Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Porsche made an espresso machine with La Marzocco, and this one has the Carrera’s ducktail

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Back in 1972, Porsche needed a way to keep the 911’s rear end planted at high speeds, and the answer was a little upturned spoiler that everyone promptly nicknamed the ducktail. Fifty-four years later, that same ducktail is holding up your espresso cups. Progress! The aerodynamics probably don’t count for much on a kitchen counter, but the vibes count for a lot, especially at 7 a.m. when you need all the help you can get.

This is the second time Porsche and La Marzocco have teamed up, and this round honors the 911 Carrera RS 2.7, arguably the most worshipped 911 ever built. The canvas is once again La Marzocco’s Linea Micra, now dressed in three historic Porsche liveries with Carrera RS script, engraved knobs, and a plaque reminding you that yours is one of 911. Your morning flat white just got a racing number.

 

Designers: Porsche & La Marzocco

Your Countertop Just Got a Racing Livery

The cleverest thing about this collab is how literally it maps the car onto the machine. Most original RS cars left the factory in Grand Prix White with colored Carrera script down the sides and wheels painted to match. Here, the white body plays the bodywork, the colored base stands in for those wheels, and the Carrera RS script runs along the lower panel, echoing its placement on the car. The Tangerine version flips the formula with an orange body and a black base, and it looks fantastic next to a real Tangerine RS. Fun math: only 60 White and Green RS cars were ever built, so the green coffee machines will outnumber them about fifteen to one.

Then come the little details, which is where Porsche nerds will happily lose an afternoon. The cup rail on top takes its shape from the ducktail. The black knobs carry laser-engraved “RS” and “2.7” caps, as though the machine is quietly reciting its own spec sheet. The analog pressure gauges get red and green indicators styled after Porsche instruments, and a magnetic “RS 2.7” badge sits on the side panel like a race roundel. Finally, a plaque reading “One of 911” makes sure no houseguest misses the limited-edition status.

A Proper La Marzocco Under All That Paint

Strip away the livery and you’ve got the Linea Micra, the compact home espresso machine La Marzocco launched in 2022. It’s a dual-boiler setup, meaning one boiler handles espresso while a second handles steam, so you can pull a shot and froth milk at the same time. The brew boiler holds 0.25 liters and the steam boiler holds 1.6 liters. The whole thing measures roughly 13 inches high, 11 inches wide, and 15 inches deep, and weighs about 42 pounds. It’s compact, but you probably won’t want to shuffle it around the counter every morning.

The everyday features are where the Micra earns its keep. A convertible 3-in-1 portafilter switches between single-spout, double-spout, and bottomless setups, so you can watch your extraction or simply make coffee. The brew paddle gives you the tactile flick of a classic lever, with an electric switch doing the work underneath. You also get an insulated steam wand, an easy-to-reach two-liter water tank, and LED barista lights for those foggy 6 a.m. shots. The La Marzocco Home app handles temperature adjustments and lets you schedule warm-up before your alarm goes off.

$7,911, 911 Units, and One Very Tiny Model Car

Now for the part that stings a little. The Porsche x La Marzocco Linea Micra costs $7,911 in the US (yes, they snuck a 911 into the price tag too), while a regular Linea Micra sells for roughly $3,900 to $4,500. That works out to about $3,400 to $4,000 extra for the Porsche treatment. The Grand Prix White with Green and Tangerine with Black editions are capped at 911 units each, while the Grand Prix White with Blue is a Germany-only run of just 150. The previous collaboration suggests they might not linger: the 2024 Martini Racing edition sold out in about eight hours.

Porsche didn’t stop at the espresso machine, of course. A matching Pico grinder ($2,125) wears the same liveries, and the wider collection adds handcrafted espresso and cappuccino cups, barista towels, coasters, coffee canisters, hoodies, caps, and socks. My personal favorite is a 1:18-scale RS 2.7 model car that comes with its own miniature coffee machine, which is adorably unhinged. The collection is offered through the Porsche Online Shop, select Porsche Centers, and select Porsche Design Stores. The original ducktail kept the RS planted at over 150 mph; this one has the less demanding job of keeping your cups from sliding off.

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This leather handbag has a built-in light so you can easily find your keys and AirPods

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Most handbags are, structurally speaking, a leather pouch with delusions of grandeur. Unzip one and you’re staring into a single shared cavity where your keys, your AirPods case, and that lip balm from three years ago all coexist until you actually need any of them. Designers spend enormous effort on the exterior, the hardware, the stitching, the silhouette, then bolt two or three unplanned pockets to the inside and call it organized. Luxury bags often leave you with elegance and chaos in equal measure, while highly functional bags tend to drift into the language of utility gear and tech accessories. Nobody seemed particularly bothered to resolve that split properly, which is what makes the ENTE Roomy V2 worth paying attention to.

ENTE decided the inside deserved just as much engineering attention as the outside, and the result is a bag with a rigid, symmetrical split-case architecture that hinges open flat into two clean, fully visible halves. The studio is calling it the world’s first split-case handbag structure, a bold claim in an industry that has been making the same basic pouch shape for decades. Whether or not that specific title holds under scrutiny, the structural idea itself is a genuinely different approach to what a bag’s interior can do. Tina Joseph, founder and lead designer at ENTE, runs the studio alongside co-creator Kareem, an eight-year partnership where she shapes the aesthetic vision and he handles structural engineering, with every functional element entirely invisible until you open the bag. Their work happens out of Chennai, India, with the Kickstarter campaign structured through a collaborator in Frankfurt, Germany.

Designers: Tina Joseph and Kareem

Click Here to Buy Now: $178. Hurry, only 22/25 left!

The split-case geometry means the bag opens flat into two distinct, organized halves rather than a single undifferentiated cavity, giving immediate visibility and effortless access to all daily essentials. Custom detachable leather gussets attach to create a wide, generous opening for daily use, and removing them lets the bag hinge completely flat for total visual clarity of everything inside at once. Tina Joseph describes the approach as treating the interior the way an industrial designer would treat a wall-mounted workspace, and that framing gives the whole organizational system its logic. If every item has a dedicated wall position, the central compartment stays completely clear for bulkier items. Yanko readers who followed our coverage of Nendo’s MAQL bag will recognize a similar principle at work, where one structural idea reshapes how an entire object functions.

A concealed, user-replaceable dry-cell DC battery circuit built directly into the bag wall provides ambient interior glow, with the switch seamlessly integrated without external bulk or visible switches. Lifting the subtle “ENTE” logo tab activates the interior light with no visible buttons and nothing on the exterior to suggest a lighting system exists at all. I’ve stood in enough dim parking garages, bag tilted over the hood of a car, to genuinely appreciate what a well-placed interior light actually solves. The battery is user-replaceable, so there’s no service trip involved when it eventually needs changing. ENTE calls this the Camouflaged Stealth Switch, which is a bit dramatic for a logo tab that turns on a light, but the underlying idea is genuinely useful.

A stretchable key leash lets you unlock a door or scan an access card without removing the bag from your shoulder, a micro-friction solution that sounds obvious the moment you encounter it. A magnetic self-aligning handle bind replaces the traditional snap button for one-handed, frictionless closure. A built-in card case mounts to the interior wall and detaches instantly for coffee runs where a card is all you need. All of the interior hardware is wall-mounted, leaving the central compartment fully open and unobstructed. The big win here is that ENTE never lets the functional language overpower the bag itself. The Roomy V2 still reads like a refined leather handbag, not a wearable organizer trying to cosplay as fashion.

The laptop pocket closure tab doubles as a secure earring slot, which sounds gimmicky until you think about how many earrings get wrecked rattling around in a regular bag. A detachable jewel tab loop on the side wall suspends chains and rings safely during transit, keeping them from tangling or scratching against the interior hardware. A secret pocket is embedded at the structural base, sitting completely out of sight for documents or anything you need fully concealed and away from casual reach. We’ve covered the organized-leather-bag space before, from Formula Studio’s modular Addition Bag to the broader design-thinking handbag conversations that surfaced through the Kickstarter ecosystem in the late 2010s. The jewelry integration in the Roomy V2 is a considered detail that most organized bag designs skip entirely.

A dedicated padded laptop and tablet sleeve is built directly into the spatial layout, keeping tech devices secure and accessible: the medium bag accommodates up to 11-inch screens, and the large up to 14-inch screens. The exterior of both reads as a clean, structured handbag silhouette throughout, which is the specific trick the bag needs to land to make its pitch credible. This is where the Roomy V2 really separates itself from most “functional” bags, because it refuses the usual trade-off. It gives you the organizational logic of a modular carry system without dragging the aesthetic into gadget territory.

Top-grain leather covers the exterior, with custom high-quality metal hardware and high-density brass teeth zippers throughout the construction. The bag comes in two leather textures, a premium cut plate design and a classic pebble pattern, with stitching tracking at 8 to 9 stitches per inch as a marker of finish integrity. Those details matter because a bag built around structure and daily use has to back up the concept with material quality. Clever architecture gets attention, but leather, hardware, zipper feel, and workmanship are what decide whether people keep reaching for a bag after the novelty wears off.

The Roomy V2 launched on Kickstarter on September 23, 2026, and ENTE comes into that launch with far more production experience than a typical first-time crowdfunding brand. While the campaign is structured through a partner and collaborator in Germany, ENTE itself is built on deep, hands-on manufacturing expertise. The team ran its own manufacturing unit for shoes and bags from 2019 to 2023, then strategically exited factory operations to focus fully on building the ENTE brand. That background means this is being led by creators who understand supply chains, structural leather assembly, premium sourcing, and production realities from the inside out. It also gives them strong connections to top-tier suppliers, premium material houses, and expert artisan factories in India’s leading manufacturing hub, which should give backers real confidence in the execution side of the project.

Click Here to Buy Now: $178. Hurry, only 22/25 left!

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This LEGO Monet artpiece looks better when you take your glasses off

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Monet’s 1882 painting of a path through the corn at Pourville has one small problem for American readers. There’s no corn in it. In British English, “corn” can mean any cereal grain, and the French title refers to wheat, so picture golden stalks rather than something you’d slather in butter. The painting itself lives in Denver, of all places, where it joined the Denver Art Museum’s collection in 2016 as part of a collector’s bequest. Now a LEGO fan has rebuilt that wheat field in bricks, with stalks that project from the frame and curve as if caught in the wind.

The builder goes by BLUE JEANS on LEGO Ideas, and this is their first tribute to another artist after a run of projects based on their own imagination and paintings. The build uses roughly 3,789 parts, about 600 more than LEGO’s own official Monet set from earlier this year. Clouds curl out of round white elements, the sea breaks into staggered strips of blue, and the path steps down toward a curved beach in tan plates. The wheat is the showpiece: a crowd of bent orange, yellow, and green stalks leaning hard to the right. BLUE JEANS decided Monet was painting a windy day, and after staring at the original for a while, I’m fully on their side.

Designer: BLUE JEANS

BLUE JEANS pushed the wheat field so far forward that the bottom half of the frame reads like a diorama, built from what look like flexible tube elements bent into arcs and capped with orange tips. The stalks bow to the right, leaving the field looking caught mid-gust. Behind them, the sea is built from short, offset rows of tiles in several blues, with white streaks standing in for whitecaps. The clouds pile up from round white and pale blue elements, with little swirl pieces tucked in to mimic Monet’s curling brushwork. A white frame trimmed with a beaded border of round studs finishes it off, and side views reveal a deep shadowbox that gives the wheat room to stick out.

My favorite detail, though, is the builder’s glasses, or rather the lack of them. BLUE JEANS took theirs off while building, blurring the hard edges of the bricks so they could judge the piece as they would a painting from across a room. They suggest viewers do the same by zooming out, stepping back, or ditching the specs. Bricks are all corners and Monet is all smudge, so it’s a useful way to judge whether the separate pieces resolve into a scene. Try it on the renders, and the wheat field snaps into focus by going out of focus.

Monet painted this scene during a ridiculously productive 1882, when two stays in Pourville produced around ninety landscapes. This was before Giverny and the water lilies, back when he was chasing weather along the Normandy cliffs. BLUE JEANS studied the painting before building, noticing how the path curves down to the beach and draws your eye toward the ocean and horizon. They read the choppy water and sideways grain as signs of wind, a plausible interpretation that also fits the quick, curved strokes of grass in Monet’s other Pourville scenes.

The project has 110 supporters so far, with 425 days left to reach its next milestone of 1,000. On LEGO Ideas, fans submit builds, supporters pile up, and projects that reach 10,000 supporters go to LEGO for review. That’s how Truman Cheng’s Starry Night went from fan submission to store shelves. So if you want to see a Monet hanging on your wall, go ahead and cast your vote on the LEGO Ideas page here!

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These Xiaomi open earbuds have five drivers and look like tech-jewelry

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I own a lot of earbuds, and I can say with total confidence that none of them have ever made me feel fancy. Earbuds are the gym socks of consumer tech. You need them, you lose them, and you never show them off. Xiaomi’s OpenWear Stereo Pro argues the category deserves better, with open-ear buds that look like they came from a jewelry counter and a case straight out of a leather goods boutique. They launched last fall, and I still can’t stop staring at the press photos.

Mirror-polished pods sit on thin silicone ear hooks, and the whole set tucks into a case wrapped in vegan leather with a suede-style lining. Each 9.7-gram (0.34-ounce) bud packs four drivers for your ears, plus a fifth that fires anti-noise outward to help keep the stranger next to you on the train out of your true-crime podcast. You can pick from Sand Gold, Titan Gray, or Graphite Black, and the gold one is the obvious answer. Xiaomi sells them for €149.99 in Europe and £139 in the UK, with no official US release. Your friend in London suddenly looks very useful.

Designer: Xiaomi

A polished metallic finish wraps each pod, and Xiaomi pairs it with a soft cream-colored silicone hook, so the shiny bit gets all the attention while the hook practically disappears. Beneath that silicone runs a 0.6mm (0.024-inch) memory titanium wire designed to flex around your ear and spring back into shape. Xiaomi built the fit around three contact points to distribute pressure, with the pod tilted outward to avoid pressing against your tragus, that little flap at the front of your ear canal. The slim hook is also designed to leave room for glasses. On a model with her hair up, the whole thing reads like a boutique ear cuff that happens to play Spotify.

The case measures 2.68 inches square and just over an inch thick (68 x 68 x 26.3mm), with pebbled vegan leather outside and a tan faux suede lining that gives it the look of a watch box. A magnetic lid holds it shut, and a little “DESIGNED BY XIAOMI” tab inside tips its hat to Apple’s famous sign-off. The buds nest in a figure eight, hooks overlapping, so neatly that it feels rude to take them out. Most earbud cases are glossy plastic pebbles that collect scratches the moment they meet your keys. This one looks more at home on a nightstand beside your watch and wallet.

Each pod combines a 0.71 x 0.51-inch (18 x 13mm) dynamic driver for bass, two balanced armatures (the tiny precision drivers found in pricey in-ear monitors) for detail, and a piezoelectric ceramic tweeter for the high frequencies. Xiaomi says Harman helped with tuning, and the Xiaomi Earbuds app offers two dedicated EQ profiles on iPhone and Android. The fifth driver, a 10mm unit, plays reverse-phase sound outward in Balanced mode. Xiaomi claims 60% better sound-leakage reduction than the original OpenWear Stereo. The company rates battery life at 8.5 hours per charge and 45 hours with the case, enough for a week of commutes before you hunt down a USB-C cable. It also says a 10-minute top-up buys two hours, a useful fallback if you forget to charge before a flight.

Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds cost $299, Shokz wants $249.95 for its OpenFit Pro, and the OpenFit 2+ sits at $179.95. Xiaomi’s €149.99 European price looks appealing alongside those US prices, though importing a pair could change the calculation. Xiaomi followed up in May 2026 with the Ear Clip, a cuff-style design closer to Bose’s approach. A year on, the hook-style Pro is still the pair I’d point to when someone tells me audio gear has to look boring.

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Samsung has a secret luxury foldable phone line, and its newest model is gorgeous

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Today I learned that Samsung has been running an entire phone line in China since 2008, and it has a name that sounds like a charity gala. The W series, called 心系天下 or “Heart of the World,” started as luxury flip phones sold through China Telecom, back when flip phones were still a flex. It has survived keypads, touchscreens, and the slow death of the old-school clamshell. Every year it gets a new number and a fancier outfit. The newest one, the Samsung W27, has just been announced, and it might be the best-dressed foldable Samsung has ever made.

Under the hood, the W27 shares its core hardware with the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra: a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, an 8-inch inner screen, and a weight of 7.6 ounces (215 grams). The difference is on the outside. Samsung swapped the Fold’s Victus 2 glass back for Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3, added a gold relief texture to the frame, and took its two colors from imperial Chinese porcelain glazes. It starts at CNY 18,999 and is exclusive to China.

Designer: Samsung

The colors come with a history lesson. The blue draws from 霁蓝, sacrificial blue, and the red from 霁红, sacrificial red, two glazes associated with imperial Ming porcelain. Imperial rituals used blue porcelain for the Altar of Heaven and red for the Altar of the Sun. The red is the legend, perfected during the Xuande reign (1426 to 1435). Attempts to recreate it in the early 1700s helped produce another celebrated glaze, now called oxblood.

Samsung changed the material to match the story. The W27 gets Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3 on both the back and the cover screen. Glass-ceramic contains tiny crystals within its glass structure, which Corning says help deflect cracks and improve toughness. That doesn’t make it porcelain, but it gives the reference a material connection beyond the paint job. The W series has loved porcelain since the W23 and W23 Flip shipped with ceramic backs and Song dynasty porcelain wallpapers. Here, a frosted, semi-translucent gold camera island sits on the back. The Armor Aluminum frame gets a gold relief texture Samsung compares to cut gemstones, while the hinge cover has a frosted metal finish.

Under all that jewelry, the W27 measures 0.16 inches (4.1mm) thick unfolded and 0.35 inches (8.9mm) folded, excluding the camera bump. Folded, that’s roughly a regular phone wearing a case. The 5,000mAh battery is a jump from last year’s 4,400mAh W26, and Samsung rates it for up to 27 hours of video playback under its test conditions. The camera setup includes a 200MP main camera and a telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom. The displays are rated for up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness. Tiantong satellite calling and texting offer another way to get a message home when terrestrial coverage disappears, subject to service availability and activation. The launch offer includes a year of satellite service, with call and text allowances. On the screen, animated wallpapers ripple with gold leaf, inspired by the Tao Te Ching line about the highest good being like water.

Pricing starts at CNY 18,999 for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage; the 1TB model costs CNY 21,999. The box includes a Kevlar case and a 45W charger, while eligible launch-period buyers can claim Elite-tier Samsung Care+ coverage. It’s a China-only release, so US buyers would need an importer. The name is already looking ahead to 2027, like a Camry arriving before its model year. Samsung has wrapped a gadget people may replace in a few years in colors potters have chased for six centuries.

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This Disposable Camera is made from Mycelium not Single-use Plastic

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Forty years ago, Fujifilm launched the QuickSnap, a plastic box of film you shot, dropped off at the drugstore, and never saw again. The disposable camera became the unofficial sidekick of wedding tables, spring breaks, and summer camps in the ’90s. In 2026, a would-be spiritual successor comes from a Brooklyn mushroom farmer. Sree Krishna Pillarisetti’s Soft-pixel is a digital camera project with an enclosure made from mycelium, hemp, and PHA bioplastic, designed to keep your photos local rather than in the cloud. The proposed compostable shell gives the disposable-camera idea a more interesting question: which part should actually be disposable?

Pillarisetti first experimented with fungus-wrapped electronics in Soft-Drive, his Parsons thesis project, which enclosed a memory card and heat sink in a shell made from mycelium, hemp, and PLA. Soft-pixel trades that PLA for PHA. The European Product Design Award named it Best Eco-Design for 2026, alongside a Top Design win in digital cameras. Somewhere in a junk drawer, an old Kodak Fling is feeling very insecure.

Designer: Sree Krishna Pillarisetti

Mycelium is the threadlike network of a fungus. Soft-pixel’s award entry describes a process combining biological growth and heat-press fabrication to produce what the designer calls a lightweight, impact-absorbing enclosure. PHA is the material change worth watching here. PLA generally needs the heat and moisture of industrial composting to break down effectively; some PHAs can biodegrade in home compost, but their behavior depends on the formulation and conditions. Putting PHA in a camera shell doesn’t automatically make the finished casing ready for your garden pot.

The translucent outer layer shows off the fibrous interior, so the camera looks a bit like a granola bar that takes pictures. Around the back, there’s a square screen, four directional buttons, and orange labels for the controls, speaker, and mic, like a hobbyist dev board. The shutter label literally says “Cheese!” A microSD label hints at where your photos end up. The award entry doesn’t list the sensor, resolution, battery capacity, or storage capacity. The best tell is the image showing four screws holding the circuit board in place, with a precision driver positioned over one. Visible screws suggest someone expects you to open the thing, a spicy idea for a design borrowing the disposable-camera playbook.

The obvious comparison is Camp Snap, the screen-free digital camera that makes you wait to review your photos on another device. Soft-pixel keeps the screen and takes aim at a different villain, the cloud. The scale of that infrastructure is worth understanding: in its 2025 Energy and AI report, the International Energy Agency estimated that data centers consumed about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly 1.5% of global electricity consumption. Its base-case projection put that figure at about 945 TWh by 2030. Those totals cover far more than photo storage, though; they aren’t a measure of what this camera would save.

Soft-pixel’s award entry gives no price or release date, since it’s clearly a concept for now. That’s fine by me, because the idea already lands: keep the electronics, keep the photos, and give the shell a different end of life. Before it goes off to feed a few blades of grass, though, we need to know how the finished casing actually composts.

 

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I’d happily swap my December ladder ritual for Linkind’s Matter-compatible Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights

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Changing your phone’s wallpaper takes about four seconds. Changing your house’s holiday decor usually takes a weekend, two trips to the hardware store, and a mild argument about where the extension cords went. The Linkind Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights ColorBlend shrink that weekend down to four seconds. They mount along your eaves once, all 200 feet, and from then on your house’s look is a theme you pick in an app. Fourth of July, fall harvest, Halloween, Christmas: swipe, tap, done. Right now it’s $100 off at launch, landing at $699.99.

Every one of the 120 heads gets two independently controlled zones, a 50° beam nested inside a 100° beam, which lets each theme run multiple colors across the entire strip. Think red, white, and blue in July, burnt orange and gold for fall, purple wrapped in green for Halloween, then the classic red and green for December. The 120+ presets cover most of the calendar already, and the Dotis AI assistant builds new ones from a plain-English description. On off-nights, a warm white keeps things looking classy. Your roofline basically gets a seasonal wardrobe, minus the closet. Two siblings, PatternChange and FlexMount, cover homes that want shaped light or have no eaves.

Designer: Linkind

Click Here to Buy Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights ColorBlend (HP6): $699.99 $799.99 ($100 off). | Click Here to Buy Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights FlexMount (HP5S): $246.99 $279.99 (12% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

How two light zones per head paint scallops on your siding

Each compact white head holds two optics sitting side by side, and both point straight down at your wall. Because the narrow 50° beam lands inside the wide 100° one, every head paints a scallop within a scallop on the siding below. Line up 120 of them along the eaves and the facade picks up what Linkind calls a dual-layer fish-scale effect. Fun fact for the house nerds: fish-scale is also the name of those rounded decorative shingles on old Victorian gables, so your house basically gets a set of light-up shingles. At up to 100 lumens per head, those layered arches stay crisp from the curb.

Those two zones combine into four basic looks, starting with Dual-Lit, which switches on both zones in every head. Consecutive keeps the same zone lit across neighboring heads, Symmetrical gives the outer heads one zone and the center head the other, and Alternating flips zones from head to head in a repeating rhythm. Throw different colors at each zone and the combinations multiply fast. For the detail-obsessed, the Edit Canvas in the AiDot app lets you set both zones on every single head, one light at a time. If a neighbor’s permanent lights are the reason you’re reading this, Edit Canvas is how you make yours look custom-designed.

Presets, Dotis AI, and warm white for the rest of the year

Christmas gets the deepest bench in the 120+ preset library, with plenty more for Halloween, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, parties, and regular cozy nights. For families, handing the phone to the kids and letting them pick tonight’s look might be the easiest holiday tradition you’ll ever start. When nothing in the library hits the spot, the Dotis AI assistant takes a typed or spoken request, say “snowy night with a little sparkle,” and builds a lighting effect from it. The DIY tab lets you create and save your own static or dynamic effects too. Music Sync pulses the lights along to whatever’s playing near your phone, turning the front yard into a dance floor.

All 120 heads add up to 12,000 lumens across the 200-foot run, plenty for a two-story roofline. Tunable white spans 1800K to 6500K, so the same lights that go full Christmas in December can bathe the facade in a candlelit amber glow on a regular Tuesday. That flexibility is great news for the year-round crowd, who can swap to team colors for game day, red, white, and blue for the Fourth, then settle back into warm white. Scheduling lets you pick the days and times, so the house lights itself every evening. Voice control runs through Alexa and Google Home, and the system also works with Apple Home, SmartThings, and Matter.

Installation, pricing, and the rest of the Linkind lineup

Setup starts with a test run, since Linkind wants every string and extension connected and lit up on the ground before anything goes on the house. From there, a positioning card spaces each head 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) out from the wall, and you drill and set an anchor for every light. Each head sticks on with 3M VHB adhesive, then gets a screw driven through it, with the adhesive acting as backup support. Threaded waterproof collars and an end cap seal the connections, and the lights carry an IP67 rating with an IP65-rated controller. One adapter runs up to 12 strings, covering all 120 lights and the full 200 feet.

The Linkind Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights ColorBlend is available now, and a $100 discount during the pre-Black Friday launch period brings the 200-foot kit down to $699.99. That gets you all 120 dual-zone heads stretched across your roofline, plus a whole calendar of looks you’ll never have to haul out of the garage again. Spend one dry fall weekend on the install and you’re set for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the big December reveal. After that, every holiday is a quick trip into the app, whether it’s Valentine’s pink, Fourth of July red, white, and blue, or plain warm white on a Tuesday. Do it right and the ladder goes back into storage until spring gutter cleaning.

PatternChange adds decorative patterns, FlexMount fits homes without eaves

The Linkind Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights PatternChange (the HP6X) shares largely the same specs as the ColorBlend, with one key difference: a lens design that adds decorative patterns to your outdoor lighting. You can run patterned light, clean pattern-free illumination, or combine both along the same roofline. Picture a gable edged in plain white with decorative patterns spilling down the wall below it. That makes it the pick for anyone who wants something the neighbors haven’t seen yet. The listing linked here is the 100-foot version, so measure your eaves before you add to cart.

The Linkind Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights FlexMount (the HP5S) goes after a different problem, which is houses with no traditional eaves. Its mounting design supports both wall and ceiling installation, so a flat facade or a covered porch can take lights too. The 150-foot system carries 90 light heads that top out at 5,850 lumens, with white adjustable from 2700K to 6500K and colors and effects handled in the AiDot app. Do the math and that’s roughly 20 inches between heads, the same spacing as the ColorBlend. Pick the one that suits your house, and remember that Christmas, it turns out, really can take four seconds.

Click Here to Buy Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights ColorBlend (HP6): $699.99 $799.99 ($100 off). | Click Here to Buy Smart Permanent Outdoor Lights FlexMount (HP5S): $246.99 $279.99 (12% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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Apple revived the glowing logo, and turned it into the ultimate status symbol

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If you owned a MacBook before 2016, you remember the glowing apple on the lid. It lit up dorm rooms, airport gates, and every TV show where someone typed dramatically in a cafe, and it told the whole room you’d spent real money on your laptop. Apple started switching it off in 2015 with the 12-inch MacBook, and the MacBook Pro followed in 2016, all in the name of thinner lids. Eleven years later, the light is back on the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, Apple’s first touchscreen Mac. This time, Apple has turned it into a full-blown status symbol.

OLED made the comeback harder, because the old logo ran on spare light from the LCD backlight, and OLED pixels make their own light with nothing to spare. So Apple had to rig up a separate light source just for the badge, and it hasn’t explained how. It even kept the old behavior, with the logo dimming and brightening along with your screen. Then it put the glow on exactly one model, leaving the standard MacBook Pro and the $1,999 M6 version with plain mirror logos. Nostalgia is officially a premium feature now, and it starts at $2,899.

Designer: Apple

Thinness killed the glow in 2015

The old glow cost Apple nothing. An Apple-shaped hole was cut into the aluminum lid, filled with translucent plastic, and lit by leftover light from the LCD backlight sitting right behind it. That free light came with baggage, though, because the cutout was an extra layer Apple had to make room for in a lid it badly wanted thinner. As panels got slimmer, there were reportedly worries about the cutout creating a bright hot spot on the display, a nightmare for a screen Apple sells on uniform brightness. So when the 12-inch MacBook arrived in 2015, thinness won, and a polished, unlit logo took over.

Losing the glow meant losing the best billboard Apple ever owned. Apple always knew that logo was aimed at onlookers, and Steve Jobs proved it years earlier. Early PowerBooks and iBooks placed the apple so it faced the owner with the lid closed, which made it look upside down to everyone else once the laptop opened. Jobs eventually reversed that, reasoning that opening a laptop from the wrong end fixes itself in seconds while an upside-down logo stays upside down forever. Hollywood reportedly played a part too, since some filmmakers were sticking decals over loaned laptops so the apple looked right on camera.

Apple now pays for a light it used to get free

OLED changed the math, because each pixel makes its own light and nothing spills out the back of the panel for a logo to borrow. The best clue to Apple’s fix is a 2022 patent for a backlit, partially reflective mirror that looks shiny when off and lets internal light through when lit. That lines up with what people saw at the launch, a mirror-finish apple that glows when the lid opens and goes dark when it shuts. Apple hasn’t confirmed the patent is the one in use, so treat it as an educated guess. Either way, somebody in Cupertino had to design, source, and power a light whose only job is to be admired by strangers.

Then Apple made that light exclusive. The standard MacBook Pro and the $1,999 M6 model keep unlit mirror logos, so the glow only shows up on machines starting at $2,899. Luxury carmakers have run this play for over a decade, ever since Mercedes dealers started offering an illuminated three-pointed star in 2013. BMW answered with its Iconic Glow kidney grilles, Rolls-Royce lit up its grille, and Bentley made its winged B glow. Those lights do almost nothing for driving, and Apple’s logo does nothing for rendering, which is exactly the point. A badge that glows is a badge people paid for.

Apple is in the status symbol business again

Apple used to sell status by default. Owning an iPod in the 2000s turned those white earbuds into a flex, and standing in line for the first iPhone in 2007 made you the most interesting person at dinner. Under Tim Cook, Apple shifted toward putting a slice of the pie in every hand, with cheaper SE iPhones, budget iPads, and a $999 MacBook Air. That strategy sold a staggering number of devices, and I’d argue it also made owning an Apple product feel ordinary. When everyone has the apple, the apple stops saying much about you.

The Ternus era looks like a deliberate correction. The $1,999 iPhone Duo folds in half and announces itself every time you open it, and the glowing logo now marks the one MacBook Pro that costs $2,899 and up. Ternus clearly knows what he’s selling, because his launch-morning teaser was a wordless clip of that logo lighting up. Jobs, who spent years fussing over which way the apple faced, would have understood the instinct completely. The apple spent 11 years in the dark, and it came back as a velvet rope.

The post Apple revived the glowing logo, and turned it into the ultimate status symbol first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis

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If the iPad were a person, this would be the week it checked its phone and found out its friends had started a group chat without it. On October 28, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen. Back in September, it revealed the iPhone Duo, a $1,999 foldable that opens into a 7.6-inch tablet-ish screen. One goes after the iPad Pro’s job of being a pro machine you can touch, and the other goes after the iPad mini’s job of being a small screen you carry everywhere. That’s two iPads made redundant in about seven weeks, which feels like a personal record for Apple.

The MacBook makes the louder case, with tandem OLED panels hitting 2,000 nits, a Dynamic Island replacing the notch, and a starting price of $2,899. The Duo makes the sneakier one, since it runs the same A20 Pro chip as Apple’s new $699 OLED iPad mini and packs an extra rear camera for good measure. Craig Federighi even conceded that the Duo can fill the space an iPad mini used to hold. Apple did keep one door shut, though, because the touchscreen MacBook has no Apple Pencil support. Call it a coincidence if you like, but it looks a lot like Apple left the iPad one job so it wouldn’t feel completely useless.

Designer: Apple

Half a pound lighter, with every port still on board

The new MacBook Pro weighs 3 pounds (1.36kg) as a 14-inch and 4 pounds (1.81kg) as a 16-inch, shedding half a pound and 0.7 pounds respectively. Thickness barely moves, landing at 0.59 inches (15mm) and 0.63 inches (16mm). OLED does most of the heavy lifting, since self-lit pixels let Apple ditch the backlight layers that mini-LED needs. Slimmer bezels also stretch the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches inside a slightly smaller footprint. A redesigned thermal system keeps sustained performance intact and pushes warm air away from the display, a smart call because OLED panels age faster when they run hot.

Apple kept every port the 2021 redesign brought back, so you still get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack. Up to three external displays work on M5 Pro, or four on M5 Max. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 run off Apple’s N1 chip, and a fast charge gets you to 50 percent in 30 minutes, which covers a layover. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours on the 16-inch with M5 Pro and 22 on the 14-inch, enough for a workday and a movie on the flight home. The lid’s Apple logo glows again too, but that comeback is a story for another day.

A tandem OLED that doubles as a reference monitor

PROLED XDR is a tandem OLED, which stacks two light-emitting layers so the panel can get brighter and last longer than a single-layer OLED. Apple rates it at 2,000 nits peak for both HDR and SDR, up from 1,600 and 1,000 nits on the mini-LED model, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. In practice, a spreadsheet stays readable at a sunny cafe table, and dark scenes stay properly black without the halo blooming mini-LED throws around bright objects. ProMotion runs from 10Hz to 120Hz, idling low on static pages to save battery. Resolution lands at 3024 x 1986 on the 14-inch and 3472 x 2266 on the 16-inch.

The panel covers both P3 and Adobe RGB, the color space print work lives in, so print designers can finally proof on a laptop without second-guessing their greens. Apple also claims more than 80 percent coverage of Rec. 2020, the wider gamut used for grading HDR video. Every panel gets factory calibrated, and built-in reference modes cover film, photography, print, and even DICOM medical imaging for research use. Genlock support syncs the display’s refresh rate to a camera’s capture, which stops flicker and tearing on virtual production sets. Add the nano-texture option, now etched straight into the cover glass, and Apple has basically folded a reference monitor into a laptop lid.

Sixteen years after Steve Jobs said no, the Mac gets touch

In 2010, Steve Jobs told a room full of press that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea, because reaching up to a vertical screen gets tiring until your arm gives up. Apple spent the next decade and a half agreeing with him. The closest the MacBook Pro got was the Touch Bar, a thin OLED strip above the keyboard that ran from 2016 until Apple retired it in 2023. The PROLED model finally breaks the rule, with a touch sensor built directly into the display panel instead of laminated on top as a separate layer. That cuts latency, so your finger feels glued to whatever it drags.

Day to day, you swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom a photo, drag slides between presentations, and double-tap a window to fill the screen. Pros get the fun stuff, with Logic Pro turning the display into a Multi-Touch polyphonic keyboard with tappable chord and drum pads, and Final Cut Pro letting editors pinch into a cut and drop clips into place by hand. The hinge has been reworked for extra stability, so the screen stays put under all that prodding. Apple even added video stabilization for calls, so your webcam feed stops shaking every time you tap something mid-meeting. It’s a very Apple fix for a very Apple problem.

macOS learns finger manners and gets a Dynamic Island

macOS 27 handles touch by translating taps into clicks, so many existing apps work on day one without an update. Apple also tweaked the interface for fingers, so touching near a window’s close button makes the controls swell up and saves you from needing surgical precision. Updated gesture APIs let developers build proper touch interactions, and Apple has lined up Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, and Shapr3D, all arriving later this year. Flicking a window to snap it against an edge feels lifted straight from iPadOS and the iPhone Duo. It’s the first visible sign of two operating systems drifting toward each other.

The Dynamic Island borrows the iPhone’s trick of turning a camera cutout into a live status bar. It now houses Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI, so search, live updates, and your assistant all sit in one pill at the top of the screen. You can accept an AirDrop, pause a song, or pick up a call with a tap, which makes the island the most natural touch target on the entire display. There’s a small catch, since Spotlight only moves into the island if Siri AI is enabled, and Siri AI is still in beta in macOS 27.2. Even so, the island turns a dead strip of pixels into something useful, which the notch never managed.

The missing Apple Pencil and the iPad’s last wall

For all the touch talk, the MacBook Pro has no Apple Pencil support. Apple’s own press release pitches the display as a full canvas for graphic designers, which makes finger-only drawing on a $2,899 reference-grade screen feel bizarre. The iPhone Duo, which is a phone, gets Apple Pencil (USB-C) support later this year, while the iPad keeps Apple Pencil Pro to itself. My read is that Apple saw how close it was to making the iPad irrelevant and left that one wall standing on purpose. Precision input is the last thing the iPad does better than anything else Apple sells.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch with M5 Pro, climbing to $4,499 and $4,799 with M5 Max, shipping November 6. That’s a $400 premium over the standard MacBook Pro, and it lands against Microsoft’s $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra, which also packs a 2,000-nit mini-LED touchscreen. Apple now sells touch on a foldable phone that opens into a tablet and on a laptop that wants to be one, all inside two months. Somewhere in Cupertino, the iPadOS team is probably refreshing Slack a little nervously. If macOS keeps picking up iPad tricks at this rate, iPadOS will need a very good answer for why it exists.

The post Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis

Posted on by

If the iPad were a person, this would be the week it checked its phone and found out its friends had started a group chat without it. On October 28, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen. Back in September, it revealed the iPhone Duo, a $1,999 foldable that opens into a 7.6-inch tablet-ish screen. One goes after the iPad Pro’s job of being a pro machine you can touch, and the other goes after the iPad mini’s job of being a small screen you carry everywhere. That’s two iPads made redundant in about seven weeks, which feels like a personal record for Apple.

The MacBook makes the louder case, with tandem OLED panels hitting 2,000 nits, a Dynamic Island replacing the notch, and a starting price of $2,899. The Duo makes the sneakier one, since it runs the same A20 Pro chip as Apple’s new $699 OLED iPad mini and packs an extra rear camera for good measure. Craig Federighi even conceded that the Duo can fill the space an iPad mini used to hold. Apple did keep one door shut, though, because the touchscreen MacBook has no Apple Pencil support. Call it a coincidence if you like, but it looks a lot like Apple left the iPad one job so it wouldn’t feel completely useless.

Designer: Apple

Half a pound lighter, with every port still on board

The new MacBook Pro weighs 3 pounds (1.36kg) as a 14-inch and 4 pounds (1.81kg) as a 16-inch, shedding half a pound and 0.7 pounds respectively. Thickness barely moves, landing at 0.59 inches (15mm) and 0.63 inches (16mm). OLED does most of the heavy lifting, since self-lit pixels let Apple ditch the backlight layers that mini-LED needs. Slimmer bezels also stretch the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches inside a slightly smaller footprint. A redesigned thermal system keeps sustained performance intact and pushes warm air away from the display, a smart call because OLED panels age faster when they run hot.

Apple kept every port the 2021 redesign brought back, so you still get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack. Up to three external displays work on M5 Pro, or four on M5 Max. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 run off Apple’s N1 chip, and a fast charge gets you to 50 percent in 30 minutes, which covers a layover. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours on the 16-inch with M5 Pro and 22 on the 14-inch, enough for a workday and a movie on the flight home. The lid’s Apple logo glows again too, but that comeback is a story for another day.

A tandem OLED that doubles as a reference monitor

PROLED XDR is a tandem OLED, which stacks two light-emitting layers so the panel can get brighter and last longer than a single-layer OLED. Apple rates it at 2,000 nits peak for both HDR and SDR, up from 1,600 and 1,000 nits on the mini-LED model, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. In practice, a spreadsheet stays readable at a sunny cafe table, and dark scenes stay properly black without the halo blooming mini-LED throws around bright objects. ProMotion runs from 10Hz to 120Hz, idling low on static pages to save battery. Resolution lands at 3024 x 1986 on the 14-inch and 3472 x 2266 on the 16-inch.

The panel covers both P3 and Adobe RGB, the color space print work lives in, so print designers can finally proof on a laptop without second-guessing their greens. Apple also claims more than 80 percent coverage of Rec. 2020, the wider gamut used for grading HDR video. Every panel gets factory calibrated, and built-in reference modes cover film, photography, print, and even DICOM medical imaging for research use. Genlock support syncs the display’s refresh rate to a camera’s capture, which stops flicker and tearing on virtual production sets. Add the nano-texture option, now etched straight into the cover glass, and Apple has basically folded a reference monitor into a laptop lid.

Sixteen years after Steve Jobs said no, the Mac gets touch

In 2010, Steve Jobs told a room full of press that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea, because reaching up to a vertical screen gets tiring until your arm gives up. Apple spent the next decade and a half agreeing with him. The closest the MacBook Pro got was the Touch Bar, a thin OLED strip above the keyboard that ran from 2016 until Apple retired it in 2023. The PROLED model finally breaks the rule, with a touch sensor built directly into the display panel instead of laminated on top as a separate layer. That cuts latency, so your finger feels glued to whatever it drags.

Day to day, you swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom a photo, drag slides between presentations, and double-tap a window to fill the screen. Pros get the fun stuff, with Logic Pro turning the display into a Multi-Touch polyphonic keyboard with tappable chord and drum pads, and Final Cut Pro letting editors pinch into a cut and drop clips into place by hand. The hinge has been reworked for extra stability, so the screen stays put under all that prodding. Apple even added video stabilization for calls, so your webcam feed stops shaking every time you tap something mid-meeting. It’s a very Apple fix for a very Apple problem.

macOS learns finger manners and gets a Dynamic Island

macOS 27 handles touch by translating taps into clicks, so many existing apps work on day one without an update. Apple also tweaked the interface for fingers, so touching near a window’s close button makes the controls swell up and saves you from needing surgical precision. Updated gesture APIs let developers build proper touch interactions, and Apple has lined up Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, and Shapr3D, all arriving later this year. Flicking a window to snap it against an edge feels lifted straight from iPadOS and the iPhone Duo. It’s the first visible sign of two operating systems drifting toward each other.

The Dynamic Island borrows the iPhone’s trick of turning a camera cutout into a live status bar. It now houses Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI, so search, live updates, and your assistant all sit in one pill at the top of the screen. You can accept an AirDrop, pause a song, or pick up a call with a tap, which makes the island the most natural touch target on the entire display. There’s a small catch, since Spotlight only moves into the island if Siri AI is enabled, and Siri AI is still in beta in macOS 27.2. Even so, the island turns a dead strip of pixels into something useful, which the notch never managed.

The missing Apple Pencil and the iPad’s last wall

For all the touch talk, the MacBook Pro has no Apple Pencil support. Apple’s own press release pitches the display as a full canvas for graphic designers, which makes finger-only drawing on a $2,899 reference-grade screen feel bizarre. The iPhone Duo, which is a phone, gets Apple Pencil (USB-C) support later this year, while the iPad keeps Apple Pencil Pro to itself. My read is that Apple saw how close it was to making the iPad irrelevant and left that one wall standing on purpose. Precision input is the last thing the iPad does better than anything else Apple sells.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch with M5 Pro, climbing to $4,499 and $4,799 with M5 Max, shipping November 6. That’s a $400 premium over the standard MacBook Pro, and it lands against Microsoft’s $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra, which also packs a 2,000-nit mini-LED touchscreen. Apple now sells touch on a foldable phone that opens into a tablet and on a laptop that wants to be one, all inside two months. Somewhere in Cupertino, the iPadOS team is probably refreshing Slack a little nervously. If macOS keeps picking up iPad tricks at this rate, iPadOS will need a very good answer for why it exists.

The post Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis first appeared on Yanko Design.