Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

The First Tracker With a Working USB-C Leash: Hands-on with Belkin SureFind Loop Cable Tag at IFA 2026

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No tracker on the market ships with an actual leash. Apple’s AirTag is a stud, so you buy a separate keychain loop just to hang it on anything. Chipolo is a disc with a small aperture punched into the edge. Google’s new Pixel Tag is a plain little monolith with the same problem. Samsung and Tile at least had the sense to build in a substantially wide hole or channel so you could pass a carabiner or leash of your own through it, which is basically an admission that they knew the leash was missing and left the job to you. Belkin’s SureFind Loop Cable Tag is the first one that just builds the leash in, and then goes one further: that leash is a working USB-C to USB-C cable you can unclip and use to charge the tag itself, or your phone, or literally anything else with a USB-C port.

It costs $24.99, weighs almost nothing, and the cable snaps back into the tag’s body to top off the 120mAh cell inside once you are done borrowing it. A rep on the IFA show floor in Berlin told me to expect roughly six to nine months of tracking per charge, a number Belkin has not put in writing anywhere yet. The tag itself is a flat white teardrop with one button, a status LED, and it is certified for both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub so it does not care which phone tribe you belong to. It ships in September across the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific. Europe, where Belkin just showed it off, does not get to buy it at all.

Designer: Belkin

A braided USB-C cable and a fabric carry strap are already built from the same material logic, a length of reinforced cord with a connector at each end, and Belkin’s actual design move was refusing to treat those as two separate problems. The loop threads through a bag handle or backpack zipper, clips shut with a small sliding toggle, and unclips into a functioning charging cable the moment you need one. Belkin has spent years making the loops and holders other brands’ trackers needed just to attach to anything, so the fact that this idea sat unbuilt for that long, inside a company with decades of cable manufacturing behind it, says more about industry habit than about engineering difficulty. Sometimes the obvious fix just needs someone willing to stop selling the workaround.

Using the cable means unclipping the tag from whatever it was hanging on, so the tracker stops tracking the thing it was tied to for as long as you are borrowing the cable to charge a phone at an airport gate. That is a fair compromise for most people most of the time, but Belkin’s marketing does not mention it, and a design this clever should be able to admit its own limits. There is also no published IP rating for this specific model, unlike the SureFind Card, which carries IP68 and can survive a dunk in water. A tag meant for backpacks and luggage sitting on tarmacs in the rain probably deserved that spec sheet line too.

Dual certification for Apple Find My and Google Find Hub means you can buy the tag without worrying about which ecosystem you’re in. However, it’s worth noting that you have to choose one ecosystem to tether your device to. If you’re an Apple guy, you configure it with Find My. If you’re team Android, stick to Google’s offering. Belkin is entering a crowded field days after Apple’s AirTag 2 and ahead of Google’s own Pixel Tag, both of which still lean on separate keychain accessories to attach to anything. Chipolo and Pebblebee already proved rechargeable trackers work and do not need replacement coin cells. Belkin took that idea and folded a second function into the strap itself, a leash that charges things instead of just hanging them. How that holds up outside a Berlin show floor, across the actual months of use it is being asked to survive, is the open question.

The post The First Tracker With a Working USB-C Leash: Hands-on with Belkin SureFind Loop Cable Tag at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Anker MindBase Gives Your Old eufy Cameras a Real Brain and 48TB of Memory: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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If you already own eufy cameras, the useful sentence in Anker’s IFA 2026 announcement is buried under the AI talk: your HomeBase S380 footage transfers straight across to the MindBase. Anker built the new hub to work with the eufy security gear people bought years ago, then bolted on a two-bay drive enclosure holding up to 48TB and a 26 TOPS compute card running an in-house language model locally. Your old cameras stay. They get a brain. That is a far rarer offer than a new camera, and considerably cheaper than replacing four of them.

The scale of what it absorbs is the part worth sitting with. MindBase acts as a Matter 1.5 controller with Thread and Zigbee support built in, and it works alongside HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant and Home Assistant rather than replacing any of them. It supports 20 cameras and 34 sensors, close to 100 Anker devices, and hundreds of third-party Matter products. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports and three USB 3.0 ports handle the wiring, with 64GB of onboard flash before you add a single drive. Anker wants to be the thing everything else plugs into, not another gadget competing for shelf space.

Designer: Anker

Getting there meant Anker had to kill its own family tree. eufy, soundcore, SOLIX and eufyMake are all being folded into the Anker name over the next couple of years, split into two groups called Anker For You and Anker For Home. CEO Steven Yang put it plainly on stage: category brands made sense when categories were separate, and they no longer are. Anker opened its first standalone store in Berlin the same week. A box asking to be the single brain of your house cannot credibly sit next to four differently branded limbs feeding it data, so the limbs had to go.

Physically, MindBase is trying to solve a problem NAS makers have ignored for two decades. Synology and QNAP enclosures still read as networking equipment, built for a closet, not a living room shelf. Anker’s two-bay chassis takes standard 3.5-inch drives and is styled to sit in the open, which is a real design bet given that spinning disks and a compute card generate heat that needs somewhere to go. Anker Innovations speaker Eric Villines framed the whole product around a gap that has bugged smart home owners for years: our houses are connected, not intelligent. A rule-based sensor cannot tell a raccoon from your kid, and MindBase’s pitch is that local memory finally lets it.

The security agent shows how far Anker is willing to let the box act alone. A yard sensor spots strangers at 15 meters and identifies family by phone credential at 30, then MindBase escalates on its own from a light, to a verbal warning, to active deterrence. For context, an entry-level Copilot+ laptop carries 40 TOPS and mostly uses it for background blur in video calls. Anker is asking for less silicon to make judgment calls about who belongs in your driveway at 2am, which is either the most useful application of on-device AI I have seen this year or the one I would want a very clear off switch for.

None of it has a price or a ship date yet, which is an odd silence for the product Anker built its entire rebrand around. Nest, Ring and Aqara are all circling the same local-hub idea without the drive bay, and that storage layer is MindBase’s real differentiator if Anker can actually ship it at a price regular households will pay. Whether the eufy hardware you already own is enough reason to wait and see is the only honest cliffhanger this launch leaves behind.

The post Anker MindBase Gives Your Old eufy Cameras a Real Brain and 48TB of Memory: Hands-on at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $119 Ultrasonic Cutter Sense Materials And Auto-Adjusts To Cut EVA Foam, Resin, PLA 3D Prints

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There are power tools, and then there are smart tools. A power tool gives you brute force; a smart tool gives you controlled, consistent results. Think of a simple drill that just spins versus one that manages its own torque to avoid stripping a screw. For delicate work like trimming EVA foam for a cosplay project or cleaning up support structures on a 3D print, you definitely want the smart one. The problem is, most handheld cutters are pretty basic, giving you one speed and just hoping for the best.

The SonicMax Slice 10 is aiming for that higher IQ. It’s a cordless ultrasonic cutter that senses the material you’re cutting and adjusts its own power output in real time. Slice through dense plastic and it pushes harder; trim the thin walls of a resin print and it eases back. This adaptive system, combined with cooling that prevents heat-related power drops, makes it feel like proper workshop equipment in the palm of your hand. It runs at 40kHz, delivers up to 50 watts of dynamic peak power, and does all of this without a single cable getting in your way.

Designer: SonicMax

Click Here to Buy Now: $119 $215 (45% off). Hurry, only 13/500 left! Raised over $124,000.

Most ultrasonic cutters on the market use transducers with a mechanical quality factor, or Qm, somewhere between 150 and 250. A higher Qm means the transducer converts electrical energy into vibration more efficiently, which directly translates to less heat generated during use. SonicMax claims a Qm of over 500 for the Slice 10, and lab data backs that up with a verified measurement of 541.1. That’s roughly two to three times higher than a typical competing tool, and it’s the foundational reason the Slice 10 can sustain longer sessions without thermal drama. That single transducer decision cascades into everything else, from runtime and cut quality to how comfortable the tool actually stays in your hand.

As the blade meets resistance, the Slice 10’s Smart Material Auto-Detection reads that feedback and adjusts power output and vibration frequency without you touching anything. Cutting through a stiff chunk of EVA foam feels different from trimming the thin walls of a resin print, and the tool responds to each material accordingly. You’re not locked into a fixed setting that works okay for most things but perfectly for nothing. The system also preserves cut quality across a long session, where material resistance can shift as the blade warms. The result is consistent cuts from the first pass to the last, regardless of what you’re running the blade through.

Heat is the reason most cordless ultrasonic cutters force you to stop every five to ten minutes, and the Slice 10 attacks that problem from two directions. Corded bench tools sidestep this issue by drawing steady power and dissipating heat more easily, but you give all of that up the moment you cut the cord. The high-efficiency transducer generates less heat from the start, and the built-in active cooling fan manages whatever thermal load does build up during a session. Overheat protection kicks in automatically at 80 degrees Celsius at the motherboard level, so the tool protects itself without you having to babysit it. You only appreciate how good this is after you’ve spent a session on a cutter that kept shutting itself off on you mid-cut.

A 5000mAh 21700 lithium-ion battery powers the Slice 10, and SonicMax made it user-replaceable, which you’ll end up appreciating far more than any spec sheet number. The 21700 is a high-performance cell format found in premium flashlights and power tools, so sourcing replacements from SonicMax or compatible third-party brands should never be a problem. SonicMax’s own branded replacement cell is rated for 500 charge cycles at 80% capacity retention, a reasonable lifespan for a tool you’re actually putting to work regularly. An 18W USB-C pass-through charging system brings it from zero to full in about 70 minutes, and the tool keeps running while plugged in. Claimed runtime sits at up to four hours, and when you run low mid-project, swapping in a spare takes seconds.

Blade choice gives the Slice 10 a lot of its bench-tool personality. SonicMax offers five blade styles that let the same handheld body take on very different jobs: a Standard Utility Blade for everyday trimming, a Precision Long Blade for tighter access and more delicate reach, a Fine Chisel Blade for careful cleanup work, a Heavy Duty Chisel Blade for more aggressive material removal, and a Wide Flat Scraper Blade for broader surface work. That range matters because it turns the Slice 10 into something closer to a compact cutting system than a one-trick knife. If you’re the kind of maker who bounces between foam, plastic, supports, edges, and surface cleanup in the same afternoon, this is where the tool starts looking properly versatile.

Lift-to-Activate sensing turns the tool on when you pick it up and off when you set it down, keeping your fingers away from controls mid-session and preventing accidental activation on the bench. A small OLED display shows real-time power output and battery level, so you’re never left guessing how much runtime remains. Built-in LED lighting illuminates the cut line, which sounds like a minor detail until you’re trying to trace a clean edge on a dark-colored print at your desk at some ungodly hour. Auto-shutdown kicks in after five minutes of idle, and low-battery protection activates before the cell drops to a damaging voltage. Together, these details make the Slice 10 feel like a tool that respects your workflow rather than constantly asking you to manage it.

The Slice 10 measures 260.5mm long and 28mm across, weighing 236 grams, keeping it firmly in single-hand, pen-grip territory across long sessions. Just the Slice 10 is available for a discounted $119, and ships with 10 replaceable Standard Utility blades. Upgrade to the Maker’s Bundle for $169 and you get the Slice 10 along with 50 blades spread across the five blade profiles (standard, precision long, fine chisel, heavy duty chisel, and flat scraper) as well as a 5000mAh replacement battery. If you’re looking for versatility and pushing your prints to the max, the $50 price bump does bring a fair share of value. You can also buy extra blades and batteries as add-ons. Shipping is expected to begin mid-October 2026 with worldwide delivery available, and SonicMax has not publicly confirmed warranty terms at the time of writing.

Click Here to Buy Now: $119 $215 (45% off). Hurry, only 13/500 left! Raised over $124,000.

The post This $119 Ultrasonic Cutter Sense Materials And Auto-Adjusts To Cut EVA Foam, Resin, PLA 3D Prints first appeared on Yanko Design.

Unofficial Audi A8 Concept Keeps Classic Sedan Proportions and a Traditional Grille

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The Audi A8 died in early 2026, quietly, the way flagships die now. Order books shut in Germany, production wound down, and the Q9 SUV inherited the crown after the A8 managed 1,406 US sales in a year the Q8 did 10,881. Audi swears a fifth generation arrives around 2030. Luca Serafini apparently decided four years is a long time to sit around, so he built one himself. His version borrows the Concept C’s monolithic surfacing and four-element light signature, then quietly refuses the vertical Singleframe, running a full-width horizontal bar with the four rings lit at center instead, plus twin exhausts in the diffuser.

Everything else on the car is doing less on purpose. Six-spoke wheels with cross-drilled discs behind them, blacked-out pillars, flush glass, a shoulder line so soft you have to hunt for it, and a titanium-silver finish borrowed straight from Concept C’s anodized aluminum look. Those illuminated rings front and rear go dark the second any regulator sees them, and the front overhang is shorter than crash structure would ever allow. Neither problem makes the renders less convincing. They just mark exactly where a designer stopped negotiating with reality.

Designer: Luca Serafini, LS Design

The vertical Singleframe remains the most argued-about thing Audi has done in a decade, and Serafini declines it outright. Massimo Frascella built that upright slab for the Concept C by reaching back to the 1936 Auto Union Type C and the 2004 A6, and when we spent forty minutes with the car in Munich it absolutely worked at roadster scale. Stretch the same face across five-plus meters of limousine, though, and authority starts sliding toward novelty toothpaste tube. What replaces it is a wide horizontal aperture with the rings glowing dead center, flanked by the four-element light graphic Audi now uses front and rear. Autoevolution called the result tame. I’d call it a designer knowing what a big car’s face has to do.

Audi built the slipperiest sedan on the planet in 1982 by bonding the side glass flush with the bodywork, hitting a drag coefficient of 0.30 and calling itself the aerodynamics world champion. Forty-four years later the same instinct gets rebranded as radical simplicity. Serafini’s A8 runs the C3 playbook almost literally, with flush glazing, no visible door handles, blacked-out pillars, and a body carrying zero character lines. The whole surface works on volume and reflection alone, which is the hardest thing to pull off in car design and the easiest to botch. Broad rear haunches and a near-vertical Kamm tail keep it from reading as a bar of soap.

Twin oval outlets sit in the black rear diffuser, which rules out any A8 e-tron reading immediately. That looks prophetic rather than backward-facing, given Audi scrapped its 2033 combustion cutoff and then dropped the 987-hp Nuvolari, a 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 with three axial-flux motors and a 10,000 rpm redline, in the exact year it once promised to go electric-only. A green vertical accent in the lower intake muddles the story slightly, since it reads like a charge-status indicator on a car with tailpipes. Serafini has been running Concept C surfacing across an imaginary Audi lineup since last September, covering an SUV, a hot hatch, an A2 revival and an R8 Spyder. This flagship is his second run at the A8.

Frascella’s rule now is that Audi shows nothing it cannot build, which makes independent work like this the only place ambition still runs unsupervised. Serafini works in Blender, 3DS Max and Unreal with AI in the pipeline, so the images are staged rather than surfaced from production CAD, and a few details fall apart under close reading. His Ferrari single seater from yesterday had the same quality, gorgeous and structurally impossible in roughly equal measure. What this A8 proves is that the segment’s problem was never the shape. Audi walked away from the sedan because buyers did, and a car this composed makes that math feel like a shame.

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Miele’s G8 Dishwasher Photographs Your Dirty Dishes Before Auto-Selecting The Cycle: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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Miele’s new G8 Diamond snaps a photo of your dirty dishes before it washes them. The moment the door swings toward shut, a light inside blinks on, a camera grabs one frame, the light dies, and the AutoVision system studies what it caught. If it sees a bottle, it calls up BottleClean and drives the spray harder. If it sees a pot, the cleaning intensity climbs. If it sees plastics, it runs the new hot air drying harder, because plastic containers are famously terrible at drying themselves. Miele showed it for the first time at IFA 2026 in Berlin, and it lands in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in April 2027.

A camera in a dishwasher makes the headline, but the memory is what makes the design. The G8 holds onto that bottle it clocked at breakfast, so stacking dinner plates on top of it by eight in the evening changes nothing. Layer in AutoDos and its PowerDisk granulate, measuring out its own detergent since 2018, then set an app rule that says wait until 80 percent full and never before 10pm, and the machine stops consulting you altogether. Miele has spent decades selling dishwashers on the promise that they scrub so you do not have to. This one wants to think so you do not have to.

Designer: Miele

Here’s the part that actually impressed me. AutoVision doesn’t run a video feed you can scrub through in the app. It fires once, right as the door clicks shut, and the machine works from that single image for the entire cycle. Load a wine bottle at breakfast, stack it under a mountain of lunch plates by evening, and the G8 still treats it as a bottle, because it saw it once and that was enough. The only real caveat came from Miele’s own team at IFA: keep bottles roughly central and pots in the lower basket, since the spray arm still struggles to reach the far corners. Vision only helps if the water can follow it there.

What makes this genuinely new isn’t the word AI, which every appliance brand at IFA 2026 was throwing around like confetti. Most of those claims are turbidity sensors, the kind that read how murky the wash water has become and adjust accordingly. LG’s SenseClean works that way, and Samsung has filed similarly around soil detection. A turbidity sensor knows the water is dirty. It has no idea why. Miele’s camera identifies the actual object sitting in the rack, a considerably harder computer vision problem, and one that both LG and Bosch have patented around for years without shipping a consumer dishwasher built on it. Miele is putting an object-recognition camera inside a box you can buy next spring, not just inside a patent filing.

Around that camera sits a decade of quieter automation finally clicking into place. AutoDos, with its PowerDisk granulate, has been dosing detergent on its own since 2018, and Miele still claims nobody else in the category offers true automatic dispensing. ExcellentDry adds a hot air system with three fixed levels, chosen once and then applied forever, aimed squarely at the plastic containers that usually come out of a cycle still damp at the base. The cutlery drawer becomes a genuine third tier, one side droppable for coffee cups, and a new touch display replaces the old dial logic. Set the app to run only past 10pm and only above 80 percent full, or tie it to your solar output, and the dishwasher stops asking permission for anything.

None of this works if you don’t trust the camera’s judgment, and Miele knows it. “Intelligence can be programmed. Trust has to be earned,” said Dr. Axel Kniehl, the company’s Executive Director of Marketing and Sales, at the IFA press conference, and it’s the one line from the whole reveal that actually admits the stakes. AutoVision only functions if enabled by the user, according to Miele’s own release, which suggests it ships switched off by default. Fair enough. Handing a machine the authority to decide how hard to scrub your grandmother’s pans is a bigger ask than letting it dose its own detergent, and Miele seems to know it needs to earn that permission slowly rather than assume it.

The G8 Diamond won’t reach a single kitchen before April 2027, and even then only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so everything here is still a promise rather than a lived-in product. But the promise is the interesting part. For a century, appliance makers competed on how much physical labor they could remove. Miele is the first one at this scale betting the next fight is over who you trust to make the fifty tiny decisions labor never touched in the first place.

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Kellogg’s Hired a Designer to Make Your Cereal’s Crackling Louder — and It’s Gloriously Weird

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Whether you’re a milk-before-cereal guy or a cereal-before-milk guy (the only correct process btw), there’s an undeniable component about the cereal-eating experience that almost everyone takes for granted. That slight crackle and pop sound as the cereal’s air-pockets burst to get filled with milk. It’s a pretty simple yet fundamental auditory feedback that your cereal-eating experience would feel incomplete without. Seriously, imagine pouring milk into your cereal and dead silence, I guarantee you, it wouldn’t feel good.

That snap/crackle is such a core part of the cereal eating journey that Dominic Wilcox designed a bowl that amplifies the sound. If it sounds weird in theory, it absolutely is, and Wilcox isn’t one to shy away from weird inventions (including headphones that swap your left and right ears with each other so everything sounds strange). The aptly named “Snap, Crackle, and Pop amplification cereal bowl” is one such invention that leans into Wilcox’s need to chase the absurd. Designed to look like a gramophone, this bowl puts a microphone to your cereal, enhancing the musical journey you embark on every breakfast.

Designer: Dominic Wilcox

The cereal bowl was commissioned by Kellogg’s as a part of their challenge to make breakfast more interesting. While most people would simply put puzzles on a cereal box to keep kids occupied, this weird contraption tickles their fancy by leaning into the kind of chaos children tend to love. The bowl comes with a horn on top, and a knob on the rim. Load your cereal, add the milk, flip the on switch, and a microphone captures the audio, playing it through the speaker unit built into the horn. The volume knob lets you dial up or down the noise… and I can only assume there’s a battery somewhere in the base that needs charging every few days.

Needless to say, the Snap, Crackle and Pop amplification cereal bowl works with all types of cereal (as well as all types of milk). Just go about your breakfast the way you normally would, and listen to the gentle white noise of your cereal turning soggy. If you want to be even more unhinged, swap the milk out with soda and you’ll hear fizzing sounds too. Your dentist will hate me, but do it for the plot!

The post Kellogg’s Hired a Designer to Make Your Cereal’s Crackling Louder — and It’s Gloriously Weird first appeared on Yanko Design.

We just reinvented Phablets: Huawei’s Wide-body Pura X View feels oddly nostalgic to the touch

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Seventy percent of Samsung’s record 1.44 million Galaxy Z8 series pre-orders went to the wide 4:3 model over the traditional tall one, a number that makes product planners cancel their afternoon meetings. Huawei saw it coming. The Pura X View, launched in China on August 20, is a slab phone with a 16:9.5 screen, no hinge, 6.68mm of thickness, and a 7,000mAh battery packed into 201 grams. Run the panel geometry and the body lands near 144 by 86mm, which is essentially the 2011 Galaxy Note’s 146.9 by 83mm with fifteen years of thinning applied on top. The first phablet just came back, and it skipped the hinge entirely.

Huawei shipped its first 16:10 phone in March 2025, roughly seventeen months before Samsung’s wide Fold 8 and eighteen before Apple’s expected iPhone Ultra. That head start counts for plenty editorially and almost nothing commercially, because the Pura X View runs HarmonyOS 7 without Google services and has no confirmed launch outside China. The width also brings a problem nobody involved has solved yet. Fold 8 reviewers keep flagging that one-handed typing on a wide cover screen demands a thumb stretch most people just do not have. Huawei is asking you to live inside that stretch full time, with no fold to escape into.

Designer: Huawei

I keep coming back to the battery number because it should not work the way it does. Cramming 7,000mAh into a 6.68mm body usually means a phone that feels like a coaster, but Huawei leaned on the extra width instead of stacking cells vertically, and the reported silicon-carbon anode chemistry lets the pack sit flatter than lithium-ion ever could. The screen-to-body math backs it up too, a claimed 96.1 percent with bezels measured at a uniform 1.05mm on all four sides, which is tighter framing than most flagships bother chasing. Around back, Huawei kept the pill-shaped camera bar and striped texture from the Pura X Max, so this reads as a family member rather than a one-off experiment.

The historical parallel only gets stranger the closer you look at it. Samsung built the Galaxy Note on a 16:10 panel in 2011 specifically because it read and wrote better than 16:9, and that logic held until the LG G6 and Galaxy S8 dragged the entire industry toward 18:9 in 2017. At the start of that year, over 95 percent of phones sold still ran 16:9. Within about eighteen months it had nearly vanished, replaced by taller and taller screens that eventually made “phablet” sound like a word from a dead language. At 1.68:1, the Pura X View is actually squatter than any of those old 16:9 phones, closer in spirit to the doomed Dell Streak than to the Note it resembles in the hand.

None of this makes the Pura X View an easy recommendation, and I would rather say that upfront than let the nostalgia do all the talking. Pricing remains unconfirmed, early Chinese estimates swing wildly between 4,499 and 7,500 yuan, and Huawei has a recent history of catching real backlash over Pura pricing. There is also no path to a Google-services version, which locks most of the world out regardless of cost. What the Pura X View does prove is that the tall screen was never physics, just a decade of consensus that Samsung and Apple are now both quietly abandoning. We covered the Pura X Max when it doubled down on this same wide logic inside a folding body, and the View feels like Huawei betting the shape works even better without the crease.

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Dyson’s $499 Camera Toothbrush Is So Advanced, They Had To Redesign The Toothpaste For It

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Dyson’s new $499 CameraJet hides a 1mm camera under the brush head, reading 28 images a second, and within 100 milliseconds of spotting a gap between your teeth it fires a cone of mouthrinse straight into it. That single lens is why Dyson also had to formulate its own non-foaming toothpaste, because bubbles blind a camera. It is also why the 12.5ml tank runs a diaphragm pump and pressure chamber, so the jet still fires when you tilt the handle sideways to reach your back molars. One optical decision rewrote the rest of the product. That cascade is the actual story here, and it is a lovely bit of design logic.

James Dyson unveiled it in Paris this morning, capping six years of work, 661 engineers and 38 patents. The vision system is called Gap Optical Targeting, trained on 470,000 dental images and running 16 million lines of code, all so a toothbrush can find the spaces nine in ten of us never floss. It ships today at $499, or £419.99 in the UK, in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink. You also get a dock that refills the tank in three seconds and RFID brush heads that count their own cleans. Every one of those parts exists because somebody decided the brush should be able to see.

Designer: Dyson

The jet took years of refinement on its own, because the shape of the water matters as much as the camera aiming it. Traditional water flossers use what Dyson calls a needle jet, a narrow, piercing stream that punches through a plaque deposit without actually lifting it away. Dyson’s engineers went hunting for a shape that would sweep plaque off the tooth instead of tunneling through it, and landed on a broad conical spray fired at lower pressure. To test that idea without running a clinical trial every time they tweaked the nozzle, Dyson spent five years building its own synthetic plaque with the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Dentistry. That is the unglamorous groundwork that never makes the keynote slide but decides whether the whole idea holds up.

None of that fluid engineering matters if the tank runs dry the moment you tilt your head back, which is the next problem the camera created. Conventional reservoirs use a straw-in-a-cup setup that draws air and loses pressure on an angle, fine for a kitchen gadget, useless inside a mouth that never sits still. Dyson’s fix is the anti-gravity tank, built around a pump that adjusts as you move so the jet fires whether the brush is upright, angled, or flat against a back molar. The brush head carries its own logic too, firmer bristles inside for stains, softer ones outside for the gumline, contoured to actually hug a tooth rather than sit flat against it. Even the sonic oscillation varies its angle mid-stroke so bristles do not stall in the tighter corners.

The camera does double duty as a diagnostic tool, streaming live through the MyDyson app so the brush briefly becomes a tiny endoscope. Dyson says nothing is recorded or stored, on the device or in the cloud, and a light on the handle shows when the lens is active. Cameras inside toothbrushes are not new. A Chicago dentist named Craig Kohler built one back in 2016 called the Prophix, a video-streaming brush that let people watch their own mouths on an iPhone in real time. It never went mainstream, and its own website still reads coming soon, a decade on. What Dyson brings that Prophix never had is the industrial muscle to turn that footage into an automated response, steering a jet instead of just showing a picture.

Dyson CameraJet in situ imagery, JPEG, PSD

Dyson has spent decades arguing that the dirt you cannot see is the dirt worth engineering around, first in carpets, then in bathroom air, now in the gap between your incisors. The CameraJet is that philosophy at its smallest scale yet, a lens standing in for the clear bin that made a bagless vacuum’s dust visible for the first time. What makes it worth writing about as design, rather than just as gadgetry, is how completely one sensor reorganized everything around it, the chemistry of the paste, the physics of the pump, the shape of the bristle. That is a rare thing to see fully worked through in an object that costs less than a laptop. Whether $499 buys cleaner teeth is a question for your dentist in six months. Whether it buys a masterclass in constraint driven design is not really a question at all.

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xTool O1 Omni UV Printer Prints on Wood, Metal, Glass, and Your T-Shirts, All From One Desktop Machine

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When a desktop printer moves 6,000 units and clears $20 million in revenue on day one, something is clearly going on beyond the usual pre-launch hype cycle. The xTool O1 Omni Printer is a 4-in-1 desktop system merging UV, DTG, DTF, and UV DTF printing in one modular machine, a combination that previously required four separate devices and considerable floor space. For years, creators have been burdened by fragmented workflows, forced to buy separate, single-purpose machines for rigid substrates and textiles. Desktop UV printing has been one of the more notable maker-market stories of 2026, and the O1 is making a clear bid for category leadership. The central design proposition is capability consolidation, and day-one sales suggest it landed with the right people.

Units have already begun shipping, turning pre-order momentum into machines arriving at actual studios and workshops. On August 27, the first offline debut of the O1 Embroidery happened at the Next Level Conference x xTool SMB Summit, where live demos will give attendees their first hands-on encounter with the platform’s textile and dimensional output. That event was a deliberate venue choice: the Summit brings together the small business creative community the O1 is built for, and debuting the embroidery capability there sends a clear signal about where xTool sees the product’s core application. Three editions run from $1,899 for the Single UV configuration to $2,999 for the full UV + Fabric hybrid. The modular dual-printhead system is the engineering decision that holds the entire consolidation promise together.

Designer: XTOOL

Click Here to Buy Now: $1899 $2499 ($600 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The dual-printhead architecture is what separates the O1 from every desktop printer in its class, operating more like a configurable platform than a fixed device. Users can run dual UV printheads for layered effects and accelerated throughput, or swap in a fabric printhead to shift between hard goods and garment workflows on the same machine. UV output covers wood, acrylic, glass, and metal with raised 3D texture effects up to 7mm deep, supported by a 2,000-plus texture library. The fabric side handles DTG and DTF workflows, including on curved and irregular surfaces, with an OEKO-TEX certified system that survives 50-plus washes without fading. A Rotary Attachment extends the platform to cylindrical objects like tumblers, with Automated 3D Modeling covering 90% of mainstream shapes for a 1:1 design preview before printing.

Positioning accuracy is delivered by xTool’s Pixel-Scan Vision System, combining Line Laser Altimetry and CIS Scanning. A Laser-Guided Auto-Focus detects each object’s highest point before printing, eliminating printhead collisions on uneven surfaces. Unlike traditional distorted fish-eye cameras, the 1:1 Distortion-Free CIS Scanning offers close-range, high-definition scans with zero dead zones, powering a jigless “Drop & Print” workflow that removes alignment jigs from the equation, which is a more meaningful time-saver than it sounds in an actual production environment. xTool Studio’s AI Contour Recognition instantly identifies irregular shapes to fill designs perfectly while automatically avoiding holes like camera cutouts. The Laser + UV Seamless Workflow lets users laser-cut a workpiece and move it to the O1, where the software automatically recognizes and aligns the print with zero manual recalibration.

Three editions cover the full range from single-mode UV to full hybrid, priced between $1,899 and $2,999, with each tier differentiated by workflow rather than arbitrary specs. The entry-level UV Edition at $1,899 targets rigid material personalization across wood, acrylic, glass, and metal. The Dual-Head UV Edition at $2,899 adds fluorescent neon inks for blacklight effects and specialized soft and hard white inks for materials like leather. The UV + Fabric Edition at $2,999 is the full cross-category hybrid, covering both hard goods and garment workflows through the OEKO-TEX certified fabric system. All three share the Pixel-Scan Vision System and xTool Studio, keeping the intelligence layer consistent across the lineup.

UV printing at the studio scale has historically required dedicated ventilation and careful ink handling, which kept the workflow inside commercial print shops. The O1 uses GREENGUARD-certified, non-reprotoxic inks and an advanced built-in air filtration system to eliminate odors in home studios. SmartCycle 2.0 automates routine care to prevent clogging, offering 14-day vacation-ready support that lets users step away with confidence and return to a machine that is ready to run. The Dual-Head UV Edition adds specialized flexible white inks, expanding the material list to leather goods and flexible substrates. Taken together, these decisions position the O1 as a machine built to live in a real creative workspace, not parked in the back corner of a commercial print shop.

The O1 Embroidery made its first public hands-on appearance at the Next Level Conference x xTool SMB Summit on August 27, putting the platform’s most dimensional textile output in front of the small business creators it is built for. Desktop UV printing has heated up considerably in 2026, with machines like the eufyMake E1 generating real market attention, and the O1 is making a clear bid for the consolidation position in that category. The 6,000-unit, $20 million day-one performance signals the market was ready for this hardware category long before the product arrived. Explore the full xTool O1 Omni Printer lineup and configure your edition at xTool’s website.

Click Here to Buy Now: $1899 $2499 ($600 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post xTool O1 Omni UV Printer Prints on Wood, Metal, Glass, and Your T-Shirts, All From One Desktop Machine first appeared on Yanko Design.

No Halo, Just Pure Sculpture: The Ferrari F1 Concept That Looks Too Good for 2026 Rules

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Back in 2015, Ferrari’s own Centro Stile design studio floated a wild pitch: what if F1 cars actually looked cool again, without breaking a single technical regulation? They called it the F1 Concept, gave it a twin deck front wing and bodywork wrapped around the wheels like a second skin, and then, predictably, nothing happened with it. Formula 1 kept getting bigger, heavier, and angrier looking, right up until the FIA finally admitted the cars needed a diet for 2026. A decade later, an Italian designer working out of Modena picked that argument back up and ran with it, and honestly, he might have done Ferrari’s own studio one better.

The car comes from Luca Serafini, who runs LS Design and has spent years building a body of work out of asking what Ferrari would look like if the brand trusted its instincts a little more. He is the same designer behind last year’s alternative take on the 849 Testarossa, done with 3D modeler Aldo Russo, where he argued the goal was updating a heritage cue’s logic rather than copying its shape. That same instinct shows up here. This single seater takes the open wheel racer silhouette everyone knows from Sunday afternoons and smooths it into something closer to sculpture, ditching the sponsor decals and the visual noise of a modern grid car entirely.

Designer: Luca Serafini, LS Design

The front wheels get faired into flowing bodywork that flows straight back into the sidepods, while the rears stay fully exposed on yellow banded slicks, which is the whole thesis of the car in one glance. Everywhere else, the surfacing does something almost nobody in real motorsport bothers with anymore. Instead of vanes, barge boards, and serrated flics doing the aerodynamic talking, one unbroken red volume falls from the nose through a soft shoulder into the rear haunch, like the whole car got poured rather than assembled from a parts bin. The black splitter, floor, and rear wing sit underneath like a visible chassis holding the sculpture up.

There is no halo here, which will be the first thing any F1 fan notices. In its place sits a swept structural screen bridging the cockpit opening, more IndyCar aeroscreen than F1 safety cage, with a periscope style airbox scoop rising behind the driver’s head that feels pulled straight out of the 1970s. It is a gorgeous solution and also the most fragile part of the whole pitch, since real single seater regulations exist specifically because open cockpits keep taking hits from flying debris.

Every render is staged inside an actual Ferrari garage, wet pit apron and all, with mechanics crouched over tire guns and Pirelli racks lined up against the wall like this car is minutes from a real session. The Rosso Corsa paint carries a white central spine from nose to airbox, reading more like a 1960s prototype stripe than anything you would see sponsored on a modern grid. Five spoke centerlock wheels, blue center nuts, a swan neck rear wing. It is close enough to real that you start forgetting it was never built to survive contact with the actual rulebook.

That rulebook, as it happens, just got rewritten against this exact silhouette. The 2026 regulations specifically remove the wheel arch fairings that curved over the front tires on recent cars, bringing barge boards back to manage the wake those fairings used to hide. Minimum weight drops thirty kilograms, wheelbase shrinks two hundred millimeters, and every gram of that smooth, appendage free bodywork Serafini drew would cost real lap time on a real circuit. None of that makes the car worse to look at. It just means this is a styling argument dressed up as a race car, not the other way around, and it happens to be a better looking argument than anything currently sitting on the actual 2026 grid.

We have seen designers wrestle with cockpit safety before, including Olcay Tuncay Karabulut’s closed canopy F1 concept we covered a while back, which tackled the same halo problem from the opposite direction. Serafini’s screen splits the difference between that fully enclosed canopy and the open halo drivers race with today, and it does not fully solve either car’s problem. What it does is remind you how much personality F1 gave up chasing regulation compliance, one flap and winglet at a time.

The post No Halo, Just Pure Sculpture: The Ferrari F1 Concept That Looks Too Good for 2026 Rules first appeared on Yanko Design.