossed fingers anywhere near the reverse tanto edge. It’s a satisfying click too, the kind that turns into an idle fidget habit whether there’s anything to cut or not. At $199.99 it isn’t chasing budget-tier button locks racing to the bottom on price. It’s proof the mechanism has fully arrived at the mid-tier, executed with a materials upgrade to match, and Tekto clearly built it for people who’ll notice the difference immediately.

Click Here to Buy Now: $170 $199.99 (15% off with code YANKO). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours! Free FedEx 2Day shipping within the USA.

2. The Pivot: Why Ceramic Bearings Turned Washers Into a Warning Sign

Pull apart any budget folding knife from a decade ago and you’ll almost always find phosphor bronze or Teflon washers wrapped around the pivot, a setup that works fine until grit, lint, or a humid afternoon gets between the layers. Washers rely on flat surface contact, so any contamination turns a smooth flip into a gritty drag that needs a hard wrist snap to force open. Ceramic bearings solve this by replacing that flat contact with a caged ring of hardened balls that roll instead of scrape, cutting friction dramatically and staying consistent even when the knife is dirty. They also can’t rust the way steel bearings eventually do, so a knife that’s been caught in the rain still deploys glassy smooth a year later. This used to be the detail separating a $50 knife from a $300 one, and in 2026 that gap has mostly closed. Once ceramic bearings became cheap to source and simple to cage correctly, there was no honest excuse left for a stiff pivot at any price.

Civivi’s Elementum earned its reputation as the reset button for budget EDC largely by being one of the first sub-$50 folders to ditch washers for a caged ceramic ball bearing pivot outright. The Elementum II carries that same pivot forward while adding a tuned button lock, and the bearing underneath does most of the work on how the knife actually feels in hand. Flick it open and it glides with none of the initial stiffness a washer knife needs to work through, and the closing motion rides that identical smooth pivot rather than some separate mechanism bolted on for the button. At 2.96 inches of Nitro-V steel and under $100 across most configurations, it’s proof the bearing upgrade never had to live exclusively at the premium end of the market. Civivi more or less forced the rest of the budget category to either match that pivot or explain why they hadn’t.

3. The Glow: Why Tritium Slots Separate Findability From Decoration

Tritium vials are sealed glass tubes filled with a radioactive gas that emits a faint, self-powered glow for roughly 25 years with no batteries and no charging required, and EDC makers have been drilling slots for them since around 2020. Plenty of that early adoption was pure theater, vials tucked into handle scales where your palm covers the glow the moment you pick the knife up, or embedded on a blade spine where they serve no purpose beyond looking tactical in a product photo. A well-placed slot solves an actual problem instead. Drop a knife in a dark bag, a glove box, or beside a bed at 2am, and a tritium vial is the difference between patting around blind and spotting a faint green dot exactly where you left it. Vials run $15 to $40 each, so a maker adding two of them made a deliberate call. Decoration gets bolted on wherever there’s leftover space, while findability gets placed exactly where your eye needs to land first.

TiNova II puts that logic to its intended use. The two tritium slots sit on the flat faces of its Grade 5 titanium scales, and depending on the finish, you get either raw sandblasted titanium letting the glow read plainly or a black-coated version that makes those same vials do most of the visual work in a dark pocket or bag. At 2.54 inches closed and just 59.3 grams, this is a knife built for keychain duty first, exactly the kind of small object that goes missing in a junk drawer or backpack pocket without a locator built in. The D2 steel blade deploys with a 360 degree spin off a ball bearing pivot, more fidget toy than tactical folder, but the tritium slots keep it from being purely a novelty. It’s a genuinely small detail on a genuinely small knife, and it’s exactly the kind of detail that separates a maker thinking about how the object gets used at night from one just checking a spec sheet box.

4. The Footprint: Why 8 Inches Became the Serious EDC’s Sweet Spot

EDC has spent the better part of a decade chasing extremes in either direction, keychain folders under 4 inches closed competing with hard-use tank knives pushing past 9 inches open, both categories treating size as the headline spec. Somewhere in the middle sits a range most serious knives have quietly converged on, an overall open length around 8 to 8.3 inches paired with a blade close to 3.5 inches. That proportion isn’t an accident or a coincidence across brands. It’s large enough to give a full four-finger grip real purchase on the handle, yet compact enough to disappear into a front pocket without printing through the fabric or announcing itself in a waistband. The blade length lands right at the edge most carry jurisdictions still consider reasonable, long enough for food prep, package handling, and cordage work without crossing into knife-you-have-to-explain territory. Novelty chases a headline number. Dimensional maturity chases the number that actually gets carried every day.

Tactile Knife Co.’s Maverick sits almost exactly on that mark, running 8.18 inches open with a 4.7 inch closed length and a 3.5 inch CPM MagnaCut blade that splits the difference between edge retention and rust resistance better than almost anything at this price. Richard Rogers designed the knife’s tri-lobe handle shape specifically to fill a full-size hand without adding bulk, and the crossbar lock keeps the release off the blade’s path the same way the better button locks do, so drawing and closing it one-handed never feels like a negotiation. At 3.9 ounces in titanium, it carries with enough presence to feel substantial without dragging a pocket down, which is the entire argument for this dimensional range in one knife. Tactile built it in Dallas alongside its better-known pen line, and the proportions read like a team that already understood exactly where the size ceiling for daily carry actually sits.

5. The Fastener: Why Torx Screws Signal a Maker That Expects You to Stick Around

A screw head sounds like the last thing worth judging a knife on, but it quietly tells you how a maker feels about your relationship with the tool over the next decade. Torx resists cam-out under torque, distributes pressure evenly across the star pattern, and doesn’t strip the way a Phillips head does after the third disassembly. Cheaper knives lean on Phillips because the drivers are everywhere, or worse, they use a proprietary bit tucked into a tiny plastic bag that gets lost within a month, quietly forcing you back to the store when the pivot finally needs a clean. The real tell in 2026 isn’t whether a knife uses Torx at all, since most premium builds do by now. It’s whether the maker actually tells you the size. A listed T6 or T8 is an invitation to keep the knife running for years. A vague “tool included” is a maker who’s already planning for you to lose it and buy another knife instead.

Tekto builds the A2 Badger around that same philosophy, running Torx head screws visible on all four corners of the chamfered aluminum handle rather than hiding the hardware or pressing it in permanently. That transparency matters more than usual here, since the Badger is an OTF, a mechanism with more moving parts than a standard folder and one that benefits from an owner who’s actually willing to open it up and relube the slide over time. At 2.18 ounces with a titanium coated D2 blade under two inches, the Badger was built specifically to slip past the length restrictions that plague OTF knives in restrictive states, and Tekto backs that engineering with a full warranty against material or manufacturing defects. Standard Torx hardware on every corner means an owner can actually service the thing rather than just carry it until something inside finally gives out. It’s a small, unglamorous decision, and it’s exactly the kind that separates a knife built to last from one built to sell once.

Click Here to Buy Now: $119 $139.99 (15% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours! Free FedEx 2Day shipping within the USA.

The post The 5 Details Every Great EDC Design Shares in 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Paper MacBook Pro: Apple’s Thinnest Redesign Now Targeting 2027, Not 2026

Posted on by

For the last several years, the Mac’s biggest leaps have come from the silicon inside it. Apple’s M-series chips transformed the MacBook Pro into a class leader on performance per watt, and for a while that made the chassis feel almost settled, a familiar shell for ever more capable internals. The latest roadmap chatter suggests that phase is ending. Apple is reportedly preparing a routine M6 refresh for late 2026, while saving the far more interesting MacBook Pro overhaul for the first half of 2027, the one many are already framing as the “Paper MacBook Pro.”

That nickname works because it instantly communicates the ambition. The idea is not literally a MacBook made of paper, but a MacBook Pro pushed so far into thinness that it starts to feel closer to a design sketch than a finished computer. If the reports are accurate, 2027 is when Apple plans to cash in on that image with a redesigned body and an OLED display, a combination that points to the company’s slimmest Pro notebook yet. For Apple, this would be a familiar kind of flex, turning thinness into theater, then selling the engineering behind that theater as the real product.

Designer: Apple

OLED is what makes the whole concept believable. A MacBook Pro display built around OLED can be thinner than the current mini-LED setup because it does not need the same backlight structure behind the panel. That gives Apple more room to slim down the lid, and once the display stack gets thinner, the rest of the machine can follow. This is why the 2027 model matters more than the late 2026 one. The M6 refresh may keep the lineup current, but the OLED redesign is the part that changes what the MacBook Pro looks like, feels like, and signals from across a room.

The catch is that every millimeter Apple removes has to come from somewhere. A thinner MacBook Pro sounds beautiful until the tradeoffs enter the conversation. Ports are the first obvious pressure point, because HDMI, SD card slots, and even MagSafe all take up physical depth. Then there is the battery, which depends on volume, and the cooling system, which depends on space and airflow. Apple can offset some of that with more efficient chips and smarter internal packaging, but industrial design always collects its price eventually. The “Paper MacBook Pro” only becomes a win if it stays recognizably Pro in the ways that matter after the keynote ends.

That is what makes this rumored 2027 machine so interesting from a design perspective. Apple already knows how to make a thin laptop. It has done that before, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes with compromises that aged badly. Making a thin MacBook Air is one challenge. Making a thin MacBook Pro that creators, editors, developers, and power users can trust for sustained work is a much harder brief. The real test of this redesign will not be the side profile in Apple’s launch images. It will be whether the machine can carry all that visual elegance without hollowing out the practicality that gives the Pro line its identity.

So what should people expect in 2027? Probably a MacBook Pro that looks noticeably slimmer, likely leans on OLED as the enabling technology, and arrives with the kind of visual lightness Apple loves to turn into a headline. They should also expect compromises to become part of the conversation the moment the design appears. That tension is the whole story here. The “Paper MacBook Pro” has the potential to be one of Apple’s most striking laptop redesigns in years, but only if the company proves that shaving down the body does not also shave away the reasons professionals buy a MacBook Pro in the first place.

The post Paper MacBook Pro: Apple’s Thinnest Redesign Now Targeting 2027, Not 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

iPhone 18 Just Slipped to 2027 — Apple Splits the Launch

Posted on by

Nineteen years is a long time to run the same play. Every September, Apple walked out with the full iPhone lineup, shook the room, and watched the world queue up. That rhythm now looks set to break. The latest round of supply-chain reporting suggests Apple will split the iPhone 18 cycle in two, with the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and a first-gen foldable arriving in fall 2026, while the standard iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and possibly a second Air model slip to spring 2027. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has outlined the broad two-phase roadmap, and recent reports have tied the spring delay to comments from Largan Precision chairman Tony Chen, who referenced a major U.S. customer moving one launch into early 2027.

MacRumors, PhoneArena, and Mashable have all converged around that same basic timeline, even if the reporting still traces back to the same analyst and supply-chain trail. The broad picture is consistent: Apple’s premium iPhones go first, the cheaper and higher-volume models come later. If that holds, it would mark the biggest shake-up to Apple’s iPhone calendar in years, especially for a company that has spent nearly two decades training customers to expect the full lineup in one September burst. The standard iPhone 18’s absence from that fall event would instantly become part of the reveal.

The practical explanation is easy enough to understand. A foldable iPhone adds complexity, premium models are easier to prioritize early, and Apple has increasingly used its top-end devices to debut the newest silicon, camera systems, and AI experiences. But the timing also fits Apple’s business logic almost perfectly. The Pro line delivers stronger margins, and it is also the tier best positioned to carry Apple Intelligence in its fullest form if memory, chip performance, and feature access continue to separate the lineup. A split launch gives Apple an entire holiday cycle where the newest iPhones on shelves are also the most expensive ones.

That is where the psychology starts to matter. Most people do not treat an iPhone launch like a spreadsheet exercise. They upgrade when the keynote is fresh, when trade-in offers are active, and when the new devices are physically available. In that environment, the standard iPhone 18 becomes the phone for people willing to sit out the excitement and return months later. The majority will not. They will buy what is new, visible, and available, which means the Pro line absorbs buyers who might otherwise have chosen the standard model if both had launched together.

A foldable above the Pro Max only sharpens that effect. Once Apple places a much more expensive device at the top of the ladder, the Pro starts to feel comparatively attainable. That is a powerful piece of pricing psychology, especially in a lineup where the base model is temporarily missing from the conversation. So yes, the headline is that the iPhone 18 may have slipped to 2027. The more interesting story is what that slip does for the rest of the lineup, because splitting the launch would change more than Apple’s calendar. It would change the role of the standard iPhone itself.

The post iPhone 18 Just Slipped to 2027 — Apple Splits the Launch first appeared on Yanko Design.

XGIMI’s Elfin Flip 4K Replaces the Power Button With A Gesture You Already Do Everyday

Posted on by

Flip phones snapped shut and ended calls. Zippo lighters click open with a sound that somehow feels more satisfying than the flame itself. Laptop lids have woken computers from sleep for two decades without anyone writing a line of tutorial copy about it. Physical gestures that double as commands used to be everywhere in consumer tech, and they disappeared almost entirely once touchscreens and voice assistants convinced designers that every function needed a menu. XGIMI just brought one of those gestures back into a category that badly needed it. The company’s new Elfin Flip 4K turns projector power into a single, tactile motion, no screen tap required.

Flip the stand upright on the Elfin Flip 4K and the projector powers on by itself, no remote, no app, no hidden button. Fold the stand back down and the unit shuts off just as automatically, closing the loop on a single continuous gesture. That same stand pulls double duty as a carry handle and rotates up to 150 degrees, letting you redirect the image just by tilting the projector in your hand. XGIMI prices the unit at 999 dollars, positioning it as a projector meant to travel between rooms rather than sit bolted to one shelf. The gesture is small, but it reveals how XGIMI thinks about the relationship between a person and the object they are holding.

Designer: XGIMI

A tilt sensor or magnetic switch built into the stand hinge likely handles the power detection, the kind of component already common in laptop lids and flip phone hinges repurposed for a projector chassis. XGIMI has not detailed which sensor drives the mechanism, and the hinge’s reliability becomes the single point of failure for an otherwise buttonless design. That stand also carries the full weight of the unit whenever someone lifts it by the handle, adding mechanical stress that a purely cosmetic hinge would never face. Repeated flipping over months of use tests durability differently than a static power button ever would. XGIMI is betting real trust in that single moving part.

Portable projectors have multiplied fast over the past few years, with Anker’s Nebula lineup and a wave of similarly sized boxes chasing the same pitch of cinema on the go. Most of that competition still separates carrying, angling, and powering the unit into three distinct actions handled by three distinct parts. XGIMI’s flip mechanism collapses two of those actions into one continuous motion, tying power directly to the act of setting the projector up. That distinction matters more in a crowded category than a marginal bump in lumens or contrast ratio, since shoppers scanning a wall of similar looking boxes respond to a difference they can actually see. A projector that turns on by being picked up travels on social feeds without a spec sheet.

XGIMI clearly built this projector around the idea that setup should disappear into the act of picking the thing up, and that instinct shows real thought about how people actually live with portable tech. A projector priced at 999 dollars competes on plenty of fronts, brightness, contrast, audio, but the small mechanical choices are often what a shopper remembers a year later. This one gets remembered for making power an afterthought instead of a chore. That’s the kind of detail that tends to travel well once people start actually using the thing day to day, long after the spec sheet stops being the selling point.

The post XGIMI’s Elfin Flip 4K Replaces the Power Button With A Gesture You Already Do Everyday first appeared on Yanko Design.

This LEGO Pink Panther Figure Is Already a Staff Pick, and It’s Easy to See Why

Posted on by

For a cartoon character who has never once opened his mouth to speak, the Pink Panther has spent over sixty years being one of animation’s most expressive performers. Every laugh comes from the smirk, the sideways glance, the exaggerated saunter set to Henry Mancini’s slinking saxophone theme. He is proof that comedy does not need dialogue when you have got timing, posture, and a really good walk cycle (I guess Mr. Bean had a fairly strong source of inspiration). It is a masterclass in physical comedy distilled into a single, impossibly lanky silhouette.

That silhouette has now been recreated in LEGO form, and it captures exactly the qualities that make the character work. The figure stands tall and thin on a black circular display base, paintbrush in one hand and a can of pink paint in the other, caught mid mischief exactly the way you would expect. The yellow eyes, the sly little smile, the long curved tail trailing behind him, it is all there, rendered in plastic with a surprising amount of personality for a figure with no moving mouth at all.

Designer: Legendary Brick2

So much of this build’s attitude is managed by practically one single color palette. The build is almost entirely pink, sleek fur pink for the body, a softer blush pink for the muzzle, with just enough black, red, and yellow accents to do all the emotional heavy lifting. The eyebrows are two thin curved pieces that somehow read as pure smugness, and the whiskers are simple black elements that give the face just enough texture to feel finished rather than blank. My favorite detail, though, has to be the articulated fingers gripping the paintbrush. It is a small thing, but it sells the entire pose, the idea that he is mid job and about to make a mess of something.

The tail is doing a lot of work too, sweeping out in a long curve that keeps the whole figure from reading as a stiff vertical column, and it is paired with a small pink dribble of paint resting near his feet, a nice little narrative touch suggesting he’s leaving some evidence, a calling card, so-to-speak. The paint can itself has a proper handle detail, and the way it hangs off his hand adds a bit of weight and believability to an otherwise cartoonish frame. It is the kind of build that rewards you for walking around it, since the side profile shows off the tail and the can strap in a way the front view just does not.

This one has already earned itself a Staff Pick badge on LEGO Ideas, and the community has responded in kind, with the project currently sitting at 3,723 supporters on its way to the 5,000 mark, with 564 days still on the clock to get there. If you have got any nostalgia for Saturday morning cartoons or just appreciate a well built cartoon silhouette, head over to the LEGO Ideas page and add your vote. I certainly did.

The post This LEGO Pink Panther Figure Is Already a Staff Pick, and It’s Easy to See Why first appeared on Yanko Design.

From Polestar to OnePlus to DJI, the US is becoming a harder place for globally influential brands

Posted on by

Polestar exited the US market last week. OnePlus decided to stop selling phones in the US on Friday. DJI has been standing at the exit for the better part of a year, held in place by a regulatory designation that has made its position in the American market functionally untenable. Three brands, three different product categories, and a pattern that is becoming difficult to explain away as coincidence or bad timing.

These were not fringe players. Polestar was the premium EV that made restraint look like a design philosophy. OnePlus spent a decade building the most credible alternative to Samsung and Apple in the Android space. DJI invented the consumer drone photography market and still dominates it globally. The US market, for a combination of regulatory, political, and structural reasons, has made room for fewer and fewer of them.

A Coincidence of Unfortunate Events?

It is tempting to view these departures as isolated stories, each with its own unique cause. Polestar’s exit was not a market failure; it was a regulatory execution. The US Commerce Department denied the brand authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule, effectively deciding that its Chinese ownership through Geely made its data-collecting hardware a national security risk. The quality of the car, its minimalist interior, and its thoughtful user interface were irrelevant. The decision was about its corporate family tree, and no amount of design excellence could overcome that.

OnePlus’s retreat is a different flavor of failure, one driven by the peculiar economics of the American smartphone market. Success in the US requires appeasing a handful of powerful carriers who act as gatekeepers to the mainstream consumer. This means expensive certification processes, marketing kickbacks, and a willingness to play by rules set by companies that also have cozy relationships with Apple and Samsung. Despite building a loyal base of tech enthusiasts who bought its phones unlocked, OnePlus, under its parent company OPPO, ultimately decided the cost of scaling up in a protected duopoly was no longer worth it.

DJI represents a third path, a slow squeeze rather than a clean break. Placed on a government “Entity List,” the company is not technically banned from selling to consumers. Instead, it is hobbled. It faces restrictions on sourcing US technology, and the designation serves as a powerful warning to government agencies and corporate clients. This creates a chilling effect that bleeds into the consumer space, eroding trust and complicating its long-term strategy. The mechanism is different, but the outcome is the same: a globally significant hardware brand finds its American ambitions curtailed by forces beyond its control.

The Design Drought is Step to Something Worse

Losing these brands is about more than reduced competition. It is about a narrowing of the American consumer’s aesthetic and technological horizons, and the effects do not stop at taste. Each of these companies brought a distinct design philosophy to its category, one that challenged the assumptions of the established players. Polestar offered a vision of the electric vehicle as a piece of clean, minimalist architecture. Its focus on sustainable materials, restrained surfacing, and a calmer user experience stood apart from Tesla’s maximal dependence on software theatrics and from the visual clutter that still defines many legacy EVs.

OnePlus, at its peak, represented the power of focused, enthusiast-driven design. It championed the idea that premium performance and a clean software experience did not need to come with a four-figure price tag. Its signature alert slider and tactile finishes showed an attention to physical detail that dominant players often reserve for their most expensive models. Its retreat may not carry the same regulatory weight as Polestar’s or DJI’s predicament, and American consumers never embraced it at mass-market scale, but its diminished presence still removes one more source of pressure from a smartphone market that already feels overly settled.

DJI’s contribution extends far beyond the drone itself. The company effectively created the industrial design language for the entire consumer aerial imaging category. From the folding architecture of its Mavic drones to the intuitive ergonomics of its handheld gimbals, DJI made advanced robotics feel approachable and elegant. The pressure placed on DJI, much like the pressure placed on Huawei before it, has done very little to slow either company’s pace of innovation globally. If anything, it has simply reduced America’s access to the results. The same is true in electric vehicles. A market shaped around Tesla as the default benchmark risks isolating itself from how far competitors like BYD have pushed battery packaging, platform efficiency, and especially charging technology. When consumers are cut off from serious alternatives, incumbents are no longer forced to respond to the best ideas available anywhere in the world. They only have to outperform the smaller field left standing in front of them.

That is the deeper problem taking shape here. Throttling options does not only limit what people can buy. It limits what the market has to compete against. Innovation rarely thrives in protected comfort (Siri has overwhelmingly sucked because Apple doesn’t have to compete with an alternative assistant within their ecosystem). It accelerates when companies are forced to answer uncomfortable questions from better rivals, cheaper rivals, or simply different rivals. Once those rivals are filtered out, delayed, or kept at the border long enough to become irrelevant, the market begins to confuse stability with progress. The design drought becomes a technology drought soon after, and consumers end up paying premium prices for products that evolve more slowly than they should.

America is No Longer the Default Stage

For decades, succeeding in the United States was the ultimate benchmark for any global hardware brand. It was the largest, most lucrative, and most culturally influential market. That is no longer a given. Today, launching in the US is a complex risk calculation, where the potential rewards must be weighed against a growing list of liabilities: suffocating regulatory hurdles, intense political scrutiny, and the high cost of competing against entrenched incumbents.

This has created a new reality where the most experimental and daring product design often debuts in Asia or Europe first. The US market, instead of being the exciting global stage, is increasingly becoming a curated and filtered destination for products deemed commercially and politically safe enough for entry. We are getting the final, polished drafts, not the exciting early sketches. The result is a design landscape that is becoming more homogenous, more predictable, and less reflective of the true diversity of global hardware innovation. The conversation is happening elsewhere, and we are only hearing the echoes.

The post From Polestar to OnePlus to DJI, the US is becoming a harder place for globally influential brands first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Titanium Calligraphy Pen Trades Tactical Utility for Softer, More Expressive Brush Strokes

Posted on by

Titanium is a material with a very specific reputation. It belongs to the world of rugged efficiency, survival gear, and precision engineering, usually chosen for objects that need to endure pressure, impact, and time with very little fuss. Brush pens come from an almost opposite design language, one shaped by softness, gesture, and line variation, where the slightest change in pressure can transform a word or sketch into something more personal. In most cases, these two worlds stay far apart, one built around resilience, the other around responsiveness.

STILL brings them together with surprising clarity. The pen pairs a machined Grade 5 titanium body with a flexible nylon brush tip that shifts from fine hairlines to bold strokes depending on how it meets the page. That contrast gives STILL its identity. It feels grounded and permanent in the hand, yet expressive in motion, creating a writing instrument that carries the discipline of industrial design into the more fluid world of journaling, sketching, and everyday handwriting.

Designer: EYEQ

Click Here to Buy Now: $69 $105 (35% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $82,000.

Unlike traditional fountain pen nibs that deliver a consistent line, STILL’s nylon brush tip responds directly to pressure. A light touch produces a 0.3mm hairline suitable for small details or delicate script. Medium pressure yields roughly 1.2mm, the kind of natural width most people instinctively use for everyday writing. Firm pressure opens the tip to 3mm, creating bold strokes for emphasis, headers, or expressive flourishes. Everything in between happens without conscious effort, turning line variation into a natural outcome of the writing process rather than a technical skill. If you’ve used an Apple Pencil on an iPad, you probably know exactly how much more expressive a brush pen is compared to a fineliner or a fountain pen.

That responsiveness makes STILL approachable in a way traditional brush pens often are not. Calligraphy brushes demand control, practice, and an understanding of stroke order to produce convincing results. STILL removes most of that learning curve. The nylon material is elastic enough to flex predictably but structured enough to return to shape immediately. It follows the movement of your hand rather than fighting it, which means you can pick it up and start writing without needing to adjust your grip, angle, or technique. The result is a pen that feels easy to use while delivering visual results typically reserved for more specialized instruments.

The titanium body is not decorative. Grade 5 titanium, also called Ti-6Al-4V, is a high-strength alloy used in aerospace, medical implants, and high-performance hardware. It offers an exceptional strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, and a surface hardness that resists scratching and wear over years of handling. At 30 grams, STILL sits in a comfortable middle ground between lightweight portability and the kind of heft that gives feedback in the hand. The balance point falls naturally near the grip section, which prevents fatigue during longer writing sessions and keeps the pen stable during more deliberate strokes.

Every component is CNC-machined from solid material, which eliminates the weak points that come from glued assemblies or plastic internals. The barrel threads are cut with micron-level precision, producing a smooth, wobble-free connection between the cap and body. That precision is not just tactile theater. It ensures that the cap seals tightly around the nib, preventing air from drying out the brush tip between uses. The barrel surface is left smooth rather than aggressively textured, allowing the hand to find its own natural grip position without being forced into a predetermined hold.

The cap does more than protect the nib. Its flat top allows the pen to stand upright on a desk, turning it into a visible, accessible object rather than something that rolls into corners or gets buried in a drawer. The teardrop cross-section solves another common desk annoyance by preventing the pen from rolling when placed horizontally. A small groove machined into the side of the cap, measuring roughly 1cm by 2mm, acts as an integrated pen rest. You can set the barrel into that groove mid-writing, suspending the nib above the surface so ink does not transfer to the table. The cap also features precision threading and an internal gasket that creates an airtight seal, keeping the brush tip moist and ready even after weeks of non-use.

The pen accepts both ink cartridges and a refillable converter, giving it flexibility across different use cases. Cartridges are faster and cleaner for travel or environments where refilling from a bottle is impractical. The converter opens access to bottled fountain pen inks, which vastly expands color options and allows for more control over ink properties like flow, saturation, and drying time. A small transparent window in the barrel displays the current ink level, removing the guesswork about when a refill is needed. That window aligns perfectly with the groove in the cap when the pen is closed, creating a visual detail that signals the care taken with tolerances and alignment throughout the design.

The anti-roll geometry and smooth barrel work together to create a pen that adapts to multiple grip styles. You can hold it like a conventional fountain pen with a tripod grip near the section, or angle it more steeply like a traditional brush, resting the barrel closer to the web between thumb and forefinger. Both positions feel natural because the cylindrical form and 10.2mm diameter provide enough surface area to stabilize without crowding the hand. The absence of aggressive knurling or molded grip zones means the pen does not dictate how it should be held, which becomes important during longer sessions where hand position tends to shift.

STILL is designed for people who write because they want to, not because they have to. It suits journaling, daily note-taking, sketching, and any situation where the act of putting pen to paper carries some intention beyond pure information capture. The brush tip makes it a strong choice for hand lettering, planner decoration, or adding visual variety to written work without requiring calligraphy skills. It works equally well for designers, students, thinkers, and anyone building a habit around analog productivity. The titanium construction and sealed cap make it practical enough for daily pocket carry, while the expressive nib keeps it interesting enough to reach for regularly.

STILL is available in six anodized finishes: Quiet Titanium, Midnight Black, Ink Blue, Horizon Blue, Moss Green, and Mist Purple. Optional leather sleeves in British Tan or Black, made from full-grain leather with soft lining, provide additional protection and a more refined carry profile. Pricing and availability details can be found on the product page.

Click Here to Buy Now: $69 $105 (35% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $82,000.

The post This Titanium Calligraphy Pen Trades Tactical Utility for Softer, More Expressive Brush Strokes first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone 3D-Printed A Scooter Small Enough To Fit Into Cabin Luggage

Posted on by

Print a phone case, sure. Print a desk organizer, fine. But print a scooter, one with wheels, brakes, a motor, and enough structural gumption to carry an actual adult human being down a street, and you have crossed into a different category of insane entirely. Ivan Miranda crossed that line without blinking, treating a 3D printer less like a hobbyist gadget and more like a small scale factory capable of manufacturing an entire vehicle from the ground up.

What makes it properly deranged is not just that the scooter exists. It is that the scooter fits in a suitcase. Every panel, every bracket, every printed part was designed to break down small enough to check onto a flight, then get reassembled on the other side into a machine that actually rides, brakes, and turns corners like it means it. Somewhere over Europe on the way to Prague, there was a scooter sitting quietly in cargo, waiting to become a scooter again the moment it landed.

Designer: Ivan Miranda

Miranda started by building his rims out of repurposed lawn mower tires, which are naturally too flat sided for anything that needs to lean into a corner. His fix was to print the rims narrower than usual, so the two internal rings sit closer together, which stops the tire sidewalls from bowing outward once inflated. The result rounds over just enough to behave like an actual motorbike tire rather than a garden tool accessory. It is a small trick, but it is the kind of trick that separates a scooter that rides from one that just sits there looking like a scooter.

Power comes from two 36 volt tool batteries wired into a belt driven hub motor, stepped down through a DC to DC converter to run the lights and horn at 12 volts. An Arduino handles the accelerator signal, translated from a modified potentiometer hidden inside the right handlebar. The one part Miranda refused to trust to plastic was the front fork shaft, which carries the combined forces of his body weight, the bike’s size, and the stresses of actual riding. That piece was machined in aluminum instead, a rare concession from a builder otherwise committed to printing nearly everything else on the machine.

The kickstand uses a bi-stable mechanism, a bearing riding over a cam bump that snaps it firmly into either the stored or deployed position without any wobble. The seat, printed in flexible filament, sits on a hinge that doubles as hidden storage underneath. Braking comes from a modified bicycle disc setup, with the disc’s center hole enlarged to accept a printed axle, and the caliper mounted loosely enough to self-align during use. None of it reads like a shortcut. All of it reads like someone who genuinely enjoys solving problems most people would rather buy a solution for.

The whole point of the build was travel, and it delivered. Miranda flew the disassembled scooter to Maker Faire Prague, packed into an ordinary suitcase, and reassembled it on site well enough to win the event’s suitcase sized project contest. Hackaday picked up the story shortly after, noting that what Miranda calls a motorbike looks, by most definitions, closer to a scooter, a distinction that promptly spiraled into a comment section argument about vehicle taxonomy nobody asked for. The finished machine weighs a little over 14 kilograms without its batteries, light enough to make the whole suitcase premise plausible rather than theoretical.

Miranda has since gone back and refined the design, swapping more of the metal components for printed equivalents and simplifying the hardware for anyone determined to attempt their own build. The updated files are now sold through his site, complete with a bill of materials and a heavy dose of legal disclaimers reminding buyers this is a hobby project, not a certified vehicle. Whether anyone else actually manages to pull a working scooter out of a suitcase remains to be seen, but the fact that Miranda proved it possible at all says something about where 3D printing has quietly ended up.

The post Someone 3D-Printed A Scooter Small Enough To Fit Into Cabin Luggage first appeared on Yanko Design.