Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

This palm-sized robot dog has a Nokia battery and a customizable LEGO-compatible back

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Petoi has been shrinking Boston Dynamics down to desk size for almost a decade now. Dr. Rongzhong Li started the company in his dorm lab in 2016, after a video of his open-source robot cat prototype went viral. That cat became Nybble, a laser-cut wooden kitty, and it was followed by Bittle, a palm-sized robot dog that ended up in classrooms, research labs, and a surprising number of home offices. Petoi says it has shipped more than 30,000 robots to over 60 countries, all running its open-source OpenCat framework. Each new model has gotten smaller, smarter, and easier to build, which brings us to the newest pup in the litter.

Meet Quaddle, a palm-sized robot dog that walks, glides, spins, and does backflips using just four servos. That’s half what Bittle uses in its legs and roughly a third of what most quadrupeds need, thanks to a spring-loaded linkage Petoi calls the MinDoF leg, which lets one motor drive both the shoulder and the knee. It weighs about 6 ounces, snaps together without screws, and takes LEGO bricks on its back. You can teach it tricks by physically moving its legs, chat with it, or code it in anything from beginner blocks to ROS. Prices start at $179, which is pretty reasonable for a dog that never needs walking.

Designer: Petoi

How one servo runs an entire leg

Each of Quaddle’s legs hangs off a single servo, with a spring and a four-bar linkage doing the job a second motor normally would. As the servo swings the upper leg, the linkage folds the knee up and straightens it again, turning one rotating shaft into a proper step. Petoi calls this the MinDoF leg, short for Minimal Degrees of Freedom, a degree of freedom being one independent way a joint can move. The spring clips onto different anchor points, changing how stiff or bouncy each leg feels. In Petoi’s tabletop tests, Quaddle walks about one body length per second, turns 90° in a single step cycle, and climbs onto a ledge as tall as its own knee.

Walking machines driven by a single crank go back to Pafnuty Chebyshev, the Russian mathematician whose 1870s linkage turned rotation into a surprisingly lifelike stride. Theo Jansen’s wind-powered Strandbeests on Dutch beaches run on the same basic idea, and Quaddle feels like their tiny, battery-powered cousin. Petoi added one more trick by fitting small bearings to the tips of the feet. Angle the legs just right and those bearings become wheels, letting Quaddle glide across a smooth desk at around three body lengths per second without a single extra motor. Fewer motors also means less weight, less cost, and less battery drain, which is how the whole dog comes in at roughly 6 ounces.

Teach it tricks by hand, then teach it in code

On the Buddy and Scout models, every leg servo reports its position back to the robot, so you can teach Quaddle a move by simply grabbing its legs. Tap to start recording, guide the legs through whatever silly dance you have in mind, and tap again to have it play the motion back. There’s no app or code involved, and Petoi says you can teach it a basic walk in about ten seconds. Recorded moves can be pulled into Petoi’s Skill Composer software for fine-tuning and shared with other Quaddle owners. For a kid, this is probably the fastest route from “I wonder if” to a robot actually doing the thing.

Buddy and Scout split their thinking across two ESP32-S3 chips, one for motion and balance and one for voice chat and smart home control. A physical slide switch cuts power to the AI chip entirely, which is great for privacy and for days when your robot dog gets a bit too chatty. Coding starts with drag-and-drop blocks, moves to Python or MicroPython, and eventually reaches the Arduino C++ firmware. Bigger projects can mount a Raspberry Pi Zero on its back or plug into ROS, the software framework most research robots run on. A browser-based simulator runs the same code as the real robot, so you can test ideas on a laptop or even a phone with no robot in sight.

LEGO bricks, a Nokia battery, and three Quaddles to pick from

The top of Quaddle’s shell takes LEGO bricks, and Petoi will publish printable shells and mounts for anyone with a 3D printer. Petoi’s own demos have turned it into a walking LEGO AT-AT, a waddling biped called the NanoDuck, and a rover on Mecanum wheels, which use angled rollers to slide sideways. Power comes from a swappable Nokia-format phone battery, the same BL-5C shape that lived inside Nokia’s famously indestructible early-2000s handsets. Quaddle ships with the bigger 1,800 mAh BL-10C cell, good for roughly 1 to 1.5 hours of walking depending on the model. Plug it into USB-C while you code and it charges as it runs, so marathon debugging sessions are fair game.

Builder PLUS ($179) handles walking and coding, Buddy ($219) adds AI chat and teach-by-hand, and Scout ($269) adds a sensor head that detects gestures, light, distance, and people. All three are priced at $144, $175, and $215, with deliveries starting in December. For context, Petoi’s own Bittle X lists at $279, Unitree’s Go2 starts around $1,600, and Sony’s Aibo launched in the US at $2,900. Petoi spent a decade shrinking big robots down to desk size, and Quaddle shows the smartest way to shrink one further is to give it fewer parts.

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Arrowspace’s $119 screwdriver identifies screws and lights up the matching bit

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For five years, Arrowmax has been teaching screwdrivers to read people. The SES Pro in 2021 watched your wrist, so a twist left or right told the motor which way to spin. The SES Max added app control, and the M1 Pro stretched output to 10 kgf·cm with a manual fallback for stubborn screws. Its little screen could report torque and battery level all day. Your screwdriver got smarter and you got lazier, in the best possible way. The obvious next question was why the tool still had no idea what screw it was holding.

The Arrowspace S1, built by the same team under a new brand name, answers that with a camera on the tail end of the screwdriver. Image recognition names the screw’s drive type and exact size, while a small probe holds the lens at a fixed distance so tiny heads stay sharp. The smart case then lights the slot of the matching bit, and Auto mode picks a safe torque for that fastener. It keeps the 10 kgf·cm ceiling of the M1 Pro, which is plenty for everything from earbuds to e-bike parts. Early pricing starts at $119, and the kit includes the case, 52 S2 steel bits, and a power tip extension.

Designers: LAU YIN / XU YU

Click Here to Buy Now: $129 $215 (40% off). Hurry, only 40/400 left! Raised over $119,000.

The Screwdriver That Squints So You Don’t Have To

The camera sits at the rear of the S1, right behind a small contact probe, and the two work as a team. You rest the probe on the screw head, which locks the lens at one fixed distance, so every shot lands sharp. A screw this small turns to mush if the camera drifts even 1mm. Arrowmax fixed that blur problem with a metal pin instead of more code, which is a very hardware-person way to win an argument. I love it, because it means recognition survives a messy bench and shaky hands instead of working only in a demo video.

Once the shot is sharp, the driver sends it to the companion app on your phone, which works out the drive type and exact size. Everything runs locally with no internet involved, so your screw photos stay on your phone. Arrowmax trained the model, a YOLO object detector, on its own collection of tens of thousands of real screw photos, currently covering 12 common head profiles. The app shows the actual camera image next to the verdict, so you can see what the S1 sees and judge the call yourself. Only the reading step needs the phone, since motor control, torque, and the displays all work on their own.

A Case That Points at the Right Bit

The smart case turns the app’s verdict into something you can see across the bench. A 2-inch TFT screen with Arrowspace’s purple interface shows the recognized screw type and size, while an LED glows under the slot holding the matching bit. Reach, grab, done. Compare that with the usual ritual of squinting at tiny codes on dozens of near-identical shafts, and the old way starts to look like a part-time job. It is the same idea as a warehouse pick-to-light shelf, shrunk down to a tray of S2 steel bits.

The 52 bits are S2 steel hardened to HRC60, which keeps the tips from rounding off after repeated use, and extended bits reach screws buried in deep holes. A magnetic holder keeps bits seated while you work. The case itself is a CNC-machined frame in aerospace-grade aluminum with EVA protection inside, a build the M1 Pro’s CNC aluminum box would recognize. That solid metal feel suits a bench that sees daily use. One box ends up holding the driver, the bits, and the answer to which bit you need.

Gentle With Earbuds, Firm With E-Bikes

Electric torque runs from 1 to 10 kgf·cm, roughly 0.1 to 1 N·m, and Arrowspace’s own chart maps that range to real jobs. The low end suits earbuds, smart bands, and glasses. Around 3 you are into laptops and camera bodies, 6 covers RC cars, drones, and game consoles, and the full 10 handles e-bike parts and large appliances. Auto mode matches a conservative preset to the screw it just identified and remembers your last setting between jobs. Prefer to drive? The app lets you tune the torque for each mode yourself.

When electric mode runs out of muscle, the S1 switches to manual on its own, a trick it inherits from the M1 Pro. The mechanism is rated for 30 kgf·cm of hand-twisted force, which handles the factory screw that laughs at motors. A 600mAh LiPo battery covers 900+ screws or about 90 minutes of continuous use, and USB-C refills it in roughly 70 minutes. An OLED on the body shows torque level, spin direction, and battery, and it even animates while charging. A full session of fiddly repairs fits comfortably inside one charge.

The Price of Never Guessing Again

The S1 suits anyone who repairs often enough to own a drawer of bits but not often enough to have a veteran’s eye, meaning RC builders, scale modelers, drone owners, and the friend who gets every laptop question. Arrowspace says the AI handles identification while your hand keeps the control, and that split feels right to me. My one wish is friendlier recognition for oddballs like JIS cross-head screws, the Phillips look-alikes in plenty of Japanese electronics. Arrowmax says updates will keep widening the 12 profiles covered today, so the wish has a path. A screwdriver that learns new screws over time is a fun idea for a tool that used to be a metal stick.

Pricing for a single S1 kit starts at $119, listed at 45% off, with $129 and $149 tiers also available. Every tier includes the driver, the illuminated smart case, 52 S2 steel bits, and a power tip extension. Shipping is an estimated $16 by air freight to anywhere in the world, so US buyers are covered, with delivery expected in April 2027. Two kits run $238 and three run $339, with shipping at $30 and $45. The optional Angle Screw attachment is sold separately, so check the product page for its price. A stripped screw can cost you a whole device, which makes $119 look like cheap insurance.

Click Here to Buy Now: $129 $215 (40% off). Hurry, only 40/400 left! Raised over $119,000.

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Do yourself a favor and buy a power station now, before the energy crisis gets worse

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Every crisis has its panic buy. In 2020 it was toilet paper and N95 masks, in 2021 it was graphics cards, in 2025 it was RAM chips, and in 2026 my money is on lithium iron phosphate. With Iran attacking tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, gas sitting at a record-for-October $4.36 a gallon, and heating oil bills forecast to climb 21% this winter, the case for keeping your own stash of electrons has never been stronger. A portable power station from Anker, EcoFlow, or Jackery keeps your fridge cold and your lights on when the grid gives up. It also runs indoors without trying to poison you, and it never needs a trip to the gas station.

Stockpiling toilet paper made you look a little unhinged. Owning a power station makes you the neighbor everyone suddenly wants to befriend during an outage. Black Friday could knock a few more dollars off, sure, but fall sale prices are already the best we’ve seen this season, and winter storms rarely wait for a coupon code. I’ve narrowed the field to one value pick from each brand, all hovering around the 2kWh mark, enough to keep a fridge humming for well over a day. Anker gets first crack, because its S2000 squeezes 2,010Wh into a 35.7-pound body that costs less than a decent espresso machine.

[Editor’s Pick] Anker S2000 2,010Wh Portable Power Station: $699.99

Anker announced at IFA 2026 that its SOLIX power station brand is folding into the Anker name, so you’ll still spot “SOLIX” on boxes and Amazon listings while the switch plays out over the next couple of years. Same company, same warranty, simpler logo. The S2000 makes a great poster child for the new identity, because it looks like it wandered over from the home appliance aisle. At 8.2 x 11.1 x 12.7 inches (208 x 282 x 323mm) and 35.7 pounds (16.2kg), it takes up roughly the counter space of a coffee maker. That makes it nearly 4 pounds lighter than Jackery’s Explorer 2000 v2 and 9 pounds lighter than EcoFlow’s DELTA 3 Max.

Inside are 314Ah lithium iron phosphate cells rated for 6,000 cycles to 80% capacity and 10,000 to 60%, the same chunky format used in grid-scale storage. Anker estimates a 15-year design life, so this thing could easily outlast your fridge. Output tops out at 1,500W continuous with a 3,000W surge, plenty for a fridge, router, lights, laptops, and a CPAP. The real magic is efficiency, with idle draw of just 6W, which helped it keep a fridge running for 34 hours and 15 minutes in GearJunkie’s testing. At $599.99 for subscribers, that works out to roughly $300 per kilowatt-hour, the cheapest of our three picks by a wide margin.

Click Here to Buy Now

What we like

  • At 35.7 pounds, it’s the lightest 2kWh station you can buy right now, and compact enough to live on a kitchen counter.
  • A UPS switchover of 10ms or less keeps your router and desktop online the moment the grid drops.
  • Long-life cells and roughly $300 per kWh make it the best value of the three.

What we dislike

  • Solar input caps at 400W, which means about five hours of ideal sunshine to refill, and winter rarely delivers ideal.
  • It isn’t expandable, so 2kWh is your ceiling.
  • 1,500W of output rules out running a space heater alongside much of anything else.

Jackery Explorer 2000 v2 2,042Wh Portable Power Station: $899

Jackery’s orange-trimmed Explorers were the default power station for years, long before Anker, EcoFlow, and Bluetti started crowding the category. The Explorer 2000 v2 keeps that familiar look but trims the bulk, measuring 13.2 x 10.4 x 11.5 inches (335 x 264 x 292mm) and weighing 39.5 pounds (17.9kg). Its proportions are squatter and more cube-like than the Anker’s, which makes it easier to tuck under a desk or beside a fridge. Jackery marketed it as the lightest and most compact 2kWh LiFePO4 station around, a crown the S2000 snatched this year by shedding nearly four more pounds. The two brands are basically locked in a very nerdy weight-loss competition.

Output is where the Jackery pulls ahead of the Anker, with 2,200W continuous and a 4,400W peak spread across three AC outlets. That’s enough headroom for a sump pump, a fridge compressor, or a microwave without the station breaking a sweat. Jackery’s ChargeShield 2.0 system layers in 62 protection mechanisms, and Silent Charging Mode keeps noise under 30dB, roughly a whisper, which is handy if it ends up in your bedroom during an outage. The cells are rated for 4,000 cycles and a 10-year lifespan, fewer than Anker promises but still plenty for daily use well into the 2030s. At $899, you’re paying about $440 per kilowatt-hour, dropping to $416 when it dips to $849.

Click Here to Buy Now

What we like

  • 2,200W of continuous output handles bigger appliances than the Anker can.
  • Silent Charging Mode stays under 30dB, so it won’t keep you up at night.
  • A 3-year standard warranty plus a 2-year extension covers you for five years total.

What we dislike

  • Only three AC outlets, so a power strip becomes part of the kit.
  • It isn’t expandable, and solar input maxes out at 400W.
  • It won’t charge below 32°F (0°C), so an unheated garage in January is a bad home for it.

EcoFlow DELTA 3 Max 2,048Wh Portable Power Station: $899

EcoFlow’s DELTA family is the brand’s bread and butter, and the DELTA 3 Max is the 2kWh sweet spot of the current lineup. It’s also the chunkiest of our three picks, measuring 19.45 x 9.41 x 12.01 inches (494 x 239 x 305mm) and weighing 44.8 pounds (20.3kg). That long, low, suitcase-like shape belongs on the floor next to the fridge, and you’ll want two hands whenever you move it. EcoFlow spends that extra bulk on muscle, and the trade feels fair once you see the output numbers. The Halloween sale has it at $899, down from $1,199, which puts it neck and neck with the Jackery on price.

You get 2,400W continuous across four AC outlets, the most of our three picks, plus EcoFlow’s X-Boost mode for resistive appliances up to 3,400W. X-Boost works by dropping the voltage, so a kettle or hair dryer runs a little slower instead of tripping the station. That’s enough headroom to run a 1,500W space heater with the fridge and router still plugged in. EcoFlow also rates it at 25dB or less when charging or discharging at 600W, which is quieter than a library. At $899, it lands at about $439 per kilowatt-hour, essentially tied with the Jackery, so the choice comes down to extra watts versus a lighter box.

Click Here to Buy Now

What we like

  • 2,400W continuous output, with X-Boost up to 3,400W, makes it the most powerful of the trio.
  • Four AC outlets, one more than the Jackery.
  • It stays under 25dB at moderate loads, so it’s easy to live with indoors.

What we dislike

  • At 44.8 pounds, it’s the heaviest of the three, roughly 9 pounds more than the Anker.
  • The long footprint eats more floor space than its boxier rivals.

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The Auk Mini 2 brings your grocery store’s herb aisle to your kitchen counter (with zero human effort)

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During World War II, Americans planted millions of victory gardens in backyards, vacant lots, and rooftops, and by most estimates those plots supplied roughly 40% of the country’s fresh vegetables. Today’s enemy is the grocery receipt, which now runs roughly 35% higher than it did in 2019. Prices have cooled lately, but they never came back down, and the herb aisle still charges luxury rates for a handful of leaves. Norwegian brand Auk has a counterattack in the Mini 2, a countertop garden that takes the victory garden indoors and shrinks it to fit beside the coffee maker. Your war effort is now four pots of basil, and honestly, I respect it.

The Mini 2 is the sequel to Auk’s best-selling Auk Mini, and it comes from a team in Oslo, where December daylight is more rumor than fact. Lead designer Johan Schreiner and his team just took home a 2026 European Product Design Award in the Kitchen Appliances category. That’s a jury-judged international competition with more than 800 categories, so call it a solid nod rather than an Oscar. The pitch is simple: herbs, salad greens, even chilies and tomatoes, grown from seed on your counter all year. It’s 12% smaller than the first model, holds 25% more water, and starts at $239.

Designers: Johan Schreiner, Jostein Kvitvang, Magnus Bjørnstad & Didrik Dimmen

A Grow Light That Stops Turning Your Kitchen Into a Nightclub

Anyone who has shared a kitchen with a grow light knows the deal: the plants get their sunshine, and so does everyone trying to eat dinner. The Mini 2 fixes that with an optical lens system that aims light down at the leaves instead of spraying it across the room. Auk’s spec sheet lists output between 300 and 1,000 µmol/m²/s of PPFD depending on mode, which is the number plants actually care about. Average power draw runs from about 5 W in slow mode to 17 W in fruit and vegetable mode. That’s somewhere between a night light and a modest LED bulb, so your electric bill barely flinches.

Scandinavian designers have been fighting glare since Poul Henningsen’s PH lamps for Louis Poulsen in the 1920s, which hid the bulb behind layered shades so light landed where people needed it. The Mini 2 carries that instinct into horticulture, and it makes a neat contrast with Lettuce Grow’s Counterstand and Glow Lamp, which tames its grow light by tuning the color temperature until it looks warm and livable. Auk controls where the light goes, while Lettuce Grow controls what the light looks like when it arrives. Henningsen was Danish, so Norway gets a polite asterisk on the heritage claim. Either way, nobody has to live under a purple haze anymore.

Walnut, Oak, and Ash: A Garden Dressed Like Furniture

Pull the Mini 2 out of the box and it reads as furniture first, appliance second. A wraparound sleeve of FSC-certified, oil-treated European wood (walnut, oak, beech, or ash) rolls around softly radiused corners, and Auk keeps the seams flush so nothing catches the eye or your sleeve. Two slim wooden dowels, 0.63 in thick, hold up a light bar made from 100% recycled Norwegian aluminum, its ribbed top borrowing the look of heat sink fins. The base and pots are recyclable ABS plastic. Even the 5.9 ft braided USB-C cable comes in green, so the wire looks like it belongs to the plant kingdom.

Five colorways run from Espresso Walnut to Sage Ash, so the Mini 2 can slip into a moody dark kitchen or a pale Scandinavian one without making a scene. The footprint shrinks from the original’s 17.5 x 8.5 in to 16.9 x 7.5 in, and Auk’s own math calls the whole unit 12% smaller. Yet the tank holds 0.9 gallons on the first fill, 25% more water than before, which means fewer refill trips and fewer “oops, I forgot” moments. Longer dowels and wider Big Plant Pots, bundled in a chili and tomato kit, let the Mini 2 grow fruiting plants too. Smaller box, bigger ambitions.

Does a $239 Garden Actually Beat the Produce Aisle?

A clamshell of basil runs about $3.50, so if you buy one a week, the Mini 2’s $239 price covers roughly 68 of them, or about 16 months of Sunday-night pesto. Power is cheap, with Auk listing 3.6 to 12.2 kWh a month, which works out to a buck or two at typical US electricity rates. Seeds, coco fiber, and nutrients add a little, so treat 16 months as the friendly estimate. Past that point, every snip is free basil with a side of smugness. Better yet, you cut exactly one sprig and leave the rest alive, so the cilantro funeral in your fridge never happens.

Nobody is quitting the grocery store over this, but cutting a few herb runs a month adds up to a real taste of food independence. Pod-based systems like Click & Grow sell you plant capsules, while the Mini 2 grows from any seeds you like in coco fiber, with no pump and no pods. The optional Bluetooth app handles light cycles and modes, and Slow Mode keeps plants from outgrowing the light while you’re away on vacation. The victory gardeners of the 1940s never had it this easy. You can order the Mini 2 at Auk’s site, and the first basil is about four to five weeks out.

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Apple’s new M6 iMac is faster, not different

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Apple’s October has turned into a full-on home makeover. First came HomeView, a $299 smart display for the kitchen with a generous helping of iMac nostalgia baked into its design. Now the iMac itself is back with the M6 chip, which feels a bit like the original star showing up after the spinoff already aired. The two aren’t rivals at all, because a 7-inch hub and a 24-inch desktop live very different lives. They play for the same team, with HomeView running the house while the iMac sits on the desk handling homework, taxes, and the occasional late-night gaming session.

The new iMac skips the M5 generation and goes straight to Apple’s 2nm M6 chip, with two more CPU and GPU cores than before. It starts at $1,499 for the 10-core, two-port model, while $1,699 gets you 12 cores, four Thunderbolt ports, and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet living inside the power brick. Apple also swapped in its own N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, which fits neatly with all that smart home energy. Those prices match what the M4 iMac cost after June’s price hike, so the extra cores are basically a free upgrade. Pre-orders open October 28, and the first deliveries land November 6.

Designer: Apple

The iMac skipped M5 and went straight to 2nm

The M6 is built on TSMC’s first-generation 2nm process, swapping the M4’s FinFET transistors for gate-all-around nanosheets that leak less power at these tiny sizes. The $1,499 model gets a 10-core CPU split into two super cores, three performance cores, and five efficiency cores. The $1,699 model bumps that to 12 cores, with two super, four performance, and six efficiency cores. Both get a matching GPU with a Neural Accelerator in every core, plus two 16-core Neural Engines totaling 32 cores. Memory bandwidth climbs from 120GB/s to up to 170GB/s, and the SSD now supports PCIe 5.0 for up to twice the read and write speed.

Apple’s own numbers put the M6 iMac up to 1.5 times faster than the M4 in Microsoft Excel and up to twice as fast for photo editing in Affinity. Ray-traced gaming performance doubles too, which is great news for anyone secretly using the family computer as a gaming rig. The biggest jump is on-device AI, with prompt processing in LM Studio up to five times faster than M4. Apple’s press release even name-drops vibe coding as an iMac use case, a very 2026 thing to say about a computer that comes in pink. If you’re coming from an Intel iMac, Apple claims up to 18 times faster performance, which should feel like time travel.

The Ethernet port lives in the power brick now

The $1,699 model comes with a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port as standard, and the $1,499 model can add one for $30. Apple builds that jack into the power adapter instead of the computer itself. That keeps the iMac’s 11.5mm-thin body free of a chunky network port, and your cable clutter ends up under the desk where it belongs. The previous model used the same brick trick, but it topped out at 1 Gigabit. At 2.5 Gigabit, pulling a giant photo library off a home server should feel a lot less like waiting for a kettle to boil.

Apple’s own N1 wireless chip replaces Broadcom, bringing Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, the low-power mesh network behind a lot of Matter smart home gear. External display support gets generous on the four-port model, which can drive two 6K screens at 60Hz, two 4K screens at 165Hz, or a single 4K panel at 240Hz. It can even run both external displays off a single Thunderbolt port. Everything you see and hear stays the same, from the 24-inch 4.5K Retina display at 500 nits to the 12MP Center Stage camera and six-speaker system. The seven colors carry over too, along with color-matched keyboards and mice that charge over USB-C.

Same $1,499 price, two more cores

The M4 iMac launched at $1,299 back in 2024, then jumped to $1,499 in June when Apple raised prices across the Mac lineup to cope with soaring memory and storage costs. The M6 model keeps that $1,499 starting price, but the base chip now has 10 CPU and GPU cores instead of eight. Compared to yesterday, that’s two extra cores of each for the same money. Compared to two years ago, the cheapest iMac costs $200 more. The four-port model at $1,699 is the one I’d point most people toward, since it bundles Ethernet, more display options, and the full 12-core chip.

If you bought an M4 iMac, enjoy it, because the display, camera, speakers, and design are identical and your browser tabs won’t notice the difference. Families still running an Intel or M1 iMac are the real audience here, and the jump will feel enormous. Pre-orders open October 28, with deliveries starting November 6. That makes it the third new Apple product in two days, after the iPad mini and alongside the M6 MacBook Pro, with touchscreen Macs still on deck. HomeView may have gotten the nostalgic looks this month, but the iMac is still the one doing the family’s homework.

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Apple just launched a MacBook Pro 24-hours before its MacBook Pro event

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On Monday, the day the new iPad mini landed, I begged John Ternus to take a break. On Tuesday morning, Apple responded by dropping a brand-new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip, roughly 24 hours before its Pro and Tell event in Los Angeles. That’s the event literally named after the MacBook Pro, by the way. It’s like a band releasing a single the night before the album drops, if the single cost $1,999. At this point I’ve stopped asking for rest and started stretching before I open my inbox.

The new MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 with 16GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage, the same price the M5 model has carried since Apple’s June price hike. Inside sits the M6, a 2nm chip with a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, two more cores apiece than before. Apple claims up to 30 percent faster graphics than M5, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 arriving through its own N1 chip. Pre-orders open October 28, with deliveries starting November 6 in silver and space black. Even funnier, Wednesday’s rumored touchscreen MacBook Pros reportedly run M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, so the cheapest Pro in the lineup now has the newest silicon.

Designer: Apple

Two more cores, 2nm silicon, and a reshuffled CPU

The M6 is built on TSMC’s first-generation 2nm process, and it first showed up in the Mac mini back in August. It swaps the old FinFET transistors for gate-all-around nanosheets, which wrap the gate around the channel on every side so less power leaks away at these tiny sizes. The CPU layout changes too, from four super cores and six efficiency cores to two super, four performance, and six efficiency cores. The GPU climbs to 12 cores, each with its own Neural Accelerator, while the Neural Engine doubles up to a dual 16-core setup totaling 32 cores. Apple claims up to 1.3 times faster Blender ray tracing and Xcode builds than the M5 model.

Apple ditched the M5 model’s Broadcom wireless chip for its own N1, which brings Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support. Thread is the low-power mesh network a lot of Matter smart home gear runs on, which fits neatly with the HomeView push Apple kicked off earlier this month. External displays get a bump as well, with two 4K monitors now running at up to 165Hz instead of 144Hz. Memory bandwidth rises to 170GB/s, though only on the 24GB and 32GB configurations. The base 16GB model stays at 153GB/s, so if you plan on running local AI models, spring for the extra memory.

Same $1,999 price tag, same body, same 24 hours

The M5 model launched at $1,599 with 512GB of storage last October, jumped to $1,699 in March when 1TB became standard, then hit $1,999 in June when Apple raised prices across the Mac lineup. Apple blamed AI data centers hoovering up the world’s memory supply, saying it had never seen component costs climb so far so fast. So the M6 costs exactly what the M5 did yesterday, while sitting $400 above where the 14-inch Pro started a year ago. That 1TB base is generous at this tier, though it also means there’s no 512GB option to save a few bucks. Students and educators can knock the price down to $1,899.

Everything outside the chip carries over from the M5 model. The Liquid Retina XDR mini-LED display still peaks at 1,600 nits in HDR, with a nano-texture option for anyone working beside a sunny window. The 12MP Center Stage camera, six-speaker sound system, HDMI port, MagSafe 3, SDXC slot, headphone jack, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports all return untouched. Battery life holds at up to 24 hours, matching the M5, so Apple’s “longest ever in a Mac” line describes a tie. Coming from a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro, though, that’s up to four extra hours, plus up to 13 times faster AI prompt processing.

The cheapest MacBook Pro now has the newest chip

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Wednesday’s 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros will bring OLED touchscreens, a Dynamic Island in place of the notch, and a lighter build. They’ll also reportedly stick with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which means the $1,999 model you can’t touch has a newer chip generation than the flagships you can. Gurman says the mini-LED models stay on sale for now before eventually being phased out. Apple announced the M6 model on October 27, exactly ten years after it unveiled the Touch Bar, its last attempt at putting touch on a MacBook Pro. I refuse to believe that timing is an accident.

For an M5 owner, the M6 is an easy skip, since the design, display, and battery are identical. For anyone still hanging onto an Intel MacBook or an early M1 machine, this is the most sensible Pro you can buy, and it costs $500 less than the $2,499 M5 Pro model. Pre-orders for the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 open October 28 at 10:10 a.m. Pacific, with deliveries starting November 6. That’s an iPad mini, an iMac, and a MacBook Pro in two days from the guy I asked to take a break, with touchscreen Macs queued up next. At this rate we’ll get that Apple Car announcement by the end of the week.

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Duramobi’s underwater speaker turns your pool into a sound system

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Here’s a pool party experiment you’ve run without meaning to. Someone’s Bluetooth speaker is blasting on the deck, you duck under to rescue a dropped pair of sunglasses, and the playlist vanishes. Up top it’s Dua Lipa, down below it’s a muffled thud and the hum of the pool filter. Water is roughly 800 times denser than air, so nearly all that sound bounces off the surface like a guest who wasn’t on the list. Hong Kong’s Duramobi decided the fix was to stop playing music at the water and start playing it inside it.

The Duramobi Pool Audio System W150 is a portable underwater speaker that hangs off the pool’s edge on a telescopic pole, keeping the controls dry while a brushed aluminum transducer sits below the waterline. A transducer is a sealed driver that vibrates the water itself, so everyone in the pool hears the same thing with nothing in their ears. No drilling, no wiring, no contractor with a concrete saw. It holds up to 1,000 songs, runs 12-plus hours per charge, and comes with a Live Voice Remote so a coach can talk straight into the water. Music, coaching, and a proper cannonball soundtrack, all headphone-free.

Designer: Duramobi

Click Here to Buy Now: $229 $399 (43% off). Hurry, only 287/300 left!

Turning the whole pool into the speaker

Sound moves about four times faster through water than through air, and your skull is happy to pass those vibrations along to your inner ear, which is why underwater music feels like it comes from everywhere at once. The W150 leans on that. Its transducer pod, a round disc with a brushed aluminum face, shoves vibrations straight into the pool instead of shouting at the surface. Duramobi says one unit covers about 20 by 20 feet (6 by 6 meters), which is a whole spa or a decent patch of backyard pool. Stand in the water and the music simply surrounds you, no earbuds and no fiddly straps.

A telescopic pole stretches from 13.4 to 35.4 inches (340 to 900mm), so the transducer stays submerged whether your pool is filled to the brim or sitting a few inches low. Duramobi calls the retractable design patented, which is a polite way of saying somebody sweated the details. Controls sit on the dry body above the waterline, so wet fingers can reach them without a dive. Bigger pools just get more units, with the setup guide suggesting two for a 39 by 20 foot backyard pool and four to six for an 82 by 69 foot resort pool. Multiple units sync, so the whole pool plays one song instead of an argument.

Beach club looks with a sealed, chlorine-resistant shell

The main body is a black triangle with a carry handle, a digital display, top-mounted buttons, and a vertical light strip that glows down its face like a lightsaber with better manners. Blue, orange, or yellow accents set the mood, and the mood is beach club instead of lab equipment. The composite shell uses encapsulated construction (sealed solid, in other words) and carries an IP68 rating, which covers dunking to about 4.9 feet (1.5 meters). Duramobi also lists resistance to chlorine, salt, and corrosion. At roughly 4.9 pounds (2,240g), it carries about like a loaded lunch bag.

Twelve-plus hours of battery covers a morning of laps and an afternoon of floating, though actual runtime shifts with volume and mode. A magnetic charging attachment means no port flap to forget about, and a full top-up takes about an hour and a half. Up to 1,000 songs live on the unit itself, so your phone can stay in the bag, far from splashes. Prefer streaming? Bluetooth 5.3 works with Android, iOS, and Windows. Four EQ modes (Home, Spa, Train, and Resort) tune the sound for where and how you swim.

Coaching cues that follow swimmers underwater

The Live Voice Remote is a handheld that lets a coach talk straight into the water, which fixes the oldest problem in swim coaching: brilliant advice shouted at people who are underwater. It doubles as a remote for play and pause, volume, and EQ, so nobody has to trek back to the speaker mid-set. Coaches can pair a pace-setting playlist with spoken cues, and every swimmer hears the same thing at once. Everyone gets the same instructions together, with no headphones and no frantic hand signals. The remote comes in the same kit as the speaker, so the coaching setup is one box.

The use case list is wide: swim training, synchronized swimming, aqua fitness, swim schools, hotels, resorts, and backyard pools. Synchro teams are the obvious fans, since staying in sync underwater is half the job. Resorts get something more romantic, a pool soundtrack with no trenching of the deck. French composer Michel Redolfi staged underwater concerts in the early 1980s, with listeners floating in pools and ocean coves with their ears submerged, so the idea has real art-world credentials. Bach underwater, Redolfi once joked, sounds like Bach in the bathroom, so choose your playlist wisely. The W150 just swaps experimental synths for your Friday favorites.

Three-step setup, zero construction

Adjusting the pole, pairing your music over Bluetooth (or picking from the built-in library), choosing an EQ mode, and lowering the transducer into the water is the entire setup routine. No drilling, no excavation, and no permanent pool hardware means renters and hotel managers can use it as easily as homeowners. A coach who shares a pool with three other clubs can set it up before practice and pack it away afterward. When the session ends, the unit comes out of the water as easily as it went in. Charge it magnetically while everyone towels off, and it’s ready for the next set.

Click Here to Buy Now: $229 $399 (43% off). Hurry, only 287/300 left!

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Even Realities’ new Tortoise Shell frame is so gorgeous, I’d buy the smart glasses just for the design

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Meta needed Ray-Ban. Google needed Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Even Realities, a Shenzhen startup barely three years old, apparently just needed a great frame designer and a tumbling barrel. Its new Even G2 Brown 2 puts a genuine tortoiseshell pattern on display smart glasses, something none of the big players have managed yet. Meta’s own $799 Ray-Ban Display comes in exactly two colors, black and sand, which feels a lot like Henry Ford’s paint policy with a waveguide attached.

Brown 2 is a new colorway for the camera-free G2, sitting next to the existing flat brown with a layered shell finish that runs all the way through the frame. Even says it developed a new material for this, most likely a proprietary acetate blend, since regular acetate gets fussy around heat and humidity. Each frame is shaped, pressed, and tumbled for 20 hours, so your pattern belongs to you alone. Even says it’s also the lightest G2 yet, and you still get live translation, notifications, and a teleprompter floating in your view. It’s available now for $649 in both the round and square frame styles.

Designer: Even Realities

A Shell Pattern That Goes All the Way Through

Brown 2’s pattern swirls through honey, chestnut, and deep espresso, the same palette that has lived on optician walls ever since real tortoiseshell was banned from international trade in 1973. Brown 1, by comparison, is a flat, opaque brown that reads more like a nicely finished gadget. The difference comes down to depth. Because the layers run through the material, light sinks into the frame and catches those darker flecks, giving it that warm, almost three-dimensional glow you normally only get from good layered acetate. A printed or painted pattern would sit on the surface and eventually start wearing thin at the bridge, right where you push your glasses up fifty times a day.

Standard acetate softens and shifts with heat and humidity, which is fine for reading glasses and a real headache for a frame that has to keep a waveguide display precisely lined up with your eyes. Even’s answer is the new material, finished the old-school way. Every frame gets pressed, shaped, and tumbled for 20 hours, the same basic polishing ritual acetate frame makers have relied on for decades, which is why no two pairs come out identical. The frames themselves come from Nikolaj Schnoor of Danish eyewear house Lindberg, and the round Panto and square shapes were picked for surviving decades of fashion cycles. Even claims all that still lands under the standard G2’s already featherweight 36 grams (1.27 ounces).

How Even Beat Meta and Google to Fashionable Display Glasses

Meta’s fashion play runs through EssilorLuxottica, which owns Ray-Ban and Oakley and co-launched the $299 Meta Glasses line in June, including a Classic Tortoise option on the Kylie Jenner frame. Those are camera-and-speaker glasses with no display, and the moment Meta added a screen with the Ray-Ban Display, the palette shrank to black and sand. Google’s Warby Parker and Gentle Monster models are also arriving display-free this fall. That makes Even, as far as I can tell, the only company putting a heads-up display inside a frame you’d pick for its looks alone. Even has been building this case since the G1, and Brown 2 is where the color finally catches up.

A $149 polarized clip and a $79 chain round out the launch, and both lean hard into the eyewear identity. The clip adds Silver Gray polarized lenses with 100% UVA/UVB protection to either frame style, turning the G2 into sunglasses for the drive home. The chain is sandblasted gunmetal stainless steel, a librarian-approved accessory now cradling a $649 computer around your neck. Brown 2, the clip, and the chain are all available worldwide today on Even Realities’ site. Meta and Google spent heavily borrowing fashion credibility from eyewear brands, and Even just built its own, one tumbled frame at a time.

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Apple’s new $699 iPad mini makes the $1,999 iPhone Duo a harder sell

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Hey John Ternus, if you’re reading this, we love you. Take a break. It’s been 2 months in and this is your third product drop, with one more just day after tomorrow. You need rest, we need rest too. An iPad mini just after you announced the iPhone Duo feels kind of criminal, days after the embargo on reviews for the iPhone Duo lifts too. It’s like you’re telling people that can’t afford the Duo that there’s a cheaper alternative. And it already works with the Apple Pencil out of the box!

The new iPad mini starts at $699, a little over a third of the iPhone Duo’s $1,999 asking price, and it gives you an 8.5-inch OLED screen against the Duo’s 7.6-inch inner display. Apple calls it the biggest update in the mini’s history, and the spec sheet backs that up. There’s the A20 Pro chip from the iPhone 18 Pro, a body just 0.21 inches (5.4mm) thin, and an IP67 rating that makes it the first water-resistant iPad ever. It supports both the Apple Pencil Pro and the USB-C Apple Pencil today, while the Duo’s Pencil support is still listed as coming later this year. Pre-orders open October 28, and the mini lands in stores November 6.

Designer: Apple

A bigger OLED canvas than the Duo’s, minus the 120Hz

Apple stretched the screen from 8.3 to 8.5 inches by shaving the bezels down 24 percent, so you get more display without the tablet growing in your hand. It’s an OLED panel now, which means every pixel lights itself and true blacks finally show up for movie night. Peak brightness hits 1,200 nits, more than double the old mini, with 600 nits across the full screen and a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio. At the other end, it dims all the way down to a single nit. That’s perfect for reading in bed without waking your partner, or for pilots checking flight charts in a dark cockpit, a crowd that has loved the mini for years.

A nano-texture glass option is on the menu too, but only on the 256GB and 512GB models, and a fully loaded cellular unit with it runs $1,249. The Duo flexes back on this one, since its 7.6-inch inner screen gets nano-texture as standard plus ProMotion at up to 120Hz. The mini stays at 60Hz. That means scrolling will feel exactly like it did on the 2024 model, which stings a little on a screen this good. It’s hard to read it as anything other than Apple keeping its two small-screen darlings from stepping on each other’s toes.

IP67 sealing, an Acoustic Display, and a 9-ounce body

The new mini is 0.21 inches (5.4mm) thin and weighs 9 ounces (255 grams) in Wi-Fi trim, down from 0.25 inches and 10.3 ounces last time. You’ll feel that 1.3-ounce diet about 40 minutes into a one-handed reading session. More importantly, it’s the first iPad ever rated IP67, good for a dunk of up to about 3.3 feet (1 meter) for 30 minutes. Poolside Kindle loyalists, you officially have competition. Touch ID still lives in the top button, USB-C stays at the bottom, and the enclosure uses 100 percent recycled aluminum.

Waterproofing a tablet gets tricky when it has speaker grilles, because grilles are basically tiny doorways for water. Apple’s fix is something it calls the Acoustic Display. Custom woofers work through the screen itself for punchier bass and more volume, while tweeters hide in the seam between the glass and the aluminum frame. The whole system sits in a sealed enclosure, which Apple credits for helping the mini earn its IP67 rating. Ten years after the iPhone 7 ditched the headphone jack and became the first IP67 iPhone, Apple’s war on openings has finally reached the iPad, and the mini’s edges look cleaner for it.

A20 Pro power, a binned chip, and Apple’s new price ladder

Under the hood sits the A20 Pro, built on a 2-nanometer process with a 7-core GPU that packs Neural Accelerators in every core. Apple claims up to 4.5 times faster AI performance and up to 2.7 times faster graphics than the previous mini, plenty for running a local AI model or a heavy Procreate Dreams project. There’s a catch, though. The 128GB and 256GB models get a binned chip (one with a core switched off), running a 5-core CPU and a single 16-core Neural Engine. Only the 512GB model matches the Duo’s full setup, with a 6-core CPU and a dual Neural Engine packing 32 cores.

Apple’s lineup now has a very clear price ladder for anyone who wants a small screen and a Pencil. The $1,999 Duo is the magic trick, and the iPhone Duo’s open-and-close animation alone has people reaching for their wallets. The $699 mini is the practical buy, with a bigger screen, full Apple Pencil Pro support, and a landscape front camera that finally makes video calls feel natural. Pre-orders open October 28 on Apple’s iPad mini page, with deliveries starting November 6 in midnight and starlight. If the Duo is a fold-out passport to the future, the mini is the paperback you’ll actually take everywhere.

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This $6 Glow-in-the-dark Carabiner might be Camping EDC’s biggest upgrade

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We put glow on everything we are afraid of losing in the dark. Watch hands, exit signs, stair edges, light switches, and those plastic stars on a kid’s ceiling all got the memo decades ago. The carabiner, an object whose entire job is hanging onto things in low light, somehow missed it. It sits there, smug in anodized aluminum, daring you to find it. That is the oversight of the century, and I will happily defend that claim at any campsite.

OBORO, from Maruhachi Kasei, a plastics factory in Nagoya, Japan that has been molding resin since 1974, closes the loop. The large D carabiner is glow-infused polycarbonate, measures about 3 by 1.7 inches, weighs 0.42 ounces, and is rated for 66 pounds. Leave it in sunlight or under a lamp for a bit and it shines for hours, with no battery, no charging, and no app (thankfully). A one-handed clip joins it for towels and tarps, rated for 55 pounds, and both come in green or a cooler blue. It is accessory gear rather than climbing gear, so keep your rope work on the real stuff.

Designer: Maruhachi Kasei

Click Here to Buy Now: $73 $91 (20% off) for 12 pieces. Hurry! Only 5 days left.

The Glow Is Baked Into the Plastic Itself

The glow pigment is mixed into the polycarbonate itself, so the entire body is the light source. There is no paint layer to chip or flake, which matters on an object that spends its life banging against rocks, zippers, and other gear. Polycarbonate is the same family of plastic used in bulletproof glazing, and the maker claims five times the impact resistance of ABS and 250 times that of ordinary glass. It also handles weather and heat better than most plastics. The gate is a nickel-plated metal wire, the one part that has to flex thousands of times, so it makes sense that it is not resin.

In the maker’s own test, twenty minutes under a blacklight gave about three hours of visible glow. Brightness peaks in the first 10 to 20 minutes and fades gradually from there, the way every glow-in-the-dark thing you have ever owned behaves. Sunlight and ordinary LED room lighting both recharge it, as many times as you like. Long-afterglow pigments like this trace back to a 1993 breakthrough at Japan’s Nemoto & Co., the lineage behind Super-LumiNova on Swiss watch dials, though the maker does not name its exact pigment. Water is the weak spot: the maker says wet pigment loses its charge and the surface can cloud, so this belongs in the tent, not out in the rain.

A Bigger Gate, Beefier Numbers, and a Clip for Towels

The large D measures about 3 by 1.7 inches and 0.28 inches thick, which the maker says is 30 percent bigger than a standard carabiner. That extra room is the whole point of the redesign. The gate opens wide enough for thick camp rope, so a mug, a kettle, and a lantern can all hang without a game of Tetris. The working load is rated at 66 pounds, while the maker’s pull test ended at 213 kilograms, roughly 470 pounds. That gap is deliberate, since the rating sits near 15 percent of breaking load, and at 0.42 ounces you will forget the thing is on your bag until you need it.

The clip is built for flat, floppy things like towels and tarps. It opens and closes with one hand, using serrated jaws and a sliding block with a toothed lock, and a thin metal loop up top lets it hang from a line or a bag. The wide mouth takes thick fabric where a standard clothespin gives up. Its 55-pound rating sits a bit under the D carabiner, which is plenty for a soaked camp towel. Two clips and a rope between trees give you a glowing clothesline you can actually find after dark.

Two Colors, Endless Things to Hang, and Roughly $6 a Piece

Green is the classic and the brighter of the two, while blue is the rarer, cooler color that I find more fun to look at. By day neither looks like it does at night, since green reads pale yellow-green and blue looks milky white. Blue is dimmer after dark, which seems a fair trade for the novelty. The use cases click once the idea sinks in: a tent guyline, a go-bag handle, a kid’s school backpack, a dog’s leash, a key hook by the front door.

The 12-piece set (six large D carabiners and six clips) is ¥11,616, about $73, against a ¥14,520 (about $91) retail price, which works out to roughly $6 a piece. Singles run about $6 for a D carabiner and about $7 for a clip. Pink versions of both ($40 for six of each), a three-pack of Suncheck glow carabiners ($33), and the older Ouroboros Carabiner Clip ($4) are available as add-ons. OBORO ships worldwide with delivery estimated for January 2027.

Click Here to Buy Now: $73 $91 (20% off) for 12 pieces. Hurry! Only 5 days left.

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