Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Google, Amazon, and Sonos All Redesigned Their Smart Speakers, Except Apple

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Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon’s devices division burned through over $25 billion, with Alexa and Echo hardware at the center of almost every bad quarter. The logic had always been that the hardware was just the entry point, a subsidized gateway to a much larger commercial relationship with the customer. But the gateway proved harder to monetize than expected. Alexa stayed useful but shallow. Echo devices multiplied without ever feeling essential. By the mid-2020s, the smart speaker category had the atmosphere of a bet that had come in wrong, expensive, underperforming, and quietly being maintained rather than championed. These fabric-covered cylinders became kitchen furniture, occasionally summoned for timers and weather forecasts, rarely inspiring anyone to rethink the room they lived in.

That atmosphere is lifting in 2026. Google, Amazon, and Sonos are each arriving with hardware that reflects a completely different set of priorities: softer silhouettes, AI that understands context, and audio that adapts to a space rather than simply occupying it. The smart speaker is being redesigned from the object outward, and the convergence across three separate companies suggests something closer to a category-wide correction than a coincidence of product cycles. The one company yet to offer a visible answer to this moment is Apple. It has the custom silicon, the acoustic engineering, and the design heritage to lead this reset. So far, it has chosen to watch.

The freeze began around 2020, right after the category normalized itself into oblivion. By that year, every major player had established its smart speaker lineup: a small version, a premium version, and often a screen-equipped version. Google had the Nest Audio and Nest Mini. Amazon had refined the Echo and Echo Dot into cheap, competent appliances. Apple had shipped the HomePod mini and repositioned the original HomePod as a premium but niche play. The market was saturated, the designs were settled, and the pace of innovation slowed to the rhythm of assistant software updates rather than genuine hardware rethinks. For half a decade, the smart speaker became something people bought once and forgot about. The category was not dead, but it had stopped asking interesting questions about itself.

What is happening now feels like an answer to questions the industry spent years avoiding. The new generation is defined by a shared visual and behavioral language that cuts across competitive lines. Fabrics are softer, volumes are lower, edges are gentler. Google’s latest Home Speaker trades the aggressive branding and hard plastic of earlier models for something that reads more like a domestic object than a gadget. Amazon rebuilt four Echo devices from scratch for its Alexa+ platform, including the new Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio, both of which prioritize touch-first controls and room-blending forms. Sonos pushed the Play and Era 100 SL into the same softer, more architectural territory. These are not coincidental choices. They reflect a collective decision that the smart speaker should feel native to the home, a piece of the room’s fabric rather than an intrusion into it.

The surface redesign only works because the internal proposition has changed too. The smarter pitch in 2026 is about behavior, not specs. AI assistants are becoming more conversational, more capable of understanding context, and in many cases more locally responsive without needing constant cloud reliance. On-device processing means faster reactions and more natural interactions. Room-aware audio tuning means the speaker adapts its output to the acoustics of the space it occupies, rather than blasting a fixed profile into every environment. The result is a device that feels less like a tool you command and more like a presence that integrates into how you use a room. That shift from command-and-response to ambient intelligence is what separates this generation from everything that came before it.

Apple’s absence from this wave is conspicuous, and it lands differently now than it might have two years ago. The company has not publicly joined the 2026 reset in any visible way. Its HomePod and HomePod mini remain comparatively static in a market that is suddenly showing signs of genuine motion. That gap would be easier to dismiss if Apple were not also in the middle of a larger hardware leadership transition. Johny Srouji, who has led Apple’s silicon engineering since 2015, was promoted to Chief Hardware Officer in April 2026, taking control of not just chips but batteries, cameras, sensors, and the full stack of core hardware technologies. Alongside John Ternus, who oversees hardware engineering as Senior Vice President, Srouji is now reshaping Apple’s product roadmap from the silicon up. That internal realignment suggests Apple is rethinking what it builds and why at a structural level, which makes the HomePod silence feel less like neglect and more like a strategic pause.

The question is what that pause means for the smart speaker itself. Apple could be deciding that the category remains secondary to other home devices in its hierarchy, or it could be planning a response that reflects the new leadership’s priorities in ways the current HomePod line does not. If Apple ships a more intelligent, more room-aware, more visibly rethought HomePod in the next twelve months, it will validate the broader industry thesis that smart speakers really are resetting around AI behavior and domestic presence. If it does not, then Apple may be signaling that it sees the smart speaker as a solved accessory category rather than a serious frontier worth heavy investment.

Either way, Apple’s eventual move will tell us more than just what the company thinks about voice assistants. It will reveal whether the smart speaker has genuinely earned a second act or whether the current wave of redesigns from Google, Amazon, and Sonos turns out to be the industry’s last serious attempt to make these devices matter. The category spent years being useful without being essential. The new generation is trying to close that gap. Apple’s decision to join that effort, or not, will be the clearest indication yet of whether the bet is finally worth taking seriously.

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This Leaked $300 LEGO Poké Ball Is the Most Ambitious Pokémon Set Yet, and It Opens Into an Entire World

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Polly Pocket understood something most toys missed. The magic was never the doll, it was the reveal, that little hinged compact snapping open to expose a bedroom, a beach, or a ballroom shrunk down to thumbnail scale. You held an ordinary object in your palm, and then it unfolded into somewhere you wanted to live. Kids in the nineties were obsessed, and the format quietly seeped into everything since, from music boxes to those tiny terrarium necklaces that keep showing up on my feed. The appeal is ancient and reliable. A sealed shell always feels like it might be hiding a whole world, and cracking it open rewards you every time.

Somebody at LEGO has finally applied that exact logic to a Poké Ball, and the images doing the rounds suggest it was worth the wait. I want to be upfront here, because this one has not been officially announced. It surfaced through leaked imagery via the r/Legoleak community, catalogued as set 72154 and titled “Iconic Trainer Moments: Poké Ball.” What the pictures show is a sealed red-and-white sphere that splits cleanly at its equator, the top dome cradling Professor Oak’s laboratory and the lower bowl opening onto a grassy battle clearing where a Pikachu squares off against an Eevee. One object, two folded worlds, and a build that finally makes the Poké Ball do the thing it always promised.

Designer: LEGO

The two halves are arranged with proper storytelling logic, which is my favourite thing about it. The top dome is where every journey starts, Oak’s lab rendered in warm yellow brickwork with three starter Poké Balls lined up on a white counter and the professor himself standing ready to ruin your afternoon with an impossible choice. The lower bowl is the payoff, an actual battle mid-scene on a bed of bright green, with your trainer on one raised platform and a rival in a green cap on the other. Open it top to bottom and you are basically replaying the opening arc of the first game in cross-section.

Down in the lower bowl, the battlefield is built on a raised green platform with rounded studs standing in for grass tufts, tiny red flowers dotting the field, and enough negative space around it that the two minifigures genuinely feel like they are facing off across an arena. The first-ever LEGO Pokémon set to feature actual minifigures, this one has Red in his signature cap and red jacket, Professor Oak in his lab coat with a swoop of grey hair, and a Picnicker in green, alongside brick-built Pikachu and Eevee figures that surfaced in earlier leaks.

The whole thing reportedly runs to 2,343 pieces, though the leaks quibble between 2,339 and 2,386, the sort of pre-announcement wobble that usually settles by launch. That sphere is clearly doing a lot of the structural lifting, given how much of the count never makes it into the diorama you actually want to stare at.

LEGO has not confirmed any of this yet, so treat the details as pencil rather than ink, but the noise points to a first of October release at a fairly hefty $299.99, which would make it one of the priciest Pokémon sets yet. It was apparently pushed back from an August date over production issues, while the rest of the summer wave held firm. My one wish, assuming the reveal lands as expected, is a satisfying, deliberate hinge on that equator seam, because a build like this lives or dies on how good the open-and-close reveal feels in the hand. Get that right, and it is an easy centrepiece.

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This 3-in-1 Qi2 + MagSafe Charging Dock Is the ‘Bedside Clutter Killer’ Apple Never Built

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It has been nearly a decade since Apple stood on stage and showed the world a glimpse of a perfect, seamless charging future. They called it AirPower, a pristine white mat where your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods could all charge together, no matter where you placed them. It was the ultimate expression of the company’s “it just works” philosophy. Then it vanished, becoming a ghost in the machine, a rare public failure that left a gaping hole in their otherwise pristine ecosystem. In the years since, Apple has released a parade of new devices all built for wireless power, yet it has never offered its own solution to charge them all at once, leaving users to fend for themselves in a tangled mess of cables.

This is the chaotic legacy of that broken promise; a nightstand cluttered with a magnetic puck for the phone, a separate dongle for the watch, and a dedicated spot for the AirPods. Into this void steps the ADAM elements Mag 3 Ultra, a device that feels like the pragmatic, real-world answer to the problem Apple created and then ignored. It is a single, intelligent object that consolidates the cornucopia of chargers into one clean, foldable station, while bringing the kind of premium technical muscle Apple never delivered itself, including Qi2 support and up to 25W magnetic fast charging. With a satisfying magnetic click, your entire daily tech trio finds its home, transforming the wire-filled mess into an organized, architectural display. It is the elegant solution the industry had to build for itself.

Designer: ADAM elements

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Built from an aluminum alloy body with a metallic finish, the Mag 3 Ultra arrives in a warm copper-orange colorway that immediately separates it from the sea of matte black and sterile white accessories dominating the category. The geometric form has a considered quality to it, with rounded corners softening the overall profile while the silhouette reads more like a designed desk object than a utility accessory. It looks genuinely at home on a nightstand or a workstation, which is precisely the point.

In its collapsed state, the Mag 3 Ultra folds flat into a compact square barely thicker than a deck of cards, slim enough and light enough to slip into the side pocket of a laptop bag without a second thought. Opening it triggers a proper transformation. The magnetic phone pad rises on an articulated arm, the watch charging ring locks into its position in the middle section, and the base reveals the dedicated AirPods charging zone. The whole structure settles into a stable, deliberate configuration with a hinge that holds its angle without wobble, giving it the kind of solid feel that justifies the premium finish.

ADAM elements designed the phone charging position with a raised elevation that solves one of the quieter frustrations with most wireless stands. The camera module on modern iPhones is substantial, and a poorly designed dock will let it press against the body of the stand, creating an awkward tilt or contact point. The elevated pad here keeps the camera completely clear, allowing the phone to sit flush and properly upright. Magnetic alignment snaps the iPhone into place with MagSafe-level precision, and the stand accommodates both portrait and landscape orientations. That landscape mode makes it genuinely useful as a StandBy display, propped up and charged while serving as a live clock face, notification board, or ambient photo frame.

Beyond simply charging three devices at once, the Mag 3 Ultra brings stronger technical value with support for the latest Qi2 protocol and up to 25W magnetic fast charging, giving it a more serious performance edge than the average bedside dock. The Apple Watch connects to its dedicated charging ring with support for fast charging across newer Apple Watch models, while the base pad handles AirPods with standard Qi wireless that works with any wireless-capable case. All three devices charge simultaneously, without any of them competing for priority or slowing each other down. To maintain that full 25W wireless charging performance consistently, ADAM elements recommends pairing the Mag 3 Ultra with a USB-C power adapter rated at 45W or higher on a single port.

The engineering behind the safety features is also well considered. The Mag 3 Ultra includes FOD, Foreign Object Detection, which prevents the charger from pushing power through metal objects like coins or cards that might accidentally land on the pad, protecting both the station and whatever is sitting on it. Overcharge, overheat, and short-circuit protection round out the suite. A small LED indicator on the phone and earbuds charging area communicates status simply and without fuss; white light for active charging, no light during standby or watch charging, and a flashing blue signal when a foreign object or over-temperature event is detected.

At $109, the Mag 3 Ultra sits in the premium tier of the 3-in-1 charging category, but ADAM elements gives it enough visual personality and technical reassurance to support that positioning. It comes in three finishes, Titanium, Orange, and Gray, each one lending the charger a different mood, from understated and technical to warm and expressive, while the inclusion of a 3-year warranty adds a welcome layer of peace of mind for something designed to live permanently on a desk or nightstand. That range really draws the difference between most regular chargers and the Mag 3 Ultra, because this is exactly the kind of product that stays out in the open every single day, where color, material, and long-term confidence can make the difference between something you tolerate and something that actually belongs in your space.

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Xiaomi launched a $107 compact photo printer while all other tech is becoming expensive

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Xiaomi picked a strange moment to launch cheap hardware, because the global gadget market spent 2024 and early 2025 conditioning buyers to accept higher prices. Phones, laptops, tablets, and wearables all saw price increases between 15 and 30 percent compared to 2022 models, and most brands blamed supply chain costs, component shortages, and inflation without offering much evidence that those factors still applied by mid-2025. Even Apple, which held iPhone pricing relatively steady for years, finally bumped the base iPhone 16 Pro up by $100 in late 2024. The price hikes stuck anyway, largely because competitors moved in unison and consumers had few alternatives. Xiaomi clearly saw an opening in categories where pricing had stagnated rather than spiked, and photo printers fit that description almost perfectly.

The Mijia Desktop Photo Printer 2 launched this week at 699 yuan (about $107) through Xiaomi’s Youpin crowdfunding platform, with a retail price of 799 yuan ($122) planned after the campaign closes. The device uses 4-color dye sublimation printing, supports 4 inch and 6 inch photo sizes, and connects via Bluetooth to phones, tablets, and computers without needing a Wi-Fi network. Xiaomi claims the per-print cost can drop to 0.99 yuan (roughly 14 cents) when using the 4 inch dual-print paper packs in higher-volume bundles, which would make it one of the cheapest per-print options in the compact photo printer category. The Mi Home app adds templates, AR photo playback, ID photo generation, and LUT color filters, leaning into the same app-native feature strategy Xiaomi uses across its smart home lineup.

Designer: Xiaomi

Canon’s Selphy CP1500 typically retails between $140 and $160 depending on region and sales cycles, and HP’s Sprocket models sit in a similar range. Fujifilm’s Instax Share SP-3 launched at $199 and has stayed there for years. None of those companies aggressively cut hardware prices, because photo printer economics depend heavily on consumables revenue. The paper and ribbon cartridges generate steady income long after the hardware sale, so keeping hardware prices high protects the perceived value of those refills. Xiaomi is attacking both sides of that model by undercutting the upfront hardware cost and claiming a per-print expense well below what competitors charge for equivalent output.

The per-print math is where Xiaomi’s really squeezing out the competition. Canon’s RP-108 paper and ink set costs around $40 for 108 4×6 prints, which works out to roughly 37 cents per photo. HP’s Zink paper for the Sprocket runs about 50 cents per 2×3 print, though the smaller format makes direct comparison tricky. Xiaomi’s claimed 14 cent per-print cost assumes you buy the dual-print 4 inch paper packs in bulk, but even the 6 inch professional paper is listed at 2.48 yuan (about 35 cents) per sheet during the crowdfunding campaign. That pricing could shift after launch, but the gap between Xiaomi and the incumbents is wide enough that even a modest increase would still leave Xiaomi ahead.

The Mijia Desktop Photo Printer 2 ships in China first, with no confirmed timeline for international availability. Xiaomi typically tests hardware on the domestic market before deciding whether to expand regionally, so this could stay China-only for months or longer. The bigger question is whether Canon, HP, and Fujifilm respond by cutting prices or whether they hold steady and bet that brand loyalty and distribution advantages keep Xiaomi contained to its home market.

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This Award-Winning Guitar Ditches the Strings, the Frets, and Most of the Body, and I Kind of Love It

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Look at RIFFMATE for a second and try to name what is missing. No strings. No fretboard bristling with metal wire. No solid slab of tonewood. What remains is the silhouette of an electric guitar sketched in mid-air, a skeletal frame that holds the double-cutaway outline everyone recognizes while hollowing out almost everything inside it. Those sweeping arms curving off the body trace exactly where a guitar’s shoulders and horns would sit, and then they float, framing empty space instead of filling it.

It takes real confidence to design an instrument by subtraction, and the RiffmateGT01 pulls it off with a straight face. Built by Shanghai’s Wo Tan Ni Chang Technology with industrial design from LKK Design Beijing, it collapses the guitar into two pieces, a slim touch-strip neck and a central pod holding the speaker, electronics, and acoustic chamber. The neck wears Roman numerals from I to VII where frets used to sit, and you play it by touch rather than by plucking steel. An AI layer shapes the sound and flattens the brutal learning curve that sends most beginners quitting by their fourth barre chord.

Designers: LKK Design Beijing

One-key disassembly lets the neck separate from the body, so the whole instrument folds into a small carry-on bag and clicks back together in seconds. Anyone who has wrestled a guitar into an overhead bin understands why that matters more than it sounds. The shells pop off too, which is where the personality lives, with RIFFMATE rendering in matte black, crisp white, a purple gradient, sunshine yellow, a blue-to-silver fade, and a warm walnut finish. Swapping those panels lets owners recolor the instrument or replace a scuffed part, stretching its lifespan instead of sending it to landfill. Modularity turns the guitar from a fixed object into a system that grows and changes with the person holding it.

The transparent render exposes a properly engineered acoustic cavity inside that central pod, with dedicated internal channels feeding a front-firing driver. That makes RIFFMATE self-amplifying, able to fill a room without an external amp or a tangle of pedals. The body wears a matte frosted texture over soft, rounded contours, sitting closer to a well-resolved Bluetooth speaker than to a slab-bodied Stratocaster. Those friendly surfaces read as age-agnostic, pitched at a curious ten-year-old and a lapsed forty-year-old guitarist alike. The whole object invites handling, exactly what an instrument built to lower the stakes should do.

Smart guitars have inched toward this moment for years, and LAVA did much of the groundwork by wrapping carbon fiber around a built-in touchscreen and turning the instrument into a full software ecosystem. RIFFMATE pushes that lineage somewhere stranger, questioning whether a guitar needs strings or a body at all, and joining a small wave of stringless designs rethinking the form from scratch. The honest caveat is that this remains award-stage industrial design, so we are judging intent and renders rather than a shipping spec sheet. As a vision, it lands as one of the boldest reinterpretations of the guitar to cross my desk in a while. Whether Wo Tan Ni Chang can build the object as beautifully as LKK drew it is the question worth watching.

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Toyota Might Give Us Flying Cars Before GTA 6

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The flying car has spent roughly a century as the world’s most reliable broken promise, forever arriving “in ten years” and forever staying on the concept-render carousel. So it means something that the newest headline reads less like a dream and more like a purchase order. Toyota and Joby Aviation have formalized a manufacturing joint venture, and the language around it is refreshingly unglamorous: productivity, quality, cost, scale. That is the vocabulary of a company that intends to build thousands of these things, not photograph one over a sunset.

The new entity carries the wonderfully bureaucratic name Joby Toyota Aero Manufacturing Preparation Company, with Toyota holding 51 percent and Joby the remaining 49. Toyota takes the majority seat, which tells you who is running the assembly line philosophy here. This is the company that gave the manufacturing world the Toyota Production System, the lean, waste-hunting gospel that reshaped how physical objects get built. Pointing that machine at an aircraft is the whole story. Joby has the eVTOL know-how. Toyota knows how to make the same beautiful object a few thousand times without the quality drifting.

Designers: Toyota & Joby

The aircraft at the center of it, the Joby S4, is genuinely lovely industrial design. Six tilting rotors let it lift straight up like a helicopter, then rotate forward to cruise like a fixed-wing plane, hitting around 200 mph while carrying a pilot and four passengers. All electric, notably quiet, and shaped with the kind of clean surfacing that makes it read as a consumer product rather than a machine. It already earned its party trick in April 2026, when it flew point to point across New York City, lifting from JFK and touching down at Manhattan heliports, compressing a two-hour ground slog into a seven-minute hop over the traffic.

None of this fell out of the sky. Toyota has quietly stood behind Joby since 2019, pouring in roughly 894 million dollars across the years to become the startup’s largest external shareholder. The relationship moving from checkbook to shared factory floor is the tell. Pilot production of the S4 is already underway at Joby’s Marina, California base, with the joint venture built to carry the company across the brutal gap between “we certified a prototype” and “we deliver at scale,” the exact chasm where most eVTOL dreams quietly die.

There are real hurdles left, chiefly FAA type certification for passenger flights, and the sky-taxi economics still have to prove themselves against a plain old ride to the airport. But when the planet’s most disciplined manufacturer takes a controlling stake in the most recognizable air taxi on Earth, the era of the render is closing. The flying car finally has a factory, a founder-run partner, and a boss who talks about lean production instead of moonshots. That is how the future usually arrives, not with a bang, but with a build sheet.

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This Presenter Remote Will Replace Your Mouse, Mic, AI Translator, and USB-C Hub

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The modern workflow is often a series of disconnected actions; typing in one window, clicking in another, and plugging in peripherals just to get started. What’s missing is a central instrument to orchestrate it all, a kind of conductor’s baton for our digital lives. Such a tool would need to do more than just advance a slide; it would need to capture spoken ideas, summon information on command, and translate language in real time, all from a single, intuitive point of control.

This is the thinking embodied in the PowerRider P1, a device that adopts the familiar form of a presentation remote for a far more ambitious purpose. Its slender, metallic body is designed to feel like a natural extension of the hand, but its power lies in consolidating complex tasks into simple actions. A dedicated AI button puts a language model in your palm, ready for quick queries. The integrated microphone turns the device into a voice input tool for instant transcription, while the clever detachable receiver doubles as a complete connectivity hub for power and video.

Designer: EGIOZR Tech

Click Here to Buy Now: $139 $199 (30% off). Hurry, only 18/100 left!

The PowerRider handles the fundamentals of presentation control with a modern upgrade. Traditional laser pointers work fine in a physical room, but they become invisible the moment you share your screen over a video call. The P1 addresses this with five digital highlight modes that appear directly on the shared display, visible to every participant regardless of how they’re viewing. These modes include a digital spotlight, a magnifier for fine details, and an annotation tool for marking up slides in real time. The device still includes a physical red laser for in-person settings, rated for visibility up to 100 meters, but the digital tools are clearly designed for the hybrid meeting environment that has become standard.

Artificial intelligence is woven throughout the device, accessible through a single button press. The AI feature connects to GPT-5 through the companion AI ONE software, offering 14 dedicated productivity categories that range from document conversion and mind mapping to code assistance and image analysis. You can ask questions, generate presentation content, or get real-time help while you’re speaking. The company has made a point of offering this AI access without monthly subscription fees, providing free tokens for everyday use. That decision removes one of the usual friction points with AI-powered hardware, where the upfront purchase is followed by ongoing costs.

Voice input mirrors something we’ve seen in smart remotes for TVs – except now it’s a work productivity feature. The PowerRider captures spoken words and converts them to text in over 50 languages, allowing you to dictate notes, emails, or meeting minutes without stopping your workflow. Real-time translation extends this further, making it possible to present to multilingual audiences with live interpretation. The built-in microphone also serves as a backup audio input for meetings, projecting your voice through any connected speaker system. This transforms the presenter into a wireless microphone when needed, a useful feature for larger rooms or when laptop microphones fall short.

The detachable receiver plugs into a USB-C port and acts as a wireless bridge to the presenter, but it also functions as a compact hub. The receiver supports 4K video output at 60Hz, 100W power delivery for laptop charging, USB-A data transfer, and a standard audio jack. This means you can connect a display, charge your laptop, and maintain wireless control with a single palm-sized dongle. It eliminates the need for a separate dock during presentations, consolidating connectivity into the same system that controls your slides.

The PowerRider weighs 63 grams, light enough to disappear in your hand during long sessions. A small LCD display on the body shows battery level, connectivity status, microphone activity, and the current time, providing at-a-glance information without needing to check your computer. The 280mAh battery delivers up to 10 hours of active use and can remain on standby for a full week. Wireless range extends to 10 meters, using either Bluetooth or 2.4GHz connectivity depending on your preference. Both modes can be toggled with a physical switch, offering flexibility for different environments and compatibility needs.

The device runs on Windows 10, Windows 11, and macOS 13 or later, covering the majority of professional users. It connects to monitors, televisions, and projectors without additional adapters, and the included accessories provide everything needed to get started. The package contains the presenter, the hub receiver, a protective travel case, USB-C and USB-A cables, and a card reader adapter for file transfers.

The PowerRider P1 is available now with early pricing starting at $139, a 30 percent reduction from its standard retail price of $199. A two-pack bundle is offered at $269, and a three-pack configuration reaches $415. Optional add-ons include power adapters ranging from 65W to 140W and an 8K HDMI cable for high-resolution setups. Shipping is calculated at $12 for most regions, with fulfillment expected to begin in October 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $139 $199 (30% off). Hurry, only 18/100 left!

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GoPro Just Crammed 6 Cameras Into One 50MP Sensor, And It Starts At $499

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Framework laptops let you swap the motherboard. Fairphone lets you replace the battery with a coin. Teenage Engineering builds entire product ecosystems around interoperability. Somewhere between the maker-movement idealism of the mid-2010s and the sustainability push of the pandemic years, modularity graduated from hobbyist curiosity to a legitimate consumer electronics strategy. Now GoPro has quietly joined that movement, and almost nobody has noticed because the packaging looks like a standard product launch.

The MISSION 1 lineup contains six distinct configurations built around a single hardware core: a 50MP 1-inch sensor and GP3 processor, wrapped in a rugged compact body waterproof to 20 meters. There’s the base MISSION 1, the MISSION 1 PRO, the PRO Grip Edition, the PRO ILS with a Micro Four Thirds mount, the PRO Creator Edition, and the PRO Ultimate Creator Edition. Preorders opened May 21, 2026, with the ILS and Creator variants shipping in Q3. Pricing wasn’t announced at launch, which is its own kind of tell. What GoPro has actually built here is a hardware platform wearing the clothes of a product line.

Designer: GoPro

The base MISSION 1 caps at 4K120 Open Gate and 8K30 in 16:9, positioned for creators who want the new sensor without paying flagship money. The MISSION 1 PRO unlocks 8K60, 4K240, and 1080p960 slow motion, all recorded in 10-bit with the GP Log2 profile for grading headroom. The PRO Grip Edition bundles a dedicated handle for run-and-gun work. The Creator and Ultimate Creator Editions add production accessories aimed at YouTubers who want a boxed kit rather than a shopping list. Every variant shares the same 14-stop dynamic range, the same 32-bit float audio, and the same waterproofing without an external housing. Firmware caps and bundled accessories, in other words, do all the heavy lifting across five of the six SKUs.

Micro Four Thirds compatibility on the PRO ILS is where the platform argument stops being subtle. The mount opens the door to hundreds of existing lenses from Panasonic, OM System, Sigma, Voigtländer, and Laowa, meaning GoPro inherits nearly two decades of glass engineering without designing a single optical element themselves. HyperSmooth stabilization keeps working with any rectilinear prime, which is genuinely wild given how stabilization algorithms usually assume a fixed lens with known distortion characteristics. The body stays waterproof despite the mechanical mount, which required custom sealing work that GoPro has been notably quiet about. This is Framework’s motherboard-swap philosophy transplanted into a category where interchangeable parts were reserved for cameras that cost five times more. MFT also carries mature adapters for Canon EF, Nikon F, and PL cinema glass, quietly extending the effective lens library into the thousands.

Six SKUs from a single sensor line is also a hedge, and a smart one. If the ILS flops with videographers because Blackmagic and Panasonic own that mindshare, the base MISSION 1 still sells to adventure creators on brand recognition alone. If 8K60 pricing scares off the semi-pro tier, the 4K120 base model catches the mid-market. The recent industry chatter that GoPro may be for sale following the MISSION 1 pivot reads very differently through this lens. Whether Nicholas Woodman is building for the next decade or quietly pitching to potential acquirers like DJI or Sony, a modular platform tells a far more compelling story than a single hero product ever could. The action camera market that GoPro invented has been eating itself for years, and platforms tend to survive longer than products in categories that are actively contracting.

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Who is Apple’s New Chief Hardware Officer: Meet Johny Srouji, The Man Shaping Apple’s Roadmap

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Every great Apple product from the last thirty years came out of a partnership. Steve Jobs had Jony Ive, a designer with more operational power than anyone at Apple except Jobs himself. Tim Cook inherited that dynamic in 2011, and over the next fifteen years the industrial design studio slowly lost its seat at the executive table, with finance and operations gaining a larger say over product direction. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has described the current studio as a shell of what it used to be, briefed by other teams rather than briefing them. That is the Apple John Ternus takes over on September 1, 2026, and his choice of number two says everything about where the next decade is headed.

Johny Srouji became Apple’s Chief Hardware Officer on April 20, 2026, a title that did not exist a day earlier. The role folds Apple’s hardware engineering group, previously run by Ternus himself, into the hardware technologies organization Srouji has led since 2015. He now controls silicon, batteries, cameras, sensors, displays, storage controllers, cellular modems, product design engineering, and every reliability lab in Cupertino. Ternus is his only boss, which effectively makes Srouji operational number two at a four trillion dollar company. The last time one Apple executive held this much hardware authority, Steve Jobs was still alive and Bob Mansfield was running the show.

Srouji was born in 1964 in Haifa, the third of four children in a middle-class Arab Christian family, his father a carpenter who built casting molds by trade. He studied computer science at Technion, graduating summa cum laude on his bachelor’s and magna cum laude on his master’s. Before Apple came calling, he had already done processor design at Intel Austin and managed IBM’s POWER7 CPU. Bob Mansfield recruited him in 2008 to build a chip Apple did not yet know how to design, which became the A4 that launched inside the first iPad and iPhone 4. Colleagues describe him as no-nonsense, allergic to technical vagueness, and unwilling to accept anything less than the hard truth about what silicon can and cannot do.

Every A-series and M-series chip you have ever used came out of Srouji’s org. His team pulled off the 64-bit A7 in 2013 that caught Qualcomm completely flat-footed, then engineered the M1 transition in 2020 that made Intel Macs obsolete overnight. Apple’s whole vertical integration story, the one that lets a MacBook Air outperform Windows laptops twice its price on battery life, is essentially his life’s work. His team also introduced the Neural Engine in 2017 with the A11 Bionic, quietly laying the groundwork for on-device AI half a decade before the industry decided AI was a talking point. The man who liberated Apple from Intel’s silicon almost got poached by Intel to be their CEO in 2019.

Ive read Dieter Rams and treated industrial design as the ordering principle of a product, sketching an object first and asking engineering to solve for it. Srouji operates from the opposite pole, treating silicon as the ordering principle and letting form factor, material, and thermal envelope adapt to what the chip can do at what power draw. The $599 MacBook Neo Apple launched in March 2026 is the perfect case study, because it only exists as a product because the A18 Pro from last year’s iPhone 16 Pro became efficient enough to run macOS without cooking itself or eating the battery. Ternus led the keynote and got the credit, but Srouji built the runway. That reframing of where design begins, at the wafer rather than the render, is the first coherent thesis about form and function anyone has articulated at Apple since Ive walked out in 2019.

Ternus and Srouji together cover the full stack from atom to product enclosure, which is the tightest hardware leadership Apple has run since Jobs, Ive, and Jon Rubinstein were setting product direction from the same conference room. Srouji has already started restructuring aggressively, splitting hardware into five groups and moving product design authority from veteran VP Kate Bergeron to Shelly Goldberg on Mac and Dave Pakula on Watch, iPad, and AirPods. He has also stood up a new Ecosystems Platforms and Partnerships team led by Matt Costello and Kevin Lynch, the latter of whom runs Apple’s still-secret robotics group. In his internal memo to staff, Srouji wrote that he intends to deepen integration between the silicon teams and the product-creating teams. Translation: the chip designers will now sit closer to the people deciding what the next iPhone actually looks like.

Everyone keeps asking whether Ternus and Srouji will turn Apple into a Xiaomi or Samsung style product factory, launching sub-brands and price tiers across every possible category. I don’t think that is where this goes. Xiaomi wins on volume and value engineering, Samsung wins on being first to try every new form factor, and Apple under Srouji looks positioned to do something closer to the Jobs-era iPod strategy: one core capability, several related form factors, each tuned to a different lifestyle. AI camera glasses in 2027, camera-equipped AirPods, a rumored wearable pendant, a HomePad with a swiveling display, and a foldable iPhone all sit on the same roadmap, and they are fundamentally the same argument as iPod versus Nano versus Shuffle was in 2005. Discipline stays intact, but the surface area for hardware expands into whatever new form the current silicon can actually support without turning your pocket into a hand warmer.

Srouji’s promotion is Apple’s bet that AI-era consumer devices will be won by whoever can co-design chip, sensor, battery, and enclosure as a single integrated object. That is a bet Apple can uniquely make because it already owns the whole stack, and one that Meta, Google, and even OpenAI (currently building its own hardware future with Ive, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan poached straight out of Cupertino) still cannot fully replicate. The risk sits on the software side, where Apple’s own AI models trail rivals and Siri keeps getting delayed for reasons nobody at Apple wants to explain in public. Srouji cannot fix that himself. What he can do is make sure that whenever Apple finally ships a competent generative model, the hardware waiting to receive it has been designed around what the model actually needs, rather than retrofitted around it after launch.

The post Who is Apple’s New Chief Hardware Officer: Meet Johny Srouji, The Man Shaping Apple’s Roadmap first appeared on Yanko Design.

We’re Officially in the Titanium Travel Case Era, Soft-Shell Suitcases Had a Decent Run…

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Pull up the baggage carousel at any major international airport and you will see a parade of soft-shell fabric or hard-shell plastic cases, most of them a muted color palette, most of them indistinguishable from one another, most of them showcasing the abuse of frequent travel (a massive scratch here, ripped fabric there, disintegrated airline stickers, cracked wheels that creak when dragged). That is the baseline the travel industry has accepted for decades. The expectation has been function within limits, not function beyond them.

Titaner’s Voyager arrives as the carry-on that resets that expectation entirely. The 20-inch titanium shell is ribbed with chevron patterning that doubles as structural reinforcement, sealed without a single zipper on its exterior, and coated with a hydrophobic treatment that sends water beading off its surface. Designed for travelers who see their gear as long-term equipment rather than seasonal accessories, it signals a broader shift in what premium carry-ons are supposed to be made of.

Designer: Titaner

Click Here to Buy Now: $579 $1079 ($500 off). Hurry, only 19/290 left! Raised over $336,000.

The shell physically, visually, practically, and literally sets the Voyager apart from any other travel carry you’ve currently got stowed underneath your bed or in your closet. Made from Grade 1 pure titanium, the kind typically reserved for aerospace applications and medical implants, the Voyager carries the same corrosion resistance and impact tolerance that have made the material legendary in other industries. Titanium does not rust, does not dent easily, and ages with a patina that adds character rather than degradation. The angled chevron texture machined across its surface does three things at once: it creates visual drama, it distributes impact force across a wider structural field, and it hides minor surface wear far better than a polished or matte finish ever could. This is luggage that looks more refined the longer you own it.

The zipperless body is where Titaner makes its clearest departure from conventional luggage logic. Most hard-shell cases still rely on zipper closures because they are familiar, flexible, and cheap to manufacture. They are also the first thing to fail under repeated stress. The Voyager uses a continuous waterproof gasket seal instead, wrapping the entire case perimeter in a material that keeps rain out and dust at bay. Pop the latches, and the case opens in two clean halves with a 180-degree flat lay. No zipper teeth to snag. No fabric track to tear. Just a mechanical hinge and a seal that either works or it does not. It is the kind of decision that makes soft-shell luggage feel like it was designed around cost, not longevity.

Travel is a series of small interactions repeated hundreds of times: extending the handle, rolling through terminals, lifting it into overhead bins, setting it down on uneven pavement. Titaner has refined each one. The telescoping handle uses a 13-stage adjustment system with no visible punch holes running down the tube, which means a cleaner visual line and a mechanism that locks at every height with a button press at the base. The handle grip itself uses a slow-return damper, so when you let go, it eases back into place instead of snapping against the shell. The eight independent spinner wheels are modular, which means if one gets damaged after years of airport abuse, you replace that single wheel instead of the entire case. Underneath, a spider-web reinforcement structure distributes the stress from each wheel across the corner assembly, so no single impact point can compromise the frame. Even the side feet are trapezoidal, designed to keep the case stable when stood upright and lifted without effort when you need to move it.

Inside, the Voyager offers a layout most frequent travelers will recognize: dual compression straps, zippered divider panels, interior pockets on both halves. The lining is stain-resistant and wipes clean. But the real interior innovation is the optional Waterproof Vault, a removable airtight inner bag with a triple-side zipper seal. Cameras, drones, passports, medication, anything that cannot afford even brief water exposure gets sealed inside. The vault can also be fitted with modular foam inserts for shock protection, turning the Voyager into a hybrid between a carry-on and a protective equipment case. It is the kind of feature that expands the product’s identity beyond clothing transport into the realm of gear protection, where soft-shell luggage has never been able to compete.

What Titaner has done with the Voyager is take the material obsession and mechanical precision that defined its EDC products (pens, multi-tools, pocket knives) and scaled that philosophy up to travel dimensions. The result feels less like luggage in the traditional sense and more like a precision mobility tool. It is cabin-approved at 20 inches, light enough to lift with one hand despite the titanium construction, and visually distinct enough that you will spot it on a carousel from across the terminal. The chevron-patterned shell catches light at angles soft fabric never could. The hardware has the same machined confidence you would expect from a high-end knife or watch. Travelers who have spent years cycling through polycarbonate shells and torn nylon cases will recognize this as something different: a carry-on designed to outlast your travel habits, not replace them every few seasons.

The Titaner Voyager is currently available at $579, discounted over the $1079 MSRP for the base 20-inch carry-on in titanium, with options to add the Waterproof Vault module and additional accessories. The campaign ships internationally, with estimated delivery starting in late 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $579 $1079 ($500 off). Hurry, only 19/290 left! Raised over $336,000.

The post We’re Officially in the Titanium Travel Case Era, Soft-Shell Suitcases Had a Decent Run… first appeared on Yanko Design.