Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Anker’s Sleep Earbuds 4 Pro Silence Snoring in Real Time With Adaptive Masking: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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Anker’s new Soundcore Sleep Earbuds 4 Pro stuff a heart rate sensor into your ear canal and bolt a round AMOLED touchscreen onto the charging case, so bedtime happens without your phone anywhere near the pillow. Each bud is a flat three gram disc with a soft silicone fin that wedges into the ridge of your ear, sitting 20 percent flatter against your head than the old Sleep A30 so side sleepers can actually lie on them. A microphone in the case listens for your partner’s snoring and reshapes the masking audio as the snore shifts pitch. It arrives in November for $349.99.

Handling them at IFA, the thing that struck me was the hierarchy. The case is the brain here, with its own screen, chip and local storage, while the buds have quietly demoted themselves to sensors you happen to wear. Pop the lid and a circular display shows the time and battery for each side. Tap through for playback controls, a brightness slider, an alarm toggle. Your phone, the single worst object to hold at midnight, has been designed out of the room entirely.

Designer: Anker

Sleep earbuds run on a brief that works backward from every other earbud, since the real question is what happens when a skull presses the thing into a pillow for eight hours. Anker’s bud is a flat disc with no stem and no nozzle, and the silicone fin locks into the ear ridge instead of pushing inward. I picked one up at the booth and it felt closer to a hearing aid component than a music earbud, the correct lineage for something meant to disappear under the weight of your head. The case carries the real design budget: a round AMOLED display, its own chip, and local audio storage, so soundscapes play offline.

Inside the ear, a 100 Hz optical PPG sensor tracks heart rate and HRV through the night, feeding BioSync, a system that checks relaxation roughly every five minutes and nudges the tempo, soundscape and binaural beats accordingly. Anker calls this an experimental lab feature, not a medical grade one, honest framing for a claim this ambitious. Snore masking runs on a separate loop: the case mic picks up snoring nearby and reshapes the masking sound as pitch and rhythm change, rather than looping one fixed track all night. Anker recommends keeping the case within two meters of the sleeping culprit with the mic aimed their way, the most savage guidance to come out of IFA this year.

The cheaper $229.99 Sleep Earbuds 4 skips the PPG sensor and the touchscreen entirely, yet it can recognize a baby crying or a fire alarm through its case mic and duck the masking audio into transparency. The Pro, despite carrying all the sensor hardware, does not do this. It reads as two products, two timelines, with no merge forced before launch. Paying $120 more buys a heart rate graph and a screen, not the feature that wakes you when something is actually wrong. That tradeoff is worth Anker addressing before the Pro ships in November.

Anker took the accessory and made it the computer, while the wearable itself got smaller and closer to invisible, the reverse of how most earbud lines evolve. Cases usually shrink as buds gain features. Here the buds vanish and the case gets a face. Whether BioSync improves anyone’s sleep needs real nights and real data, not a show floor. But a screen you check instead of a phone you scroll is the right instinct for something built to sit beside your head while you’re unconscious.

The post Anker’s Sleep Earbuds 4 Pro Silence Snoring in Real Time With Adaptive Masking: Hands-on at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Self-Moving Harry Potter Chessboard Stole The Show At IFA 2026 From Every AI Gadget

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IFA in 2026 was wall to wall AI. Every fridge had an assistant, every vacuum had a personality, every booth rep used the word “intelligent” until it stopped meaning anything. I walked past maybe forty products that promised to think for me before I found the one thing on the entire floor that made me feel something, and it did not involve a single chatbot. It was a chess board, sculpted like a ruin, moving its own pieces across a glowing marble surface with nobody touching them. That board is GoChess Wizard Alive, Particula’s officially licensed Harry Potter set built with Warner Bros. for the film’s 25th anniversary, and it out-charmed every piece of “smart” hardware in the building.

Here is my petty little theory about consumer tech right now. We have gotten so good at building things that are useful that we forgot how to build things that are delightful, and those are not the same skill. GoChess solves that by hiding four robots under the surface, letting 32 stone pieces glide into position with zero visible mechanism, all while looking like something dug out of the Chamber itself. It ships as a limited run of 1,000 numbered boards at $999, the first batch sold out in 48 hours, and the second presale opens September 28. I did not review this like a gadget. I reviewed it the way you judge a magic trick, and it passed clean.

Designers: Particula x Warner Bros.

I zoomed in using a macro mode on my camera and the details were staggering. The pawns kneel with crossbows braced against a shoulder, heads bowed like they are waiting on orders. Knights rear up on horseback behind kite shields carved with a rosette pattern lifted straight from the film’s chamber sequence. The king stands wrapped in a crowned great helm, both hands folded over a sword pommel like a tomb effigy that got bored of lying down. This is medieval funerary sculpture cosplaying as a chess set, and it works because Particula resisted the easy move of just slapping Harry Potter branding on a generic Staunton set.

The playing surface is printed to look like veined marble rather than the flat two-tone grid every smart board defaults to, and the LED coaching rings glow up through that stone texture instead of sitting on top of it like a UI overlay. Blue rings show your legal moves, green flags the strongest option, and the whole system stays invisible until you actually need it. That restraint in the interface design is what sells the illusion. A cheaper execution would have turned this into a light-up toy. Particula built something that looks like a prop first and a gadget second.

The robotics trace back to Particula’s original 2023 GoChess, which used a patent-pending system of wheeled micro-robots under a translucent surface to shuttle magnetic pieces around. Wizard Alive runs the four-robot configuration from that lineup, the faster of the two setups, which is why a full board reset happens in seconds instead of a slow crawl. You can also just talk to it. Call out “knight to h3” the way Ron does in the film and the piece answers you, gliding into position with no hand involved. Standing at that booth, watching strangers do this to each other and burst out laughing, was the most fun I had at the entire show.

I walked into that convention center braced for smart fridges and AI-branded nonsense, and I walked out having relived being nine years old for about twenty minutes straight. That is the real achievement here, not the robotics or the licensing deal, but the fact that a chess set out-delighted an entire hall of companies trying much harder to impress me. If you want in, the second presale batch opens September 28 for 48 hours before it vanishes again, same as the first one did. Move fast. The pieces certainly will.

The post This Self-Moving Harry Potter Chessboard Stole The Show At IFA 2026 From Every AI Gadget first appeared on Yanko Design.

InfiMaker K1 at IFA 2026: The 5-Axis Desktop CNC Turning Any Creator Space Into A Fabrication Lab

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Every serious maker has hit the same wall at some point. You finish a design, you’re ready to hold the actual object in your hands, and then reality intervenes: the part needs machining, the machining needs a shop, the shop needs weeks, and your idea sits in a queue somewhere while the momentum drains out of it. InfiMaker was built by a team who got sick of that wall. Founded in Shenzhen in 2024 by Bowen Xie and Linjian Xiang, both veterans of DJI’s drone and robotics divisions, the company set out to shrink industrial-grade fabrication down to the size of a desk. Their first product, the K1, launched on Kickstarter on August 11, 2026, with Super Early Bird pledges starting at $5,199. It is a desktop CNC machine that does something very few machines at this price or size have managed: true simultaneous five-axis machining, the kind that lets a tool approach a part from nearly any angle without flipping, re-fixturing, or losing precision along the way.

What makes K1 worth a longer conversation isn’t the spec sheet alone, impressive as it is with its 1.5 kW spindle, 20,000 RPM top speed, and 0.01 mm repeatability. It’s the thinking behind it. Bowen Xie spent more than two decades in robotics before this, starting with competitive robotics as a kid and eventually landing at DJI, where drone motion control and robot-vacuum perception quietly became the foundation for how K1 handles trajectory, calibration, and setup. We sat down with Bowen, whose company is bringing K1 to IFA this year, to talk about what it actually takes to make five-axis machining approachable, why AI CAM has to know when to say no, and what he hopes a fifteen-year-old somewhere builds with one of these machines first.

Yanko Design: You spent more than twenty years building robots before this, and you and Linjian came out of DJI. What did drones teach you about motion control that turned out to apply directly to cutting metal?

Bowen Xie: I started teaching myself programming at seven and entered FLL at nine, so robotics has been a continuous part of my life for more than twenty years. At DJI, between Linjian and me, that experience covered both drones and ground robots, including robot vacuums.

Drones taught us that precision motion is not simply about commanding motors. The system has to know where it is, plan a trajectory, coordinate multiple axes, sense disturbances, and correct continuously. In flight, the disturbances may be wind or a changing payload. In CNC, they become cutting forces, vibration, tool wear, and thermal drift.

That thinking transferred very directly into K1. We brought robot-control experience into five-axis, six-motor coordination, trajectory control, FOC, vibration suppression, self-calibration, and error compensation.

The robot-vacuum experience added another important layer: perception. Instead of asking the operator to perform every centering, origin-setting, and calibration step manually, the machine should be able to see the workpiece, fit it to the digital model, calculate its position, and use probing to help establish the setup.

Then AI CAM can turn that known geometry into a machining plan that the user can inspect and approve. The practical change is less time spent setting up the machine and making trial cuts, and more time getting to the first good part.

YD: The origin story is that you kept hitting a wall whenever an idea needed a physical part. What was the specific project that made you stop and think, we should just build the machine?

Bowen: The specific setting was our university robotics competition team, rather than one dramatic component.

We built more than twenty robots, and every iteration created a new need for custom metal parts: brackets, joints, mounts, transmission parts, and structural pieces. We could change a design in a day, but a custom part could take weeks, sometimes close to two months. In some cases, having it made in China and shipped to Canada was still cheaper than sourcing it locally.

That mismatch stayed with me. The intelligence of the project could move quickly, but its physical development was controlled by an external manufacturing queue.

Later, while building autonomous construction equipment at Robolution, we ran into the same problem at a larger scale. Eventually, it stopped looking like a procurement problem. It looked like a missing product: a manufacturing system that could sit beside the engineer and move at the same speed as the design process.

That was the origin of K1.

YD: You’ve said making CAM easy was harder than making it powerful, and that the hard part was deciding what to take away. What was the thing you most wanted to keep but cut?

Bowen: The thing I most wanted to keep was the full parameter surface.

Engineers often feel safer when every feed, step-over, tool option, entry strategy, and machining parameter is visible. It feels transparent and professional. But if you expose all of those decisions at the beginning, the user has to become a CAM specialist before making the first part.

What we cut was not professional control. We cut the requirement to make every professional decision manually in the default workflow.

InfiStudio should understand the geometry, material, tools, and machine, then propose a machining strategy with reasons behind it. The user should be able to inspect the tool list, simulate the result, change the parameters, or take over completely. But they should not have to confront the entire parameter tree before they know which decisions actually matter. The goal is not to hide complexity inside a black box. It is to move complexity to the moment when it becomes relevant.

YD: There’s a version of this machine that stays firmly a tool for experienced machinists, and a version that tries to bring in people who’ve never touched CNC. Those two users want opposite things. How did you decide who K1 is really for?

Bowen: We decided that K1 is for people with a serious task, not necessarily people with previous CNC experience.

That could be an independent engineer making a robot joint, a product designer developing a camera body, a jewellery studio producing a wax model, or a small business making a custom product. They may be new to CNC, but they are not new to designing, engineering, or making things.

A traditional machinist needs transparency, manual control, standard G-code, and the ability to understand exactly what the machine is doing. A new user needs guidance, safe defaults, visual feedback, and a much shorter path to the first successful part. We designed the workflow so that those are layers of the same product rather than two separate products.

K1 is not meant to replace a large industrial machining centre in high-volume production. It is meant to give an ambitious creator a level of capability that previously required a much larger machine, several specialist tools, and years of accumulated workflow knowledge.

You can be a beginner in CNC without being a beginner in making.

YD: AI can turn a sentence into a 3D model in seconds, but a model isn’t a machinable part. Where does that gap actually show up, and what does InfiStudio do about geometry that looks fine on screen and can’t be cut?

Bowen: A generated model only has to look convincing on a screen. A machinable part has to obey geometry, tooling, material, fixturing, and physics.

The gap appears in very specific places: broken or non-manifold surfaces, walls thinner than the available tool, internal corners smaller than the cutter radius, deep cavities the tool holder cannot reach, undercuts with no valid approach angle, or geometry that collides with the stock or fixture. A model can look perfect and still have no safe machining strategy.

InfiStudio treats model generation as the beginning of the process, not the end. It can post-process and repair broken geometry where possible, recognize machining features, propose tools and operations, generate the toolpath, and simulate the process. On the machine side, perception and probing help connect that digital plan to the position and orientation of the real workpiece.

The important part is how the system behaves when the answer is no. If a region cannot be reached, the software should identify it and help the user change the geometry, tool, orientation, fixture, or setup. It should not invent a toolpath simply because the user asked for one.

AI should reduce the amount of specialist work required to find a valid process. It should never hallucinate machinability.

YD: What’s the question backers ask most, and what’s the one you wish they asked more?

Bowen: The question we hear most, in many different forms, is: “Can it really make the part I care about?”

Sometimes people ask about stainless steel, titanium, or aluminium. Sometimes they ask about a particular tolerance, surface finish, size, or geometry. But underneath all of those questions, they are asking whether K1 is a real manufacturing tool or only an impressive demonstration.

That question deserves evidence: the material, tool, cooling, setup, toolpath, machining time, and measured result. A headline specification alone is not enough.

The question I wish people asked more is: “What does the complete path to the first good part look like?”

That includes importing or generating the model, checking manufacturability, setting up the stock, establishing the work coordinate, selecting tools, generating and simulating the toolpath, machining, and inspecting the result. The real value of K1 is not one impressive number. It is how much of that complete process one person can now own.

YD: IFA is a consumer electronics show. Why bring an industrial-grade five-axis mill to a hall full of consumer appliances and robots?

Bowen: IFA is exactly where we want to make this argument, because we believe advanced manufacturing is becoming personal technology.

A five-axis CNC is industrial in what it can do, but it does not have to be industrial in how difficult it is to install, understand, and operate. Robotics, perception, AI, software, and consumer-hardware product design are changing what can fit into an individual workspace.

We are not trying to make a CNC machine behave like a kitchen appliance. Cutting metal still involves real forces, tools, fixtures, coolant, chips, and safety. What we are doing is applying consumer-product discipline to that complexity: a coherent product, guided setup, integrated software, clear feedback, and a workflow designed around the person using it.

IFA brings together AI, robotics, consumer hardware, design, and new ways of living with technology. We want visitors to see that the next important device in a personal workspace may not only display information or automate the home. It may manufacture an idea.

YD: Is there a craft tradition in Europe, jewellery, watchmaking, prototyping, that you’re specifically hoping finds this machine?

Bowen: Jewellery is probably the first European craft community I hope connects with K1.

Independent jewellery studios work with wax models, moulds, complex curved surfaces, fine details, and short production runs. Five-axis access can be valuable because it reduces repeated flipping and makes it easier to reach surfaces and undercuts that are difficult in a conventional three-axis workflow.

I am also interested in watch-case and bezel prototyping, instrument making, model building, and small metalworking studios. Europe has a strong tradition of combining precision with personal authorship. That is very different from anonymous mass production, and it aligns closely with what we want K1 to enable.

The machine should not replace the craftsperson. Decisions about proportion, material, finish, and meaning still belong to the person. CNC should extend the craftsperson’s capabilities by handling precision, repeatability, and difficult geometry while leaving the creative judgment intact.

YD: What’s the object someone has made with a K1 that you didn’t expect?

Bowen: One object that surprised me in terms of the response it generated was the brass bull our team machined.

We initially treated it as a visually interesting demonstration. But people did not only react to the finished sculpture. They started asking very technical questions: How did the tool reach the underside? How was the stock held? Which surfaces needed simultaneous five-axis motion? How many operations and tool changes were involved?

That was the unexpected part. A playful object opened a serious conversation about tool access, workholding, surface continuity, and five-axis toolpaths more effectively than a conventional engineering test piece might have.

It reminded me that a good demonstration should not only prove that a machine can cut something. It should make people curious about how the manufacturing process works.

YD: If this works the way you want it to, what does someone’s workshop look like in five years that doesn’t exist today?

Bowen: In five years, I think a small workshop will look less like a miniature factory and more like one highly capable person working with an intelligent manufacturing system.

The process may begin with a prompt, a sketch, or an existing model. AI helps create or refine the geometry, but then the manufacturing layer begins. The software checks whether the design can actually be cut. The machine uses perception to understand the real stock and workpiece, helps establish the origin and setup, and uses probing and calibration to connect the physical object to the digital model.

AI CAM proposes tools, parameters, and a machining strategy. Simulation shows what can be reached and where the risks are. The human reviews the important decisions, changes anything necessary, and approves the job. During machining, the system monitors the process and responds to abnormal conditions.

The workshop is not fully autonomous, and it is not a black box. The person still owns the intent, material choice, trade-offs, and quality. But they no longer need to coordinate a long chain of separate specialists and suppliers before testing an idea.

That is what “one person, one table, one factory” means to me: not removing the human, but giving one human much greater manufacturing agency.

YD: Somewhere out there a fifteen-year-old is going to use one of these and it’ll change what they think is possible. What do you hope they make?

Bowen: I hope they make the first necessary part for something much bigger.

It might be a joint for their first robot, a device that solves a problem in their family, an instrument nobody has built before, or the first prototype of a company they have not yet imagined starting.

I began programming at seven and entered FLL at nine, so I know how important it is to discover early that you can change the physical world, not just understand it. At that age, the first part does not need to be commercially valuable or technically perfect. It needs to prove that an idea in your head can become something real through your own decisions and effort.

I do not want the machine to do the imagining for them. I want it to make the distance between imagination and reality short enough that they are willing to try.

The post InfiMaker K1 at IFA 2026: The 5-Axis Desktop CNC Turning Any Creator Space Into A Fabrication Lab first appeared on Yanko Design.

We Held The World’s Thinnest Portable SSD at IFA 2026: Hands-on With The Lexar Muse

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Here is a fun little irony nobody asked for. The same AI boom that is making your laptop smarter is also making storage more expensive and harder to get, because every gigabyte of NAND that could go into your next SSD is currently being fought over by datacenters training the next big model. Micron basically said the quiet part out loud this year, killing off its own consumer brand Crucial to chase those fatter AI margins. Less choice for regular people, more racks for hyperscalers. Meanwhile the actual demands on your personal storage have only gone up, phones shooting in formats that used to require a cinema camera, and pockets that were never designed to also carry a second device.

Which makes it almost funny that Lexar, the brand Micron itself walked away from years ago, just used its 30th birthday to launch the kind of drive that actually solves that pocket problem. You have probably had a Lexar SD card in a camera bag at some point, or bought one of its USB drives without thinking twice about who made it. At IFA 2026 in Berlin, the company unveiled the Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD, a magnetic, credit-card-thin drive built for phone shooters drowning in 4K footage or even people within the Apple ecosystem who don’t want to splurge on cloud storage. Turns out the company nobody expected much from just built the phone accessory a lot of us did not know we needed.

Designer: Lexar

The first thing you notice about the Muse is how little of it there actually is. Lexar carved the enclosure from a single block of metal, no seams, no visible joints, tapering from roughly 3.8mm at its thickest edge down to a single millimeter at the rim, numbers the company is calling the thinnest and lightest portable SSD on the market right now. Hold it flat and it genuinely reads more like a guitar pick than a storage device. Getting there required shrinking everything else too, a custom ultra-thin circuit board and tightly stacked NAND dies packed into a shell with almost no wasted volume. This is not a drive that got thin by cutting corners on capacity or speed either, which is usually where these design exercises fall apart.

The magnetic attachment system is pretty impressive, because adding a USB-C port on the Muse would mean complicating the build and making things thicker. Lexar built a proprietary PogoPin connector for the data link, paired with a bundled SnapLink Magnetic Cable, and backed both the connector and the carry sleeve with N52-grade neodymium magnets, serious holding power for something this small. Slot the drive into its sleeve, snap the whole assembly onto a MagSafe iPhone, and your rig sits flush against the back of the phone rather than tugging at a port from underneath. Anyone who has fumbled a cable connection mid-handheld shot will understand immediately why that matters more than the spec sheet suggests.

Lexar quotes 1,050MB/s read and 1,000MB/s write, comfortably clearing Apple’s 440MB/s threshold for unlocking 4K120 ProRes recording on external storage, with plenty of room left over for whatever comes next. That puts the Muse in direct conversation with the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, the drive that has largely owned this category since it launched at CES 2025 with a rugged silicone shell and an IP65 rating. Lexar decided to bet instead on thinness and weight as the whole pitch, creating something close to a MacBook Air moment for portable SSDs, where the headline spec is simply how little of the product you notice. It arrives in 512GB and 1TB capacities starting Q4 2026, with pricing yet to be announced.

The Muse was not the only thing on Lexar’s IFA floor. The company also showed off its AI Storage Core concepts, next-gen Gen5 SSD and Storage Stick hardware built around a custom Longsys controller and a caching layer called Luma Bridge, aimed at feeding local AI models faster while easing pressure on scarce DRAM. Alongside that sat a new Dashcam USB Flash Drive Series, automotive-grade sticks rated for extreme cabin temperatures and built to survive the kind of nonstop loop recording that kills cheaper drives inside a year. Neither is available to buy yet, but both point at where Lexar’s next thirty years are headed, well past the camera bag.

The post We Held The World’s Thinnest Portable SSD at IFA 2026: Hands-on With The Lexar Muse first appeared on Yanko Design.

What Happens When Bauhaus Meets a Pizza Oven? AEG Just Showed Us At IFA 2026

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Ask four designers what Bauhaus means and you will get six or seven answers, depending on how passionate the designers are. AEG leaned into exactly that. The brand gave its new 3in1 oven to four artists, asked them to interpret the movement through their own lens, and then invited a jury to sit at IFA Berlin and pick a winner in front of a live audience. Low stakes for the oven. Slightly higher stakes for everyone holding a scorecard.

What makes the lineup fun is how little the four entries agree with each other. One goes flat and quiet. One paints a desert. One wraps the whole thing in pizza slices. One builds a grid and fills it with tomatoes and suns. All entries made their way to IFA, where a jury panel of four industry elites convened to vote for their favorite design. Here’s a look at all the four entries.

Alpay Efe (Winner)

Alpay Efe painted an oven that pretends to be a drawing of an oven. Flat sage green across the top, warm cream through the body, slate blue at the base, with a copper line running the edge of the door like somebody inked it in. Look at it in a photo and your brain files it as a concept sketch or a 3D render with the shading turned off. Then you remember it is a physical appliance sitting on a physical table, and the whole thing goes slightly sideways. He essentially took the flatness of 2D animation and wrapped it around a real object, letting the panel seams do the work that outlines do on a cel.

That illusion has a history behind it. Efe was born in Oberhausen in 1987, studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, and has spent his career painting portraits that sit somewhere between realism and abstraction. One of his early solo shows was literally called “Illusions of Reality.” So a painter who normally builds depth on a flat canvas here spent his time flattening depth on a solid one, which is a neat inversion of his day job. It also happens to be the most orthodox Bauhaus entry of the four. Reduction, geometry, no ornament anywhere, and every choice doing something perceptual rather than decorative.

Darius “Baka Arts”

Darius Puia, working as Baka Arts, went the opposite direction from everyone else in the room. His oven is a desert. Sand and bone-cream across the whole body, a low horizon line, a single tiny figure standing out there in all that empty space, with small hits of red and yellow doing the work of a sun. The scene runs across the panels as one continuous landscape, so the object stops behaving like a box with four sides and starts behaving like a canvas that happens to have corners. It is the calmest thing in the lineup by a wide margin, and in a contest where two entries are covered in food, calm reads as a strategy.

The surprise is that this comes from an artist known for the loudest possible palette. Puia is a German digital designer who has spent well over a decade on cyberpunk and sci-fi work, all neon, dystopian cities and retro anime energy, with a healthy stack of surreal 3D pieces behind him. Trading that in for a quiet stretch of sand and one lonely figure is a real gear change. There is a Bauhaus argument in it too, since the entire composition rests on reduction, negative space and restraint, which is roughly what the school spent its whole existence preaching.

Hombre SUK

Pablo Fontagnier committed to the bit harder than anyone. His oven is wrapped in a deep burgundy field packed with repeating pizza slices, basil leaves and tomatoes, with graffiti lettering tucked into the pattern so it reads as wallpaper from across the room and as street art up close. Every surface is covered. The top, the sides, the panels around the door, all of it running as one continuous repeat that ignores where the box stops and starts. Given that the appliance has a dedicated pizza mode, wrapping it in pizza is either the most obvious move available or the boldest, and honestly the confidence is what sells it.

He has the CV to back the swagger. Born in Mannheim in 1981, trained as a graphic designer at the Academy of Communication there, and working out of Nuremberg since 2013, where he is enough of a local fixture that the city library put one of his designs on a rolling bookbus and the castle hosted his projections during Blaue Nacht in 2023. He has painted for Disney Germany, Eastpak, Casio and O2, and shown work everywhere from Shanghai to Moscow. His style leans on clean shapes, hard edges and old-school light-and-shadow work, which is where the Bauhaus link quietly lives. Strip the pizza away and the underlying grammar is all repetition and structure.

Josephine Rais

Josephine Rais built a grid and then refused to behave inside it. Her oven is divided into squares of yellow, blue, red, cream and black, laid out with the kind of rigid geometry that would make a Mondrian fan nod approvingly, except each square is filled with tomatoes, suns, aubergines and flowers in full bloom. The structure is strict. The content is having a party. That tension is the smartest Bauhaus reading in the group, because the school always argued that order was a framework for expression rather than a cage, and this is what that idea looks like when somebody actually tests it on a countertop appliance.

Rais is the one with an industrial design background, which explains a lot about how confidently she handled a three-dimensional product. She studied Fine Arts early on, took a bachelor’s in product design and a master’s in strategic design, then landed in Berlin as a freelance illustrator, where her bright, joyful, food-and-people-heavy style has pulled in clients like Adidas, Apple, Adobe, Nike, TikTok, Coca-Cola and Xbox. She has described her work as her version of a colourful, happy pop utopia, and the oven is exactly that, boxed neatly into a grid and still managing to look like it wants to feed you.

The post What Happens When Bauhaus Meets a Pizza Oven? AEG Just Showed Us At IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Floating Lamps, Pet Phones, and Printers That Print On Ripped Paper: The Weird Wonderful Gadgets At IFA 2026

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If you’ve ever spent more time picking a keyboard switch than you spent picking your last laptop, this roundup is partly for you. If you’ve ever rigged up a portable projector to a laptop balanced on a hotel minibar just because you wanted a bigger screen, same. The brands in this collection showcased at the Global Connect Show at IFA 2026 are for people who have already decided that “good enough” isn’t, and who show up to a tech show looking for the thing that makes an already-decent setup genuinely great. That’s a specific kind of shopper, and a very satisfying one to cater to.

What looks like an unrelated collection on paper tends to share the same underlying energy. Rugged devices built for environments where standard tech has a short life expectancy. Smart home hardware for homes that don’t want a renovation. Clean energy systems for people who want independence from the grid without building a bunker. Levitating lamps that look like they belong in a different century. AR glasses from one of the most credentialed teams in the space. There’s a lot going on, and somehow all of it belongs in the same list.

Magcubic M800 Pro GT: The Budget Projector Brand That Decided Durability Was the Next Frontier

Magcubic has a story worth knowing before talking about the M800 Pro GT. Founded by tech and home entertainment experts with a mission to make big-screen experiences accessible to a wider audience, the brand grew from an unknown startup to a top-10 global projector brand in under two years. It did that by doing something the projector industry wasn’t really expecting, which was leveraging LCD technology and supply chain muscle to cut high-end projector costs by as much as 80%, launching models that match or outperform premium competitors at a fraction of the price. The HY series became an Amazon bestseller and the kind of product that gets recommended constantly in home theater forums by people who can’t quite believe what they paid for it. The M800 Pro GT is what comes after that success, and it’s asking a different question: not just how cheap can a good projector be, but how long can it actually last.

The answer Magcubic is offering is a sealed optical engine, which sounds like a small detail until you’ve owned a projector long enough to watch it slowly get worse. Unlike traditional projectors that leave optical components exposed to dust and airborne particles, the M800 Pro GT’s sealed architecture creates a cleaner internal environment, helping preserve the optical path and supporting consistent projection performance over time. Dust contamination is genuinely one of the most common reasons a projector’s image quality degrades over months of use, and it’s the kind of thing that rarely appears in spec sheets but absolutely shows up in two-year-old Amazon reviews. The M800 Pro GT represents a significant evolution in Magcubic’s product strategy, shifting focus from pure affordability to durability and long-term reliability, while staying true to the brand’s core mission of making high-quality projection accessible to all. For a brand that built its name on price, adding longevity to the pitch is a smart and mature next move.

Arzopa Portable Monitors, Frames, Calendar: A Screen for Everything

Portable monitors were always a niche category for the kind of person who travels constantly and refuses to work on a 13-inch laptop screen. What’s changed is that that person is now everyone. Arzopa has been building in this space for a while, and the Z1RC Plus TS shows what that investment looks like: a 17.3-inch 2.5K touchscreen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, responsive touch navigation, and 100% sRGB color coverage. The Z2FC trims things down to 15.6 inches and trades the touch panel for a 120Hz refresh rate and QHD resolution, all at 742 grams, which is the version for people who want their portable gaming situation to look a lot less embarrassing in a coffee shop.

The D14 Pro digital frame and the C1 Smart Calendar are where the brand starts to feel like it has a genuine point of view. The D14 Pro is a 14-inch 2K aluminum-alloy frame with multi-user remote sharing, unlimited cloud storage, and 32GB of built-in storage, with zero subscription fees, which puts it in direct competition with brands like Aura that have made recurring costs their whole personality. The C1 Smart Calendar, which launched in May 2026, is a 14-inch touchscreen family hub with a C1 Pro at 17.35 inches planned and a 27-inch C1 Pro Max already in development. It handles calendar sync, tasks, shopping lists, meal planning, and kid reward systems with no subscription required. The wall is clearly next on Arzopa’s agenda.

BUBBLEFLOW: Wireless Speakers That Deliver Perfect Spatial Audio No Matter How They’re Arranged

Four little wireless pods, no cables, no left-right dogma, and a promise that dropping them wherever you feel like should sound just as good as painstakingly measuring out a 5.1 setup. Each speaker in the system packs a UWB module, an omnidirectional antenna, and a microphone array, and together they automatically detect each speaker’s spatial coordinates and optimize the sound field rendering in real time, delivering an immersive experience with “any placement, always immersive.” That’s the party trick, but the deeper flex is what happens once the room is mapped. Users get an interactive interface where vocals, guitars, drums, and other musical elements can be moved through 3D space, front-left, orbiting the room, wherever the mix calls for. None of it requires special tracks either. The on-device AI spatialization engine performs real-time object separation and spatial rendering on any third-party streaming music or local audio files, so a decade-old stereo mp3 gets pulled apart and rebuilt in three dimensions without anyone re-mastering a thing.

The backstory tracks with a lot of the sharper hardware coming out of Shenzhen lately. BUBBLEFLOW was founded in 2025 and incubated at xbotpark, the robotics industry base started by Professor Li Zexiang, DJI’s co-founder, with angel backing from Hillhouse Ventures that same year. That pedigree shows up in the ambition of the pitch, four separate “world firsts” bundled into one four-speaker kit, but the company is keeping the actual retail launch on a slower clock, with the first hardware product expected to officially launch in the fourth quarter of 2026. IFA is where the concept gets its legs under it in public for the first time, with an interactive experience zone at Booth H25_265 letting attendees personally experience the wonder of “letting music flow freely through space.” Judging by the leaked booth photos already floating around, with the pods glowing teal on their charging dock, this is shaping up to be one of the more photographed corners of the show.

DOOGEE S300 Plus Thermal and Anymoving M1 Pro: Built for Where the Signal Drops

Thermal imaging on a smartphone used to mean paying a premium for a CAT S61 or clipping a FLIR One onto your existing phone and hoping the cable held. DOOGEE has been quietly making that kind of hardware more accessible for years through its S-series rugged lineup, and the S300 Plus Thermal continues that with high-definition thermal imaging that detects temperature differences and hidden heat sources, helping users observe and assess challenging environments. That covers a genuinely wide range of use cases, from hikers tracking animal heat signatures at dusk, to tradespeople doing electrical inspections or checking for insulation gaps in walls. It sits in a growing category of working tools that happen to look like smartphones, and for a brand that’s been building rugged hardware long enough to know what outdoor users actually need, adding a thermal sensor here feels less like a spec-sheet stunt and more like a logical next step.

The Anymoving M1 Pro outdoor smartwatch pairs with the S300 Plus Thermal in DOOGEE’s Outdoor Life ecosystem, bringing dual-band GPS and route navigation to keep users reliably on track. Dual-band GPS, meaning simultaneous L1 and L5 signal reception, is the same technology that separates a Garmin Fenix from a basic fitness tracker, offering significantly better accuracy in environments with tall buildings, dense tree cover, or canyon walls bouncing satellite signals around. Seeing it land in a watch positioned well below Garmin’s price bracket is the kind of trickle-down that makes the outdoor wearable market genuinely interesting right now. The broader Outdoor Life ecosystem is built for outdoor explorers, combining rugged performance, long-lasting power, reliable protection, and practical tools for demanding environments, and taken together, these two products make a credible case that you don’t need to spend flagship money to be properly equipped for the outdoors.

Epomaker Keyboards: The Brand That Keeps Asking What Else a Keyboard Could Show You

The mechanical keyboard community has strong opinions about everything, including, apparently, what should be on top of a keyboard besides keys. Epomaker has been leaning into this with its RT line for a while, and the RT98 continues that with two moves worth talking about. The numeric block detaches and remounts on either side of the board, southpaw for extra mouse room and coding, right-handed for data entry. It takes about five minutes to swap, and that kind of modular numpad flexibility is rare even in pricier boards. The other trick is a 1.14-inch detachable Mini TV display in the upper right, connected by PogPin contacts, showing time, battery, system status, weather, and up to three custom GIFs. It runs Bluetooth 5.1, 2.4GHz and USB-C across three paired devices, with an 8000mAh battery rated at up to 45 days of typical use or 300-plus hours continuous. Then there’s the Glyph, which went a different direction entirely: a retro typewriter conceit wrapped around genuinely modern enthusiast hardware. Round, concave PBT dye-sub keycaps at a uniform, non-sculpted height on a floating-key architecture give it the typewriter look without the staircase row heights that wreck your wrists. There’s a working return lever on the left, toggle up for Enter and press down for Backspace, and a 2.79-inch TFT smart screen showing status, time, RGB control, plus custom GIFs and logos.

The TH108V2 Pro is the most grounded of the three, a full 100% layout board aimed squarely at people who want a solid daily driver with some personality. At $98.99 to $99.99, it’s a full-size 104-key gasket-mount keyboard with a few smart refinements over its predecessor. The knob has moved from the left side edge to the front right face, so it’s actually reachable without hunting. It has hot-swap 5-pin, per-key south-facing RGB, a TFT glass screen with GIF upload, and a 10,000mAh battery rated up to 200 hours, with tri-mode switching and 1000Hz polling at 2ms latency. Taken together, the three map neatly onto Epomaker’s three different answers to the same question of what a keyboard should show you: the Glyph puts a screen where a typewriter’s platen would be, the TH108V2 Pro treats it as dashboard furniture, and the RT98 makes it a removable object you can take off entirely. That’s a surprisingly coherent lineup for a brand that started as a community crowdfunding darling and has clearly figured out what it wants to be.

ECO-WORTHY 48V 100Ah Batteries: One for the Wall, One for the Rack

Home energy storage has been having a moment for a few years now, accelerated by grid instability, rising electricity costs, and the broader push toward solar self-sufficiency. The category has been somewhat dominated by big names charging big prices, which is exactly the gap ECO-WORTHY has been building into. Both of the 48V 100Ah batteries showing up at IFA share the same 5.12kWh core, Grade-A LiFePO4 cells rated for 6,000 cycles, and the ability to stack up to 32 units in parallel for a total of around 163kWh if someone wants to go genuinely off-grid. They are the same 5.12kWh building block wearing two different attitudes toward the room it lives in. The wall-mount treats storage as something you hang and forget, with a conduit box and a screen at eye level. The Cubix100 treats it as infrastructure you stack, where the certification paperwork matters more than the finish. One is furniture, the other is equipment.

The wall-mount version at $929.99 comes with a 4.3-inch smart display, Bluetooth and WiFi app monitoring, and a built-in aerosol fire suppression module for thermal runaway mitigation. It charges and discharges down to -4°F (-20°C) thanks to a special low-temp electrolyte, with an operating range of -20 to 55°C both ways. It also carries a 10-year limited warranty with lifetime technical support, which is the kind of commitment that matters when something is literally bolted to your wall. The rack-mount Cubix100 at $849.99 is the one with the stronger case for serious installations, though. It carries UL1973, UL9540A, and CEC Listed certifications, plus completed system-level UL9540 testing by Intertek covering both DC and AC systems. That last one matters because UL9540 is what makes a home battery install legally permittable in much of the US, and it is rare at this price. Compatibility extends to Victron, Deye, Growatt, Lux Power, Sol-Ark, GoodWe, EG4, and SRNE, which covers most of the inverter brands people are actually buying.

Gravity Aura, Universe Time & Levatron: Objects That Treat Levitation as a Design Language

Levitating products have been around long enough that the novelty has worn off for most people. A Bluetooth speaker floating above a base, a globe spinning in mid-air, a lightbulb hovering over a wooden plinth. The category accumulated a lot of Kickstarter fatigue before it ever really found its footing. What Gravity is doing feels genuinely different, partly because the company spent five years actually building the underlying technology before selling anything. Founded by CEO Zhao Zhengdong, Gravity developed GravSpace (Spatial Force Field Control System) and GravPulse (Contactless Power Transfer Technology) over that period, and now holds nearly 100 independent intellectual property rights and core patents. The result is a spatial control system that goes beyond the typical “magnet in the base, object floating above it” formula. Unlike traditional levitation products that place objects directly above their bases, Aura uses GravSpace to suspend Auraform beside Aurabase. That sideways spatial relationship is what makes the Aura lamp feel like something from a different category entirely. Aura combines magnetic levitation with GravPulse, allowing Aurabase to transfer energy across space to Auraform so it can glow without cables or physical contacts. During the day it reads as a quiet floating sculpture. At night, it’s a light suspended in space.

The other two products push the concept in very different directions. Universe Time takes inspiration from the endless orbit of planets around stars, with its base envisioned as a distant planet with a precisely cut surface, above which a smaller sphere called the Planetary Pointer floats and continuously orbits while rotating on its own axis, echoing the perpetual motion of planets moving through space. It never stops moving, which means it functions less like a clock and more like a kinetic sculpture that happens to tell time through orbital position. A refined ring of light around the base represents the energy within a planet, with every proportion and detail carefully considered to bring planets, orbits, energy, and motion together in a mysterious, futuristic object that feels like an artifact from an unknown civilization. Then there’s the Levatron, which is the wildest swing of the three. Levatron is Gravity’s exploration into the idea of mechanical life, where three conical components levitate and rotate at the top of a robotic arm, creating a sense of order between precise structures and levitating motion, somewhere between a machine and a living organism. It has no practical function that can be easily summarized, which is kind of the point. A lot of the most interesting design objects don’t.

VEVOR Tools: Professional Work Tools on a Consumer Professional Budget

VEVOR has built its reputation doing something the tool industry has historically been reluctant to do, which is making genuinely capable equipment available to people who run a small operation out of a garage or spare room rather than a fully kitted workshop. The brand spans an almost absurd range of product categories, from meat slicers to welding equipment to heat presses, and the through-line across all of it is the same: professional-grade specs without the price tag that assumes you’re running a factory. The Auto Heat Press is a good example of this. It features hands-free auto pressure and release for effortless pressing, dual heating with 231lbs of pressure and even heat distribution, digital controls for temperature, time, and pressure settings, two presets and two custom modes, and comes with a heat cloth included. For anyone running a custom merchandise side hustle or a small print shop, the hands-free auto pressure mechanism alone is a meaningful upgrade over manual clamshell presses, where inconsistent pressure application is one of the more common reasons transfers come out uneven.

The other two products are squarely aimed at people who work with their hands in a more technical capacity. The 1/4-inch Drive Digital Torque Screwdriver covers 2.65 to 70.67 in-lbs of torque at plus or minus 2% accuracy, with 8 presets, 500-reading memory storage, real-time and peak torque measurement modes, and a quick-release bit holder for fast changes. That kind of memory logging and measurement accuracy matters in electronics assembly or device repair, where over-tightening a screw by feel is how you ruin a perfectly good piece of kit. The 40-Piece Machine Tap and Die Set rounds things out on the fabrication side, with HRC55-62 steel that resists wear and corrosion, CNC-machined and heat-treated components for sharp threads, coverage across M3-M12 and 1/8-27NPT, a portable case to prevent tool loss in field repairs, and a hex die design that delivers even force for sturdiness. Snap-on sells tap and die sets at prices that make your eyes water. VEVOR’s pitch is that the metallurgy and machining tolerance can be just as good without the brand tax, and for a lot of working machinists and serious hobbyists, that argument is increasingly hard to dismiss.

uCloudLink PetPhone & MeowGo G50 Max: One Lets Your Pet Call You, the Other Connects You Everywhere Else

The standout detail of the PetPhone is that the pet can initiate the call. Three jumps connects it, with simple training. That is the thing separating it from every GPS collar on the market. That one feature reframes the whole product, because GPS collars have existed for years and the category is crowded with competent options. What makes the PetPhone worth talking about is the underlying connectivity layer that makes something like that even possible. It runs on CloudSIM with no physical SIM card, covering 390-plus carriers across 200-plus countries, and supports two-way voice calls, pre-recorded voice messages, calming music streaming, feeding and playtime routines, geofencing with alerts, and a social community feature. Tracking uses six positioning technologies: GPS, AGPS, LBS, Bluetooth, WiFi, and Active Radar. On-device AI also monitors activity and flags behavioral shifts like anxiety or restlessness. All of that in a 37g device rated IP67, with five days of battery per charge, attaching to any existing collar via two silicone loop bands. Worth noting: first shown at MWC 2025, the device launched at retail in September 2025 at $89.99, a substantial climbdown from the expected $199 to $299 price range quoted at its debut.

The MeowGo G50 Max is a different kind of product entirely, and honestly a more interesting one to analyze. Introduced at MWC 2025 as a hotspot with satellite capability, it was repositioned at CES 2026 as an “AI-powered connectivity hub” spanning orbital, in-flight, and ground-based networks. The satellite piece is where it gets genuinely novel. Through a partnership with Skylo using 3GPP Release 17 NTN and no bulky external antenna, the coverage claim extends to the 70% of the globe without cellular. But here’s what makes it actually credible rather than just marketed: uCloudLink states plainly that broadband is unavailable over satellite. What you get is two-way messaging and Emergency SOS, available in 38 countries, with 30 satellite messages per month for three months on some bundles. Designing a product around gracefully degrading rather than pretending it will not is a rarer thing than it should be, and for frequent travelers the rest of the package is genuinely strong. Wi-Fi 6, up to 16 connected devices, a 4,850mAh battery with 18W fast charging, coverage across 200-plus countries and 5G in 80 to 90 countries. AI HyperConn manages credentials for home, office, hotel, and in-flight WiFi alongside cellular and satellite, marketed as “One Device, One Account,” while an AI travel assistant handles flight tracking, translation, exchange rates, and buying local data by voice.

Pantum: BM4300ADW: A Printer So Good, It Prints On Crumpled, Torn Paper Too

Every office has a printer story, and it is never a good one. Paper jams remain one of the most consistent points of friction in printing, and Pantum has apparently decided that fixing it deserves to be a headline feature rather than a footnote. The BM4300ADW belongs to the brand’s Efficient Pro Series, positioned around a low paper jam rate design alongside high-speed printing, auto-duplex efficiency, and one-step driver installation. That’s a mono laser multifunction printer rated at 33ppm on A4 and 35ppm on letter, with a first print out time under 8.5 seconds, an 800MHz processor paired with 512MB of memory, a 250-page input tray, and a one-page multipurpose tray for the odd envelope or letterhead job. None of those numbers are wild on their own, but the framing is telling. Pantum isn’t leading with speed or resolution here, it’s leading with reliability, which is a strange thing to have to sell as a feature until you remember how much collective time gets lost every year to a printer eating a sheet of paper sideways.

There’s a fair chance a slightly torn sheet actually feeding through cleanly instead of jamming halfway is down to the feed roller design and paper path engineering that this Efficient Pro line has been built around. There’s also a bit of corporate context worth knowing here. Pantum was formerly part of the Ninestar Group, and as of April 22, 2026, the company officially renamed itself to Pantum Technology, a signal that the brand wants to be known on its own terms rather than as a division of a larger printing and imaging conglomerate. That kind of rebrand usually comes with a renewed push into new markets, and IFA is as good a stage as any to make that case. A printer that handles paper carelessly and still prints clean is a small thing to demo on a show floor, but it’s exactly the kind of detail that sticks with the person standing there watching it happen.

Inateck AceTouch Pro: The iPad Keyboard That Won a Design Award for Getting the Boring Stuff Right

Apple’s own Magic Keyboard has been the default answer to “which iPad keyboard should I get” for years, largely because Apple made third parties look lazy by comparison. The AceTouch Pro is one of the more convincing arguments that this default is worth questioning, and it has actual jury validation behind it. It won the Red Dot Design Award in 2026, standing out among thousands of entries, with the panel evaluating not just how it looks but how it works. That distinction matters. Red Dot juries are notoriously unsentimental about function over form, so the win says as much about the engineering as the aesthetics. The headline spec is weight: 7.6mm thin and 530g, which Inateck says is 150g lighter than other fully equipped iPad keyboards. For anyone who has ever felt their bag get meaningfully heavier the moment a keyboard case goes in, that difference is the kind of thing you notice within the first commute.

The touchpad is the part that actually changes how the thing gets used day to day. At 5.1 inches, it is 70% larger than a standard iPad keyboard touchpad, with full gesture support and palm rejection, and Red Dot’s own project notes describe it as offering freely definable shortcuts alongside a programmable function key. That’s a meaningfully different pitch from most keyboard cases, which treat the trackpad as an afterthought bolted onto a typing accessory. Typing feel gets the same attention, with 1mm key travel on a scissor mechanism, a skin-friendly spray coating on the keycaps, and 14 independent shortcut keys for one-touch switching. The whole case attaches magnetically and detaches in one second, supporting four stable orientations including dual vertical placement, and the integrated stand adjusts from 0 to 160 degrees, which covers everything from flat sketching to a fully upright video call. Bluetooth 5.3 keeps input lag low enough that it should not be a factor for design or writing work. A PCR material version is also available for anyone weighing the sustainability angle, and taken together, it reads less like a case that happens to have a keyboard and more like a genuine laptop replacement pitch for the iPad, backed by a jury that apparently agreed.

The post Floating Lamps, Pet Phones, and Printers That Print On Ripped Paper: The Weird Wonderful Gadgets At IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Macintosh-Inspired Hub Adds SSD Storage, Ports, Shortcuts, and a Mini Screen: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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Everything on my desk right now is some shade of gray aluminum, and I’m starting to resent it a little. Every dock, every stand, every accessory wants to be a slab of cold metal that photographs well and feels like nothing in your hand. Wokyis clearly misses the old days too, back when computers were made of warm, slightly yellowed plastic that looked friendly instead of expensive. Their newest release, the i5, leans hard into that feeling, right down to the off white shell that actually looks like it wants to sit on your desk rather than intimidate it. It splits into two pieces, a tilted head up top holding a small screen, and a control deck below packed with real, clicky buttons.

That plastic shell isn’t just a style choice, it’s basically the whole argument. Anodized aluminum is sleek, sure, but it’s also cold to the touch and forgettable within a week. This off white finish has warmth to it, the kind that made old Macs feel approachable instead of like expensive jewelry. Underneath the throwback shell, the i5 works as a genuine secondary display for your Mac or laptop, mirroring or extending your desktop, with four shortcut keys for copy, paste, screenshot, and screen lock, plus a central knob that clicks for play and pause and rotates for volume. Wokyis brought the 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 version to IFA 2026 in Berlin, sitting above the 10Gbps model already selling on their site for $169.99.

Designer: Wokyis

The design lineage here is not subtle, and I mean that as a compliment. That tilted head sitting atop a boxy base is a direct nod to the original Macintosh and its compact successors, the machines that first convinced people a computer could look like a friendly little appliance rather than a beige filing cabinet. Wokyis isn’t the first accessory maker to borrow that silhouette, but the i5 commits harder than most, right down to a boot screen greeting that echoes the smiling Mac startup chime era without actually copying Apple’s own iconography. It’s homage rather than imitation, and it lands because the proportions genuinely feel considered instead of slapped together for nostalgia points.

The screen itself deserves a second look before you touch it, mostly because you can’t. It’s a 5 inch, 1280×720 IPS panel, sharp enough to sit next to a real monitor without embarrassing itself, but it skips touch input entirely. There’s no finger smudging that pretty glass, no accidental taps while you reach for your coffee. You either mirror your main display onto it or extend your desktop across it, treating it like a dedicated spot for a music player, a chat window, or scrolling lyrics while the rest of your screen stays clear. It’s a small, deliberate decision in a market obsessed with adding touch to everything, and it works because the i5 never pretends to be anything other than a second monitor.

The control deck below is where the personality really lives. Four mechanical keys handle copy, paste, screenshot, and screen lock, each one a satisfying, precision click that beats fumbling for a keyboard shortcut. The centerpiece is a chunky red knob that clicks down for play and pause, then rotates like a volume dial, doing the job of two separate controls without adding a second component. It’s tactile in a way that most modern hubs never bother with, and it turns a boring task like adjusting volume into something you almost look forward to doing.

Connectivity is where the i5 earns its keep as an actual workstation rather than a desk toy. The 10Gbps model packs an M.2 NVMe slot good for up to 8TB, four USB-A ports, a USB-C port, simultaneous SD and microSD readers, a 3.5mm audio jack, and HDMI-in, all wrapped around a body that measures 145 by 131 by 154mm. The new 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 variant shown at IFA presumably pushes that bandwidth ceiling considerably higher, though Wokyis hasn’t published pricing or a ship date for it yet.

I like that Wokyis is betting on plastic when everyone else is betting on metal, and I like it more that the bet actually pays off in how the thing feels to use. The i5 won’t replace your monitor and it isn’t trying to. It just wants to sit there, warm and a little goofy, doing real work while looking like it walked out of 1984. That’s a good trade.

The post This Macintosh-Inspired Hub Adds SSD Storage, Ports, Shortcuts, and a Mini Screen: Hands-on at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Fresh Plant Milk and Tofu From Scratch? Nuvell’s Tabletop Kitchen Appliance Does Both: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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I will admit it outright, I have never once thought about how tofu gets made, the same way most people never think about how gasoline gets made, it is just there, cold and vaguely virtuous in the produce aisle. Roy Chou, brand director at a young company called Nuvell, wants to change that, one countertop machine at a time. At IFA Berlin 2026, his team unveiled the Plantein, built like a superautomatic espresso machine, dial and touchscreen included, except it turns soybeans into warm, fresh tofu in about forty minutes instead of a shot. It also whips up plant milk from oats, almonds, or soy in roughly twenty, no soaking. Chou walked me through it like a proud parent, and I genuinely wanted one on my counter by the end.

The mechanics are simpler than they sound, soybeans and water go in one side, a natural coagulant Chou described as an ocean derived salt goes in too, and heat and pressure do the rest. That coagulant is almost certainly nigari, the traditional Japanese setting agent, which explains why Chou insisted the texture comes out cleaner and sweeter than gypsum set blocks. Firmness gets dialed in by extending the cycle, and Chou hinted at flavored versions already tested in-house, a matcha batch and a berry one meant for dessert. Pre-orders open at CES 2027, with a price tag within the $1000-$1300 range, according to Chou.

Designer: Nuvell

The Plantein wears a brushed stainless front over a matte black chassis, one knurled aluminum dial on its cheek, a small touchscreen up top, and a mug parked on a warming plate exactly where a cappuccino would sit. A swing arm lever holds the press module over a slotted drip tray, and the whole assembly detaches for cleaning the way a portafilter does. It is a smart borrow, since home tofu making has always meant cloth, a mold, and a stack of cookbooks, not an appliance anyone photographed. Leaning on Jura and Breville’s design language buys instant kitchen credibility, even if the guts underneath do something completely unrelated to coffee.

Where Chou got genuinely animated was flavor. He described testing a matcha batch and a ginger and berry version meant to be eaten as dessert, which tracks with how tofu already behaves across Asia, where silken curds get blended into smoothies and sweetened into douhua rather than treated as a meat substitute. That framing does more marketing work than anything else Nuvell said at the booth, since most Western buyers only know tofu as the bland cube used in stir fries and to make plant bacon. It’s only in the past few years that Food YouTubers have extolled the virtues of blending silken tofus to make low-carb high-protein pasta sauces or dessert mousses.

Fully automatic bean to block tofu machines already exist, they just live in commercial kitchens and food plants, built at fifty liter scale for canteens rather than countertops. What Nuvell is actually pulling off, and it is a genuinely new trick, is shrinking that whole process down into something that fits next to your coffee grinder. Pre-orders open at CES in Las Vegas this coming January, with units shipping around February, so the wait is short enough to actually stay excited for. If Chou’s numbers hold, forty minutes for warm tofu and twenty for plant milk turns a genuinely tedious kitchen chore into something you queue up before a shower. I am already thinking about what a matcha version tastes like on toast, and that is a very good sign for a machine that has not even shipped yet.

The post Fresh Plant Milk and Tofu From Scratch? Nuvell’s Tabletop Kitchen Appliance Does Both: Hands-on at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

PITAKA Turned a Berlin Bunker Into a Wheat Field For Their New Aramid Case Collection at IFA 2026

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There is a long gold tapestry cascading down a concrete bunker wall in Berlin right now, and it feels nothing like what it is actually made of. Run your hand across it and your brain says silk. Your eyes say wheat field caught mid gust. Neither answer is correct. What you are actually touching is aramid fiber, the same aerospace grade material that shows up in body armor and fighter jets, rated at up to five times the strength of steel by weight. PITAKA spent 10,000 plus hours figuring out how to make something this tough feel this soft, and the payoff is standing right there on the wall.

This was the setting for Signals in the Wind, PITAKA’s first ever solo brand event, held during IFA week at The Feuerle Collection. The whole night revolved around one new case collection called Wind Over Wheat, and honestly, once you have felt the tapestry, the name stops sounding like marketing copy and starts making a lot more sense.

Designer: Pitaka

The venue choice alone deserves its own article.. Feuerle is a converted WWII telecommunications bunker with two meter thick walls, the kind of building that was engineered to survive things silk never has to think about. PITAKA filled that stripped back concrete shell with almost nothing except the tapestry, a handful of case displays mounted on slim black stands, and a soundscape by Berlin based composer Temple Rat, built from field recordings of wind moving through wheat. The cases themselves stood at uneven heights along the walk, which sounds like a small styling choice until you realize it is doing exactly what real wheat does in a field, growing unevenly, catching light differently depending on how the wind hit it that day.

Wind Over Wheat comes in three finishes, each named like a tiny poem. Golden Drift is wheat under full sun. Surging Awn is younger wheat still gathering strength. Berlin Nocturne is the same field fading into night, a nod to the city hosting the whole thing. All three are built using Trace Form, PITAKA’s new technique that intentionally lets certain fibers stray from their programmed path, so the texture ends up looking a little different every single time. Less assembly line, more happy accident.

Then the night ended in the best possible place. Guests moved up from the bunker’s underground galleries to Feuerle’s terrace, which turned out to have its own patch of tall, wheat like grasses growing right there in the open air. It is the kind of detail you cannot plan around unless you got extremely lucky with venue selection, and it closed the loop on the whole theme in a way no projector or soundscape could. Standing on a rooftop with real grass swaying next to a case built to mimic that exact motion is a pretty satisfying way to end an event about materials and perception.

Wind Over Wheat’s limited Trace Form Edition launches September 17, with pre-orders opening September 9th. If you are at IFA Berlin this week, PITAKA’s main booth is in Hall 5.2, Booth 209.

The post PITAKA Turned a Berlin Bunker Into a Wheat Field For Their New Aramid Case Collection at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

An AI Gave Me A Full-Body Massage: Hands-on with DaVinci AI Pro Massage Chair at IFA 2026

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Somewhere out there is a bingo card of jobs AI would come for, and I guarantee nobody had masseuse on it. AI has already eaten its way through a scary chunk of the low-level workforce, copywriting, junior coding, customer support scripts, even the guy behind the wheel in some cities now. But there was always this quiet assumption that a good deep tissue rubdown needed actual human hands, actual human judgment, someone who could feel where the knot was and adjust on the fly. That felt safe. Untouchable, even. Then I walked into Bodyfriend’s booth at IFA 2026, sat down in a chair, and casually talked my way into the best massage of the show. Apparently the human-to-human touch job just got automated too.

The chair was Bodyfriend’s DaVinci AI, running the same generative AI Bodyfriend had just unleashed in Seoul days before IFA, badged DaVinci AI Pro. Instead of picking from a shelf of presets, it listens to plain language and builds a massage from scratch, mixing 134 basic blocks across body zones, pressure, and duration. Bodyfriend puts the theoretical combinations in the trillions, and having felt the difference, I believe the math. A PPG sensor in the hand massager also reads heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood oxygen in real time, so the chair responds to your actual state, not just your words. I did not know any of this walking in. I just knew I was tired, sore, and willing to talk to a chair like it owed me something.

Designer: Bodyfriend

I had clocked around 15,000 steps that day, running on trade show coffee and basically nothing else, and my feet and shoulders had reached the point of open rebellion. I sat down, and instead of hunting for a remote, I just talked to the tablet mounted on the armrest. “Hey Buddy,” I said, “give me a strong foot massage, and also help relieve tension in my neck and shoulders.” Within about a minute it had built something specifically for that, working my feet, shoulders, and spine while leaving my hands completely alone, because I never asked for them. When I got a flicker of FOMO and asked it to include a hand massage too, it recalibrated on the spot rather than restarting from zero. Talking to it felt closer to briefing a person than operating a machine.

The DaVinci name carries some real design pedigree behind it. Bodyfriend’s earlier DaVinci models were developed with Italdesign, the Turin studio behind decades of concept and production cars for names like Lamborghini and Bugatti, and that automotive language shows up in the chair’s sculpted shell and the confidence of its proportions. This year’s leap is less about the shell and entirely about what is happening inside it. Where the original DaVinci used bioelectrical impedance analysis to profile your body composition, the AI Pro generation swaps that for conversational intelligence, a shift from measuring you passively to actually listening to you. It is the difference between a chair that studies your body and one that takes instructions from it.

Bodyfriend’s booth this year also carried the 733, a wearable healthcare robot that took home an IFA Innovation Award honor for independently guiding your arms and legs through stretching and standing assistance, proof this is a company betting hard on robotics well beyond the living room recliner. Against that backdrop, DaVinci AI reads less like a gimmick and more like the company’s flagship idea about where home wellness tech goes next. We covered Bodyfriend’s Quantum robotic chair at IFA 2024 and called it a bodygasm in leather and Bang & Olufsen sound. DaVinci AI trades some of that theater for something quieter and arguably bigger: a chair that finally understands what you are asking for, in your own words, on the first try.

The post An AI Gave Me A Full-Body Massage: Hands-on with DaVinci AI Pro Massage Chair at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.