Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

ASUS ROG Spatha X 65K: The Heavy MMO Mouse That Comes With Its Own Museum Dock

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The ROG Spatha X 65K comes with a charging dock, and the dock is doing four jobs. It’s the 2.4 GHz receiver, the charger, a battery status readout with a toggle button on the back, and an angled plinth that holds the mouse nose-up like a museum piece. Fifteen minutes parked on it gets you 25 hours of gaming, which is roughly one very poor decision about bedtime.

The mouse it holds is worth the pedestal. ASUS revived its MMO flagship at Gamescom 2026 with 12 programmable buttons, a 65,000 dpi AimPoint Pro sensor, hot-swappable Push-Fit Socket III switches, and a 126-gram body that takes two 10-gram weights across five front, center, and rear configurations. On the same stage, ASUS also showed the 56-gram Gladius IV Ace. One brand, one day, two completely opposite theories of what a mouse should weigh.

Designer: ASUS Republic of Gamers

Two 10-gram modules and three mounting positions produce the five configurations ASUS advertises: bare at 126 grams, a single weight sitting front, center, or rear at 136, and both installed at 146. Three of those five options weigh exactly the same amount. What changes between them is the center of gravity, which moves the pivot point when you swing from the wrist. ASUS built a balance system and marketed it as a weight system, which undersells the more useful half. Anyone who has shimmed a mouse with coins and electrical tape will recognize the intent immediately.

Angular, deliberately mismatched thumb buttons arranged in the outline of the ROG eye carry straight over from the 2015 original, and ASUS says so out loud rather than pretending the shape is new. No two buttons in that cluster share a profile, so your thumb identifies them by edge geometry instead of counting positions. The side grip carries a Mayan-inspired pattern pressed into the surface, and the primary buttons are dished so fingertips settle into them. Eleven years on, that thumb logic holds up better than most ergonomic thinking from its era.

Nobody plays above 3,200 dpi, so the 65,000 figure exists to sit on a box next to a competitor’s smaller number. The upgrade that actually changes how the mouse behaves is the 11 preset lift-off distances, which matter enormously for a device built around low-sensitivity sweeping across a large pad. Repositioning a 126-gram body means lifting it constantly, and a badly calibrated lift-off turns every reset into a cursor jump. ASUS spent the engineering where it counts, then wrote the press release around the other thing. Standard industry practice, and mildly annoying every time.

Worn-out clicks kill more mice than dead sensors do, which makes Push-Fit Socket III the feature most likely to still matter in three years. The box ships with a switch tweezer, two spare ROG Silent Micro Switches, a PTFE feet set, and grip tape. The default ROG Micro Switch II is rated at 100 million clicks and the silent option at 50 million, with third-party switches dropping in within a few minutes. Configuration runs through Gear Link in a browser, so no Armoury Crate install is required. Anyone who has fought that software will read this as an apology.

ASUS has announced no price, no release date, no color beyond black, and no total battery life, which is a conspicuous omission for a device this heavy on radio duty. At 137mm long and 126 grams before you add anything, it also rules out small hands entirely. The 2021 Spatha X landed near $150, so budget accordingly and expect a premium on top of that. For a mouse asking you to push nearly a third of a pound around all evening, I’d want the runtime figure in writing before committing. The dock is beautiful. It should not have to work that hard.

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This ceiling fan hides an 80W Hi-Fi speaker and smart lighting in one sleek unit

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You get light from above. You get wind from above too. So at some point, somebody was bound to ask the obvious next question, why not sound from above as well? Ceiling fans have spent years quietly doing side quests with built-in lamps, remote controls, and the occasional smart feature, but this feels like the first time one has aimed for proper living room territory. The lamp-plus-fan combo has always felt like a polite upgrade to an appliance nobody was particularly excited about.

WindGroove’s AirFi One takes that idea and runs with it, folding a Hi-Fi audio system, atmospheric lighting, and airflow into a single ceiling-mounted fixture. The audio setup is co-developed with Jamo, the Danish speaker brand founded in 1968, which gives the whole thing considerably more credibility than your average gadget trying to do five jobs at once. It’s one of those products that sounds slightly absurd for about three seconds, right up until you realize how much floor space your speakers and fans have been stealing this whole time.

Brand: WindGroove

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

Putting a speaker inside a spinning mechanical system is, acoustically speaking, a problem that mostly did not exist before. Motors generate vibration, and that vibration travels through metal housings and mounting hardware until it finds a speaker driver to rattle. At higher fan speeds, the blades also create periodic air pressure variations at blade-pass frequency, a rhythmic pulse that can cause a speaker cone to flutter and introduce distortion into the output. Positioning the speaker overhead compounds the issue further, because the ceiling acts as a large reflective surface, creating phase cancellation and comb filtering effects where certain frequencies pile up while others cancel out. Nailing clean Hi-Fi sound out of a product that is also spinning at variable speeds, mounted above a live listening environment, is a genuinely impressive engineering feat.

WindGroove’s entire design thesis rests on one idea: technology should dissolve into the room, not announce itself from it. Making that happen acoustically meant solving real engineering problems, because a spinning motor introduces vibration into a speaker chassis and rotating blades create periodic air pressure pulses that can rattle a driver into distortion. Intelligent DSP processing that corrects for ceiling reflection and overhead projection in real time is WindGroove’s most elegant solution, allowing the speaker to disappear into the architecture and still fill a room properly. Total harmonic distortion is rated at 1% or below, keeping music sounding like music rather than like hardware working hard. A motor running at under 32 decibels reduces mechanical vibration at the source, so the DSP has considerably less chaos to correct for.

Jamo has been building musically balanced speakers rooted in Scandinavian design since 1968, and that acoustic philosophy is what WindGroove borrowed for the tuning here. The 80W 3-way setup, twin 15W mid-high drivers plus a dedicated 50W subwoofer, carries real Hi-Fi ambitions rather than the polite background-audio compromise most integrated appliances settle for. Frequency response runs from 45Hz to 20kHz, wide enough to cover genuine bass texture and crisp high-frequency clarity across the full spectrum of recorded music. Bringing in a heritage audio brand rather than speccing the cheapest available driver stack reflects WindGroove’s conviction that invisible technology still needs to perform at the highest level when you actually sit down and listen. Putting a Jamo-tuned 80W Hi-Fi system inside a ceiling fan is the kind of product decision that only makes sense if you believe the room should come first, and the hardware should figure itself out.

The fan boasts a maximum airflow of 4621 CFM at under 32 decibels, quiet enough to run while music is playing without competing with it, and the blade direction reverses seasonally so the unit pulls its weight year-round. The dual-zone lighting system combines everyday illumination with immersive ambience. The lower section serves as the primary light source, providing bright, even illumination for the entire room. You can choose from three color temperatures – warm white for a cozy, relaxing glow, natural white for comfortable everyday lighting, or cool white for a crisp, energizing feel. Stepless dimming lets you fine-tune the brightness to suit everything from winding down at night to working, reading, or getting ready in the morning.

Picture a Friday evening where you dim the lights, the room shifts to a warm amber glow, the fan hums almost imperceptibly overhead, and the music you put on actually sounds like the artist intended it to. No speaker on a shelf eating into the bookcase. No standing fan taking up the corner you always meant to do something with. No three apps open at once trying to get everything to behave. The ceiling handles it, and the room just feels right in a way that is surprisingly hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.

AirFi One is priced at $499 at retail and is available for purchase right now on WindGroove’s website.. Sure, you could just duct-tape a Bluetooth speaker to your fan and call it a day – but having an 80W sound system built into your ceiling fan isn’t something everyone can boast of.

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate

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Daewoo’s Rose Portable Iron collapses into the profile of a classic clothes iron, except there’s no soleplate anywhere on it. The red dome is a 550kPa steam head that never touches your shirt, and the whole assembly parks on a desk in the footprint of a sheet of A4 paper. The black wand tucks flat against the body when you’re done, closing everything into one clean shape instead of leaving cords and heads scattered around. Fold it up and you get a glossy red teardrop that looks like it belongs on a shelf next to your hats and cufflinks, not shoved in a closet with the vacuum. It might be the best looking iron I have ever laid eyes on, full stop.

That’s kind of the point. Ironing has looked the same since your grandmother’s era, hot metal, heavy arm, burnt fingertips optional. Daewoo took the silhouette everyone recognizes and gutted the inside, swapping pressure for a fine mist of high pressure steam that hovers over the fabric instead of flattening it. The project comes out of Guangdong Daewoo’s in-house design team under Wang Jun, and it won Top Design honors in the Home Appliances: Small category at the 2025 European Product Design Award, a competition that judges shipping products rather than sketches. It’s a weird little magic trick, and somebody clearly thought it deserved a trophy for pulling it off.

Designer: Guangdong Daewoo Design Team

Design history has a name for this trick, skeuomorphism, when a new object borrows the shape of what it’s replacing so people instinctively know what to do with it. Digital cameras kept the shutter click, and early e-readers animated a page turn, small gestures borrowed from objects they were busy erasing. The Rose runs that instinct backward, keeping the exact wedge shape of a clothes iron even though nothing inside actually presses fabric anymore. It’s a strange kind of respect for a shape nobody thinks about, right up until someone guts everything underneath it and leaves the outline alone on purpose. The result looks familiar enough to trust and strange enough to stop your thumb mid-scroll.

Inside that dome is the actual news. A 550kPa pressurized system pushes steam through five stages of vaporization, dense enough to punch through fabric fibers without soaking them, so clothes come out warm and dry rather than damp. Daewoo’s own demo shows the head steaming a balloon without popping it, which is either a fun party trick or genuinely reassuring if you own anything silk. Five modes tune temperature and steam volume by fabric, running from 110°C for silk up to 210°C for wool, with a narrower precision tip built for touchy spots like coat buttons. None of that matters if the thing scorches your favorite shirt, but on paper, it is built to avoid exactly that.

The original Daewoo chaebol collapsed into bankruptcy in 1999, and this badge now belongs to Guangdong Daewoo, a licensed China based operation with a Korean trading office attached. That is not a knock on the product, plenty of legacy names live second lives this way, but the actual design credit sits with Wang Jun’s team, not the vintage logo. It is also a corded, mains powered unit rather than a battery gadget, so portable here means light enough to carry across a room, not cordless freedom. It currently ships only in China across a small ladder of trims, working out to roughly 140 to 196 dollars depending on exchange rate. No release outside China is confirmed yet, so importing one means budgeting for a plug adapter and a converter.

Most appliance makers chasing “reinvented” just bolt a screen onto something and call it smart. Daewoo instead looked at the single most recognizable silhouette in the laundry room and asked what would happen if everything under it changed while the outline stayed put. The answer folds down to the size of a sheet of paper and looks better on a dresser than most speakers do. Whether it actually out-irons a cheap steamer from the drugstore is a separate question nobody outside a Guangdong test lab has fully answered, but as a piece of industrial design humor, it is hard not to grin at.

The post Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate first appeared on Yanko Design.

Your Child’s First Lambo Could Be This $3,995 Yellow Stroller – And It’s Rarer Than Most Supercars

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Your kid will own a Lamborghini roughly forty years before you do, and it will cost you $3,995 to make that happen. Silver Cross and Automobili Lamborghini just launched the Reef AL Giallo, a limited-run stroller finished in the yellow that made the Miura famous. Only 500 exist worldwide. Each one carries a numbered plaque in the footplate, the way limited-run supercars carry chassis numbers. It launched today, August 27, and it closes out a partnership that started with an orange version back in 2025.

Silver Cross has been building prams in Yorkshire since 1877, which makes it eleven years older than the internal combustion car business it just partnered with. The company was known for decades as the Rolls-Royce of prams, supplying George VI and the Queen Mother. Lamborghini was founded in 1963 by a tractor manufacturer with a grudge. Putting those two lineages on the same chassis should feel absurd. The odd thing is how carefully it has been done, right down to a debossed Y-pattern lifted from Lamborghini’s actual car interiors.

Designers: Silver Cross, Automobili Lamborghini

The carrycot is a high-gloss polycarbonate shell with integrated airflow, angled to echo the folded bonnet line of a supercar, and lined inside with automotive-grade suede. The pushchair seat pairs that suede with bamboo fibre and a multi-peak faceted hood. A genuine leather bumper bar wraps the front with embossed Lamborghini badging. The handlebar casting is finished by hand, and the brake pedal uses a step-on, step-off action designed not to scuff your shoes, which is the single most useful idea in the whole package. Even the storage basket gets origami-style folding so it holds its shape against the frame’s angles.

The hexagon and the Y have been Lamborghini’s structural grammar since Marcello Gandini started folding cars into wedges in the late sixties, and both show up in carbon weave, air intakes and seat stitching across the modern range. Silver Cross debossed the pattern rather than printing it. The colour strategy is similarly disciplined. Giallo (Italian for ‘yellow’) appears as piping, stitching, a harness liner and a wheel hub, while the body stays almost entirely black.

Now the maths. The Reef AL Giallo is built on the Reef 2, a Silver Cross stroller that normally sells between $999.99 and $1,299.99, so the $2,700 price bump accounts for the leather and suede, and that licensed logo. It also weighs 13.6kg, or about 30 lbs, which is double what a lot of parents lift into a car boot. A brand built on the pursuit of lightness has produced its heaviest possible interpretation of a pram. Folded, it measures L71 x W61 x H30.5cm, so boot space matters. Set against the Bentley Trike or Lamborghini’s licensed e-scooters, though, this is a far more serious object.

Silver Cross has announced this as the final edition, which is a scarcity mechanic as much as an editorial decision, and the resale market will treat it accordingly. Pair it with the orange Arancio we covered last year, and you have a matched set that some collector will absolutely chase. What sticks with me is the suspension. William Wilson’s 1877 breakthrough was spring suspension on a pram, and here those springs sit exposed on the chassis, sold as performance engineering. A 149-year-old British invention, wearing an Italian costume, and still doing its original job.

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Milan Smart Glasses pack a 12MP camera, live translation in a stylish ‘non-gadget’ design

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Le Corbusier wore round glasses. John Lennon wore round glasses. Several decades of architects, artists, and intellectuals who wanted to look like they read a lot wore round glasses. There is a long, slightly pretentious tradition attached to the panto and round frame silhouette, one that signals “considered, creative, European in a very specific mid-century way.” L’Atitude 52°N, the Berlin-based eyewear brand behind the Departure Collection, named their panto frame Milan for a reason, and they loaded it with a 12MP Sony camera, an AI assistant, and real-time translation into five languages before shipping it out the door.

Milan launches August 25th in the US and Europe, and the hardware it carries makes a more interesting case than the marketing copy would suggest. A 12MP Sony IMX681 sensor with a 107-degree ultra-wide field of view captures 1080p HD video and high-resolution stills, with a 6nm AI chip handling noise reduction, color processing, and exposure in real time. The Goya AI assistant manages music, calls, navigation, and battery checks by voice, while an AI Tour Guide feature uses the camera to visually identify landmarks and deliver 30-second expert commentary on demand. Live two-way translation covers five languages, all through the frame’s open-ear speakers and five-mic array. It comes in Olive and Obsidian from $399, with the photochromic lens option jumping that to $449.

Designer: L’Atitude 52°N

Click Here to Buy Now: $449

Milan’s matte finish and rounded panto silhouette exist in deliberate contrast to the BERLIN frame’s angular, navigator-coded geometry: BERLIN for a classic utility vibe, MILAN for culture. The EMS TR90 frame and self-adjusting temples bring the total to about 50 grams with lenses, genuinely light for a frame carrying cameras, microphones, speakers, and a 6nm AI processor inside it. Two colorways launch, Olive and Obsidian, each paired with gradient tinted or photochromic lens options that auto-adapt to changing light. Stainless steel spring hinges carry an ultra-wear-resistant nano technology coating tested over 20,000 cycles, three times harder than steel by L’Atitude 52°N’s own testing. IP65 sealing and a UV-hardened finish handle the elements, so the build is more rigorous than the silhouette lets on.

The Sony IMX681 sensor sits at the bridge with a 107-degree field of view that approximates natural peripheral vision reasonably well, and the 6nm AI processor handles real-time noise reduction, exposure calibration, and color enhancement so stills are usable without post-processing. Portrait and landscape modes are both supported, which matters for anyone managing content across platforms with different aspect ratio preferences. A tap on the frame or a “Hey Goya” voice command triggers capture, keeping hands free and the moment intact. 32GB of onboard storage holds everything locally until you sync via the companion app. The 1080p video ceiling is the one number that will catch attention from anyone shopping around, given that rival frames at lower price points are already delivering higher resolutions.

The AI Tour Guide uses the camera’s visual recognition to identify landmarks and artworks, delivering 30 seconds of expert commentary after a tap or voice trigger. Live Translation handles two-way voice conversation in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish, with each session running up to five minutes before auto-closing. General Goya tasks work hands-free via the “Hey Goya” wake phrase, covering navigation, music, battery status, call management, and quick Q&A. All of it runs directly through the glasses without needing to pull out your phone or break the flow of whatever you are doing. A group communication Intercom Strap accessory is also in development, which will add offline mesh-networked voice chat with up to eight people simultaneously.

Open-ear stereo speakers and a five-microphone array handle audio in both directions, with AI noise reduction keeping voice commands readable even in crowded environments. Privacy is handled with more care than most of the category bothers with: photos and videos live locally on the device and are deleted after syncing to your phone, and Goya AI interactions leave nothing stored in the cloud. A physical LED on the frame lights up whenever recording is active, and covering it stops the camera immediately, audio included. Milan is built for GDPR compliance, which reflects the brand’s German roots and resonates with European buyers especially. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 handle connectivity, and the 200mAh battery delivers up to six hours of mixed use, with an IP67-rated charging case offering eight to ten full top-ups and a 20-minute fast-charge to 70%.

At $399 base and $449 with photochromic lenses, Milan is priced at the premium end of what is now a genuinely crowded field, with strong hardware available at lower price points from several well-funded players. The value case lives in design and privacy architecture rather than raw specs. The panto silhouette is more considered and more wearable than most competing frames, and the local-only media storage model is among the tightest privacy implementations shipping in this category today. Six hours of mixed-use battery is workable for a day out, but worth factoring in for anyone planning longer trips. The AI feature set is a meaningful differentiator, particularly for solo travelers navigating unfamiliar cities who would otherwise juggle translation apps, maps, and camera apps simultaneously.

Milan is available from August 25th on the L’Atitude 52°N website, with pre-orders placed before that date qualifying for a $50 discount. Gen 1 Departure Collection buyers, covering both BERLIN and MILAN, get full access to Goya AI features out of the box, including Voice Activation, AI Tour Guide, Live Translation, and AI Image Recognition, with no subscription required. L’Atitude 52°N has committed to giving users advance notice of any changes to that access model. The smart glasses space is genuinely crowded in 2026, with major players from tech and fashion all competing for the same audience. Milan’s answer is a panto frame, a matte finish, and a camera that asks you to simply look at the thing you want to remember. Le Corbusier would probably have approved, and he was notoriously difficult to impress.

Click Here to Buy Now: $449

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Aston Martin’s New V12 Supercar Has a Face That Looks Suspiciously Like a Mustang

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Aston Martin’s new supercar reminds it of, and it was not a Vantage. It was a Mustang. Or a Camaro, depending who you ask on which forum. That is a wild sentence to type about a British V12 GT that costs more than most houses, but here we are, because the Valen swapped Aston’s usual oval headlamps for hooded, horizontal DRL bars that genuinely do look like they escaped from Dearborn. I get the pearl clutching. I also think the internet is only half right, and the other half of the story is way more interesting than a meme.

Because while everyone was busy roasting the front end, almost nobody was talking about the paint, which might be the single best thing Aston Martin has ever sprayed onto a car. Satin Andromeda Red shifts from deep red into copper and gold before dipping into blue undertones, using Chromaflair pigment tech that keeps shifting even in low light. There is also no rear window, but we will get to that. First, let us talk about why a supercar with a hood ornament for a face somehow still looks incredible in the metal.

Designer: Aston Martin

The Mustang comparisons are not baseless, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favors. Deeply recessed slimline headlamps sit hooded under a plunging bonnet edge, the daytime running lights stretch into a horizontal bar, and the grille motif runs almost to the corners of the fascia instead of sitting in its usual trapezoid box. That is a genuinely different grammar for Aston, a brand that has built its entire visual identity around a vertical, jewel-like nose since the DB9. Horizontal light bars and hooded lamps have become the default vocabulary for aggressive front ends across the industry, from pony cars to hypercars, and Aston just adopted it wholesale. The result looks fantastic in isolation. It also looks less like an Aston Martin than anything the brand has built in years, which is either the whole point or the whole problem, depending on how attached you are to the marque’s design DNA.

Reichman has more or less admitted as much. He describes the Valen as a chance to explore more extreme emotions through a new form language, and Robb Report reported the design studio’s moodboard was headed with four words: ruthless, ominous, experimental, alter ego. That is an unusually blunt brief for a company that spent a century being polite about horsepower, and it explains why the Valen’s face reads as confrontational rather than refined. Aston did not stumble into looking aggressive. The team built a car specifically designed to provoke a reaction, and judging by the forum threads, it is working exactly as intended.

Then there is the paint, and honestly, this is where I think the Valen earns its price tag. Satin Andromeda Red is a bespoke Q Ultra color built on Chromaflair pigment technology, shifting from deep red through copper and gold before settling into intense blue undertones depending on the angle and the light hitting it. Most automotive paint is static. This one behaves like it has moods, holding that color shift even in low light environments rather than needing direct sun to perform. Pair it with the option of a fully exposed carbon body, herringbone weave running down the centerline and tintable in custom satin or gloss finishes, and Aston has built one of the more technically interesting finish options on any current production car, muscle car face or not.

The rear end doubles down on the provocation. Aston deleted the Vanquish’s conventional rear window and bootlid entirely and replaced both with a solid carbon tailgate, its upper edge sculpted into a Gurney flap that generates downforce without a bolted-on wing. Beneath it sits a 170-liter boot with an optional Touring Pack luggage set. Quad titanium exhaust tips, two stacked high and two low, poke through a perforated heat-management panel underneath a full-width light bar. It is a genuinely strange trade of visibility for silhouette, and it puts the Valen in the same conversation as the McLaren P1 and the Polestar 5, cars willing to sacrifice a rear window for a cleaner shape and a cleverer aero solution.

Under all that theater sits a 5.2-liter twin-turbo V12 making 838bhp and 738lb-ft, good for 0-60 in three seconds and a limited 214mph, built on a Vanquish chassis shedding up to 110kg through carbon, titanium, and magnesium. Only 150 will exist, each starting around £1.5 million before Q’s inevitable rabbit hole of options. Whether you read the Valen as Aston Martin finding a bolder voice or briefly losing its accent, it is impossible to look at and feel nothing, and for a company that has spent years being tastefully quiet, that alone might be the real design win here.

The post Aston Martin’s New V12 Supercar Has a Face That Looks Suspiciously Like a Mustang first appeared on Yanko Design.

Razer Turned Its Snake Logo Into a $90 Keycap and It Sold Out in 8 Minutes

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Every major brand consultancy on earth will tell you the same thing right now: flatten your logo, go monochrome, simplify for digital. BMW listened. Volkswagen listened. Mastercard, Burberry, Warner Bros., all of them listened, and all of them emerged from their rebrands looking vaguely like they were designed by the same committee in the same week. The industry calls it blanding. The internet calls it something less polite. Razer, apparently, calls it an opportunity.

The Artisan Keycap Triple-Headed Snake Edition is the brand’s first artisan keycap, and it is about as far from a flat logo as physically possible. The triple-headed snake emblem that has lived as a 2D print on Razer products for nearly three decades has been turned into a full sculptural form: resin-cast, painted by hand, and detailed down to the tiny yellow irises in each snake’s eyes. It went on sale on August 22nd, 2026, priced at $89.99, and was gone in eight minutes.

Designer: Razer

Razer’s first product was the Boomslang gaming mouse, named after a venomous green snake from sub-Saharan Africa, with the brand’s now-iconic acid green pulled straight from the animal’s coloring. The triple-headed emblem grew out of that, and has been staring out from mice, keyboards, and headsets ever since. What nobody had done, until now, was give it a body. The Artisan Keycap starts from a precision 3D model built to hold detail at close range from every angle, then gets cast in resin mixed and cured to maximum hardness so the color won’t fade with daily use. After that, a human being sits down and paints each one individually, which means no two come out identical. Razer runs a two-stage quality check against the original model before anything ships.

The result, as seen in the process shots from Razer’s own production workflow, is genuinely impressive at this scale. Grey primed sculpts on painting stands give way to base-coated Razer green, and then a detail brush places the yellow eye dots with the kind of precision you’d normally associate with Warhammer miniature painters, not gaming peripheral makers. The GamesRadar reviewer who got a sample a week before it sold out noted that even the snakes’ tiny nostrils had been painted, which is a level of detail nobody strictly asked for and is therefore exactly the kind of detail worth celebrating.

On the practical side, the keycap fits any cross-stem (MX-style) switch, which covers most mechanical keyboards on the market, not just Razer’s own lineup. Razer recommends dropping it on a lower-traffic key like F12, partly because the three-dimensional snake heads sit noticeably proud of the surrounding keys, and partly because solid resin won’t let RGB backlighting through. The Chroma lighting on your other keys stays unaffected. You can technically use it on any key you want, but putting it on Escape and then accidentally hammering it during a tense moment in CS2 seems like tempting fate.

The keycap is currently sold out, exclusive to Razer.com and RazerStores. Whether Razer runs another batch is unconfirmed, so if the secondary market is your only option right now, just know that resellers have been asking considerably more than $89.99 since about eight minutes after the drop.

The post Razer Turned Its Snake Logo Into a $90 Keycap and It Sold Out in 8 Minutes first appeared on Yanko Design.

Backbone’s iPhone Gaming Controller Goes Translucent for Xbox’s 25th Anniversary

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Remember when you could see inside your Game Boy? Or your iMac? Or basically every piece of tech your parents told you was “too expensive to touch”? The early 2000s were absolutely obsessed with showing you the guts of things, and honestly, it ruled. Backbone apparently remembers too, because the new Xbox 25th Anniversary Edition of their Pro controller just raided the Controller S color archive and came back with three translucent shells that smell like 2002 in the best possible way.

Crystal Clear, Iconic Blue, and Bold Orange. Those aren’t made-up retro-adjacent names. Those are the actual original Xbox Controller S colorways, pulled straight from Microsoft’s retail catalog from back when controllers felt like objects worth bragging about. Backbone did their homework, and it shows.

Designer: Backbone

The Iconic Blue and Bold Orange units aren’t fully see-through. The grip bellies have a frosted, almost cloudy quality, and the plastic deepens where two layers of shell overlap, creating a subsurface glow effect that’s half-accidental, half-beautiful. The Bold Orange, particularly, looks backlit in direct light, the kind of amber warmth you’d get through sea glass. Crystal Clear is a different proposition entirely: genuinely transparent, every internal rib and screw boss visible, the trigger mechanism readable through the shell. Three colorways, three completely different personalities, all from the same tooling.

Every surface your hands actually contact is solid black. The thumbstick caps, the D-pad, the face buttons, the rear paddles, the trigger tips. Opaque, grounded, present. Everything else goes translucent and pulls back visually. It’s a simple call that makes the controller feel intentional rather than just see-through for novelty’s sake, your hands know exactly where to land, and the shell gets to be the art. The one exception is the Backbone button, which stays orange across all three colorways. On Bold Orange it vanishes completely into the shell; on Crystal Clear and Iconic Blue it’s a single warm accent, doing all the color work by itself.

The bridge connecting the two grips carries a fine perforated dot-matrix texture, the “BACKBONE” and “XBOX 25” co-branding, and a miniature Xbox sphere in place of the O. That whole wordmark sits on the one surface that disappears the second you dock a phone. Permanent branding, placed where only you see it. There’s something genuinely charming about that.

Hardware-wise this is the full Backbone Pro package underneath the anniversary paint: full-size ALPS thumbsticks, Hall Effect triggers, two remappable rear paddles, ultra-quiet face buttons, Bluetooth LE with FlowState one-press device switching, and dual batteries rated to 40 hours. USB-C wired or fully wireless, works across phones, tablets, PCs and TVs. The whole thing sits under 200 grams. No changes from the base Pro, which is absolutely fine when the base Pro is already regarded as the best thing you can strap to a phone for serious gaming.

The Backbone Pro Xbox 25th Anniversary Edition is $159.99, preorders are open now, and shipping kicks off in October 2026. It comes with a free month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and one gentle warning: it’s sold as a blind box, so the universe picks your color. All three are in equal production, all three look great, and the orange is objectively the most dramatic. Pick accordingly, or just roll the dice.

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At $69.99, the Boya Notra Neo Is the AI Note-Taker That Students Can Finally Afford

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The Plaud NotePin costs $169. Boya’s own Notra flagship launched in February 2026 at $149.99. For a stretch, if you wanted a dedicated AI recorder with real transcription and AI-powered organization, you were looking at spending north of $150, which quietly priced the category out of reach for the students and young professionals who arguably needed it most. Every new tech category does this: it launches expensive, finds its early adopters, and then figures out how to bring the price down. Boya just compressed that timeline significantly with the Notra Neo, a $79.99 AI recorder that retains the core AI note-taking experience of the flagship.

Launching September 4th at IFA 2026 in Berlin, the Notra Neo targets students, young professionals, multilingual users, and anyone who has been curious about AI note-taking but wasn’t ready to drop $150 on the experiment. The spec differences from the Notra are real but they’re calibrated: storage drops from 64GB to 8GB, the ambient pickup range goes from 10 meters to 5 meters, and battery life trims from 24 hours to 20. The core AI feature set remains available, with transcription across 140-plus languages, speaker identification, summaries, to-do lists, mind maps, and AI Search across your entire recording history. Automatic switching between Ambient, Phone Call, and Bluetooth recording modes means the device reads the situation and adjusts without you touching a setting. Pre-orders open August 24 at $69.99.

Designer: BOYA

Click Here to Buy Now: $69.99 $79.53 (12% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hour!

Boya’s automatic scenario detection handles context management silently: Ambient kicks in for face-to-face conversations, Phone Call for phone calls (obviously), and Bluetooth when you’re on a virtual meeting through your earbuds. In Ambient mode, the device picks up 360-degree audio within a 5-meter radius, covering most classroom or conference table setups without precise positioning. For first-timers already managing a phone, a laptop, and half a dozen tabs, that simplicity matters more than any individual spec. None of this requires navigating a settings menu mid-session or remembering which mode you last used. A similar friction-removal logic powered the REETLE E-Ink iPhone case YD covered last year, where a single dedicated record button built into the frame turned out to be the one design decision that made the entire product click.

Keeping the full AI feature set identical to the flagship Notra is genuinely the most interesting product decision Boya made with the Neo. Transcription runs across 140-plus languages and dialects with speaker labeling, making it a credible tool for multilingual classrooms, international teams, and professionals who regularly conduct conversations across more than one language. The AI layer generates summaries, to-do lists, mind maps, and insights from those recordings, with 60-plus professional templates calibrated for different scenarios. AI Search lets you query your entire recording history without scrubbing through audio, which shifts this from a recorder into a searchable knowledge base. Everything syncs and exports through the Boya OS App and Web, with format options for audio, transcripts, summaries, and mind maps.

The Notra Neo boasts a cleaner front face than its flagship counterpart, swapping the “BOYA Notra AI” label for a simple “Boya” wordmark on a smoother surface. The form factor follows the compact square silhouette now standard in this category, but the softer branding reads younger and more consumer. Nothing about the physical profile announces entry-level in the way cheaper electronics sometimes can’t avoid, which matters for users already self-conscious about carrying a dedicated recorder. At $80, the Notra Neo competes less with the Plaud than it does with the phone propped against a water bottle, and that’s a smarter fight to pick.

Pre-orders for the Notra Neo open August 24, 2026, at a discounted $69.99. At its budget-friendly price, this is the most accessible entry point into dedicated AI recording the category has seen, and for anyone who has been putting off the experiment, the excuse just ran out.

Click Here to Buy Now: $69.99 $79.53 (12% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hour!

The post At $69.99, the Boya Notra Neo Is the AI Note-Taker That Students Can Finally Afford first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hyundai’s New $30K Ioniq 3 Electric Hatchback Isn’t Coming To America (Hint: Tariffs)

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Here’s the Ioniq 3. It costs about as much as a well optioned Camry, it looks like nothing else in its price bracket, and you will never be able to buy one in the United States. Not because it failed some test, not because Americans don’t want small cars anymore, though we clearly don’t buy them. Hyundai built this thing specifically for European roads and European wallets, and then, somewhere in a boardroom, decided the math for shipping it here simply doesn’t work. So enjoy the photos. That’s about as close as most of us are going to get.

Hyundai unveiled it at Milan Design Week of all places, which already tells you this car cares more about form than your average econobox. Flat roofline, four pixel dots spelling “H” in Morse code above the grille, an interior built around furniture design instead of dashboard clutter. It’s a compact hatchback with a starting price around thirty grand and a face circular enough to make you nostalgic for the Beetle era. It is, by most measures, a properly cool small EV. It just also happens to be built in Türkiye, which under current tariffs might as well be built on the moon.

Designer: Hyundai Design Center

The whole thing runs on what Hyundai calls “Art of Steel,” a design language born from the fact that Hyundai is one of the only automakers left that actually makes its own steel. Instead of pretending that’s boring industrial trivia, the design team leaned into it, sculpting the Ioniq 3 around how sheet metal actually bends and holds tension. The result is the “Aero Hatch,” a silhouette with a roofline that runs dead flat over both rows of seats before diving into a rear spoiler like it just remembered somewhere else it needs to be. That flat roof isn’t decoration. It buys rear headroom while the tail does the aerodynamic heavy lifting, landing a drag coefficient of 0.263 that Hyundai is calling class leading.

Step inside and the car keeps making its case. Hyundai calls the layout “Furnished Space,” meaning the cabin is arranged more like a piece of living room furniture than a traditional dashboard, with an open floating center console and seat fabrics pulling references from 1970s Italian furniture design. There’s a hidden underfloor bin called Megabox tucked beneath 322 liters of regular boot space, bringing total capacity to 441 liters in a car barely over four meters long. Materials lean sustainable without making a big show of it, recycled PET seat coverings, a steering wheel wrapped in corn derived synthetic leather. None of it screams for attention, which somehow makes it land harder.

The numbers back up the styling. Two battery options, 42.2 kWh and 61 kWh, get you 213 and 308 miles respectively on the WLTP cycle, running through a 400 volt architecture rather than the fancier 800 volt setup found on the Ioniq 5. That’s the quiet trick behind the low price. UK trims start at £22,245 for the entry Advance and climb to £31,945 for the sportier N Line Evo, with a 10 to 80 percent DC charge landing around 29 minutes across the lineup.

Here’s the annoying part. The Ioniq 3 rolls off the line at Hyundai’s İzmit plant in Türkiye, and current US tariff policy makes importing anything built there financially pointless. Meanwhile Hyundai has already trimmed its US EV lineup this year, pausing the Korea built Kona Electric and dropping the standard Ioniq 6, leaving the $35,000 Ioniq 5 as the brand’s de facto entry point stateside. That’s an awkward position to be in when Kia, Hyundai’s own sister brand, is bringing the smaller and cheaper EV3 to America instead.

So no, you can’t have the Ioniq 3, and pretending otherwise would be lying to you. What you can do is watch it become the car every European hatchback rival now has to answer to, while wondering why the industrial base making the case for small, affordable EVs keeps getting built everywhere except here.

The post Hyundai’s New $30K Ioniq 3 Electric Hatchback Isn’t Coming To America (Hint: Tariffs) first appeared on Yanko Design.