Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

This Damascus Steel compact EDC knife packs two sliders into a 0.6-inch body

Posted on by

Double sliders in a pocket EDC tool? That’s not something you see often, mostly because fitting two independent sliding mechanisms into a body small enough to actually carry is a nightmare of compromise and thickness. LUNARK’s Edge & Pop Dual pulls it off anyway. Each slider operates independently with its own thumb control, so you can deploy the Damascus blade, pop out the bottle opener, or leave both closed and use the whole thing as a phone stand. The mechanism is clean, the actions are positive, and nothing interferes with anything else. It’s the kind of solution that makes you wonder why more multitools don’t try this approach, until you remember that engineering two sliders into a 0.6-inch-thick handle without turning it into a brick is genuinely difficult.

The blade is 67 layers of Damascus steel over a 9Cr18MoV core, rated 58 to 60 HRC, and the bottle opener uses a dedicated bartender-style slider instead of just being a cutout. When both sliders are retracted, the tool sits flat as a phone stand for devices up to 0.3 inches thick. LUNARK already delivered over 2,000 units of their first product, so they’re not a Kickstarter ghost. The Dual measures 3.1 inches open, weighs 2.5 ounces, and comes with your choice of Ebony or Golden Sandalwood handles against a heat-treated 420 stainless steel frame. It ships January 2027 for $60, and it’s one of the smarter takes on the pocket multitool I’ve seen in a while.

Designer: Allan, LUNARK

Click here to Buy Now: $39 $60 (35% off). Hurry, only a few left!

The Dual is LUNARK’s follow-up to the Edge & Pop One, a single-slider Damascus pocket knife and bottle opener that shipped to over 2,000 owners worldwide. The One earned a solid reputation for sharpness and out-of-the-box quality, with owners specifically calling out the Damascus blade and the compact feel. The Dual takes that foundation and adds a second independent slider, expanding the tool from two functions to three without meaningfully growing the footprint. That second slider is really the whole story here, and it’s where the design jumps from a good EDC knife to something genuinely worth talking about.

Drop-point Damascus with 67 folded layers is impressive on any knife, but packing it into a 1.1-inch, 0.08-inch-thin profile on a tool this compact is a genuine flex. The 9Cr18MoV high-carbon stainless steel core gives it a Rockwell hardness of 58 to 60 HRC, solid enough for daily use without constant sharpening. That covers tape, packaging, rope, leather, and light wood carving without much drama. Damascus patterning also varies with every forge, so no two blades will look exactly the same, which is a nice bonus for the collector side of the EDC brain.

Nobody wants to balance their phone against a coffee mug during lunch. When both sliders are fully closed, the Dual holds your phone in portrait or landscape on any flat surface, supporting devices up to 0.3 inches thick, which covers most phones and small tablets. There’s also a useful bonus in that same closed position: the body can press buttons or pull handles without deploying the blade, making it handy for doorbells or latches when your hands are full.

LUNARK paired heat-treated 420 stainless steel for the frame, rated 45 to 48 HRC, with either Ebony or Golden Sandalwood handles, and the result looks nothing like a tactical tool. The wood finishes bring warmth against the industrial steel, and the rectangular silhouette reads more desk object than gear catalog. Allan, LUNARK’s founder, wanted a refined everyday carry rather than something that looks like it belongs on a Molle pouch. Ebony runs darker and more formal, while Golden Sandalwood brings a warmer natural grain that pairs nicely with the Damascus blade patterns.

Pricing starts at $39 on the Super Early Bird tier, saving $21 off the $60 retail price. That’s a solid entry point for a Damascus EDC with this level of mechanical sophistication, and you still choose your wood handle at a later stage after ordering. For anyone wanting the full LUNARK lineup, the Family Pack bundles one Edge & Pop One (LUNARK’s single-blade knife from last year) with two Edge & Pop Duals for $89, saving $91 against the combined retail of $180. It’s a good option if you want both generations of the tool or have someone in mind who’d genuinely appreciate a gifted EDC.

Click here to Buy Now: $39 $60 (35% off). Hurry, only a few left!

The post This Damascus Steel compact EDC knife packs two sliders into a 0.6-inch body first appeared on Yanko Design.

Gen Z Is Buying Old iPods to Quit Spotify. Fiio’s $50 Hi-Fi MP3 Player Does It Better.

Posted on by

I tried to listen to an album last week. The whole thing, start to finish, like a functioning adult in the 90s. I made it four tracks before a Slack ping, a WhatsApp text, and a push notification from Hinge. By track six I was scrolling through IG. I started with conscientiously listening to an album, and I ended up in a rabbit hole on social media while the music played in the background. My phone is a magnificent piece of engineering that is somehow terrible at the one job I keep handing it.

Plenty of people figured this out before I did, and their fix was buying a discontinued Apple product from a stranger online. TikTok has north of 100,000 posts tagged for iPods, refurbished sales have grown as much as 15% a year since Apple killed the line in 2022, and some kids are using them to smuggle music past school phone bans, which is the most resourceful thing I’ve heard all year. The FiiO Snowsky Echo Nano is that same instinct, available new, for $49.99, with a DAC chip nobody was putting in fifty dollar hardware five years ago.

Designer: FiiO (Snowsky)

Click Here to Buy Now

Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined the term “friction-maxxing” in a January essay for The Cut, and it went viral quickly enough to earn her a Wikipedia page inside six weeks. Her argument is that tech spent fifteen years making life easier, providing every song, every movie, every TV show episode at your fingertips for a simple (but steadily increasing) subscription fee. No looking for CDs, no scrolling through files, no visiting sketchy websites to download MP3s It was a simpler alternative, it killed torrenting for a vast population overnight… but Gen Z’s had enough. Friction-maxxing means picking the annoying option on purpose, and the Echo Nano is that philosophy machined out of aluminum. You load your own files. You turn a physical dial. You stare at a 0.91-inch monochrome OLED physically incapable of showing you album art,leave alone a notification. The screen’s poverty is the whole product.

Everyone will call this an iPod, which is kind of understandable and also kind of wrong. The proportions are a vertical stick with a hexagonal cross section and a lanyard bracket built into the top like a tiny roll cage, which is Sony Network Walkman DNA rather than Cupertino’s. Apple built a rectangle for your palm, Sony built something you wore around your neck, and FiiO clearly went shopping in the second closet. The knurled anodized dial handles power, volume, screen, and playback with one thumb, sitting as the only piece of jewelry on an otherwise stern slab of CNC’d aluminum-magnesium alloy. Visible screws at both ends read as a small political statement about whether objects should open. Seven colorways, including a coral and a teal, are the one honest Apple quotation, straight off the iPod Mini.

The 360mAh battery delivers around seven hours, and Reddit’s verdict on that figure has been a collective ‘meh’. Seven hours covers a commute and a workday rather than a weekend, and you will top it up more often than something this small should demand. Weigh that against $49.99 and what the money actually buys, because Spotify and Apple Music run roughly $12 a month, which is $144 a year, indefinitely, for a library you never own. An independent CS43131 DAC, DSD256 hardware decoding, and a dedicated audio-grade crystal oscillator would have meant flagship spending half a decade ago. Storage climbs to 256GB via microSD, and there’s a 3.5mm jack, which at this point qualifies as hospitality.

A used iPod Classic on eBay runs about eighty dollars for a fifteen-year-old machine with a spinning hard drive and a battery on its farewell tour, with higher-capacity units sailing past $150. The Echo Nano costs less, arrives new, charges over USB-C, and does the same single job with better silicon. It also works as a USB DAC for your phone or laptop, a funny hedge for a device sold on escaping your phone, and probably an accurate read of how anyone actually lives. Nobody is abandoning the smartphone. They’re carving out one protected activity and building a small aluminum fence around it, and fifty dollars is exactly the right price for a fence you’re allowed to walk away from.

Click Here to Buy Now

The post Gen Z Is Buying Old iPods to Quit Spotify. Fiio’s $50 Hi-Fi MP3 Player Does It Better. first appeared on Yanko Design.

LEGO built a working Donkey Kong arcade game that lets you throw barrels at Super Mario

Posted on by

In 1982, Universal Studios looked at Donkey Kong, saw King Kong, and sent lawyers. Standard shakedown stuff, and most companies would have folded and paid up. Nintendo’s counsel Howard Lincoln did some digging instead and found that Universal had previously argued in court that King Kong was public domain, because it suited them at the time. The judge was not amused. Nintendo won, collected damages, and Lincoln eventually ended up running Nintendo of America. A cartoon ape throwing barrels down some girders survived a copyright fight against a Hollywood studio and helped bankroll a company that now sells more hardware than most of Hollywood sells tickets.

That ape finally gets his LEGO moment with the Donkey Kong Arcade (72051), a 1,367-piece brick cabinet standing 39 cm tall, 27 cm wide, and 15 cm deep. It’s slightly strange that LEGO got to the NES, a Pac-Man cabinet, and a pinball table before touching the game that saved Nintendo from a warehouse full of unsold Radar Scope machines, but here we are. Pull the lever and one of 21 barrels drops into play, rolls down the girders, and loops back around underneath for another run. No motors, no app, no sound. Purely mechanical, in the best possible way.

Designer: LEGO

The screen is the showpiece and it’s built as flat pixel art, something that rectangularLEGO bricks do pretty well. Donkey Kong himself occupies the top left in that unmistakable stack of red-brown studs, Lady stands on the highest girder next to a tiled HELP! sign, and Jumpman sits a few floors below in his blue and red. The girders are magenta, the ladders are teal, and the hammers sit waiting on their little pedestals exactly where muscle memory expects them. There’s an oil drum with a flame sprouting out of it, four circular character portraits at the corners of the bezel, and a marquee where every letter of DONKEY KONG hangs off its own individual bar element. That last detail is the sort of thing you only notice from behind, and it’s a lovely bit of overengineering for what is essentially a sign.

LEGO left the back completely open, which I personally love. Flip the cabinet around and you get the whole mechanism laid bare: Technic linkages, axles, a long lever arm running the height of the build, and transparent chutes at the base where the barrels queue up for their return trip. It reads like an open watch movement, and it does the thing good mechanical design always does, which is make you understand how it works just by looking at it. You load barrels into a slot on the control deck, the lever meters them out one at a time, gravity handles the rest, and the loop feeds them back. For a set that could easily have been a static wall piece, somebody in Billund clearly fought to keep it playable.

The controls are real controls too. The joystick shifts Jumpman along his girder and the yellow button makes him hop, which means you can genuinely attempt to dodge a barrel and genuinely fail. Purists will note that the cabinet itself is boxier than the 1981 original, with a flat screen where the real thing had a curved CRT and an angled control panel, so don’t expect a scale-accurate replica of the machine that ate your quarters. It’s an interpretation, and the blue and white striped base sells it well enough.

Worth flagging that this lands under LEGO Super Mario rather than Icons, where the Pac-Man cabinet and the Pinball Machine both live. Small thing, but it tells you LEGO is treating Donkey Kong as Mario canon rather than arcade history, which is arguably backwards given who came first.

The Donkey Kong Arcade (72051) is up for pre-order at $199.99 with shipping from August 1, limited to three per household, and it nets you 1,300 LEGO Insiders points if you’re collecting those. LEGO’s own product page can’t decide whether it’s 1,367 or 1,371 pieces, so pick whichever number you prefer at parties. The one thing missing is sound. Give me a brick-built clicker that fires off that opening stomp, or even just a light behind the marquee, and this goes from very good to genuinely unbeatable.

The post LEGO built a working Donkey Kong arcade game that lets you throw barrels at Super Mario first appeared on Yanko Design.

LEGO Koenigsegg weighs 480 kg more than the real car and hits 70mph

Posted on by

Three hundred twenty-seven thousand, nine hundred and six pieces. Every single one placed by a human hand, pressed into position by a human thumb, across 391 days and more than 9,400 hours of work. No robots, no automated assembly, no laser guided anything. Just people in a room in Denmark, snapping plastic together for over a year.

Here’s the part that should get your attention: they developed this exactly like a real car. Not “we glued bricks to a go-kart and hoped.” They ran it through aero stability testing to confirm the plastic skin would stay attached at speed, which matters a lot when your body panels are held on by nothing but clutch power. They loaded the suspension. They tested brakes. Things failed, because 327,906 individual connections give you a lot of places to fail, and each time the crew dragged it back, hunted down the weak point, reinforced it, and went out for another run. Trial and error, the oldest engineering method there is, applied to a toy. What came out the far end of that process was a LEGO car that will do 70 mph, which is a sentence I did not expect to write today.

Designer: The LEGO Group

Thousands of small angular panels overlap in shingled rows across the nose, fenders and flanks, like scales on a very expensive fish, each one tilted slightly relative to its neighbor. A Koenigsegg’s surfacing is all compound curvature, the kind of double-bent carbon fiber that LEGO’s rectilinear system has no vocabulary for, so the team approximated it through faceted repetition instead. Step back and the eye reads a continuous curve. Step in and you can see the staircase. It’s the same trick LEGO’s sculpture teams use on large brick-built figures, and the only honest way to render an organic form in a system built on right angles.

Press one button on a Regera and the doors, front hood and rear clamshell all swing open at once, hydraulically, in perfect sync. Koenigsegg calls it Ghost Mode, and it exists for no reason beyond showing off the engineering underneath. The LEGO car does the same thing, automated, on 1,800 kilograms of plastic, with the dihedral synchro-helix doors rotating up and outward while the rear clam lifts behind them. That mass figure is the joke of the entire project. Christian von Koenigsegg built his reputation on drilling holes in bolts to save grams, and the real Sadair’s Spear comes in at 1,320 kg dry. The replica outweighs it by 480 kg, of which 400 kg is Technic elements alone. He engineered a 1,625-horsepower hypercar lighter than its own toy.

Markus Lundh ran the real Sadair’s Spear up the Goodwood hill in 47.14 seconds in July 2025 for a record that still stands, so LEGO handed him the brick version and pointed him down it instead, threading between the flint walls in the wrong direction. It hit 111 kph, more than double the previous LEGO big build record of 50 kph. Lundh got out and described it as incredibly smooth, said the brakes, steering and suspension all behaved, and admitted it reminded him of driving an actual Koenigsegg. He said this after sitting in an orange and black plastic cabin held together by the same clutch power that betrayed us all when the roof caved in on our childhood spaceships.

The 1:8 scale Technic set arrives at 4,104 pieces as the sixth entry in the Ultimate Car Concept Series, following the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, Bugatti Chiron, Lamborghini Sián, Ferrari Daytona SP3 and McLaren P1. It carries a working V8 piston engine, a nine speed sequential gearbox with a rotating gear indicator disc, Triplex suspension front and rear, and a manual Ghost Mode that raises the clam, doors and hood together. Twenty years of Technic supercar sets have been building toward this level of mechanical honesty. Watch your step in the pits, though. A stray piece from this one would be a nightmare to step on.

The post LEGO Koenigsegg weighs 480 kg more than the real car and hits 70mph first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Air-Magnetic Rowing Machine Is Built for HIIT-Level Workouts, Not Just Cardio

Posted on by

In the Season 1 finale of House of Cards, Frank Underwood rows himself into such a state of focused intensity that the handle snaps clean off the cord. It’s one of those small, telling moments: a machine built for sustained, steady cardio meeting effort it was never designed to handle. The image stuck because it captured something true about most rowing machines, that they’re engineered around a certain kind of effort, and past that point, something gives. The MERACH UltraRow R60N starts from the opposite premise. Where most rowers set a ceiling and hope you don’t find it, the R60N is specifically built to be pushed, with a resistance system designed for the kind of high-intensity, high-force training that would have kept Underwood’s handle in one piece.

The cleverness of the R60N is in how it resolves a real limitation that stronger users run into with traditional air rowers. Air resistance is dynamic and honest: the harder you pull, the more resistance you feel, which is exactly the kind of feedback that makes rowing intervals work. The problem is the ceiling. For advanced athletes or anyone chasing high-resistance strength training on the rower, air resistance alone eventually runs out of room. A standard air rower maxes out at around 600N at 25 SPM. Magnetic resistance added on top pushes that number to 900N at the same stroke rate, a 50% jump in peak handle force that opens up explosive power training, high-resistance interval work, and strength-focused sessions that a pure air machine simply cannot support. Levels 1 through 8 preserve the dynamic, effort-responsive air rowing feel entirely, with magnetic resistance gradually layering in above level 8 to extend the range rather than replace the experience.

Brand: MERACH

Click Here to Buy Now: $690 $1099.99 ($409.99 off, use coupon code “YANKO”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

A 32-vane internal fan generates air resistance across levels 1 through 7, scaling naturally with how hard and fast you pull. From level 8 onward, magnetic resistance stacks on top of that air baseline, pushing peak resistance to 900N at 25 SPM. That’s a number worth paying attention to: competitive indoor rowing demands resistance levels that most consumer rowers simply can’t reach, so having a hard ceiling that high gives serious athletes something to actually chase. The 10-level structure also keeps things useful across a range of users, from someone just trying to get their cardio in to someone chasing anaerobic output with the kind of focus Underwood would appreciate.

The 5mm one-piece extruded aluminum monorail keeps the frame planted with zero wobble and supports up to 500 lbs, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds. Most competing rowers under $1,000 cap out somewhere between 300 and 350 lbs, and that structural gap shows up as the flex and shake you feel mid-stroke rather than just a number in a spec table. Monorail construction beats bolted-segment frames here, both in rigidity and in how the machine feels when you’re pulling hard. The visual language reinforces the hardware, with a smoked-black flywheel grille and a minimalist matte-textured finish that looks more at home in a living room than a gym floor. It’s the kind of thing that matters when you don’t have a dedicated workout space and the rower is going to be sitting in full view.

The “N” in R60N stands for Non-Motorized, and it’s one of the more practically useful things about the machine. The console converts your rowing movement into energy to power itself, with four AA batteries on standby purely for the initial startup. There’s no wall outlet to hunt for, no power cord to trip over, and no awkward placement decisions forced by wherever the nearest socket happens to be. The 5.3-inch adjustable anti-glare backlit LCD logs up to 20 local workouts and tracks pro-level metrics including 500m split time, wattage, and SPM curves, alongside time, distance, calories, heart rate, stroke count, average wattage, and drag factor. Bluetooth 5.0 with FTMS protocol support means it plays nicely with third-party training apps too, so you’re not stuck with whatever the onboard console offers.

The seat is anatomically contoured with a coccyx relief groove and thigh-support channels that reduce pressure during long, high-intensity rowing workouts, because nobody wants to tap out early because the seat feels like a park bench. The 16-inch seat height makes getting on and off genuinely easy, especially for injured users or seniors, and the footrests adjust across 7 levels to accommodate different foot sizes without any tools. These are details that tend to get treated as afterthoughts on budget rowers, so having them actually thought through here makes a difference once sessions stretch past the 20-minute mark.

Storage comes down to two steps: the rail detaches quickly into two pieces for compact storage, with an integrated anti-pinch handle built into the joint so you don’t have to worry about catching your fingers. Front-stabilizer transport wheels let you tilt and roll the whole thing rather than carry it, which is the difference between a machine you actually put away and one that just lives permanently in the corner. Workout modes cover Manual, Target Mode where you set a goal and row to it, and an Interval Mode with four pre-set structures and customizable target intervals. That last one is the most directly useful for HIIT: the machine handles the interval counting so you’re not squinting at a phone timer between sprints.

The UltraRow R60N is priced at a discounted $690 and comes with free shipping and a two-year warranty included. A 500 lbs frame, one-piece monorail, non-motorized console, and 900N resistance ceiling would typically push a rower well into the $1,200 to $1,500 range, so the pricing is genuinely competitive for what’s on offer. For the next 30 days, using code YANKO at checkout unlocks the discounted price (down from an MSRP of $1099.99), making it a pretty good time to pull the trigger if a performance-grade home rower has been on the list.

Click Here to Buy Now: $690 $1099.99 ($409.99 off, use coupon code “YANKO”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post This Air-Magnetic Rowing Machine Is Built for HIIT-Level Workouts, Not Just Cardio first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Italian-Designed Glass Hip-Flask Is the Most Thoughtful Gift You Will Find in 2026

Posted on by

The spirits world has spent decades perfecting what goes inside the bottle. The vessel that carries those spirits once you leave home has received considerably less attention. BARKUTAN, a Hong Kong-registered brand with Italian design roots, spent 19 months asking why that gap exists, and the glass hip flask it produced is essentially its answer. The core is lead-free glass, the same material distillers trust to preserve aroma and flavor integrity, wrapped in a removable top-grain leather sleeve that covers every surface of the bottle in a 360-degree embrace.

What separates this from leather-wrapped glass flasks already on the market comes down to how the sleeve attaches. Existing options either glue the leather to the glass permanently, meaning a cracked bottle wastes the whole product, or they use a removable sleeve that only wraps part of the flask. The BARKUTAN design wraps the glass completely and still allows the sleeve to be pulled off entirely, a combination the brand holds a premium patent on. Two capacities are available, 100ml and 210ml, in six leather colors.

Designer: BARKUTAN

Click Here to Buy Now: $109 $159 (31% off). Hurry, only 273/300 left!

At the heart of the BARKUTAN flask is a simple, powerful idea: your drink should taste like your drink. That metallic tang that often comes with a traditional flask is an accepted flaw, but it’s a flaw nonetheless. Using glass as the container material eliminates that issue entirely. Glass is neutral, it’s clean, and it respects the complex profile of a fine beverage. It’s the reason premium drinks are bottled in glass in the first place, so extending that logic to a portable vessel just feels like common sense that’s been a long time coming.

The design details show an obsessive level of thought. A beautiful, convex lens-style window is cut into the leather, letting you check the fill level at a glance. It’s a practical touch that also looks fantastic, sort of like a porthole into your own personal supply. The cap system is equally clever. It uses a combination of cork and silicone liners to create a genuinely leak-proof seal, because no one wants a damp pocket. The cap itself is connected to the flask with a custom snap-button tether, a feature common on metal flasks but rarely seen on glass ones, solving the age-old problem of fumbling with a loose cap outdoors. They even integrated a tiny label slot into the tether, so you can tell your different concoctions apart.

While it’s a great personal accessory, the BARKUTAN really shines as a gift. A flask is a classic choice for groomsmen, graduates, or any special occasion, but the personalization options here take it to another level. Unlike most brands that might offer a simple text engraving, BARKUTAN lets you customize up to four different areas: the leather sleeve, the stainless steel cap, the wooden cap, and even the cap tether’s snap button. With over 300 free templates to choose from, you can add names, dates, or custom emblems to create something truly personal. It already arrives in a premium gift box, so it’s ready to impress right out of the mail.

A great gift is also one that lasts, and this flask is designed for the long haul. The removability of the 360-degree leather sleeve is the main event. It provides full protection, but if the unthinkable happens and you drop it at just the wrong angle, the gift isn’t ruined. You just slide the sleeve off and pop in a new glass insert; every BARKUTAN even ships with a spare. This transforms the flask from a disposable item into a buy-it-for-life piece of gear. That spare wooden cap, full cleaning kit, and extra liners are all part of the package, making it a complete experience from day one.

BARKUTAN is offering the flask in two sizes. There’s a pocket-friendly 100ml version that’s TSA-compliant for your carry-on, perfect for a single responsible serving. Then there’s the larger 210ml flask for longer trips, bigger gatherings, or for those who just have a bit more of a habit to satisfy. Both sizes are available on Kickstarter with Early Bird pricing starting at $109 for the 100ml flask and $125 for the 210ml. You can grab a set with both sizes for $209. The top-grain leather sleeves come in six classic colors: Black, Brown, Dark Brown, Navy Blue, Olive Green, and a rich Cherry Red. The flasks come with a 1-year warranty and lifetime support, which, for a vessel built to be repaired instead of replaced, seems just about right.

Click Here to Buy Now: $109 $159 (31% off). Hurry, only 273/300 left!

The post This Italian-Designed Glass Hip-Flask Is the Most Thoughtful Gift You Will Find in 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Insta360’s foldable drone patent targets DJI Neo 2 at sub-250g

Posted on by

Insta360 built its reputation on cameras that see in every direction at once. It’s literally in their name. The X series made 360-degree capture accessible; the Luna Ultra brought Leica optics to a handheld gimbal. Flying something, though, is a different category of challenge, and the patent images that appeared in July 2026 show the company working through what a foldable drone looks like with Insta360 DNA. The illustrated design at the bottom shows folding arms, a ring-shaped propeller guard, and a dedicated locking mechanism, a form factor that prioritizes the moment of packing away just as much as the moment of takeoff.

DJI’s Neo 2 has the casual drone segment largely to itself in the sub-250g category, with a rigid one-piece frame and a 19-minute flight time that have made it a reliable default for creators who want aerial footage without the complexity of a serious drone setup. Insta360 entering that space would break what has effectively been a two-player market, with Zero Zero Robotics’ HoverAir as the only real alternative. The folding design alone gives Insta360 a structural argument against the Neo 2; a potential 360-degree camera, if it materializes, would give it a creative one. What a wonderful year for foldables, eh? We’re expecting a folding iPhone in September, and Insta360 might give us a folding drone too!

This isn’t just some forum rumor, either. The patent images (from patent file CN223865117U), which started making the rounds on July 16th and were highlighted by outlets like Tech Court, are pretty specific. They show a drone body with the “Insta360” logo stamped on it, with fully folding arms that tuck into the chassis and a distinctive ring-shaped guard protecting the propellers. There’s even a dedicated locking mechanism detailed, which tells you just how seriously they’re taking the whole “fold-and-go” concept. This is a design that screams it was made to be stuffed into a pocket, not carefully placed in a bespoke case.

But here’s the thing: this isn’t Insta360’s first aerial rodeo. Before they decided to put their own name on a drone, they sent in a scout team under the sub-brand Antigravity. The A1 drone they launched was, frankly, a bit of a monster: a sub-249g drone with a wild dual-lens setup that shot 8K 360-degree video and made the drone itself invisible in the footage. It was a spec-sheet beast and a clear shot across DJI’s bow, proving Insta360 had the engineering chops to compete in the sky. It was their way of testing the waters.

Now, it looks like they’re done testing. This new patent is the second, more direct shot. And here’s the kicker: for a company obsessed with 360-degree video, the patent images don’t show a fisheye lens. At all. It’s a huge question mark hanging over the whole project. Are they hiding the tech, or are they planning to launch a drone that, for the first time, doesn’t have their signature feature? If they’re aiming for a rumored sub-$200 price point, leaving the 360 camera on the cutting room floor might be the only way to get there. It’s a move that would be both shocking and, in a weird way, perfectly logical.

You also can’t forget that this is all happening while the two companies are actively suing each other in China. This isn’t friendly competition; it’s a full-blown hardware rivalry. Insta360 came for DJI’s gimbals, tested the drone market with a sub-brand, and is now preparing a direct assault on DJI’s most accessible drone. With a release window expected somewhere between late 2026 and early 2027, we’re not just watching a new product being born. We’re watching the next chapter in a tech soap opera, and it’s about to get very, very interesting.

The post Insta360’s foldable drone patent targets DJI Neo 2 at sub-250g first appeared on Yanko Design.

Stanley doesn’t make gym equipment… but this stylish kettlebell proves it should

Posted on by

Fill a Stanley tumbler with a yogurt-based smoothie from bottom to top and you actually end up getting an arm workout. A 40oz Stanley cup can weigh close to 4lbs or upwards of 1.5 kilograms if filled to the brim with something dense like a smoothie or a thick latte. Jane Morelli just decided that if she was gonna give her arms a workout, why simultaneously rely on ugly looking kettlebells? Morelli superimposed Stanley’s design language onto kettlebells and the result looks just gorgeous.

Every gym equipment I’ve used has looked boringly functional. The kettlebells at my gym come in bright colors, but that’s just a color-code so you know the difference between a lighter and a heavier kettlebell even if the number on it wears off (it almost always does). Morelli’s design merely bridges two worlds together, and I won’t lie – the results look like the most seamless collab ever imagined. My only gripe is, I wish these kettlebells were actually tumblers too!

Designer: Emanuele Jane Morelli

Haute gym equipment might not be a category but these kettlebells definitely make a case for it. Each one is styled with chic curves, and a color palette I’d only expect from companies like Hermès or Stanley. Subtle pastel shades, punctuated by just one hot pink color for the yoga-moms who need their gym equipment to be as flashy as their gym outfits. Each kettlebell has a lacquer-like sheen on it, along with the Stanley logo emblazoned on the front, larger than the weight units below it because that’s what matters more. The style statement.

I get that I can sound a little ironic, but I’m all for brand crossovers. (The only time I really object is when Tesla does stuff like manufacturing vodka or whistles because they seem to be obsessed with side quests and not really making any cars). This one piques my fancy because Stanley isn’t just a social statement, it’s perfect for fitness-freaks too who love chugging protein shakes from their 30-40oz cups, or sharing Strava stats superimposed against their Stanley cups just to paint a picture of how much ‘aura’ they have.

Morelli’s done a pretty remarkable job of simply yet effectively distilling Stanley’s brand language onto a piece of gym equipment, without necessarily caricaturing the Stanley cup’s silhouette. The kettlebells have a separate, distinct character, and the dual-band colors on each individual kettlebell represents a palette that feels distinctly high-fashion yet accessible. Quite like the company’s big, beautiful, nearly indestructible tumblers.

The post Stanley doesn’t make gym equipment… but this stylish kettlebell proves it should first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $79 “No-Laundry” Shirt stays fresh for 30 days without washing, thanks to its engineered fabric

Posted on by

The future keeps finding new ways to make water feel precious. Some of it goes to lawns, some to laundry, some to the AI data center working overtime to generate recipes for vegan, gluten-free, keto brownies made without chocolate. So when a shirt shows up claiming 30 days of wear without a wash cycle, the concept lands with a mix of curiosity, skepticism, and a weird amount of relevance. That curiosity is reasonable. The skepticism, depending on how you feel about a decade of textile engineering research, may not hold up.

HercLéon offers the HercShirt V5.0 in three versions. The Budget model stays smell-free for 3+ days, the Standard version stretches that to 14+ days, and the Max model is the one built for 30+ days between washes. The difference comes down to how many odor-fighting elements are woven into the fabric. Budget uses one, Standard uses four, and Max uses all seven. According to the brand, that seven element system includes copper, silver, zinc, gold, volcanic ash, and two proprietary ingredients, all embedded directly into the shirt rather than applied as a surface treatment.

Designer: Wen Muenyi / HercLéon America

Click Here to Buy Now: $39 $49 (20% off). Hurry, only 21/100 left! Raised over $246,000.

Copper is the shirt’s frontline defense, targeting the bacteria responsible for the locker-room smell that ruins gym gear by day two, with natural antimicrobial properties that have been recognized for centuries and are currently deployed on hospital surfaces to reduce microbial load. Silver handles a second class of odor-causing microbes, and its use in medical dressings and performance textiles makes its role here read as engineering rather than marketing. Zinc addresses the sharper, sulfurous compounds produced during heavy sweating, and because it is gentle on skin and widely used in skincare products, it adds another layer of protection without compromising comfort. Gold supports the performance of the other active elements, helping the smell-control system work together more effectively, and because it is highly stable, it helps the fabric maintain consistent performance across many washes. Volcanic ash absorbs moisture and environmental odors before they settle into the fabric, functioning as a porous internal sponge that traps what it catches until washing can clear it out. The final two elements stay off the published ingredient list, a reasonable call from a brand that has spent years narrowing this formula down to something that works.

Pack one shirt for a week-long trip instead of seven, and you begin to understand what HercLéon is selling, because the whole point of a trip is to have less on your plate, not to check a bag, wait at baggage claim, fight for trunk space, or spend vacation time looking for laundry. The V5.0 is built to hold up from a morning gym session to dinner at eight without a change, covering the kind of full-day travel that defeats most performance shirts by mid-afternoon. Shirt odor itself comes from seven distinct chemical processes, not one, which is why most fabrics may accidentally help with one or two types while the HercShirt was built to address all seven. Off-grid users, healthcare workers, and new parents with no bandwidth for weekly wash cycles all figure into HercLéon’s intended audience, and none of those use cases require a stretch of imagination to map. The shirt’s proposition is fundamentally about reclaiming time and space, two things that clothing has rarely been designed to address this deliberately.

Most performance shirts earn their odor-control claims through surface treatments, finishes applied at production that fade with every wash, while the HercShirt’s active elements are woven in and designed to perform like new for years. That construction choice means the odor control does not follow the same fade curve that makes most performance gear feel ordinary by its tenth wash. Most tees die in the wash rather than from wear, and because the HercShirt is washed far less frequently, it skips the cycle that degrades fabric, with one shirt reportedly outliving roughly seven ordinary tees. The brand estimates the V5.0 goes through around five times fewer wash cycles than a conventional tee across its lifespan, which reframes the premium price as a replacement-cycle calculation rather than a fashion expense. Less washing also means less water, less detergent, and less energy use, which quietly loops back to the resource anxiety the shirt was practically designed to exist inside.

The HercShirt V5.0 is available in three configurations, letting you choose how long you want to go between washes. The entry-level Budget model costs $39 and uses one active element for over three days of wear. For $69, the Standard version steps up to four elements, pushing the wear time to two weeks or more. The top-tier Max model, priced at $79, includes all seven elements and delivers on the full 30-day promise. All versions are designed to be smell-free from the start, with the only difference being their endurance.

Sizing is offered from Small to 4XL for men and Small to 2XL for women. The shirt is currently available in a matte, deep ink black, though a charcoal gray color has also been unlocked, with navy blue, maroon, and forest green planned as future options. For those looking for a more personalized fit, a set of three custom-tailored shirts is available for $399. HercLéon ships internationally to the US, Europe, Japan, and India, among other regions. While delivery for the V5.0 is estimated for November 2026, earlier generations of the HercShirt are currently available for purchase on the company’s website.

Click Here to Buy Now: $39 $49 (20% off). Hurry, only 21/100 left! Raised over $246,000.

The post This $79 “No-Laundry” Shirt stays fresh for 30 days without washing, thanks to its engineered fabric first appeared on Yanko Design.

WWDC 2026, Six Weeks Later: What Actually Shipped

Posted on by

If Liquid Glass is the face of iOS 27, the intensity slider is the part that decides whether that face is wearing reading glasses. Apple never showed it during WWDC 2026, even though it may be the most visually crucial control in the entire redesign. This one setting lets users adjust the strength of the transparency effect system-wide, which means it directly shapes readability, contrast, depth, and the overall vibe of Apple’s biggest interface experiment in years.

That makes its quiet arrival in the public beta feel kind of wild. Apple presented Liquid Glass as a confident design statement, but the slider reveals something more interesting, a design system with a built-in self-correction mechanism. Suddenly the story is not only about what Apple announced on stage. It is about what Apple had to add once the software met real screens, real eyes, and real people who do not want their Control Center looking like a soap bubble.

Designer: Apple

Six weeks separate the WWDC 2026 keynote from iOS 27 Public Beta 2, and in software terms, that is enough time for a lot to shift. Public Beta 1 landed July 13 with the slider and a Siri AI rollout to general users. Beta 2 followed on July 22 with speed improvements, a Screen Time overhaul, and more. Together they paint a picture of iOS 27 that looks noticeably different from what Apple demoed at Apple Park in June.

App icons have been getting the same quiet treatment. Beta builds are shipping with re-layered icons that carry more visual depth than what showed up on stage, tweaking how the foreground and background elements of each icon interact with the glass effect behind them. It reads as subtle in a screenshot and feels significant once you are actually navigating the phone. The whole system carries a different visual weight than the keynote suggested.

Apple built Siri AI on Google’s Gemini, and that partnership is the backbone of the biggest headline in iOS 27. The revamped assistant can hold context across apps, answer open-ended questions, and dig into your emails, messages, and photos to surface relevant information, putting it in genuine competition with ChatGPT and other conversational AI tools for the first time. What the keynote mostly skipped was how that Gemini handoff surfaces visually inside Siri’s UI, what the latency actually feels like, and how different it is from the ChatGPT integration Apple shipped in iOS 18.

Thirty percent faster app launches, 80% faster AirDrop, 70% faster Photos capture loading. Apple is putting some big performance numbers on the table, benchmarked against an iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 26.4.2, which is more specific than the usual “up to” framing with nothing behind it. Whether those gains hold on newer hardware in real daily use is still something beta testers are working out.

macOS 27 Golden Gate is running the same play in parallel, bringing Liquid Glass refinements to the desktop and putting Siri AI inside Spotlight. It also becomes the first macOS to fully drop Intel support and retire Rosetta 2, which is its own headline for a different day. For anyone designing or building for Apple platforms, September is the target, when the stable release lands alongside the iPhone 18 lineup. The betas are the closest thing to a final spec sheet right now, which makes that quiet little slider a pretty loud signal about where Liquid Glass is actually headed.

The post WWDC 2026, Six Weeks Later: What Actually Shipped first appeared on Yanko Design.