Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Apple’s $899 Mac mini Skips M5 Entirely, Keeps the 2024 Body

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Twelve days ago I wrote that Apple was testing a Mac mini with a brand new M6 in the cheap model and a carried-over M5 Pro in the expensive one, and that anyone holding out for a clean M5 mini should let that dream go. That machine now exists, with a price and a ship date. Mark Gurman’s reporting was the source and it landed almost exactly. I would be enjoying this more if the shipping version had not arrived with a hundred dollars stapled to both configurations. Being right is fun. Being right about a price hike is considerably less fun.

Here is what Apple actually put on sale on August 25, arriving September 22 across 30 countries. The $899 base mini gets M6, Apple’s first 2nm chip, with 12 CPU cores, 12 GPU cores and a Dual 16-core Neural Engine running at up to 170GB/s. The $1,699 model gets M5 Pro, scaling to 18 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, 64GB of memory at 307GB/s, Thunderbolt 5, and the ability to cluster multiple minis to run large models entirely on device. Two chip generations, one product page. The aluminum shell is untouched since 2024.

Designer: Apple

Six hundred dollars bought an M4 Mac mini in October 2024, which felt at the time like Apple briefly forgetting to charge properly. May 2026 killed the 256GB configuration and pushed the effective floor to $799. June raised the M4 Pro from $1,399 to $1,599. Apple told the Wall Street Journal it had never seen component prices climb this much this quickly, pointing at the memory and storage crunch that AI data centres created. So the entry Mac has gained three hundred dollars in under two years, and the desktop best suited to running models locally got expensive precisely because everyone else is running models too.

M6 is Apple’s first 2nm silicon and it lands in the cheapest Mac on the shelf, with a 12-core CPU split into two super cores, four performance cores and six efficiency cores, plus a Neural Accelerator inside every one of its 12 GPU cores. M5 Pro, sitting in the machine that costs eight hundred dollars more, is last year’s architecture scaled wider. On the multi-core and graphics work that Pro-tier buyers actually pay for, M5 Pro wins comfortably. On the number printed on the box, it loses. Apple spent a decade teaching people to read that number as shorthand for how current a machine is, and has now quietly stopped honouring its own shorthand.

The gap traces back to a decision that had nothing to do with the mini. Apple reportedly cancelled the M6 Pro and M6 Max outright, fast-tracking an AI-focused M7 line rather than building a Pro tier that would be stale within months of shipping. The engineering logic is sound and I understand it. The customer position is still rough. Mac Studio pulled the same trick last year with mismatched M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips and nobody blinked, because Studio shoppers expect spec weirdness, while the mini is the Mac people buy specifically because it never asks them to think.

Three Thunderbolt 4 ports sit on the back of the newer-silicon M6 model, while the older M5 Pro gets Thunderbolt 5. That is segmentation, not physics, and it is the clearest sign that Apple is now pricing tiers rather than describing them. Both machines pick up Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard, with a 10Gb option. The two front USB-C ports still run at plain USB 3 speeds. New genlock support over USB-C syncs a display to a camera, including the iPhone 17 Pro, which is a genuinely useful addition nobody will notice.

That unchanged aluminum box remains my favorite part of this whole story. Every vertical cooling case, stacking SSD and retro Macintosh shell built for the M4 still fits, which is accidental sustainability of a kind Apple rarely gets credit for. The power button is still underneath, obviously. What Apple has not published is a single head-to-head AI benchmark between M6 and M5 Pro, which is the one comparison that would tell buyers whether the cheap mini out-thinks the expensive one. Its silence there is doing a lot of work.

The post Apple’s $899 Mac mini Skips M5 Entirely, Keeps the 2024 Body first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Finally Built the Three’s Company Apartment in LEGO, Celebrating the 70s Sitcom

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Sitcom apartments are basically stage sets pretending to be homes, and nobody understood that better than “Three’s Company.” The entire show ran on doors slamming at the wrong moment, eavesdropping from the kitchen, and someone hiding in a closet two seconds before the wrong person walked in. It only worked because the apartment was designed like a farce machine, with sightlines built for maximum chaos. Take away the laugh track and what you’re left with is genuinely clever spatial choreography, the kind an industrial designer can appreciate even if the plot involved Jack faking a limp again.

That’s exactly what makes this LEGO Ideas build so satisfying to look at. Builder AssociateFranticMinibeard has laid the whole apartment open like a dollhouse, hallway, bathroom, kitchen, living room, all visible at once in 1,293 bricks. It is basically the show’s floor plan finally getting the cutaway camera angle it always deserved, and it turns out sand green walls and a round dining table can carry an enormous amount of 1977 nostalgia.

Designer: AssociateFranticMinibeard

You get the full Santa Monica apartment split into legible zones, a bedroom with framed wall art, a bathroom complete with an honest-to-goodness bathtub, a kitchen stacked with yellow cabinetry and appliances, and a living room anchored by that round table and sofa where half the misunderstandings presumably happened. Off to one side sits a darker, moodier space with bar stools and small round tables that reads unmistakably like a certain downstairs hangout regulars would recognize. The reddish brown flooring against those sand green walls nails a very specific late 70s SoCal palette that most LEGO sitcom sets, being stuck in the 90s, never even attempt.

My favorite detail, though, is that bathtub. It sounds like a throwaway prop until you remember the entire premise of the show hinges on it. Jack Tripper does not apply for the open room like a normal person, he crashes a going away party, passes out, and gets found the next morning asleep in that tub, which is apparently enough to convince Janet and Chrissy he is roommate material. Including it here is a small choice that says the builder actually understood what makes this show tick, rather than just slapping seventies wallpaper on a generic apartment shell.

The minifigure lineup backs that up too. All seven key characters made the cut, Jack, Janet, and Chrissy front and center, plus Stanley and Helen Roper alongside their eventual successor Ralph Furley, with neighbor Larry Dallas rounding things out. Technically the Ropers and Furley never overlapped on the show, but as a greatest hits roster spanning all eight seasons, it works.

Right now this build is sitting at a modest 20 supporters with 60 days left just to crack the first LEGO Ideas milestone of 100, so it needs momentum fast before the clock runs out. Given that LEGO already has a growing shelf of sitcom sets, from Central Perk to the Golden Girls, and none of them dip back into the 1970s, there is a real gap here worth filling. If you grew up watching Jack talk his way out of trouble on a weekly basis, head over to LEGO Ideas and give this one your vote before the countdown hits zero.

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Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case

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Fingerprint readers are on phones, laptops, door locks, and gym lockers. They are on tablets, car dashboards, hotel room entrances, and even some credit cards. The one place you still cannot use one in Apple’s ecosystem is the watch on your wrist, and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is reportedly the device that might finally change that. Leaks suggest Touch ID could be integrated into the Action button or side button, bringing biometric authentication to the Apple Watch for the first time in the lineup’s eleven-year history. Apple is expected to announce the Ultra 4 at a fall event in September 2026, and the fingerprint sensor question is the detail that has dominated the pre-announcement conversation.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman expects no major design changes to the Ultra 4 this cycle, which would likely include a new biometric button, making the Touch ID rumor more aspirational than confirmed. MacRumors has flagged it as increasingly unlikely as a result. Gurman does foresee a chip upgrade, health and fitness improvements, and efficiency-driven battery gains from the same-sized cell. Other leaks sketch out a thinner titanium case, a redesigned rear sensor array with up to eight sensors, and watchOS 27 with a smarter Siri and new women’s health tracking. Touch ID may or may not make the cut, but the Ultra 4 is shaping up to be a meaningful update either way.

Designer: Apple

Apple Pay authentication on the Ultra currently requires a double-press of the side button, which is fine at a checkout counter and genuinely irritating mid-trail with trekking poles in both hands. A Touch ID sensor in the Action button would solve that in the most direct way possible. The Action button already handles flashlight toggling, workout starts, and dive computer modes depending on configuration, so adding biometric capability would make it the most densely functional physical control on any Apple device. Building a reliable fingerprint reader into a button that regularly encounters water, mud, and cold is the engineering challenge that may keep bumping this feature to a future generation. That tension between the obvious use case and the real manufacturing difficulty is likely why this rumor has had such a short lifespan in reliable reporting.

Current leaks point to as many as eight sensors on the back of the Ultra 4, compared to the existing array that handles heart rate, SpO2, wrist temperature, and ECG. The shift Apple appears to be making is away from software-compensated estimations toward hardware-grounded measurements, which matters most for use cases like altitude training and longitudinal hypertension monitoring. The chassis is also expected to get thinner, and that matters more than it sounds: the Ultra 3’s profile is comfortable during workouts and just present enough during overnight wear that some owners skip sleep tracking altogether. A slimmer build addresses that without touching the rugged character of the product. Together, the sensor overhaul and the thinner case are the two changes most likely to make existing Ultra owners seriously consider upgrading.

Battery life is expected to hold steady or extend slightly through chip efficiency gains rather than a larger cell, with the Ultra 3’s 42-hour standard and 72-hour Low Power Mode serving as the baseline to beat. watchOS 27 brings a more context-aware Siri with a dedicated watch app, Apple Intelligence across first-party apps, and new perimenopause and menopause tracking in Health. Apple is separately developing a more significant Watch redesign for a later generation, with reports pointing to a round case and a screenless fitness tracker. The Ultra 4 arrives before any of that. Touch ID would have made this generation an easy, quotable pitch; without it, the sensor upgrade, the thinner body, and the software stack carry the argument instead.

The post Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case

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Fingerprint readers are on phones, laptops, door locks, and gym lockers. They are on tablets, car dashboards, hotel room entrances, and even some credit cards. The one place you still cannot use one in Apple’s ecosystem is the watch on your wrist, and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is reportedly the device that might finally change that. Leaks suggest Touch ID could be integrated into the Action button or side button, bringing biometric authentication to the Apple Watch for the first time in the lineup’s eleven-year history. Apple is expected to announce the Ultra 4 at a fall event in September 2026, and the fingerprint sensor question is the detail that has dominated the pre-announcement conversation.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman expects no major design changes to the Ultra 4 this cycle, which would likely include a new biometric button, making the Touch ID rumor more aspirational than confirmed. MacRumors has flagged it as increasingly unlikely as a result. Gurman does foresee a chip upgrade, health and fitness improvements, and efficiency-driven battery gains from the same-sized cell. Other leaks sketch out a thinner titanium case, a redesigned rear sensor array with up to eight sensors, and watchOS 27 with a smarter Siri and new women’s health tracking. Touch ID may or may not make the cut, but the Ultra 4 is shaping up to be a meaningful update either way.

Designer: Apple

Apple Pay authentication on the Ultra currently requires a double-press of the side button, which is fine at a checkout counter and genuinely irritating mid-trail with trekking poles in both hands. A Touch ID sensor in the Action button would solve that in the most direct way possible. The Action button already handles flashlight toggling, workout starts, and dive computer modes depending on configuration, so adding biometric capability would make it the most densely functional physical control on any Apple device. Building a reliable fingerprint reader into a button that regularly encounters water, mud, and cold is the engineering challenge that may keep bumping this feature to a future generation. That tension between the obvious use case and the real manufacturing difficulty is likely why this rumor has had such a short lifespan in reliable reporting.

Current leaks point to as many as eight sensors on the back of the Ultra 4, compared to the existing array that handles heart rate, SpO2, wrist temperature, and ECG. The shift Apple appears to be making is away from software-compensated estimations toward hardware-grounded measurements, which matters most for use cases like altitude training and longitudinal hypertension monitoring. The chassis is also expected to get thinner, and that matters more than it sounds: the Ultra 3’s profile is comfortable during workouts and just present enough during overnight wear that some owners skip sleep tracking altogether. A slimmer build addresses that without touching the rugged character of the product. Together, the sensor overhaul and the thinner case are the two changes most likely to make existing Ultra owners seriously consider upgrading.

Battery life is expected to hold steady or extend slightly through chip efficiency gains rather than a larger cell, with the Ultra 3’s 42-hour standard and 72-hour Low Power Mode serving as the baseline to beat. watchOS 27 brings a more context-aware Siri with a dedicated watch app, Apple Intelligence across first-party apps, and new perimenopause and menopause tracking in Health. Apple is separately developing a more significant Watch redesign for a later generation, with reports pointing to a round case and a screenless fitness tracker. The Ultra 4 arrives before any of that. Touch ID would have made this generation an easy, quotable pitch; without it, the sensor upgrade, the thinner body, and the software stack carry the argument instead.

The post Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Georgian Residential Complex Rejects Straight Lines on its Floor Plan, Mimicking The Ocean

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Straight lines are easy. Any architect can slap a rectangular tower on a plot and call it a day, and most beachfront developers do exactly that because straight lines are cheap, fast to build, and easy to sell off a brochure. Georgia’s Adjara coast just got a project that looked at that playbook and said absolutely not. Montemar Residential, a three tower complex rising in the seaside town of Gonio, ditches the grid entirely in favor of forms that ripple, curve, and cantilever like something dragged up from the Black Sea itself. It is the kind of building that makes you stop scrolling, then immediately want to know who signed off on it and how.

Designed by Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia of Alpha Architecture, the complex sits on a 10,000 square meter plot within a UNESCO listed stretch of coastline, right where Adjara’s oddly tropical microclimate runs into the Black Sea. Each of the three 16 story towers tops out around 48 to 52 meters and wears a dramatic aluminum crown that flares out over the roofline like a mushroom cap, or if you squint, a seashell caught mid opening. Parking for 300 vehicles sits tucked below grade, keeping the ground plane free for landscaping and plazas. It is a lot of building, and it wants you to know it.

Designers: Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia

The seashell inspiration shows up in how the facade behaves. The balcony edges do not stack in the usual identical, floor by floor grid you see on every coastal high rise from Miami to Marbella. Instead they undulate, staggering in and out like sediment ridges carved by tidal movement, which gives each tower a texture closer to a geological formation than a construction product. Aluminum embossed sheet cladding wraps the crowning terraces, catching light in a way that concrete or glass simply cannot, and it is the detail that separates Montemar from the generic curved tower trend that has been creeping through Gulf and Black Sea resort markets alike.

The space between the three towers is treated as public terrain rather than leftover setback, with green plantings, plazas, and communal zones designed to pull residents out of their units and into shared space. Panoramic apartments come with private terraces and jacuzzis angled toward the water, the kind of amenity that used to be penthouse exclusive and is now standard issue on any coastal development trying to compete for buyers. Whether that democratization of the infinity view holds up once the cranes clear out is the real test, since renderings are notoriously generous with light, weather, and empty beaches.

Gonio is a strange place for this kind of architectural swing. It is a historic town, not a resort capital, and Montemar is betting that sculptural ambition can coexist with a UNESCO designation next door rather than clash with it. If the finished towers deliver even half of what the renders promise, this stretch of the Adjara coast is about to become a lot more interesting to watch than its neighbors on the Black Sea.

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CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks

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If you have ever charged a Xiaomi phone with the bundled brick, there is a decent chance CUKTECH’s engineers had a hand in it, even though the name never made it onto the packaging. The company started in 2016 as a straight up OEM, building chargers behind the scenes for Xiaomi and other big players, before merging with ZMI in 2022 and finally launching products under its own name. It is the classic story of a supplier deciding it was tired of being invisible.

That decision has paid off. The CUKTECH 30 Charging Station Ultra just picked up two wins at the European Product Design Award, one for computer accessories and one for office appliances, thanks to a 300W GaN powered design from Chong Wang and Ziyao Wang. We have followed the brand’s climb as its power banks and chargers kept getting screens, better materials, and sharper industrial design with every release. This latest charging station, with its five ports and a live readout of exactly what your gear is pulling, is the moment the sleeper brand stops sleeping.

Designers: Chong Wang & Ziyao Wang

Three USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and a dedicated DC output share the front face, and together they can push out up to 300W total. The two primary USB-C ports handle up to 140W each under PD 3.1, which covers most modern laptops without breaking a sweat, but the real number only shows up when you route power through the DC port. That single line is built to talk directly to compatible laptops and can hit the full 300W ceiling on its own, essentially replacing the oversized proprietary brick that usually ships in the box. I have three of those bricks sitting in a drawer right now doing absolutely nothing, and a single box that can outmuscle all of them at once is exactly the kind of consolidation I did not know I needed.

Third generation GaN sits at the core of the whole system, paired with what CUKTECH calls a PFC plus LLC dual architecture, a combination chosen specifically to keep five simultaneous charging sessions stable without the unit turning into a space heater. Gallium nitride has become the default material for anyone chasing high wattage in a small footprint, since it switches more efficiently than older silicon designs and sheds heat faster under sustained load. Thirteen fast charging protocols are baked in, including PD 3.1, PPS, Xiaomi’s own 120W standard, UFCS, Huawei SCP, and both QC and AFC, which is a genuinely broad net for a single charger to cast. Intelligent power allocation reads what is plugged in and redistributes wattage on the fly, with specific tuning for handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally that tend to confuse less sophisticated multi port chargers.

A 1.83 inch IPS display sits front and center, color coded per port, tracking wattage, voltage, and current across all five connections in real time, with a small running graph of total load underneath. Most chargers ask you to trust a single LED and hope for the best. This one just tells you, continuously, which is a small shift that changes how the object feels to live with on a desk. Nine layers of protection cover temperature, over-voltage, and over-current scenarios, which matters more than usual given how much power is moving through a chassis this size.

The form itself leans minimal, angled slightly on a magnetic tilting base so the screen stays readable without craning your neck, and finished in a two tone silver and black that reads more like studio monitor than power strip. A right angle DC cable keeps the desk tidier than the usual straight jack, and the grounded three pin AC cable is a small nod to safety that a lot of competitors skip to save a few cents.

None of this would matter much if the pricing did not make sense, and at $159.99 it lands right where a serious desk upgrade should, undercutting rivals capped at 140W or 200W while offering meaningfully more headroom. CUKTECH spent a decade building other companies’ chargers before it ever put its own name on a box. Two design award wins later, it is clear that decade taught them exactly which details actually matter.

The post CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple is Building a Short, Wide iPhone Ultra… Now It Owes Us an Actual iPhone Mini

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I have a friend who still uses an iPhone 13 mini held together by a case and pure spite, and every single time a new iPhone launches, she asks me the same question. Is it small yet. It never is. Apple has spent years telling us, implicitly, that small phones do not sell, that the market has spoken, that everyone wants a bigger canvas for videos and games and doomscrolling. Fine, sure, the sales numbers backed that up in 2023. But sales numbers do not mean the desire disappeared, they mean the alternative was not good enough to fight for.

Which brings me to the iPhone Ultra, Apple’s rumored first foldable, expected to close into a short, squat, almost passport-shaped little brick before you unfold it into something the size of an iPad mini. That folded shape is the closest thing to mini energy Apple has shown in years, and it is buried inside a two thousand dollar folding phone nobody asked to be the delivery method. My friend does not want an iPad mini that folds. She wants her 13 mini, but new. Apple already built the shape. It just built it around the wrong phone.

Designer: Apple

The Air existed to answer a question almost nobody was asking at checkout, namely how thin can a phone get before the internals start filing complaints. It was a genuine engineering flex, the kind of thing that looks incredible in a teardown video and slightly pointless in daily use. I understood what it was trying to prove. I just never needed it proven to me personally, and I doubt I was alone in that.

The Ultra is rumored to repeat that exact flex, except this time the thinness gets folded in half, closing down to somewhere between 9 and 9.5mm shut and reportedly as thin as 4.5mm open, according to recent leaks. That is a genuinely wild number for a phone with a hinge in it. Apple is once again proving it can do the hard, borderline unnecessary engineering thing. The difference is that this time, buried inside that flex, is an actual shape people have been begging for since 2023. Apple just does not seem to have noticed it yet.

Go back and look at what the 13 mini actually was for a second, because I think people forget how unremarkable the compromise really was. It measured 131.5mm tall, 64.2mm wide, weighed 141 grams, and ran the exact same A15 chip as the standard 13. You gave up battery life and screen real estate. You did not give up the flagship experience shrunk down to fit an actual hand. Compare that to where the standard iPhone lineup sits today, regularly north of 6.1 inches before you even get to Pro Max territory, and the gap the mini used to fill has only gotten wider and lonelier.

Now put the Ultra’s folded footprint next to that. Reports point to a 5.5 inch cover display when shut, in a short, wide, passport style shell that is about as close to mini adjacent proportions as Apple has shipped since the mini died. The catch is that this compact shell only exists as a doorway into a 7.8 inch, 4:3 inner screen and a starting price rumored to land somewhere between 1,999 and 2,499 dollars. Nobody buying that phone is buying it to have something small in their pocket. They are buying an iPad mini that happens to fold shut, which is a completely different pitch than the one my friend has been asking me about for three years running.

There has been some loose speculation, mostly a 9to5Mac piece from last year, that Apple’s new staggered launch schedule could theoretically clear a runway for a smaller phone somewhere down the line. Even that piece called the odds slim to none, and nothing currently on Apple’s roadmap for the 18, 18e, 18 Pro, or Ultra includes a mini in any form. Samsung, for what it is worth, has stuck with its Z Flip clamshell as its own answer to compact, so the appetite for small has not vanished industry wide, it has just gone unanswered on Apple’s side of the fence for a while now.

So here is the pitch, and it is not a complicated one. Apple has now proven twice, once with the Air and once with the Ultra’s folded shell, that it can engineer real compactness without breaking anything important. Skip the fold. Skip the tablet trapped inside a phone shaped envelope. Take that exact short, wide, passport sized footprint and wrap a single, non folding screen around it, call it a mini, and ship it. Apple does not need a new idea here. It already built one. It just keeps hiding it inside features nobody was asking it to attach to.

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Lando Norris’s New LEGO Helmet Is Weirdly Emotional to Build

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McLaren just hit 1,000 Grands Prix, which in Formula 1 years is basically ancient royalty status. Only Ferrari has been around longer in this sport, and Ferrari acts like it too. So when a team crosses a milestone like that, you throw a party, you paint a special livery on the car, and apparently, you also get LEGO to build you a commemorative brick helmet with your driver’s face on the box.

That is exactly what happened with Lando Norris’s set, a 793 piece build that packs his signature yellow and black “blob” design (his words, not mine) onto one side of a papaya orange helmet shell. It is McLaren history and Norris’s personal branding smashed together into a display piece, and somehow LEGO made that combination look genuinely good instead of like a marketing fever dream.

Designer: LEGO Design Team, co-created with Lando Norris

What makes this one different from your average licensed tie in set is that Norris was actually in the room for it. This was not LEGO grabbing some reference photos and calling it a day. The drivers worked directly with LEGO’s design team to shape both the Norris helmet and its companion piece for teammate Oscar Piastri, and the real helmets both drivers wore trackside at Monaco were based on the LEGO designs, not the other way around. That is a genuinely rare flex for a toy company. Daniel Meehan, LEGO’s Creative Lead for F1, put it well when he said building organic helmet curves at this scale “presents exciting opportunities for exploring new building techniques and creative parts usage,” which is design speak for “yeah, this was hard and we are proud we pulled it off.”

And they did pull it off. The papaya orange half and the neon yellow squiggle half meet along a seam that somehow still reads as one continuous helmet, not two mismatched shells taped together. Printed tiles handle every sponsor logo along the brow, McLaren, Mastercard, Dropbox, OKX, all sitting exactly where they would on the real thing. The back of the helmet is where the emotional weight lives though. LEGO printed “1.000 GP” and “1963” across the rear in bold anniversary numerals, with a small nod to “Bruce / Mal Est. 1963,” a reference to Bruce McLaren founding the team over sixty years ago. “NEVER STOP RACING” runs along the base of the visor. It is a lot of history packed into a helmet the size of a grapefruit.

My favorite detail, though, is buried in the yellow side paneling where LEGO snuck in a tiny printed minifig head, smiling face and all, hidden right inside Norris’s own design pattern. It is such a small thing, but it is basically LEGO signing its own work, and it tells you the people building this actually cared about more than just slapping a logo on a shelf piece.

The set comes mounted on a black display stand with Norris’s number 1 and a printed signature plaque, plus a minifigure of Norris himself in off track team gear, reportedly the first time he has been rendered as a LEGO minifig. It also plugs into the LEGO Builder app so you can rotate and zoom your progress mid build, which is a nice touch if you like tracking your pit stops digitally.

This helmet drops right after LEGO built ten full size, actually driveable F1 cars for a stunt at last year’s Miami Grand Prix, so the brand’s relationship with the sport is clearly only ramping up. The Lando Norris McLaren Mastercard F1 Team Helmet (set 43023) is available now for $89.99 on LEGO.com and through McLaren’s official store, alongside the matching Oscar Piastri edition if you want the full garage set.

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This Clear Acrylic CD Player Turns Your Music Collection Into Kinetic Art

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The iMac G3’s translucent Bondi Blue shell sold 800,000 units in its first five months, which was Apple’s way of proving that exposing a computer’s internal geometry could be its single most compelling feature. Nothing put a transparent back on a phone in 2022 and made every other Android’s solid slab look like it had something to hide. Skeleton mechanical watches have been charging a premium for visible gear trains for centuries. Teenage Engineering turned exposed PCBs into a full aesthetic identity. The pattern is clear enough: when mechanisms are beautiful, hiding them is just a waste. CD sales have been quietly growing for four years now, physical music is back in force, and the SYITREN RM1 arrives to give CD players the transparent treatment they probably always deserved.

The RM1 houses its full CD mechanism inside a dual-layer ultra-clear acrylic frame, with precision metal corner pillars and the disc, optical pickup, and PCB all visible from the front. SYITREN, founded in 2017 and recognized by the MUSE, London, French, IDA, and A’ Design Awards, designed it with the CD’s own iridescence as a feature rather than a side effect. You press a disc onto the transport and suddenly there’s a spinning, light-catching object on your desk or wall that is also playing music. Audio routes out via Bluetooth 5.3 or 3.5mm AUX, with SYITREN leaving the speaker out entirely and trusting you to own one already. It measures 260 x 260 x 42mm, weighs 0.9kg, and starts at $89.

Designer: SYITREN

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $179 (45% off) Hurry, 62 of 1200 units left!

Dual-layer acrylic panels sandwich the CD mechanism between them, and the precision metal corner pillars at each corner read as structural jewelry rather than hardware fasteners. As the disc spins, its iridescent surface catches ambient light through the panels and scatters it differently depending on the label design, the printing, and the reflective surface underneath. Some discs glow gold under warm room lighting, others catch cool blue from overhead. A disc with a dense printed label plays completely differently as a visual object than a silver-surface one, which means every album in your collection has a slightly different personality in this frame.

A warm-yellow 2×8 LED matrix, visible through the acrylic from the front, shows track number, animated visuals, and volume level alongside a linear progress bar. The amber glow against the spinning disc creates what SYITREN calls a “visual rhythm,” and it’s a phrase that actually earns its keep here. Warm lighting and a slowly rotating disc at the center of a room does something to the quality of an evening that a Spotify queue on a phone simply cannot. It’s a mood object as much as an audio component. The choice of warm yellow over a cooler white or blue LED tone is clearly deliberate, positioning the RM1 alongside lamps and wood furniture rather than making it look like something pulled from a server rack.

SYITREN’s decision to ship the RM1 without a built-in speaker is both a nod to the Discman-meets-headphones culture, but also just fair common-sense engineering. Squeezing a driver into a 42mm-thick transparent frame would have produced tinny, directionally compromised sound that undermined everything else about the product. Instead, the RM1 connects to your existing speakers or headphones via Bluetooth 5.3 at a 10-meter range with a 95 dB SNR, or through a 3.5mm AUX jack for wired setups. For anyone who already owns a decent Bluetooth speaker or a bookshelf stereo, this approach makes the RM1 a source component and a visual object, which is exactly what it should be. It’s the same logic that drives high-end audio separates: source, amplification, and output each handled by the component built specifically for that job.

A built-in 16-bit DAC and 24-bit DSP sit at the core of the RM1’s signal chain, sampling at 8-48 kHz with a CD audio SNR of ≥85 dB and total harmonic distortion plus noise below 0.1 percent. Dynamic range lands at ≥70 dB, which is a respectable figure for a consumer portable at this price. Supported formats include standard audio CDs, MP3 discs, and WMA discs, which covers everything from your 2004 burned collection to freshly pressed albums. Playback modes offer repeat one, sequential play, and shuffle, with a remote control included in the box. The battery is an 18650 cell rated at 2000mAh, charging via USB-C in one to two hours and delivering six to eight hours of continuous playback.

Wall-mounting a CD player requires solving a problem that horizontal-tray consumer units have never had to worry about. CD optical pickups are designed to track a horizontally spinning disc, and tilting the whole assembly vertically introduces vibration and skip risks that would make most standard mechanisms unreliable on a wall. SYITREN addressed this with a 40-second anti-shock buffer for standard audio CDs and a 120-second buffer for MP3 discs, pre-reading and caching audio data so that ambient vibration or minor disturbances can’t interrupt playback. The optical pickup itself was also specifically engineered for vertical operation. Most people who buy the RM1 will probably never think about any of this, which is precisely where engineering and design blur together in the best way.

The RM1 ships with both a wall-mount system and a detachable desk stand, making the placement decision entirely yours and entirely reversible. Hung against a wall between picture frames, it reads as a kinetic art piece during playback and a minimal geometric object when the disc isn’t loaded. On a desk or shelf, the angled stand positions the disc facing you directly, turning the player into the kind of object your eye keeps returning to from across the room. SYITREN’s own imagery places it in apartments, studios, cafes, and living rooms, and the transparent form factor genuinely holds up across all of those contexts. At 0.9kg and 42mm deep, it’s also considerably lighter and thinner than photographs tend to suggest.

The RM1 starts at $99 and is available through SYITREN’s campaign, with the N200 Bluetooth speaker bundled together for a price of $139. The 18650 cell charges via USB-C in one to two hours and delivers up to eight hours of continuous playback, so the unit is genuinely portable if you want to move it between rooms. SYITREN doesn’t publish a formal warranty term in its current materials, so confirm those details directly before purchasing. The company has been manufacturing and shipping audio hardware since 2017, with distribution across more than 15 US retail cities and five global markets. At $99, the RM1 is the most considered CD player I’ve seen that treats the format as something worth displaying, and for anyone sitting on a collection of discs that hasn’t been played in years, that’s a genuinely compelling reason to dust them off.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $179 (45% off) Hurry, 62 of 1200 units left!

The post This Clear Acrylic CD Player Turns Your Music Collection Into Kinetic Art first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Built Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence Album Art as a Monochrome LEGO Diorama

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There was a solid decade there where every other Tumblr blog, VSCO caption, and breakup playlist owed a spiritual debt to one woman in a bikini top and a fringe crop, staring off into the California haze like she’d just been dumped by a guy named Jim who drove a vintage Mercedes and never called back. That’s Ultraviolence in a nutshell. Lana Del Rey’s third album didn’t just soundtrack a generation’s melancholy, it basically invented the aesthetic language for it (moody filters, palm trees, cursive fonts, the works). Ten years later, the album still feels like its own little universe, and apparently one LEGO builder agreed hard enough to spend an unreasonable number of grey and black bricks recreating it.

That builder is ErfinderEdlerBenny, and their LEGO Ideas submission called simply “Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey” takes the album’s iconic black and white cover art and turns it into a full physical diorama, vintage car, palm trees, wrought iron gate, and all. No color anywhere. Just a wall of grayscale brick that somehow captures a very specific kind of heartbreak. It’s the kind of tribute that only makes sense if you’ve actually sat with the record, and honestly, that’s exactly the point.

Designer: ErfinderEdlerBenny

Zoom into the left side of the build and you land in a smaller vignette pulled straight from the “Ultraviolence” music video, the one where Lana wears a white dress and veil that reads somewhere between bridal and funeral, which, fair, tracks with a song about a relationship that hits like a kiss and also just hits. A wrought iron gate, a gnarled black tree, and a scattering of butterflies (some black, some ghostly white) surround the minifigure, and the whole corner has a quiet, almost gothic hush to it that a lot of official LEGO sets wouldn’t dare attempt. It’s a small scene, but it carries a surprising amount of mood for something built entirely out of grey bricks.

The right side flips that mood toward the ocean, borrowing imagery from the “West Coast” video instead, think hilly landscape silhouettes and a Ferris wheel motif tucked among a pair of tall black palm trees. It’s a clever way to fold a second song into a diorama technically named after the album’s title track, and it gives the whole build a sense of narrative pacing you don’t usually get from a static display piece. Two songs, two moods, one connected scene, and somehow it never feels cluttered or like it’s trying to do too much at once.

Piecing an entire album’s visual identity into LEGO form is no small feat, especially when you’re deliberately working without color as a crutch. Most builders lean on bright palettes to sell mood and depth. ErfinderEdlerBenny does the opposite, using texture, shading, and clever part choices (that basketball net style foliage, those stacked grey slopes for the skyline) to create contrast entirely through shape and shadow. It’s a genuinely tricky design problem, and the fact that it still reads clearly as “sad LA girl in a vintage car” from across a room says a lot about the execution.

As of writing, the project sits at 284 supporters with 422 days left to hit its first milestone of 1,000, so there’s plenty of runway left for the Lana faithful to show up. If you’ve ever screamed “West Coast” a little too loudly on a road trip, or know exactly which era of your life is tied to this record, this is the kind of tribute worth backing. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote. My one wish is that they somehow rig the sun piece to glow, because nothing says Ultraviolence quite like brooding in monochrome komorebi.

The post Someone Built Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence Album Art as a Monochrome LEGO Diorama first appeared on Yanko Design.