Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

The Mac mini Form Factor is So Perfect, Literally Everyone is Copying It

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Apple Mac mini at center surrounded by six lookalike mini PCs from ASUS, Slimbook, Lenovo, MSI, Geekom and AceMagic.

Apple’s Mac mini is a 127 by 127 by 50mm aluminum square, and the PC industry has spent 2026 rebuilding that square with different logos on top. ASUS’s ExpertCenter PN55 measures 130 by 130 by 34mm. Geekom’s A9 Max sits at 135 by 132 by 46mm. Japan’s Links LC3501 shrinks it to 100 by 100 by 34mm. Dell skipped the mini entirely and went for the Mac Studio, giving the XPS RTX Spark Desktop a dark gray boxy body with a removable lid underneath for the SSD. At this point nobody is even pretending.

The convergence gets funnier at the expensive end. Every RTX Spark mini PC shown at Computex 2026, from Dell, Lenovo, ASUS and MSI, turned up with four USB-C ports, one HDMI and 10Gb Ethernet in a near-identical gray box. ServeTheHome, which photographed all four on the show floor, reckoned Nvidia is keeping a heavy hand on the steering wheel and enforcing design requirements on its partners. Apple arrived at this shape through integration, drawing an enclosure around a chip it designed itself. Everyone else arrived by consensus, or possibly by memo. Same silhouette, wildly different reason for existing.

1. Geekom A9 Max

Geekom A9 Max Mini PC on a table

Geekom’s A9 Max lands at 135 by 132 by 46mm, which puts it within 8mm of the Mac mini on every axis, close enough that the tape measure tells its own story. The chassis is full metal with softly radiused corners and a flat top plate, carrying the visual weight along with the footprint, that sense of a machined block rather than a molded shell. Inside is AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with Radeon 890M graphics, up to 128GB of DDR5 across two SODIMM slots and a pair of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe slots, for around $1,000. Geekom has spent years positioning itself as the answer to Intel’s NUC line, which died in 2023 and left the reference shape unclaimed. Somebody was always going to pick it up.

The limits show up under load rather than on the spec sheet. Testers found the 890M and the memory ceiling holding back heavier creative work, and the fans announcing themselves during video editing, which is the cost of working inside Apple’s volume without Apple’s thermal budget. One review measured an NPU benchmark score less than half what the identical processor managed in a rival machine, a gap Geekom later traced to a UEFI bug and patched. Apple ships one firmware for one board while Geekom ships many, and that difference surfaces in software long before it surfaces in the aluminum. The metalwork is excellent, and the chassis is the part of this machine that needed no revision at all.

2. Minisforum AI X1 Pro

Minisforum AI X1 Pro Mini PC on a table

Minisforum built the AI X1 Pro around everything Apple leaves out, and the case swelled accordingly. You get three M.2 slots, dual 2.5GbE, two USB4 ports, Wi-Fi 7, an internal 135W power supply instead of a laptop brick, and an OCuLink connector for hanging a desktop GPU off the side. Configurations run from a Ryzen 7 H 255 up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, with sale pricing landing between $899 and $1,369 depending on memory and storage. The workmanship sits clearly above the class average, with properly machined surfaces rather than the painted-over castings this price bracket usually delivers. It is the most capable machine in this roundup and the least contained.

Reviewers logged what that ambition costs, noting that the swollen footprint makes it a harder sell against the M4 Mac mini, that it runs loud, and that the Wi-Fi needed attention out of the box. Every port is volume, every volume is airflow, and airflow is noise, which is the chain of consequences Apple sidestepped by declining to offer any of this in the first place. The AI X1 Pro is the honest version of the trade, and it tells you in cubic centimeters exactly what expandability costs. Anyone who has priced an external GPU enclosure knows OCuLink is the cheapest route to real graphics performance in a small box. You simply cannot have it inside a 127mm square.

3. ASUS ExpertCenter PN55

ASUS ExpertCenter PN55 Mini PC

ASUS measures the ExpertCenter PN55 at 130 by 130 by 34mm and 0.6kg, which is three millimeters off the Mac mini’s footprint in both directions and a full 16mm slimmer. The aluminum chassis carries finely etched lines across the top that run off the edge and resolve into the rear cooling vents, a detail doing real work by turning a functional grille into a graphic element. Inside is a Ryzen AI 400 Series processor with an NPU rated up to 55 TOPS, up to 96GB of DDR5, six USB ports and dual LAN, enough to drive four 4K displays. ASUS validated the whole thing to MIL-STD-810H for round-the-clock operation, which matters for the signage and kiosk deployments this line actually sells into. It was announced at CES 2026 and started shipping in Q2.

ASUS inherited the entire NUC program from Intel in 2023, which gives it more historical claim to the small desktop than anyone except Apple, and the PN55 still reads like a Mac mini that got a job in IT. Its own idea is the chassis mechanism, a hinged lever that pops the machine open for RAM and storage swaps without a single tool. That is a direct answer to Apple, whose 2024 redesign sealed the enclosure and turned memory into a decision you make once and live with for five years. An IT manager buying two hundred of these cares more about that lever than about anything else on the spec sheet. The footprint is borrowed; the service model is entirely its own.

4. Acer Veriton RI110

Acer Veriton RI110 Mini PC

Acer announced the Veriton RI110 at IFA in Berlin on September 2, making it the newest arrival in this convergence by a matter of days. The chassis measures 138.5 by 131.3 by 52.1mm and weighs 630 grams, so it sits 11mm wider than a Mac mini, 2mm taller, and marginally lighter at 1.39 pounds against Apple’s 1.5. Acer calls it a mini workstation, which is a lot of syllables for a box the size of a sandwich. Inside is Intel’s Core Ultra X7 358H with Arc B390 graphics, up to 96GB of dual-channel LPDDR5X and up to 4TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage, with 10GbE and 2.5GbE both fitted. Acer claims it will run AI models of up to 120 billion parameters locally.

Soldered LPDDR5X sets the ceiling here, because memory is fixed at the moment of purchase and stays fixed for the life of the machine, the same bargain Apple asks you to make. The OCuLink port is the counterweight, a PCIe 4.0 x4 link rated at 64Gbps that lets you hang a full desktop graphics card off the back, which is the most un-Apple gesture available in this form factor. That 120 billion parameter figure deserves a squint, since fitting a model that size into 96GB requires aggressive quantization Acer has not specified anywhere in its materials. North America gets it in Q4 2026, EMEA in Q1 2027, and no price has been announced. It is a Mac mini with a hole drilled in the back.

5. Links LC3501

Link LC3501 Mini PC

The Links LC3501 is 100 by 100 by 34mm, weighs 260 grams, and runs a four-core Ryzen 5 3501U that AMD shipped on the Zen+ architecture back in 2019. Scaling the square down to a 10cm footprint works visually, because the proportions hold and the thing reads as a deliberate object rather than a shrunken one. Japanese distributor Links sells it for ¥58,800 with 8GB of DDR4 and ¥64,800 with 16GB, roughly $367 and $404, with a 256GB SATA SSD and Windows 11 Pro preinstalled. It shipped in mid-September 2026 and is not coming to the US, so treat this one as evidence rather than as a purchase. The chip inside is seven years old and the case could not care less.

Putting a 2019 processor in a 2026 enclosure reads oddly until you look at where DRAM and NAND prices have gone, at which point the arithmetic makes sense. What the machine exposes is that the silicon has become the variable and the shape has become the constant. A 100mm footprint at 34mm tall is a genuinely lovely object, smaller than the Mac mini in every dimension, and the shape is doing considerably more of the work here than the hardware. Designers have a name for this moment, when a form outlives the constraints that produced it and carries on as pure style. The LC3501 is that moment, on sale now, for $367.

6. AceMagic F2A

AceMagic F2A Mini PC

AceMagic’s F2A measures 148 by 120 by 39mm in an all-plastic case, running a Core Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H with Intel Arc graphics, 32GB of DDR5 and a 1TB SSD for under $600. The proportions are a rectangle rather than a square, which changes the read entirely, because a square sits on a desk as an object and a rectangle sits there as a component. Plastic shifts it further, since much of the visual argument of this form factor rests on appearing to be a solid machined block. Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5Gb Ethernet are both fitted, there is a spare M.2 slot, and the ports are sensibly split across front and back. For the silicon on offer, the price is fair.

The port list is where the budget becomes visible, with no USB4 or Thunderbolt anywhere and every USB-A connector capped at 5Gbit/s. Dual fans get loud under sustained load, with no button or software toggle to bring them down. A plastic shell radiates far less heat than machined aluminum, so the fans work harder to compensate, which is a material decision producing an acoustic outcome. Apple’s aluminum enclosure functions as a heatsink that also happens to be a housing, and that double duty is the expensive part of this form factor. The outline is the cheap thing to reproduce. The substrate is not.

7. Slimbook ONE

Slimbook ONE Mini PC

Spanish builder Slimbook ships the ONE at 158 by 130 by 58mm in silver aluminum and black plastic, which is about as close to Cupertino as a color pairing can get without sharing a supplier. Configurations run to a Ryzen 7 H 255 or the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, with up to 128GB of RAM and up to 16TB of SSD storage, plus OCuLink, dual 2.5GbE, Wi-Fi 7 and USB4. Pricing starts at 649 € for the Hawk Point model, roughly $760, rising to 949 € for the Strix Point version. The order page is the real product here, because Slimbook preloads Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or Linux Mint for free and charges extra for Windows. There is no US retail presence, so buying one means ordering from Spain.

Putting a silver aluminum square on a desk and booting KDE Plasma on it is a small act of comedy, and Slimbook knows exactly what it is doing. The company built its identity on selling Apple-grade hardware to people who actively prefer Apple’s software stay out of it, which turns the shared shape into an argument rather than an accident. Its own spec sheet at one point listed the machine as 5.5mm tall, a decimal point slip that would have made this the thinnest desktop computer ever built. The real number is 58mm, which is 8mm taller than a Mac mini and precisely what fitting OCuLink inside costs you. Small Linux vendors rarely get the metalwork this right.

8. MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG Mini PC

MSI has been building this box since 2015. The original Cubi arrived with a Broadwell chip, curved edges and a choice of black or white, nine years before Apple’s square settled into its current proportions. The current model is the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG, announced at CES 2026 and shipping from May 1, measuring 119.6 by 115.2 by 37.5mm for a total volume of half a liter. That makes it smaller than the Mac mini on every single axis, which is an engineering result rather than a marketing one. Inside is an Intel Panther Lake chip up to the 16-core Core Ultra 9 386H, 32GB of DDR5, dual Thunderbolt 4, dual 2.5G LAN and Wi-Fi 7.

Matte black plastic and a fingerprint sensor set into the power button are the tells that this was drawn for an IT deployment rather than a display shelf, the finish flat and light-absorbing where anodized aluminum would catch an edge highlight. The compactness and the tool-free access to RAM and storage are the wins. The $1,999 price of a loaded configuration and the Xe3 integrated graphics are the limits, with barebones units starting at $569 for anyone supplying their own memory and storage. There is no USB-A connector anywhere on the rear panel, which anybody running a wired keyboard will notice on day one. MSI builds the chassis from post-consumer recycled plastics and ships it in FSC-certified packaging.

9. Lenovo ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2

Lenovo ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2 Mini PC

Lenovo aimed one product further up the Apple lineup here, because the ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2 is chasing the Mac Studio, and the aim is uncomfortably good. It measures 195 by 191 by 108mm against the Mac Studio’s 197 by 197 by 95mm, landing within 6mm of Apple’s footprint on both axes and standing 13mm taller, which is roughly the height of a graphics card getting its own way. Inside that 3.6-liter box sits a full desktop GeForce RTX 5060 with 8GB of GDDR7, an Intel Core Ultra 9 285 vPro, 64GB of DDR5, three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and a 350W internal power supply rated at 92% efficiency. Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI 2.1 are both present. It weighs 8.2 pounds, or roughly five Mac minis.

Stuffing a desktop-class graphics card into Mac Studio proportions is the one thing Apple has never attempted, and it is the entire reason this machine exists. The chassis leaves room to swap the graphics card, the storage and the memory, making it the most serviceable object in this roundup by a distance, and the vents running down its flanks are doing considerably more visible work than Apple’s concealed underside intake. The costs are a 12-month warranty, no memory card reader of any kind, and pricing that has turned volatile, with one UK buyer paying £1,510 in late 2025 for a configuration listing above £3,400 by February. Configurations run from $1,919 to $2,409, which is Mac Studio money for Mac Studio dimensions. The square is the marketing; the RTX 5060 is the argument.

The post The Mac mini Form Factor is So Perfect, Literally Everyone is Copying It first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s $1,999 iPhone Duo Costs the Same as a Budget MacBook, iPhone, Watch, and AirPods Combined

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Price comparison between the iPhone Duo, MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, Watch SE3, and AirPods Pro 3

Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo, costs $1,999 for 256GB. That same money also buys four other Apple products with change left over: a 512GB MacBook Neo at $799, an iPhone 17e at $699, an Apple Watch SE 3 at $249, and AirPods Pro 3 at $249. Add it up and you land on $1,996, which is three dollars short of one folding phone. I ran the numbers twice because it looked like a typo. It’s not a typo, it is Apple’s live price list as of September 2026, and the distance between the cheapest thing Apple makes and the most expensive thing Apple makes has never been this wide.

Nobody at Apple decided the phone should cost more than the computer. It happened the way most design inversions happen, one component at a time. Folding glass, a custom hinge, titanium, a second display and a 2nm A20 Pro stack up until you arrive at $1,999 and call it a flagship. Meanwhile the MacBook Neo shed Touch ID, MagSafe and a backlit keyboard to reach $599 in March, before creeping to $699 in June. One product was optimized upward until it became jewelry, the other was optimized downward until it became a school supply, and the two now sit in the same online store 1,300 dollars apart.

The Ladder Apple Built Backwards

The iPhone Duo, MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, Watch SE3, and AirPods Pro 3 placed on a wooden table, eye level shot

For most of the iPhone’s history, the price ladder ran in a predictable direction. Laptops cost more than phones, because laptops did more work and carried more metal, glass and cooling hardware. The first MacBook launched in May 2006 at $1,099, which is roughly $1,750 today after inflation, while phones were largely carrier freebies bundled into two-year contracts. That relationship held, loosely, for two decades. It just quietly broke, and the break happened inside a single product lineup rather than across the industry.

What makes the inversion worth dwelling on is that Apple built both ends of it on purpose. The MacBook Neo was engineered down to a price, stripped of the backlit keyboard, fast charging and MagSafe that would normally be standard on a $700 laptop, so that Apple could compete with Chromebooks and entry Windows machines. The iPhone Duo was engineered up to a price, layered with every expensive material Apple had available, and our own coverage of the Duo’s launch called it the biggest redesign of the iPhone since the home button disappeared in 2017. The Apple Watch SE 3, meanwhile, is the one product in this stack that got frozen in place, launched alongside the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 last September and left untouched at this year’s keynote entirely.

What $1,996 Actually Buys

The iPhone Duo, MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, Watch SE3, and AirPods Pro 3 placed on a wooden table.

Run the alternative stack and it holds together as a genuinely complete kit rather than a novelty math exercise. The 512GB MacBook Neo gives you a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, an A18 Pro chip, and up to 16 hours of battery in a recycled aluminum shell, for $799. The iPhone 17e covers the phone slot at $699, currently the cheapest new iPhone Apple sells after the rest of the lineup went up $100 on September 9. The Apple Watch SE 3 adds a wrist device with an always-on display and 18-hour battery for $249, and AirPods Pro 3 close the loop at $249 with active noise cancellation, a custom heart rate sensor, and live translation built in.

That is a laptop, a phone, a watch and a pair of earbuds, touching every screen size Apple makes, for three dollars less than one folding phone. It is worth being honest about what that stack gives up. None of those four devices fold, none of them run the A20 Pro, and the SE 3 skips the electrocardiogram and blood oxygen sensors that the pricier Apple Watch Series 12 carries. But as a snapshot of how far Apple’s floor and ceiling have drifted apart, it is hard to beat, and it is proprietary math nobody else appears to have bothered running.

The Hinge Is Doing the Expensive Work

The thing actually driving the $1,999 sticker is not marketing, it is the hinge, and Apple spent real engineering years proving it. The folding display uses a scratch-resistant coating, a polymer cover layer Apple says is up to 40% stiffer than materials used for similar applications, multiple layers of high-strength glass, and a titanium plate underneath, all wrapped around a custom hinge designed to minimize the crease that plagues rival foldables. That is a lot of material science stacked into one seam, and it is the primary reason a Duo cannot be priced anywhere near a Neo.

Apple paired that hinge with an A20 Pro built on a 2-nanometer process, its first chip at that node, delivering what Apple claims is 35% higher sustained performance than the iPhone 17 Pro thanks to a new cooling system built for a thinner chassis. None of that is padding. A folding OLED stack with a titanium frame genuinely costs more to manufacture than a fixed aluminum body, and first-generation folding hardware from any brand has always carried a premium while yields improve. The fair comparison is not Duo versus cheap Apple gear, it is Duo versus other folding flagships, and our own breakdown of what the Duo got right that Samsung still hasn’t found it costing exactly $100 more than the Galaxy Z Fold8’s $1,899.

Nobody Asked For a Missing Middle

What turns this from an interesting price gap into a strange one is what Apple left out of the September 9 keynote entirely. There is no standard iPhone 18, no iPhone 18e, no iPhone Air 2, all reportedly pushed to spring 2027. Anyone who wants a new iPhone before then chooses between $1,199 for the Pro and $1,999 for the Duo, with nothing built to sit between those two numbers this year. Apple has effectively removed the middle rung of its own ladder at the exact moment the top and bottom rungs drifted furthest apart.

That gap is where the $1,996 stack might just appeal to the Apple fan who has a strict budget to work with. It fills the space Apple’s own lineup left empty, assembling a complete household of devices for less than the price of the one device Apple actually wants you looking at this fall. None of that makes the Duo a bad phone, and folding glass this durable was never going to be cheap. It does mean that for one more season, the most interesting purchase decision at Apple has nothing to do with which iPhone to buy, and everything to do with whether you buy an iPhone at all.

The post Apple’s $1,999 iPhone Duo Costs the Same as a Budget MacBook, iPhone, Watch, and AirPods Combined first appeared on Yanko Design.

Delightfully Retro LEGO Art Deco Hotel Celebrates Vice City with GTA 6 Right Around The Corner

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Here’s a fun bit of trivia to drop at your next party and watch people’s eyes glaze over: LEGO made its own version of Vice City before Vice City existed. It was called Paradisa, it ran from 1992 to 1997, and it was basically an entire toy line built on pink bricks, jet skis, and mustachioed men serving cocktails poolside. Nobody remembers it because it got quietly discontinued and replaced with fairy castles, but the DNA never really left the company. Fast forward a few decades and GTA 6 is about to remind the entire planet why Miami pastels slap so hard, and wouldn’t you know it, a LEGO Ideas builder has basically resurrected Paradisa just in time.

The Art Deco Hotel is the result, a 2,600 piece love letter to Ocean Drive that reads like someone locked a LEGO fan in a room with old Paradisa catalogs and a Netflix trailer for GTA 6. It is not licensed, it will never be licensed, and honestly, that might be exactly why it works.

Designer: Distracted Builder

The guy behind this one is a certified LEGO Ideas veteran, a 10K Club member with a track record of digging up dead LEGO themes and giving them a proper send off (his previous project was a Samurai Castle tribute to the old 90s Ninja subtheme, so this is clearly his whole vibe). For the Art Deco Hotel, he says he’s visited Miami three times and fell hard for Ocean Drive in person, and that he wanted to bottle both the architecture and his love of 80s music into one build. He calls the model “a small tribute to LEGO Paradisa,” which is putting it mildly, because the finished hotel is basically wearing a Paradisa name tag. The vertical neon sign running down the central tower spells out P-A-R-A-D-I-S-A, with HOTEL glowing on a pink marquee below it, which might be my single favorite detail in the whole build. It is a tiny piece of branding doing three jobs at once: it nails the real Ocean Drive habit of stacking hotel names vertically so passing cars can actually read them, it winks at the LEGO theme that inspired it, and it just looks great lit up against all that turquoise trim.

Under the hood, this thing is a proper working hotel, not just a pretty face. The facade folds open to reveal a lobby with a reception desk and an elevator, guest rooms furnished with beds and cabinets, bathrooms with actual sinks and showers, and a staircase leading all the way up to a rooftop pool and bar. Add in the palm trees, the scooter parked out front, and a minifig sunbathing on the roof with a cocktail, and you’ve basically got a functioning slice of 1980s Miami sitting on your shelf, no felony charges required.

The best part is the timing nobody planned. LEGO did not get a call from Rockstar, Distracted Builder is not secretly working for Take-Two, this is just what happens when good design instincts and good taste in vacation destinations collide. The Art Deco Hotel currently sits at 2,505 supporters on LEGO Ideas, with the next milestone at 5,000 and 558 days still on the clock, so there’s plenty of runway left. If you want to help push this pastel dream toward an actual box set, you can head to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote. And if LEGO’s design team is somehow reading this, do the sign in light bricks. This hotel deserves to glow at sundown just like the real ones do.

The post Delightfully Retro LEGO Art Deco Hotel Celebrates Vice City with GTA 6 Right Around The Corner first appeared on Yanko Design.

MagSafe Drone Lets You Attach An iPhone For Perfect Hands-free Selfies And Videos

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Flying Gimbal Drone concept with an iPhone mounted on it

Google’s Add Me is one of the stranger things a phone has ever done. Introduced on the Pixel 9, it takes a photo of your family, then hands the phone to somebody in that photo, who takes a second shot of you standing where the gap was. The phone stitches the two together and produces a group picture that never existed, of a moment where everybody was never actually in the room at once. It works remarkably well. It is also, if you think about it for longer than four seconds, deeply odd, a family portrait assembled in post like a Marvel crowd scene.

Flafa proposes the analog answer to the same question. A concept from Kaiyuan Liu and four classmates at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, it’s a small quadcopter that carries your phone into the air so the camera can hold its own position while every human stays put. The phone snaps onto a magnetic pad below four fully enclosed rotors, hangs face-out, and records while the drone flies itself. It won its category at the 2025 European Product Design Award. Same problem, opposite philosophy: Google removes the photographer with software, Flafa removes them with lift.

Designers: Kaiyuan Liu, Qiushi Wang, Yan Wang, Shiqi Liu & Xiaoyi Chen

Family posing in front of a drone with an iPhone mounted on it

Selfie drones have failed so many times that the category has a graveyard. AirSelfie tried in 2017. Snap’s Pixy launched in 2022, died four months later, and was recalled in 2024 because the batteries caught fire. They all lost for the same reason. A drone light enough to fly indoors cannot carry a camera that beats the phone already in your pocket, so you buy a flying camera, fly it twice, and quietly retire it to a drawer. Flafa declines that fight entirely by bringing no camera at all.

Mounting an iPhone onto a Drone Gimbal using MagSafe

Two small sensor windows sit on the front propeller shrouds, giving the drone its own eyes for navigation while your phone dedicates itself to recording. That division of labor is the smartest thing in the whole project. Most flying cameras ask one sensor to handle obstacle avoidance, subject tracking, and image capture simultaneously, and it shows in the footage. Here the quadcopter worries about the ceiling fan and the phone worries about your kid’s face, which is roughly how you’d split the job if you had two people.

Somebody on this team understood that a drone meant to hover near a toddler cannot look like drone. The renders show warm oat cream, soft radii, matte surfaces, and not one visible screw, putting Flafa closer to a Muji humidifier than to anything DJI has shipped. Consumer drones are almost universally styled for a man in sunglasses on a cliff, all black plastic and angular vents. That grammar makes sense in a camera bag. It makes none in a living room during a birthday party.

The mount deserves credit for paranoia. A magnetic puck holds the phone, and a hinged brace folds along the handset’s edge as mechanical backup, which suggests the team thought hard about a thousand dollars of glass becoming a lawn dart. That said, the physics remains the open question. An iPhone Pro Max weighs around 233 grams, heavier than an entire DJI Neo, and hanging that mass below the center of lift makes a pendulum. The project is called a flying gimbal, but the renders show a hinge rather than an actuated axis.

Student concepts are allowed to be ahead of their batteries. What Flafa gets right is the framing of the problem, and that part is free. Every family album has one person missing, and it’s whoever picked up the camera. Google’s answer is to invent them back in afterward. This one just sends the camera upstairs for a minute.

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A Designer turned Xiaomi’s Logo into a Multi-Utility Vehicle Concept

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Side profile of the Xiaomi Horizon concept MPV in blue-to-lavender paint, parked on a white platform above still water.

You know that little rounded square Xiaomi uses as its logo? The one a Japanese design legend spent actual months tuning with a math equation just to get the curve right? Lucas Angelo looked at that shape and thought, sure, why not build a car out of it. The result is the Xiaomi Horizon, and I mean that almost literally. The tailgate is one giant glowing squircle. The wheels are squircles. The whole rear end reads like someone blew up an app icon to the size of a minivan.

It sounds like a gimmick until you remember Xiaomi’s entire EV strategy is basically “make our products feel like they all came from the same brain,” and a car shaped logo is honestly not the dumbest way to pull that off. Whether it should be a Multi Purpose Vehicle or something else entirely is a separate question, and we will get to it. But credit where it is due, this thing has more brand DNA baked into its sheet metal than most concepts manage with an entire mood board of heritage references.

Designer: Lucas Angelo

Front three-quarter view of the Horizon against a tall black louvered wall, with mountains visible in the background.

Rear three-quarter view of the Horizon at dusk, showing its illuminated red squircle taillight and the Xiaomi wordmark.

That squircle obsession is not Angelo inventing a bit for fun. Back in 2021, Xiaomi hired Kenya Hara, the design legend behind MUJI’s whole visual identity, to redraw its logo. He landed on a superellipse formula, dialed to a value called n equals 3, which is the mathematically precise sweet spot between a perfect square and a perfect circle. People online mocked it as three hundred grand for rounded corners. Angelo apparently took it a lot more seriously than the internet did, because Horizon’s entire rear fascia is basically that formula rendered at automotive scale, ringed in individually lit LEDs so it glows like a screensaver whenever the car is parked.

Front three-quarter view of the Horizon showing its illuminated Cascade Grille and squircle wheel hubs.

Straight-on rear view of the Horizon on a salt-flat-like surface, with its glowing red squircle taillight centered.

The front end plays a similar game with something Xiaomi calls the Cascade Grille, a full width lattice of tiny illuminated squares that fade in a stepped pattern across the nose. It is not a functional intake so much as a light show, which tracks for a brand that made its name on phones and smart speakers before it ever touched a chassis. Xiaomi’s actual head of automotive design, Li Tianyuan, cut his teeth on the BMW iX and the i Vision Circular, a concept that turned BMW’s kidney grille into a digital display. Angelo landing in almost the same conceptual neighborhood, independently, says his instincts are pointed in a direction the real design team already validated once.

Side view of the Horizon parked in front of a spiked black wall, taillight lit, with snowy peaks behind it.

Here is where things get spicy. China’s premium electric MPV segment has a body count, and the most famous casualty is the Li Auto Mega, a smooth, curvy one box people mover that the internet immediately nicknamed the hearse. One owner slapped high speed train decals on his because the jokes wrote themselves, and Li Auto’s own design chief was still publicly defending the car more than two years later. A big blank slab of a rear end on an MPV is basically an invitation for the internet to decide what it looks like for you, and it is never flattering.

The Horizon driving down a city street past a billboard

This is exactly the trap Horizon’s illuminated tailgate sidesteps. Instead of a flat dark void back there, you get a glowing signature the size of a barn door, something to actually look at instead of squint at. Whether Xiaomi ever builds anything like this is unlikely, especially now that the real Xiaomi has already picked its answer to the family hauler question with the SkyNomad, an EREV SUV with a fridge and a bed mode rather than a sliding door MPV. But Horizon is a fun reminder that sometimes the best way to honor a brand is to take its smallest, most mocked design decision and blow it up until everyone has to take it seriously.

The post A Designer turned Xiaomi’s Logo into a Multi-Utility Vehicle Concept first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple is Working on Two iPhone Game Controllers Under its Beats Brand

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Concept Beats branded iPhone game controller, close-up on the right grip showing X, Y, A, B face buttons, thumbstick, and red Beats logo, with the clamped iPhone home screen visible at left, lit in red.

Apple and the gaming crowd have always had one of those relationships where you nod at each other across a party and never actually walk over. Apple makes the chips, brags about them beating a PS5 in some benchmark slide, then goes right back to talking about spreadsheets and stargazing apps. Gamers, meanwhile, buy a Steam Deck or a Switch and never think about the iPhone in their pocket as a gaming device at all. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman just reported that Apple wants to finally cross the room, having spent over a year quietly developing its own gaming controllers for the iPhone. The bigger twist is who gets to wear the name tag. Rather than an Apple logo, the hardware is reportedly launching under Beats, the audio label Apple has been slowly turning into its lifestyle catch-all since buying it in 2014.

Code unearthed in a leaked macOS 26.7 build gives the rumor real teeth, naming two unreleased devices, T6502 and T1057, each carrying its own dedicated controller profile instead of placeholder code. Both come with the standard gamepad vocabulary, sticks, triggers, a D-pad, face buttons, the stuff every controller on the planet already has. T6502 keeps things simple and wired. T1057 adds Bluetooth, motion sensors, and a noticeably different haptic engine, suggesting more than one idea is being tested at once. Nothing is priced, dated, or confirmed, but the code alone says this has moved well past a mood board.

Designer: Apple

Concept Beats branded iPhone game controller shown fully assembled with an iPhone clamped in the center, both grips visible with D-pad, thumbsticks, and red Beats logos, set against a dark background with a large red Beats logo behind it.

Gurman’s sourcing on the branding is the part I keep chewing on. He says Beats executives are leading both the engineering and the product concept, not just slapping a logo on something Apple’s industrial design team already finished. His reasoning is that the culture and lifestyle around gaming controllers fits Beats better than it fits Apple, and that the sub-brand gives the company room to use cheaper materials and a louder design without dragging down the premium finish people expect from anything wearing the actual Apple logo. Read between the lines and that is Apple admitting its own aesthetic has a ceiling. Titanium and glass photograph beautifully, but nobody wants to grip a cold slab for a three-hour Genshin Impact session. Beats, with its glossy plastics and its very unserious relationship with color, is a far more honest home for an object designed to be squeezed, dropped, and thrown in a backpack pocket.

Concept Beats branded iPhone game controller in two separated halves with the iPhone floating above, left grip showing D-pad and right grip showing face buttons, both with red Beats logos, resting on a dark reflective surface.

There is a decent trade-off lurking here too, and it is worth naming before anyone gets too excited. T6502, the wired one, is basic by design, which means it will likely be the cheaper, more disposable option with none of the motion sensing or richer haptics that make a controller feel alive. T1057 sounds like the one worth wanting, but Bluetooth controllers introduce pairing friction and battery anxiety that a simple USB-C plug-in never has to deal with. Apple will have to pick a lane, or price the two far enough apart that the choice makes sense, and so far there is no signal on either price or release window. History also isn’t fully on Apple’s side. The company has floated controller ideas for years without shipping one, and it once required developers to support the Siri Remote’s accelerometer as a de facto gaming input before quietly dropping that mandate. A leaked profile in a beta build is not a keynote slide.

Close-up of the left grip of a concept Beats branded iPhone game controller, showing the D-pad, thumbstick, and red Beats logo, with the clamped iPhone visible in soft focus behind it.

Where this actually matters long term is the software Apple has already built around it. iOS 26 shipped a dedicated Games app that pulls your library, your Game Center friends, and Apple Arcade into one hub across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, and Arcade itself has quietly grown past 250 titles for $6.99 a month. A first-party controller, even a scrappy Beats-branded one, gives all of that infrastructure something physical to plug into, which is a very different goal from just selling more hardware. It also puts Apple in the odd position of competing with its own shelf space, since the Apple Store already sells the Backbone One and the SteelSeries Nimbus, and we covered how Backbone’s own Pro model already chases full-size ALPS sticks and forty-hour battery life at a premium price. Razer’s brand new Prio takes the opposite approach entirely, folding down to credit card size for people who would rather not carry a controller-shaped commitment at all. Apple showing up now, later than everyone, wearing someone else’s logo, says less about gaming and more about how Apple treats every category it enters late. Quietly, sideways, and only once it has found a version of itself that does not feel like Apple at all.

The post Apple is Working on Two iPhone Game Controllers Under its Beats Brand first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Supercharged Grand Tourer Was Built Using a 90-Year-Old Metal-Shaping Tool

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The GTX in Riviera blue, all splitter, vents, and a rear wing that towers over the roofline.

There is a tool called an English wheel that has been shaping aluminum car panels since roughly the 1930s. It is a big metal hoop with a roller in the middle, and you push sheet metal through it by hand until it curves the way you want. It sounds like something you would find in a blacksmith’s shed, not in the workshop of a car aiming for 1,200 horsepower. Yet that is exactly the tool Coventry Metalcraft used to hand-form the body of the new Jensen Interceptor GTX, alongside laptops running computational fluid dynamics software. Old-world muscle meets new-world math, and somehow both sides showed up to the same car without arguing.

Jensen International Automotive unveiled the GTX in early September, and it is a strange beast by design. It is Jensen’s first ever clean-sheet car, built to preview a whole new Interceptor lineup, and it gets there using ten English wheels worked by more than 30 artisans, alongside digital design data from studio Avant Design and mixed-reality checks nobody in 1966 could have dreamed of. The result is a 960 bhp supercharged V8 grand tourer wearing hand-beaten aluminum panels shaped partly by algorithms. Britain’s oldest car-forming trick just got a very modern wingman.

Designer: Avant Design

Under the hood: a 6.8-liter supercharged V8 from Late Model Engines, wrapped in carbon and gold foil.

Long bonnet, fastback roofline, and a wing that ruins the original Interceptor's silhouette on purpose.

Avant Design, based out of Royal Leamington Spa, is the studio responsible for translating the original 1966 Interceptor’s proportions into something that reads as contemporary rather than costume. The long bonnet survives, the tightly drawn greenhouse survives, and the wraparound rear glass that made the original such a distinctive shape is still there, even if a towering rear wing now partially blocks the view of it. What is new is the front end, with slim horizontal LED lighting and enormous carbon intakes replacing the old car’s chrome-heavy face. Interestingly, this is not Avant’s first crack at reimagining this exact silhouette. Back in 2023, the studio quietly published a concept called the E-Ceptor, an electric take on the Interceptor with reworked rear glazing and a fresh grille graphic. The GTX effectively took that speculative sketch and gave it a supercharged V8 instead of a battery pack.

Diffuser, quad exhausts, and a wing built for lap times.

A full-width taillight and a wing pulled straight from GT3 territory.

The aluminum decision, both for the chassis and the body, was not driven by sentiment. David Duerden, Jensen International’s managing director, put it plainly when explaining why the GTX skipped carbon fiber entirely. He does not want the car riding like “a skateboard,” which is a fair concern given how punishing a stiff carbon tub can feel on a road built for a Sixties grand tourer, not a modern track special. Aluminum chassis structures are also considerably cheaper to produce in small batches, since they avoid the expensive tooling that carbon fiber demands before a single panel gets made. For a car expected to sell in the dozens rather than the thousands, that economic math matters more than bragging rights about carbon weave.

No screen, just a MoTeC dash, roll cage, and switchgear built for business.

That economic logic is exactly why the English wheel earns its keep here. Hand-forming panels sidesteps the tooling costs that would sink a low-volume carbon fiber program before it ever reached a customer. Coventry Metalcraft’s artisans still shape every piece the old-fashioned way, but they are working from digital surfaces that Avant Design refined using CFD modeling, chasing the 350 kilograms of downforce the GTX needs to behave itself at speed. It is a genuinely odd combination of a seventy-year-old forming technique and simulation software that did not exist when the original Interceptor left the Kelvin Way factory. Jensen is betting its entire comeback on that combination holding together, and so far, from what we have seen, it seems to be working rather beautifully.

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TECNO’s Lamborghini Phone Draws Its Logo in Light Using 177 Mini LEDs

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TECNO POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition

The most expensive Lamborghini phone ever made was a $6,000 slab of hand-stitched leather and gold plating called the 88 Tauri, and it ran Android KitKat on a Snapdragon 801. That was CES 2015, peak era for buying two-year-old silicon at four times the price because someone put a bull on it. Tonino Lamborghini made three of those phones between 2013 and 2017, then went away. The name has now resurfaced on the back of a TECNO POVA that costs about $490, and the badge is finally earning its position. It gets drawn in light instead of stamped in metal.

On the POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition, the Italian brand’s “L” is rendered by 177 individually controlled mini-LEDs in TECNO’s Alive Matrix panel, and the red Pulse Line down the center of the back is a passive optical effect built from internal mirror structures sandwiched between two coating layers at different physical heights. Rotate it and the red rises out of the black, then drops back in. The phone is spec-identical to the standard POVA 8 Pro, so every difference you are paying for is a surface decision. Thai prices start at 15,999 baht for 8GB and 256GB, topping out at 19,999 baht for 12GB and 512GB. There is no US release and no US carrier certification.

Designer: TECNO Design Team, in collaboration with Tonino Lamborghini S.p.A.

Mechanical Grammar, Translated

The brief TECNO gave itself was to take a vocabulary that belongs to cars and make it belong to a slab of glass and aluminum, and the way in usually decides whether that kind of project reads as clever or as a paste job. The team started with the visual codes of mechanical design rather than the logo itself: body lines, cooling grilles, honeycomb patterns, exhaust-inspired detailing. That’s the right instinct. A shield pasted onto a black rectangle says nothing. A shield built from the same geometric logic as an engine bay at least has a reason to exist there. The result is the Signature Shield pattern ringing the Pulse Line, a hexagonal structure lifted from Tonino Lamborghini’s own emblem and mechanical detailing rather than invented fresh for the phone. It gives the back of the device an actual sense of depth and structure instead of a flat decal sitting on top of a chassis that was never designed with it in mind.

The Manufacturing Problem Nobody Sees

The interesting part isn’t the pattern, it’s how TECNO built it. Getting that Pulse Line to shift color under different lighting angles required internal mirror structures processed to redirect light the way a curved mirror does, stacked underneath a brightness-enhancing first layer that behaves closer to a lacquer finish than a printed graphic. Between the two layers sits a real, physical height difference, which is what gives the effect actual depth rather than the flat printed texture you get on most co-branded rear panels. TECNO describes this as one of the most complex rear-cover processes it has run on a POVA product, and the harder problem wasn’t making one unit look right, it was getting thousands of units to look right consistently. That’s a legitimate manufacturing achievement on a phone priced well under $500, and it’s the kind of detail that gets lost entirely once a press release compresses it down to “premium finish.”

POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition with a 144Hz Display

A Skin That Goes All the Way Through

TECNO didn’t stop at the shell, which is the part most co-branded phones treat as optional. The software carries the same black-and-red system with reworked icon outlines, nudging soft rounded shapes toward hexagon and shield silhouettes so the interface reads as an extension of the hardware rather than a wallpaper slapped over stock Android. TECNO says the software work alone took close to four months, covering the boot animation, dynamic wallpapers, ringtones, and the Alive Matrix “L” effect. The accessories continue the bit: a braided black-and-red cable, a case built from TPU and polycarbonate carved with a Kevlar-inspired carbon fiber texture. None of it is essential to how the phone functions, but all of it is the difference between a badge and a bit that someone actually thought through.

What a Tonino Lamborghini Badge Used to Cost

Worth sitting with how far this pulls the brand from its own history. This partnership started back in March at MWC, where TECNO and Tonino Lamborghini unveiled the POVA Metal Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition alongside a water-cooled mini gaming PC concept carrying the same red-and-gunmetal language into laptops, tablets, and earphones. That first phone felt closer to the old playbook than this one does. The 88 Tauri and its 2014 sibling, the Antares, were built around leather, gold plating, and price tags that assumed the badge alone justified the markup. The 2017 Alpha One dialed the ornamentation down but kept the price near $2,100. Automobili Lamborghini’s own collaborations, including the Oppo Find X Automobili Lamborghini Edition at €1,700 against a €1,000 base phone, followed the same math: better materials, a visible badge, a premium that tracked the logo rather than the manufacturing. This is the first Lamborghini phone where the badge shows up as a production process instead of a price justification, and it happens to be the cheapest one the family has ever put its name on. For the full spec rundown on the rear panel construction, we’ve covered the hardware side of this phone in detail already.

Close-up of the TECNO POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition phone's camera bump

Price, Availability, and the Fine Print

Thailand has this now, sold through BaNANA, IT CITY, Jaymart, and other retailers since August 21, with early buyers getting a Tonino Lamborghini backpack and a Tecno Watch 3 Active thrown in. Pricing for India and other markets hasn’t landed yet as of this writing. If you’re reading from the US, this one isn’t coming your way in any official form. TECNO has no FCC certification and no carrier partnerships stateside, so anything that turns up on a resale site is a gray-market import with no warranty support behind it. Worth knowing before anyone gets attached to a color they’ll never see in a carrier store.

The Badge, Recalibrated

TECNO didn’t need Tonino Lamborghini’s name to sell a $490 phone with a good screen and a big battery, which makes the choice to spend four months on software and reinvent the rear-cover process for a mid-ranger feel almost backward by traditional luxury-licensing logic. Usually the name does the selling and the hardware coasts. Here the hardware earns the attention and the name rides along for once. Whether that model survives past a limited run is a separate question, since Tonino Lamborghini’s own history with phones has always run in short bursts before going quiet for years. For now, the badge looks better on a light source than it ever did on leather.

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Foam Earplugs Haven’t Changed Since the 1970s — This Spiral Design Just Made Them Obsolete

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The humble foam earplug has been functionally unchanged since the 1970s: roll it down, jam it in, hope it expands to a seal, and find it somewhere in the sheets by 2 AM. It’s one of the few everyday objects that design culture has genuinely never come for, maybe because the attenuation numbers technically work, or maybe because nobody with enough resources was annoyed enough to fix it. The Ears 360 Silence, a CE-certified soft silicone earplug from Paris, is a structural redesign of that whole idea. Its retractable spiral wraps into the outer ear’s helix rather than anchoring in the canal, locking the plug flat and flush against the head with 24 dB SNR measured to EN 352-2:2020 and a peak of 29.9 dB at the frequency range where snoring and human voices live. The foam never had a chance.

Youcef Abdaoui runs a studio near Paris and started prototyping the Silence in 2024 with a bent wire and a bit of putty, just to test whether a helix-anchoring spiral could hold in an ear. It did, and the dozens of iterations that followed produced a product France voted Product of the Year 2026, consumer-elected rather than jury-awarded, which tells you something about how it performs in actual ears. Ears 360 has since shipped to more than 120,000 customers through their store, 500+ pharmacies, and B2B partners before going international. The Silence is not a prototype. It is certified to EN 352-2:2020, mass-produced, and more than 14,000 units are already in stock. I got to see a pair in person, and the silicone finish reads as serious product, not a health-aisle impulse buy.

Designer: Youcef Abdaoui

Click Here to Buy Now: $21 $35 (40% off). Hurry, only 57/300 left!

The ear is already a spiral. The outer rim of the pinna is anatomically called the helix, a curved ridge that traces a partial revolution around the auricle, and deeper inside, the cochlea completes that geometry: a full spiral chamber, coiled like a snail shell, that converts sound pressure into neural signal. Nature returns to the spiral repeatedly because it distributes force without concentration points, the same structural logic behind a nautilus shell or the tight coil of a fern fiddlehead before it unfurls. The Ears 360 Silence works with that architecture: the spiral holds, not the tip. Instead of pressing into the canal and trusting friction, the retractable spiral wraps laterally into the helix and locks there through geometry, bearing almost no canal pressure, which is the whole reason the plug sits flush rather than protrude. If you know how spiral springs work, think of the way the spiral on the earplug expands to fill your ear canal. Along with friction, this physical detail helps the Silence adapt to pretty much any ear shape or size.

The flatness is perhaps the most impressive detail, setting it apart from every earplug you’ve seen in the past. The loop-style reusable earplugs that have become popular over the past few years make a design virtue of their visibility, with a circular protrusion sitting outside the ear canal as a deliberate aesthetic statement. That works at a concert, but it becomes a pressure point the moment you roll onto your side in bed, which is the situation most people are buying earplugs for in the first place. The Silence’s spiral body measures 18.44 mm by 15.49 mm, slim enough that there’s nothing significant pressing against a pillow. The profile looks almost deceitfully small for what it’s actually doing… and yes, Youcef did mention that the earplugs work perfectly well in concerts too.

One spiral body, two protection levels, switchable in seconds from 24 dB to 29 dB. The standard silicone tips, available in three sizes (9.9 mm, 11.9 mm, and 12.9 mm diameter), deliver 24 dB SNR, enough to take a busy street down to library territory without muffling conversation entirely. The Swim & Work Kit clips on triple-flange tips that push attenuation up to 29 dB, entering genuine worksite and industrial territory. User satisfaction data from Ears 360 puts concert approval at 91% and commute approval at 97%, and an IPX7 waterproof rating keeps the spiral itself pool-ready alongside the kit’s triple-flange seal.

One Silence replaces hundreds of disposable foam earplugs. The earplug’s body is made to last for years, the silicone tips are replaceable instead of throwing the product away, and the packaging is compact by design so every shipment travels as a slim letter, not a parcel. No separate carbon offset claim required. Pricing starts at €24 (roughly $28) for a single unit with carry case and all three tip sizes, with the Silence and Swim & Work Kit bundle at €27, and a Duo Pack at €39 for two. Current colorways are Black and Pink, with Green planned as a future addition. Delivery is November 2026, and no specific warranty period is stated on the product page, though the replaceable-tip architecture makes longevity something you can actually act on rather than just take someone’s word for.

Click Here to Buy Now: $21 $35 (40% off). Hurry, only 57/300 left!

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No Switches Needed. Just Press, Pull, or Bop These Silicone Lamps: Behind The Design with YD

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Here is a fun little contradiction to chew on before we get into the actual lamps. The whole point of Call It a Day, Tongqi Design’s new lighting collection, is that you barely have to try. You bop it, you tug it, you flop your hand near it, and it turns on. Zero precision required, zero thinking involved, which is exactly the pitch when you have just walked through the door after a day that emptied you out. But get this. The less effort the lamp asks of you, the more effort someone else clearly put into making that possible. That is the trade we are here to unpack.

Shanghai-based designer Tongqi Lu built the collection, a table lamp, floor lamp, and pendant, around soft silicone shades with zero switches anywhere on them. Every gesture works because the material itself is doing the sensing, not a button hunting for your finger. It sounds simple sitting in your living room. It is not simple to make, and that gap between the two is basically our whole story today.

Designer: Tongqi Lu

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The Design

Call It a Day is a three piece lighting collection, a table lamp, a floor lamp, and a pendant, and every one of them is dressed in soft, translucent silicone instead of glass or fabric. That alone is a break from convention, since silicone shades are usually reserved for LED strip diffusers rather than the whole visible body of a lamp. But the real departure is that none of these lamps have a switch. You bop the table lamp, you tug the pendant by its cord, you press the floor lamp wherever feels natural, and the light responds. There is no correct spot to find in the dark. The entire shade is the input, which sounds like a small shift until you realize how much of lamp design has always been built around finding one tiny precise point.

Lu frames the whole thing around the moment you get home and your body checks out before your brain does. She has talked about dropping onto the sofa and reaching out to press, pull, or tap without really thinking about it, and the light turning on not because she followed a rule but because she did not. That is a genuinely sharp way to think about interaction design. Most lighting asks you to be at your most coordinated right when you are at your least. Call It a Day flips that expectation, and the coiled yellow cable running through the collection is a nice touch too, borrowing the old pull chain gesture without being precious about it.

The Process

Here is where things get interesting, because the studio itself is not some slick production facility. It is an office in Shanghai with a plastic sheeted folding table, jerrycans of liquid silicone lined up against the wall, and a window looking out over the skyline. Before any of it was cast, the whole collection existed as full scale cardboard mockups, a pendant hung from a coiled cord and a table lamp balanced on a paper cone, sitting in the corner of the room like a rough draft nobody threw away. That is a genuinely useful thing to see, because it shows the gesture and the proportions were locked in long before the material was.

The shades themselves come out of large block molds with a fine grid texture cut into the cavity, which shows up on the finished silicone as a soft woven pattern once the lamp is lit. Getting silicone out of a mold cleanly is trickier than it sounds, since silicone tends to bond to itself, so getting a cast shade out of a cast mold without either tearing or fusing takes real care with release agents and material choice. Pouring it clean adds another layer of difficulty, since bubbles trapped in a translucent material show up as visible flaws once the light hits them. In the photos, you can see two people pouring together, one holding the bucket steady, the other running a palette knife across the lip so the silicone comes down in a thin ribbon instead of glugging out in one shot, which is a simple trick for keeping air out of the pour. It is not a factory process. It is a hand process, done carefully, on a folding table, gallon by gallon.

The Perspective

What I like most about Call It a Day is that the ease on the user’s end is clearly paid for somewhere upstream, and that upstream cost is visible if you know where to look. A switchless lamp sounds like a simple idea until you have to actually engineer a material that can be grabbed, twisted, and mistreated without breaking or losing its shape, and then cast that material cleanly at scale in a small studio. That gap between the lived experience and the labor behind it is exactly what a lot of good product design tries to hide, and here it is sitting right out in the open in the process photos.

It also helps that the whole thing traces back to something real. Lu’s early work, the lemon shaped Citron lamp, her furniture line built around trees and water lilies, all of it circles the same idea of pulling people back into their bodies after a long day in a city that does not really let them slow down. Call It a Day feels like the most literal version of that idea yet, a lamp built entirely around the ninety seconds when you have officially given up on being careful. Whether or not the gesture control holds up over years of actual use is a question only time and daily wear will answer, but as a piece of intent, this one lands.

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