Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

This shapeshifting pocket knife becomes a fixed blade when you shorten its handle

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Knife people love to argue, and the oldest argument in the book is fixed blade versus folder. Fixed blades win on trust, because a solid piece of steel with no pivot can’t fold shut on your fingers. Folders win on pocket-friendliness, and both camps have been yelling about it on forums since dial-up. Zyac Design’s Z01S tries to end the fight by being a bit of both. It’s a Grade 5 titanium folding knife with a handle you can shorten while the blade is open, engaging an additional lock designed to keep it from folding. I’d call it a peace treaty, but knife forums would probably find a way to argue about that too.

Zyac has been chasing one particular ratio across several knives. The original Z01 and the later Z05 both used sliding parts to fit more blade into less handle, with the Z05 getting close to a 1:1 blade-to-handle ratio on a compact frame. The Z01S lets you adjust that ratio, offering a full-length grip one minute and a stubby one the next. It pairs that mechanism with Böhler M390 steel, a choice of drop point or tanto blade, and every screw and plate left proudly on display. It’s aimed at collectors who buy knives for their mechanisms, which, if you’ve read this far, probably includes you.

Designer: Zyac Design

Click Here to Buy Now: $379 $499 (24% off) Hurry! Only 5 of 50 left.

Two Handle Lengths and an Extra Lock

With the blade open, you press a release button, slide the rear section of the handle forward, and it locks into its shorter position. Press the button again to extend the handle back to full size, with no tools, loose parts, or screws to undo. The full-length mode gives you a conventional grip, the setting I’d reach for when breaking down a mountain of delivery boxes. The short mode brings your hand closer to the edge, changing the grip for controlled cuts. Zyac describes the two modes as different personalities. The blade stays identical, but the way you hold it changes.

A standard liner lock holds the blade open in either mode, while a second lock engages when you shorten the handle. According to Zyac, that interlock prevents the blade from folding while the handle is short, even if the liner lock is released. Closing the knife becomes a deliberate two-step move: extend the handle first, then release the liner. Zyac also says the release button can’t be pressed while the knife is closed, preventing the handle from sliding into the blade’s edge inside your pocket. It’s the sort of interlock you’d expect on a power tool, and I appreciate a knife designer considering what happens if a lock is accidentally released.

Hardware on the Outside, Glow in the Dark

Zyac calls its approach “deconstructed design,” leaving the screws, frame, plates, liner lock, and sliding structure exposed instead of tucking them behind smooth scales. Architecture fans will recognize the logic from Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the building that famously wears its pipes and ducts on the outside. On the Z01S, the exposed hardware lets you follow what moves when you press the button. Deployment offers plenty of options too, with a back flipper, a front flipper, and thumb studs that also allow a middle-finger flick. I like that Zyac skipped picking a favorite and left that debate to your fingers.

Each side of the handle carries three slots for tritium or photoluminescent tubes measuring roughly 0.06 x 0.24 inch (1.5 x 6mm), six in total. Tritium glows without charging, which can help you spot the knife in a dark tent or drawer, while the cheaper photoluminescent tubes recharge through exposure to light. Leave the slots empty and they still read as part of the handle’s industrial pattern. The Z01S ships without a pocket clip, relying on a lanyard hole and knife bead to keep its profile clean. An optional clip replaces the middle spine piece, integrating into the existing structure rather than attaching to the side.

Titanium, Zirconium, and M390 Steel

The standard Z01S handle is machined from Grade 5 titanium and stonewashed to help disguise scuffs. Grade 5 is titanium alloyed with aluminum and vanadium, making it stronger than pure titanium without adding much weight. The blade uses Böhler M390, a powder metallurgy steel containing chromium, vanadium, and molybdenum, chosen for its edge retention and corrosion resistance. You can pick a drop point, whose lowered tip and curved belly suit everyday slicing, or a tanto, with an angular, reinforced tip suited to piercing. I’d lean tanto here, since its geometry matches the knife’s machined, angular look.

Collectors get three premium editions beyond the standard titanium model: black zirconium with a gold titanium frame, full black zirconium, and a ZircuTi frame paired with a Damascus blade. ZircuTi is a layered titanium and zirconium laminate that gives each handle a distinct striped pattern. Kickstarter pledges for the Z01S start at $299, with blade shape selected in the post-campaign survey. Shipping is charged separately, while the pocket clip and tritium tubes are optional extras. My advice is to pick the metal you’ll enjoy staring at, because you’ll be sliding that handle back and forth far more often than you’ll be cutting anything.

Click Here to Buy Now: $379 $499 (24% off) Hurry! Only 5 of 50 left.

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DIY Mod Makes The Apple Logo Glow On (Some) Existing MacBooks

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The glowing Apple logo was the best free feature Apple ever shipped, and I will not be taking questions. For years it turned every MacBook into a tiny lighthouse in coffee shops, classrooms, and airport lounges. Then Apple killed it on the 12-inch MacBook in 2015 and on the Pro in 2016, swapping the glow for a polished mirror that does nothing but reflect your own face. A decade later, the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR brings the light back, starting at $2,899. Apple clearly figured we’d pay extra to feel nostalgic.

A YouTube channel called Various Disassembly Methods cracked a way to get that glow on a Touch Bar MacBook Pro, and it needs no LEDs and no wiring. The trick is to pop out the polished logo insert, fill the hole with clear epoxy, and cut an opening in the black sheet behind it so the screen’s own backlight can leak through. A cheap iPhone screen protector serves as the mold face, a hack so inexpensive it feels borderline illegal. You will need a heat gun, serious patience, and a brand-new LCD, since you’ll likely crack the original on the way out. Here’s how to do it, and which MacBooks can join in.

Designer: Various Disassembly Methods

Strip the Screen, Free the Apple

Start with the display assembly detached from the laptop, then go after the bezel strip printed with “MacBook Pro” along the hinge. A dab of ethanol and a heat gun soften its adhesive, so thin spudgers can lift it free, followed by the rubber corner trim and every T3 Torx screw along that edge. Heat the panel’s perimeter next and slide a thin metal spatula through the glue between the LCD and the aluminum lid. Lift the panel from the bottom edge, unplug its two connectors, and coax the top edge loose last. Expect bits of the old panel to break off along the way, which is why a fresh LCD goes in at the end.

With the LCD gone, what’s left in the lid is the entire backlight, which on this generation lives in the aluminum shell itself. Peel off the optical films, then slide out the acrylic light guide plate, a clear sheet that spreads light from edge-mounted LEDs across the whole screen, then lift the mirror-finish reflector. Beneath those sit black sheets, and under them, the reason you’re here. The polished Apple logo is a separate insert glued into an apple-shaped hole in the lid, so heat it from outside, push firmly, and pry from inside until it pops out. Seeing your work mat through a MacBook lid feels deeply wrong and extremely satisfying.

Epoxy, a Toothpick, and an iPhone Screen Protector

Mix up two-part clear epoxy for the new logo window, measuring it per the instructions on a kitchen scale and stirring like your life depends on it. Before pouring, stick a cheap iPhone tempered glass screen protector over the logo hole on the outside of the lid. That glass becomes the mold face, so the resin cures flat and glossy, flush with the aluminum around it. Pour from the inside slowly, guiding the epoxy with a toothpick, and stop before it overfills so the back stays flat. Chase any trapped bubbles with a gentle pass of the heat gun, which thins the resin enough for the air to escape.

Once the resin cures, peel the screen protector away to reveal a clear apple sitting flush in the lid. Tempered glass makes an inspired mold, since it is dead flat, removable, and costs next to nothing. The last design move is a small cutout in the black sheet behind the logo, which gives the backlight a path straight to the resin. Everything else goes back the way it came out, with an air gun clearing dust between layers and the films facing their original direction. Install a brand-new LCD last, power up, and your Apple glows for the first time in its life.

Will Your MacBook Glow? Check the Screen

The screen is the whole test, because the mod borrows light the display already makes. Any MacBook with a backlit LCD has a light source sitting directly behind the logo, waiting for an exit. That covers the Touch Bar Pros, the edge-lit LCD MacBook Air, the older 13-inch Pros, and the mini-LED 14-inch and 16-inch Pros. On most of these, the job should come down to the same eviction: pop the glossy logo insert, cast the resin window, and clear a path to the backlight. Mini-LED machines, which replace the edge strip with thousands of tiny LEDs directly behind the panel, have a different internal stack, so expect a different teardown even if the idea holds.

The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR is the one model this mod can’t touch, because OLED pixels light themselves and there’s no backlight to borrow. Apple already gave that logo its own glow, so nobody’s losing sleep. The $599 MacBook Neo has the backlit LCD this mod needs, but its logo is matte and cut into the aluminum surface, with no insert to pop out. Getting a glow there means machining or laser cutting an apple-shaped opening through the lid, which turns a weekend craft project into a fabrication job. Pull it off, though, and you’d own a $599 laptop doing the one party trick Apple saved for its new OLED Pro.

Ten Years of Waiting, One Cup of Epoxy

The glowing logo was always a bit of a billboard. Early versions faced the user, and in 2001 Apple flipped the orientation so the apple sat upright for everyone looking at the back of an open laptop. Every café table and lecture hall became free advertising, powered by light the screen was making anyway. The new MacBook Pro keeps that connection by tying logo brightness to the display, and this mod gets the same behavior automatically, since it uses the exact same light. Apple needed a decade and a brand-new display to bring the glow back, while Various Disassembly Methods needed epoxy and an iPhone accessory.

If you have a Touch Bar MacBook Pro gathering dust, this is probably the most charming thing you could do with it. Credit for the method goes to the YouTube channel Various Disassembly Methods. Budget for two-part epoxy, a T3 Torx driver, and a free weekend on top of the new panel. The reward is a laptop that announces itself from across the room, in the same glow that made a generation fall for Apple. For anyone who never forgave the mirror logo, that might be the best upgrade money can barely buy.

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This yellow Lamborghini concept has more LEDs than your gaming PC

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Some of the most fun Lamborghinis on the internet never left Sant’Agata Bolognese, mostly because they never arrived there. They come from independent designers on Behance, armed with rendering software and a healthy disregard for subtle styling. Takashi Ito’s Lamborghini Fulgor joins them. Picture a yellow wedge with a glass bubble canopy, glowing three-pronged headlights, and wheels that light up like a theme park ride. It looks like what Lamborghini might build if the accountants took a long vacation.

Ito’s Fulgor arrives while Lamborghini’s own studio is exploring a quieter look. The brand’s Manifesto design study traded wings and blades for smoother surfaces, while its first electric car keeps sliding further down the calendar. The Fulgor heads in the opposite direction, though its wedge proportions, Y-shaped lighting, and founding-year number on the fender all trace straight back to Sant’Agata. Ito hasn’t shared specifications or a powertrain, so the conversation here is all about the styling.

Designer: Takashi Ito

Three-pronged LED claws frame each corner of the nose, forking around the intakes instead of sitting inside a headlight housing. They’re a pulled-apart version of the Y signature that runs through the Aventador, the Huracán, and the Revuelto, with the light itself becoming the outline. Above them, two slashed vents on the hood point toward the A-pillars. A carbon splitter with a recessed center intake anchors the nose at ground level, and the bull shield sits on a sharp central crease. Lit up at night, that face looks like it would be recognizable from a block away, which is half the point of owning a Lamborghini.

A single glass bubble wraps the cabin from the cowl to just behind the seats, and none of the renders show a door cut line. That canopy has roots at Lamborghini, going back to the 2013 Egoista, the single-seat 50th-anniversary show car whose design took cues from attack helicopters. The Manifesto played with a glass canopy too, so Ito is working with an idea the brand has explored. The bubble also pushes the cabin’s visual weight forward, emphasizing the rear haunches. How you’d actually climb in remains a mystery, and I’m choosing to enjoy the mystery.

The side profile is where the Fulgor gets more adventurous. From the door back, the yellow bodywork swells into enormous rear haunches that climb into flying buttresses, framing a triangular intake right behind the cabin. Those surfaces are soft and fluid, closer to a scoop of mango sorbet halfway through melting than to the angular panels of a modern Lambo. Below them, crisp carbon blades run along the sill. The contrast between those rounded yellow surfaces and the sharp black trim gives the eye plenty to follow.

Each covered wheel disc carries a glowing three-pointed star, repeating the headlight motif from nose to hubcap. Out back, the rear wheels sit partly exposed behind big detached carbon fins, giving the tail a skeletal, race-car look. Y-shaped red taillights bracket a carbon panel wearing the Lamborghini script. Then comes my favorite detail: a single diagonal red bar slashing across the diffuser, off-center. That stripe breaks up the otherwise symmetrical rear without needing another fin or vent. There are no visible exhaust tips either, which keeps the powertrain question wide open.

The “63” on the front fender gives the Fulgor its motorsport accent. Lamborghini was founded in 1963, and the number has since shown up on the Sián FKP 37’s 63-unit run, the Aventador SVJ 63, and the SC63 endurance racer. Ito’s racing-number placement recalls the SC63’s livery, which suits a design this aggressive. Compare it with the <a href=”https://www.yankodesign.com/2025/10/08/lamborghini-manifesto-flexes-sharper-lines-and-a-muscular-stance-that-define-the-brands-bold-future/amp/”>Lamborghini Manifesto</a>, built to celebrate 20 years of Centro Stile, which took a smoother approach to the brand’s styling. The two concepts pull in different directions despite sharing familiar Lamborghini cues.

The Fulgor certainly doesn’t look ready to calm down. If I could change one thing, I’d switch off the wheel lighting, because the haunches and that diffuser slash already give the eye plenty to chase. Factory concepts tend to answer to brand strategy, while independent ones answer only to the designer’s taste. With the accountants still on vacation, the Fulgor makes a convincing case for letting them stay there.

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The iPhone Air 2 might come with a Pixel-shaped camera bump and dual lenses

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Apple’s thinnest iPhone is currently a foldable. The iPhone Duo measures 0.20 inches (5.2mm) when unfolded, taking the title from the 5.6mm iPhone Air after just one year. Leaks suggest the Air could tie it again. The rumored iPhone Air 2 reportedly shrinks to 5.2mm while adding a second 48MP camera and a bigger battery, ahead of a possible spring 2027 launch. Renders based on those leaks put both lenses in a wide, rounded pill that looks borrowed from Google’s Pixel design book.

Korean blogger yeux1122 posted the 5.2mm figure in October, while Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station puts the battery at 3,500mAh, up from the original’s 3,149mAh. Analyst Jeff Pu adds a 48MP Ultra Wide camera, a 2nm A20 Pro chip, and a slightly smaller Dynamic Island to the rumored specifications. One way to make room could be a Samsung-made display technology called CoE, short for Color Filter on Encapsulation, which reportedly makes the OLED panel thinner. The Information also reports a vapor chamber, the cooling hardware used in the Duo, to help manage heat from the A20 Pro.

Image Credits: Tech Town

Apple’s Plateau Gets the Pixel Treatment

Apple built the original Air around its plateau, a raised strip running the full width of the back that houses the A19 Pro chip and the 48MP Fusion camera, leaving much of the lower body for the battery. The Tech Town renders shrink that strip into a rounded pill inset from the edges, with two lenses on the left and the flash and microphone on the right. Google followed a similar path. The Pixel 6 introduced an edge-to-edge camera visor in 2021, and the Pixel 9 pulled it in from the sides into a floating pill in 2024. Unverified photos said to show Air 2 packaging also depict two cameras in a horizontal row.

I’d file the resemblance under convergent evolution. On a phone this thin, the raised band across the top gives camera hardware some much-needed depth. Lining up two sensors horizontally makes sense, which is roughly where Google landed too. My one gripe with the renders is the lens rings, which protrude from a plateau that already protrudes from the back. That two-step bump fights the pitch of a phone sold on thinness, and I’d expect Apple’s final design to flatten it. Sky Blue, already an Air color, looks lovely here. I hope it sticks around.

A Second Camera and a Bigger Battery

The Ultra Wide could be the most noticeable upgrade. The original Air’s single Fusion camera offers 2x crops, but it can’t pull back to fit a whole dinner table or a cramped hotel room into the frame. On other recent iPhones, the Ultra Wide also powers macro mode, so the Air 2 could gain close-ups of latte art and tiny bugs. The rumored battery increase is modest on paper, roughly 350mAh, though it could help with endurance alongside a 2nm chip. Whether that means avoiding a 20% panic at dinner will take testing. Pu also expects a slightly smaller Dynamic Island, freeing up a sliver of the 6.5-inch screen.

Much of the rumored hardware is already in the iPhone Duo, which went on sale October 23 with the A20 Pro, a vapor chamber, and a body measuring 5.2mm when unfolded. That would give Apple an existing set of components and thin-body engineering to draw on for the Air 2. Pu expects other specifications to carry over from the original Air, including 12GB of RAM and the 18MP Center Stage front camera, which widens the frame for group selfies without requiring you to rotate the phone. If the thickness rumor holds, Apple’s lineup could soon have two 5.2mm phones.

Fewer Rivals in the Thin Phone Race

Samsung appears to be stepping back. Its Galaxy S25 Edge launched at 0.23 inches (5.8mm) and $1,099, but Korean outlet The Elec reported that development of the S26 Edge had been halted. Digital Chat Station says other phone makers are rethinking their ultra-thin flagships too. That could leave the Air 2 with fewer big-name rivals next year. Within Apple’s US lineup, the iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the iPhone Duo at $1,999, so the Air 2 could sit below both.

Apple hasn’t announced the Air 2, its price, or a release date. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman points to spring 2027 alongside the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e, while Pu narrows the window to the first quarter, with reports suggesting March. The original Air started at $999 in the US. A second camera at that price would make the sequel an easier recommendation, provided the thinner body doesn’t come at the expense of the battery gains these leaks promise.

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This award-winning yarn packaging looks good enough to lick (please don’t)

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Yarn packaging has one job, and it usually quits the moment you get home. The paper band gets torn off, the plastic bag goes in the trash, and the yarn ends up in a ceramic yarn bowl that knitters buy separately to keep the ball from rolling across the floor. ShenZhen YUTO Packaging Technology looked at that routine and decided the packaging should do the bowl’s job too. Its Ice Cream Cone-Shaped Yarn Packaging seats a ball of yarn in a folded paper cone, with an outlet at the tip designed to feed the strand as you knit. It also happens to look like a waffle cone.

YUTO is a Shenzhen-listed packaging heavyweight with more than 50 manufacturing centers worldwide, so this is a very serious company having a very silly afternoon. A team led by Li Xingguo and Ding Zhiyong developed the cone, which won a Red Dot: Best of the Best in the 2026 Design Concept competition. That label goes to the top entries in each category, one step below the Luminary, which this year went to Toyota’s four-legged walk me chair. A yarn wrapper sharing an awards list with a flying car and a rollable laptop is a pretty great flex. It’s still a concept, so yarn bowl makers can relax a little longer.

Designers: Li Xingguo, Ding Zhiyong, Yang Li, Li Xiang & Ding Qiqi (ShenZhen YUTO Packaging Technology)

The whole cone folds from a single sheet of paper. Up top, an interlocking paper lock is designed to keep the yarn ball seated through shipping, shelf time, and the inevitable toss into a tote bag. Down at the tip, a small outlet lets the strand feed out as you knit, doing the job of a yarn bowl’s curly slot. The yarn tail trails out of the point like ice cream dripping through the bottom of a cone, and it’s the only drip here you’ll be happy about. The idea is that the strand slides free while the ball stays put instead of rolling across the floor.

Most yarn packaging gets about thirty seconds of attention before it hits the trash. This cone is meant to keep working after checkout. Red Dot’s description says it doubles as a support stand and a needle holder, so your needles get a parking spot right next to the yarn they belong with. A cone can’t balance on its point, though. In YUTO’s photos, the cones lie on their sides or stand upright in a row, much as they would in an ice cream parlor’s cone holder. A ball of yarn and its needles sharing one tidy paper cone is honestly more organized than any knitting bag I’ve ever owned.

A white diamond grid printed over kraft-colored paper turns a plain cone into a waffle cone, and the illusion works from across the room. The open top lets the yarn play the scoop, so its actual color and texture do the selling instead of a photo on a label. A curved band wraps over each scoop with flowing script lettering, making the set look like a tiny gelato display. YUTO’s write-up calls the design biomimetic, though the resemblance here is to dessert. Naoto Fukasawa played a similar visual joke with his Juice Skin juice boxes, dressed as banana and strawberry skins. YUTO flips the joke by dressing up something you definitely should not eat.

Michaels’ 2026 Creativity Trend Report found that searches for knitting, crochet, and embroidery jumped 136% in six months. For knitters posting yarn hauls online, a row of pastel cones is ready for the camera roll. The cone also fits a pattern in YUTO’s 2026 work, which includes a mortise-and-tenon toolbox and a wine package, each folded from a single sheet of paper. If a yarn brand ever puts this on shelves, I’ll be the guy in the craft aisle asking about sprinkles.

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Trent Reznor’s custom synth has an Atari 2600 built into it

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Trent Reznor has a reputation for smashing keyboards on stage. This one, he’ll probably keep. Swedish woodworker Love Hultén built the Nine Inch Nails frontman a one-off sound station that combines an analog synth rig with a working Atari 2600+ console. There’s a cartridge slot on the front panel, a little monitor up top, and a joystick sitting next to the keyboard like it’s waiting for its turn. It’s basically Reznor’s childhood bedroom and recording studio merged into one hardwood cabinet on legs. Missile Command is already loaded, naturally.

Reznor had a 2600 growing up, taught himself to program on a Commodore 64, and went on to create the sound for id Software’s Quake in 1996. So the Atari here is personal. Hultén, meanwhile, has been combining woodworking with electronics since design school in 2010, building synths, arcade cabinets, and consoles, mostly as one-off commissions. His work tends to look like it came from a 1970s electronics company that hired cabinetmakers instead of plastic molders.

Designer: Love Hultén

The sound comes from an Analogue Solutions Ample, a desktop synth handmade in England with a $2,499 price tag. Apart from its MIDI chip, the circuitry is analog, with three oscillators, a 24dB low-pass filter, and circuits based on designs from the mid-1970s. Its party trick is a pin matrix, a grid where you route signals by pushing tiny pins into holes instead of wrangling patch cables. The pins come in different resistances, so the one you choose changes how strongly a signal hits its destination.

Hultén brought that pin matrix onto his own panel. Rows labeled VCO1, VCO2, VCO3, noise, and ring mod line up against destinations like filter cutoff and oscillator pitch, with bright orange pins marking the active connections. Six gold plates in the middle of the console appear to be the Ample’s touch keys, each sending a set voltage when tapped. A compact keyboard handles regular playing duties below. The knobs, switches, and pins occupy one tall panel, giving the instrument the look of a vintage studio console.

Next in the chain is the Zen Delay, a stereo delay box Erica Synths built with London label Ninja Tune, co-conceived by Coldcut’s Matt Black. It pairs a tempo-synced delay with a 24dB multimode filter and valve overdrive, a combination suited to warm, dubby sounds with a little grit. After that comes an Industrialectric RM-1N reverb pedal for extra space. Hultén gave the effects their own stretch of panel, with knobs for feedback, drive, tone, reverb mix, and one simply labeled drone. Reznor could build an entire Ghosts-style soundscape without ever leaving this cabinet.

Then there’s the Atari itself, an official 2600+ that Atari and Plaion released in 2023 for $129.99. It’s an 80%-scale replica of the 1980 four-switch model, with HDMI output, an enlarged cartridge slot, and support for original 2600 and 7800 carts. Hultén moved that slot onto the main panel, flanked by power and TV type switches that recall the original console’s controls. A small monitor sits in the top corner, and a classic joystick is set into the keyboard deck. In the photos, it’s running Missile Command, where your cities always fall eventually, which feels extremely on-brand for Nine Inch Nails.

Black panels with orange lettering mirror the old Atari cartridge labels, including the Missile Command cart sitting in the slot. The horizontal ridges across the face echo the ribbed top of the original 2600. Even the knobs alternate between black and orange. The biggest wink is the cabinet: the 2600 famously wore fake woodgrain, and Hultén answered with real hardwood. Around the back, a grain-textured black panel has an Atari logo cutout glowing red. Slim black legs give the whole thing the proportions of a mid-century cabinet.

Hultén’s 2022 NES-SY37 already paired a console with a synth using chiptune modules. This build puts an analog synth and a working Atari side by side, each doing its own job. It’s a one-off commission, so there’s no buying one. The Ample, Zen Delay, and 2600+ are separate products, though, if you’re feeling brave with a jigsaw. I just hope Reznor keeps this one far away from the stage.

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Scriben AI Ballpoint Pen Refuses To Act Like Other ‘Unnecessary’ AI Devices

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Tech companies love inventing new objects for you to carry around. Smart glasses, AI pins, little pucks you clip to your shirt that light up when they’re listening. Every year there’s a new shape competing for a spot in your pocket, and every year most of them simply disappear from group chats about gadgets that didn’t pan out. Meanwhile, the actual bottleneck in most professional days has nothing to do with a missing gadget. It’s the stubborn, unsexy fact that you cannot fully listen to someone and write down what they said at the same time.

The answer Scriben landed on was already sitting in the room. Instead of building a new device, they picked the one in your bag, your blazer pocket, or rolling around your desk drawer: a pen. Nobody in a meeting side-eyes you for picking one up, which is sort of the whole premise. It writes like a pen, sits in a room like a pen, and does considerably more thinking than a pen has any right to. Behind it is Sleepmind, Inc., led by Yidi Xu, a SPCr-backed founder whose previous job was helping build Microsoft Copilot.

Designer: Yidi Xu, Founder & CEO, Sleepmind, Inc.

Click Here to Know More.

Silver or matte black, 0.6mm ballpoint, leather sleeve, and a single button: the Scriben pen’s spec sheet reads like a design school constraint exercise. It ships with a quick-start guide and writes on any paper with a standard ballpoint refill. The pen records audio but doesn’t attempt to digitize handwriting, unlike the Nuwa Pen’s handwriting-scanning approach, which put it in a different product category entirely. A USB-C port hides under the top cap, and the entire interaction model is that one button: press it and the pen records locally, storing up to 18 hours of audio on 64GB of onboard storage, roughly 400 hours total, offline, with no phone required. It has won a Red Dot Design Concept award, which evaluates design intent before production rather than a shipped product, and a 2026 MUSE Design Awards Silver in Product Design.

Xu spent years at Microsoft watching genuinely capable AI keep routing people back to a screen. Her training at Tsinghua, followed by an MBA at Wharton, crystallized one design instinct above all: solve the problem at the root, not the surface. The root problem was the habit of asking people to adopt new behaviors in exchange for intelligence that was supposed to simplify their lives. “AI should learn how you work,” she says, “not the other way around.” That inversion is Scriben’s entire design brief in one sentence.

Saying no to a feature is a design decision, and Sleepmind made a lot of them. No screen on the pen, no LED readout, no haptic patterns to decode, no mode-switching between recording and writing. If a feature made the object feel more impressive but the interaction more demanding, it got cut. This is the philosophy sometimes called calm technology: tools that operate in your peripheral awareness rather than demanding your foreground attention. YD has covered a growing wave of products chasing the same idea, from the Flowtica Scribe’s agentic recording approach and the MedPen’s secure capture pitch to SwitchBot’s clip-on wearable format, and Scriben is the first where the deliberate omissions feel like the actual design story, and honestly, that’s harder to pull off than it sounds.

Most AI recorders stop at capture: record, transcribe, surface a summary, repeat. The gap Scriben targets is everything that happens after, the follow-up email, the task that needs logging, the decision from last Tuesday that reappears in Thursday’s conversation with no context attached. The system builds persistent memory across recordings, not a library of audio files but an evolving understanding of your work, your people, and your open commitments. Transcription covers 85 languages, with speaker diarization that resolves names when the system has enough context to match voices to identities. Xu is explicit that this memory needs to be vertical: what matters to a lawyer is different from what matters to a sales executive, and treating every professional’s context the same way is a failure of design, not just technology.

Scriben can draft the follow-up, prepare a document, or queue a task, but nothing leaves without a human sign-off first. This prepare, review, approve model treats autonomy as a governance decision rather than a default setting, which is a more honest framing of AI agency than the usual pitch that it just handles everything. The system connects to Gmail, Outlook, and over 9,000 tools through Zapier, generates a Morning Brief each morning built from your accumulated context, and supports Model Context Protocol letting it feed verified context to Claude, ChatGPT, and Zoom AI Companion. The intelligence sits in the middle; the person stays at both ends.

A pen that records conversations raises a real question before it raises any features. The social optics are context-dependent: a partner meeting at a law firm is a different environment from a first client call or a medical consultation. Scriben is clear that following applicable consent laws is the user’s responsibility, not the product’s. What the design does control is data architecture: audio is captured and stored locally until the user actively chooses to sync, so nothing streams to a server the moment you press the button. That’s a meaningfully different posture from most cloud-first recorders, and it matters considerably to anyone working in a regulated field.

Scriben is available now at scriben.ai in silver and matte black, both shipping with a leather sleeve and a quick-start guide in the box. Xu frames the pen as the first expression of a larger ambition: a multimodal context layer that understands professional work across sources, formats, and industries, compounding over time. If that thesis holds, the most capable AI in your next meeting might turn out to be the object you’ve been reaching for your whole career. And it may just also be the perfect Christmas gift for that difficult-to-gift-for family-member or friend with a corporate job and an obsession with productivity.

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AULA’s Neos 75 keyboard has a tiny hi-fi deck bolted to the side

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A company named after a tarantula just launched a keyboard with finishes named after gods, and I’m still processing it. AULA’s Chinese name translates to tarantula, and the brand built its reputation on RGB-soaked gaming boards that cost less than a decent pizza night. Creepy-crawly branding and rainbow lighting were basically the whole identity. Then the Neos 75 showed up with an all-aluminum body, metal keycaps, a color screen, and a launch manifesto about the Renaissance. Somewhere inside AULA, a team of designers clearly read a little too much art history, and I’m thrilled about it.

The Neos 75 comes from AULA.New Renaissance, a new in-house team of product designers, structural engineers, and keyboard nerds, and it’s their first product. It’s a 75% low-profile mechanical keyboard with 84 keys, a CNC-machined aluminum chassis, and custom Kailh switches. The party trick sits on the right, where a color screen, two slotted metal knobs, and chunky round media buttons form a console that looks borrowed from a Teenage Engineering synth. Preorders opened in China on October 23, with a global release listed as coming soon.

Designer: AULA.New Renaissance

A Tiny Hi-Fi Deck Lives on the Right Side

Two slotted metal knobs crown the console, each shaped like an oversized screw head you could almost turn with a coin. The upper one is removable and damped, handling volume and mute. The lower knob flips through screen pages and even pulls up a built-in calculator, which spreadsheet people will appreciate more than they’ll admit. Below them sit three round metal buttons for rewind, pause, and fast-forward, plus a pill-shaped NÉOS button and a small round key. All of these controls can be remapped in AULA’s driver.

That cluster recalls Dieter Rams’s Braun radios and record players of the 1950s and 1960s, with their round buttons and tidy control layouts. The same influence runs through Teenage Engineering’s OP-1, the OP-1 Field, and the all-black OP-XY. The Neos 75 borrows that visual language and places a 2.3-inch, 480 × 360 color display beside the controls, showing the clock, battery level, and artwork. The whole corner looks like a portable music player attached to a keyboard. Some Chinese forum users called the console a lump, but I’d call it the entire personality.

Dressed Like a Museum Piece, Named Like a Pantheon

AULA CNC-machines the one-piece chassis from aluminum, then finishes it in one of four colors named after deities. Venus is anodized silver, Hades anodized black, Selene anodized gray, and Athena gets an electrophoretic white coating. Bonus mythology lesson: Venus is Roman, so one deity snuck in from the neighbors. The keycaps are aluminum too, flat around the edges with a gentle curve in the center. Full metal keycaps are still a rarity on mass-produced boards, and on a walnut desk the whole thing looks like it belongs in a museum gift shop.

AULA’s manifesto argues that the Renaissance put people back at the center of the world five centuries ago, and that the Neos 75 now puts the keyboard back in human hands. It’s a big claim for a typing device, and the copywriting got roasted online. The details are more interesting. Lowercase legends like “ho.me” and “p.up” give the keys a playful voice, and “Reason & Emotion” is printed on the Enter key. A line of text runs along the spacebar, and the screen’s default face pairs the clock with a glowing statue. Teardowns also show a custom curve across the letter keys and fold-out feet.

Gasket Guts and a Price Tag Worth Talking About

Inside, a gasket mount cushions the typing assembly, backed by layers of PORON foam, an IXPE switch pad, and a PET sheet intended to shape the sound. The switches are custom low-profile units built with Kailh, sitting in hot-swappable sockets, with linear and tactile options available. The board supports wired, 2.4GHz, and Bluetooth connections, with a 4,200mAh battery housed in its own compartment. VIA compatibility and AULA’s A HUB 3.0 software provide remapping options on Windows and macOS. The board measures about 14.7 × 4.8 × 1.2 inches (372.8 × 122.3 × 29.65mm), including the extra console.

China preorders opened at ¥1,299.1 (roughly $180), down from a list price of ¥1,599.1 (about $225). Official US pricing hasn’t been announced, and AULA lists the global launch as coming soon. This is the brand’s first move into four-figure RMB pricing, putting it up against low-profile favorites like the NuPhy Air75 and the Lofree Flow. Neither combines a screen, metal knobs, and aluminum keycaps in one package.

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A rare Sony Walkman now powers this gorgeous wooden cassette tape wall

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Cassettes are selling again, which means more people own tapes and have nowhere sensible to put them. US buyers picked up 436,400 cassettes in 2023 according to Luminate, up from about 80,000 in 2015, and storage has mostly stayed stuck in the plastic-rack era. Love Hultén’s fix is a wall-mounted unit built for a client named Melted Veldt, combining a rack for around 54 tapes with a player built from a late-1990s Sony Walkman WM-EX655. Up top, a brushed aluminum panel holds a tiny oscilloscope screen, a speaker grille, and keyboard-style transport keys. Hang it up, slide in a tape, and your music collection becomes the decor.

Hultén works out of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has spent years turning old tech into handmade wooden oddities, from an IBM-inspired tape cabinet to a crane-driven record player. This piece is calmer than most of his work, but the details are pure Hultén. Engraved lines on the faceplate connect the knobs and buttons like a circuit diagram. The oscilloscope wiggles along to whatever’s playing, which is useless in the best possible way. A slot under the screen shows off the current tape’s J-card, so guests know exactly what you’re making them listen to.

Designer: Love Hultén

Sony built the WM-EX655 between 1997 and 1999, wrapping it in a diamond-patterned aluminum shell it claimed was 2.8 times tougher than its predecessor’s. It also packed auto reverse and Dolby B, a noise reduction system that tamed the hiss every tape fan knows by heart. Hultén mounts the mechanism behind a rounded window, so you can watch the reels spin while the music plays. He said this would probably be his last such build, since grade-A Walkmans are getting hard to source. Battery figures for this unit aren’t public, though his original C-52 reportedly managed more than 40 hours per charge, which is long enough to forget where the cable lives.

Brushed aluminum, a gridded speaker grille, and a screen with rounded corners recall 1960s and 1970s electronics, when Braun radios and portable TVs made metal panels feel like the future. The transport keys are sculpted like mechanical keyboard caps, three in gray and one colored play key that stands out at a glance. Two toggle switches marked PW-ON and CH-ON sit above them, next to a red indicator LED. Two small aluminum knobs sit under the screen, each set into an engraved dial reminiscent of an old TV’s tuning controls. The panel looks complicated from across the room, but up close, the controls are straightforward.

Below the deck, three columns of slots hold roughly 54 cassettes, each lying flat with its spine facing out. Hultén made a point of the horizontal storage in his post, and it turns the collection into something you browse like a bookshelf. Judging by the standard cassette cases, I estimate the whole unit stands about 25 inches tall and 15 inches wide (roughly 65 x 38 cm). That makes it a bit shorter than the C-52, which measured about 31 x 14 x 3 inches (78 x 35 x 7 cm) and used dual round speakers instead of a single grille. The flat top doubles as a tiny shelf, already home to a vase and a spare clear tape.

If you just want to play tapes, FiiO’s CP13 costs around $90, with an aluminum shell that nods to Sony’s original 1979 TPS-L2 Walkman. Your tapes still need somewhere to go, though. Hultén’s piece keeps the player and the collection together, with every spine on display. This one is a one-off commission for Melted Veldt and isn’t for sale, but if cassettes keep selling like this, I hope somebody builds a production version and copies the keycaps exactly.

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This Printer-shaped Chair Has Receipts… Literally!

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Somewhere along the way, the internet decided that “receipts” means proof. Screenshots of your ex’s texts are receipts. That old tweet a celebrity forgot to delete is a receipt. Muddycap, the anonymous South Korean designer who keeps turning random objects into chairs, has gone back to the original meaning and made one you can sit on. Or at least imagine sitting on. The Receipt Chair is a thermal receipt printer blown up to armchair size, and the paper spitting out of it is your backrest. Consider this my receipt for being a lifelong Muddycap fan.

Like much of Muddycap’s work, the chair is a 3D render, and it’s convincing enough that you’ll double-check. The details come straight from the black POS printers sitting at checkout counters across America. A glossy shell forms the armrests, one of which hides the paper roll behind a smoked window, while a leather-look cushion fills the seat. The charcoal base gets vents, a rocker power switch, and little green and red LEDs. Up top, the receipt rolls out in a big white loop with a blurred-out total, a barcode, and MUDDYCAP CHAIRS printed across the bottom. I’m choosing to believe the total is blurred because the price would make me faint.

Designer: Muddycap

Countertop thermal printers like Epson’s TM-T20 are designed to sit beside a register and vanish into the background, all matte black plastic, a flip-up lid, and a paper slot. Nobody buys one for its looks. Muddycap keeps those utilitarian details, including the parts a chair has zero use for. The vents, the switch, and the two status lights do nothing for your backside, yet they’re why your brain reads “printer” a split second before it reads “chair.”

As a seat, the proportions look generous. The deep, low cushion and tall armrests suggest a club chair for sinking in with a drink rather than sitting upright with a laptop. Thermal paper naturally curls off the roll, and Muddycap uses that curl as a reclined backrest that rises behind your shoulders before sweeping over toward the paper bay. A real version might use molded polypropylene or thin powder-coated steel to recreate that curve, though the renders don’t establish how it would be built. The loop hangs well behind the seat, so this looks like a terrible wall-hugger.

Designers have been turning everyday objects into seating for decades. Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni turned a tractor seat into the Mezzadro stool in 1957, and Studio65 turned a pair of lips into the Bocca sofa in 1970. Muddycap plays the same game with a digital-era twist, building a running series of chairs out of the gadgets and interfaces we stare at all day. His Low Battery Chair turned your phone’s most stressful icon into seating, and a three-seater shaped like a mixing-desk fader borrowed its form from audio gear. The Receipt Chair fits right in, celebrating the piece of paper your Apple Pay tap can still produce.

Hypebeast once profiled Muddycap under a headline about chairs that can’t be sat on, and he has talked about eventually producing some of his designs. If this one ever makes the jump, I already know where it belongs: right by the checkout lanes of a big-box store, where tired shoppers waiting on a price check can finally sit down. Until then, the renders live on his Instagram.

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