Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

This titanium watch turns Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit into a dial

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Ask any American watch nerd about space watches and you’ll hear one word within three seconds: Speedmaster. Moon landing, NASA certification, the whole legend. Meanwhile, eight years before Apollo 11, a Soviet pilot strapped on a standard-issue navigator’s watch and went around the planet first, and that story gets a fraction of the airtime. I love a Speedy as much as anyone. Still, the first human in orbit deserves a little more wrist love, and a Moscow designer just delivered some.

Alexey Yakushik’s Yuri Gagarin: First in Space is that delivery. His brand launched in 2025, and this is a big step up from its earlier releases on Vostok and Luch movements. The case is Grade 5 titanium, 45mm across (about 1.8 inches), with a domed sapphire crystal, a Miyota 8215 automatic sits under a custom module, and a rocket hand circles a blue Earth every hour. It collected two European Product Design Award wins this year. The run is 130 pieces, split between natural titanium and black PVD, at about $4,150 each, sold only through the brand’s Russian site.

Designer: Alexey Yakushik

A polished blue Earth sits dead center of the dial, and a rocket-shaped minute hand laps it once an hour. Minute numerals ring the globe like a launch-control readout. Hours sit lower down as bold Arabic numerals, with a red marker picking out the current one. Four plates on the diagonals spell СССР in Cyrillic, which is about as subtle as a Soviet space poster should be. For the record, Vostok 1 took roughly 89 minutes to orbit the planet and the rocket does it in 60, but I won’t be filing a complaint about the pacing.

The case and the integrated bracelet are both Grade 5 titanium, the alloy aerospace engineers love because it is strong, light, and unbothered by most of what life throws at it. At 45mm the case is large on paper, though titanium weighs far less than steel, and the brand hasn’t published the weight or thickness. The domed sapphire crystal is 35mm across and bulges up over the globe like a capsule window, which is the whole porthole idea in one piece of glass. Water resistance is 100 meters, the lume is BGW9, and the links look faceted and angular in the renders. Nobody is mistaking it for a dress watch.

Underneath sits the Miyota 8215, a 21-jewel Japanese automatic workhorse that keeps time reliably and stays out of the dial’s way, with the brand’s AYW001.1 module built on top. The renders show a custom rotor stamped with 1961, СССР, and 2026, the sort of detail only the owner will ever see. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin’s full name wraps the sapphire caseback window, and every watch carries its own number, such as 01/65. Hiding a love letter on the back of a watch is a wearer-only flex, and I’m here for it. Nobody across the table will ever read it, which is exactly the point.

Yakushik says the project has the blessing of Gagarin’s daughters, Galina and Elena, along with Roscosmos support. It launched April 16, 2026, timed to the flight’s 65th anniversary, and the first piece went to the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics. The European Product Design Award is a paid-entry Farmani Group competition that covers concepts and finished products, so read the two wins as a nod to the design and leave the horological verdict to others. At about $4,150, the money goes to the titanium, the bracelet, the dome, and the custom display more than the base caliber. Gagarin carried a 33mm brass tool into orbit, and sixty-five years later his flight has a 45mm titanium watch of its own.

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This Jenga tower is also a lamp, and it lights up as you stack it

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Give an architect a box of blocks and they’ll tell you it’s research. Toronto architecture studio PARTISANS took that excuse all the way and came out the other side with a lamp. The Jenga Light rebuilds the game’s famous rectangles in a translucent material that glows from inside. Set the blocks on a powered base and electricity travels upward through every point where one block rests on another. The path the weight takes is the same path the power takes. That one idea turns a party game about collapse into a lamp you build by hand, one glowing brick at a time.

Lead designer Alex Josephson and teammate Teddy Shropshire solved the fiddliest part of the problem with a component most people have never heard of. The blocks hide bridge rectifiers, tiny circuits that make polarity a non-issue. Flip a block, rotate it, or push it into a cantilever that looks like it’s daring gravity, and it still lights. The lamp won its category, Home Lighting: Lamps and Luminaires, at the 2026 European Product Design Award, an international competition that welcomes prototypes as well as finished designs. Pricing and availability haven’t been announced yet. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how many blocks it takes to reach the ceiling.

Designers: Alex Josephson & Teddy Shropshire

How bridge rectifiers make every block reversible

Every electrical connection has a positive side and a negative side, and most stacking lamps deal with that by forcing pieces to go one way. A bridge rectifier is four diodes arranged in a loop, and it sends current out the same way no matter which way it comes in. Tuck them inside the blocks and “upside down” stops meaning anything. A brick can sit flat, sit flipped, or spin around, and its LEDs get the right polarity every time. That one cheap part deletes every rule you’d otherwise have to learn before playing. It’s the electrical version of a USB-C plug, which also stopped caring which way you hold it.

Compare that with the Tetris lamp ThinkGeek sold around 2012, where a powered bottom piece fed light to the tetrominoes stacked above it and the interlocking shapes did the steering. Later patents for modular light kits went mechanical, adding magnets and contacts shaped to avoid short circuits when blocks meet at odd angles. LumiBlocks took the magnetic route too, pairing snap-together blocks with app control and RGBCW LEDs. PARTISANS skips magnets entirely, letting electronics handle orientation and gravity handle everything else. The result asks nothing of you except a steady hand. That also happens to be the only thing Jenga ever asked.

Translucent printed bricks and a grid of contacts

From the photos, the bricks appear 3D-printed in a translucent plastic, with visible layer lines and a wavy internal infill. Most designers would sand or hide that texture, but here it does the job of a lampshade. Light passes through the infill and paints a woven, scaly pattern across every face, so each block glows with a grain that frosted acrylic could never give you. The shots mostly show warm white light, with one hero image running cooler. PARTISANS hasn’t published brightness or color temperature figures yet. Stack enough bricks and the whole thing reads like a lantern built by someone who really loved masonry.

Small metal contacts dot the top of each block, three in a row on the long pieces, while the base carries more, plus a power cord and a small port on one side. Those dots likely form a grid that decides how far one block can overhang the next and still stay lit. They also mean you can’t play an actual round of Jenga on it, since shimmying a brick out of the middle of a tower will just disconnect the entire top half of the lamp. Think of it as Jenga-inspired, with the building half of the game kept and the pulling half retired. A bumped table can still flatten a ten-minute spiral, which is the most Jenga thing left about it.

From a Toronto toy fair to a Toronto studio

Jenga began as a family game Leslie Scott played with wooden blocks growing up in Ghana, and it launched at the London Toy Fair in 1983. Its real break came in 1986 at the Toronto Toy Fair, where Hasbro’s chairman reportedly decided he had to have it. Forty years later, a Toronto studio has turned the same stack into a table lamp. PARTISANS is mostly an architecture practice, best known for the cedar-lined Grotto Sauna on Georgian Bay, yet Josephson keeps drifting into lighting. His Gweilo lamps, made from hand-molded acrylic sheets, won the 2016 AZ Award for Best Lighting Installation.

Playful lighting has had a good run lately, from Analog lamps, which grew out of LEGO play and now sell at MoMA, to app-controlled magnetic blocks for desk setups. The Jenga Light skips apps and color modes and bets everything on the hands-on part. The European Product Design Award judges entries anonymously and accepts prototypes, so this win recognizes the idea and its engineering ahead of any retail launch. PARTISANS hasn’t announced pricing or a release date. Until it does, I’m staring at my old Jenga set and wondering how hard bridge rectifiers really are to solder.

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Only nine of these gorgeous red-to-aluminum Ducati customs will ever exist

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Paint has one job on most vehicles, and that job is covering up the metal underneath. Bandit9 clearly doesn’t agree with that particular ideology. The Saigon-based studio’s new (RED) 800 starts out in deep Racing Red at the nose, then lets the color thin out as it sweeps back until all that’s left is raw, hand-brushed aluminum. It’s a Ducati 821 custom built with (RED), the charity co-founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver, and only nine will ever exist. Every one of them sends $14,000 to the fight against AIDS and other preventable diseases, which is a pretty great excuse to own a motorcycle this good-looking.

Each fade gets applied by hand, so no two of the nine bikes will wear their red in exactly the same spot. I love that, because the paint job becomes a fingerprint. Underneath sits the same recipe from Bandit9’s Ducati 821 build: Ducati’s 821cc Testastretta twin making 110 horsepower, wrapped in a seamless hand-shaped aluminum unibody that weighs a claimed 386 pounds dry. That earlier bike went with aluminum and carbon and skipped the red entirely, which feels almost rude for a Ducati. This one brings the red back and then lets it fade out halfway, a Ducati that only partly remembers its roots. It’s priced at $49,900 and built to order, with an 8 to 12 month wait.

Designers: Bandit9 & (RED)

How the red drains across one seamless aluminum shell

The fade works because there’s nowhere for it to stop. Bandit9’s unibody wraps the nose, tank, and flanks in one hand-shaped aluminum skin, so the red never runs into a panel gap that would force a hard edge. The color sits deepest on the tank and tail, then drains down the flanks toward the belly like it was poured on from above. By the time it reaches the engine cases, the brushed grain of the metal has taken over completely. In the close-up shots, that grain even seems to show through the red near the transition, which hints at a translucent candy coat laid straight onto bare aluminum.

That candy approach, if it is one, would explain why the bike looks lit from inside. Translucent paint lets light hit the metal underneath and bounce back through the color, so the red picks up a glow that solid paint can’t fake. Thinning the coat by hand also means the painter controls exactly how fast the red gives up, which is where the fingerprint comes in. A red LED strip tracing the tail’s edge down toward the rear suspension carries a line of color past the point where the paint stops. Basically, the red keeps going even after the bike runs out of paint.

A fade with roots in 1950s hot rods and (RED)’s aluminum gadgets

Southern California painter Larry Watson gets a lot of the credit for turning fades into a custom-culture staple. Starting in the late 1950s, Watson helped popularize panel paint, scallops, veils, and fades, shooting candy colors over silver and pearl on cars like his own 1958 Thunderbird. Those jobs were loud, flashy, and built to be seen at a drive-in. Bandit9 takes the same basic idea and strips out the flash, using a single color and letting bare metal do the rest. It’s a hot rod technique wearing a gallery outfit.

Red over bare aluminum also happens to be (RED)’s unofficial house style. One of the organization’s most famous early products was a red aluminum iPod nano in 2006, and in 2013 Jony Ive and Marc Newson designed a one-off aluminum Leica M for a (RED) auction at Sotheby’s. That camera sold for $1.8 million, and the whole sale raised $26.2 million once the Gates Foundation matched it. Bandit9’s bike slots neatly into that family of red-and-metal objects built to raise money. It’s also the only one I know of with a Ducati engine.

The same price as the regular 821, which makes the red free

Bandit9 left Ducati’s mechanical bits alone and rebuilt everything you actually look at. The 821cc Testastretta twin makes 110 horsepower and 65.8 lb-ft of torque, good for a claimed 0 to 60 mph run of 3.3 seconds and a top speed of about 125 mph (201 km/h). A custom tubular steel trellis frame holds it together, with a 43mm Sachs fork, an adjustable Sachs rear shock, and a single-sided swingarm. Dual 320mm Brembo monobloc calipers handle stopping up front. Ducati’s engineers did the hard part, and Bandit9 spent its months on the shell.

At $49,900, the (RED) 800 costs exactly what Bandit9 charges for its regular Ducati 821, which means the buyer pays nothing extra for the paint or the $14,000 donation. Sell all nine and (RED) collects $126,000. Orders go directly through Bandit9, and with only nine slots, they probably won’t hang around long. Plenty of charity editions just dip a product in red and call it a day. Bandit9 made the red the entire design, then had the good sense to let it fade out right where the metal gets interesting.

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Wuben’s tiny flashlight packs 500 lumens and a blade into 40 grams

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My phone flashlight handles most of my after-dark chores, which is a funny confession from someone who writes about EDC gear for a living. It is always in my pocket, it is bright enough, and it asks for nothing extra. Then a job needs both hands, and suddenly the phone is clamped in my teeth, aiming at the ceiling while I squint at a breaker box. The phone flashlight is a great idea with one design flaw, which is that it comes attached to a phone. Hands-free light has always been the gap, and headlamps are too much hardware for a trip to the garage.

Wuben’s G6 SPARK is a keychain-sized answer to the teeth problem. Its clip rotates 90 degrees with distinct clicks, so you can clip it to a pocket, cap brim, or backpack strap and aim the beam where your hands are busy. The 500-lumen main light handles distance, a 100-lumen side light with red modes handles up close, and a hidden blunt-tip blade covers the odd chore. The body is 7075 aluminum, 0.34 inches (8.6 mm) thick, and 1.4 ounces (40 g or about as much as an AirPods case).

Designer: Wuben

Click Here to Buy Now: $33.99 $44.99 (24% off). Hurry, only 411/1000 left! Raised over $111,000.

Eleven credit cards thick and cut from aerospace aluminum

The G6 SPARK measures 2.56 by 1.35 inches and 0.34 inches thick (65 by 34.2 by 8.6 mm), and it weighs 1.4 ounces (40 g). That makes it roughly eleven credit cards thick, so it vanishes into a jeans pocket. The body is 7075 aluminum, which Wuben calls aerospace-grade, and a slab this thin needs a metal with a spine. Wuben rates it IP66 against dust and powerful water jets, with 1 meter (3.3 feet) of impact resistance, so a keychain’s daily abuse should not scare it. The USB charging port hides inside the body, which keeps the face clean and symmetrical.

7075 is the zinc-rich member of the aluminum family, and it has a reputation for being far tougher than the 6061 found in most flashlight bodies. Aircraft engineers fell for it because it is light and stiff at the same time. Stiffness is exactly what a flat flashlight needs, since a thin body that flexes is a bad day for the lens and the electronics. On a keychain, that rigidity should also help it survive a crowded pocket full of other metal. A push-release attachment lets you pop it off the ring when you want it in your hand instead of dangling off your keys.

Three lights, one button, and a click code you can learn in an evening

The main light tops out at 500 lumens with a 66 meter (217 ft) throw and a peak beam intensity of 1,089 candela. Those numbers describe a beam for the space around you, like a driveway or a campsite, rather than a hillside across the valley. Light color is 5000K, a daylight white, and the CRI of 70 means colors look decent rather than lab-accurate, which is fine for finding a dropped screw. Brightness steps are Eco, Low, Medium, and High, and you cycle them by holding the button. A double click jumps to Turbo, a triple click gives you Strobe, and mode memory remembers your last setting.

The independent side light is the one I expect to use most, since it gives a close-range pool of light at arm’s length. White comes in Low, Medium, and High, topping out at 100 lumens, which is plenty for reading a label or tracing a wire. Red adds a steady mode and a signal mode at 10 lumens, handy for saving night vision or flagging yourself on a dark road. Hold the button while the main light is off to wake the side light, and hold again to cycle the five modes. That is a lot of options on one button, though the click patterns are easy enough to learn in an evening.

A clip that aims, a blade that hides, and a cap brim that becomes a headlamp

The clip is the headline trick, rotating through 90 degrees with distinct mechanical clicks so you can feel each position. Clipped to a cap brim, it works like a minimalist headlamp, and I would happily wear it to read in a tent. Tucked into the side is a blunt-tip utility blade that handles opening boxes, slicing tape, and sharpening a pencil, and probably a marshmallow stick if you ask nicely. Fold it away and the G6 goes back to being a slab that keeps your keys company. My one wish is a tiny tactile mark near the button, so a cold thumb can find it in the dark.

Click Here to Buy Now: $33.99 $44.99 (24% off). Hurry, only 411/1000 left! Raised over $111,000.

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Abxylute’s $65 smartphone gamepad packs Hall Effect triggers, clickable sticks, and gyro aiming

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Valve raised the price of the 512GB Steam Deck OLED to $789 this May, a number that makes anyone want to close the browser tab out of spite. Blame the AI boom, which has data centers swallowing memory chips faster than factories can make them, leaving handhelds to fight over the scraps. Now look at the phone in your hand. It runs native console ports like Resident Evil, streams entire Xbox and PlayStation libraries, and emulates most of the consoles a millennial grew up with. All it lacks is a pair of real thumbsticks and triggers, which is a far cheaper problem to solve.

Hong Kong-based abxylute solves that problem with the M5 and M6, two sliding controllers that magnetically snap to the back of your phone. Closed, they sit behind it like a chunky case. Slide the phone up and a full gamepad appears underneath, Xperia Play style, with sticks, triggers, and rumble. The M5 is the slim one, plugging in over USB-C with zero pairing and pass-through charging. The M6 goes wireless over Bluetooth, adding clickable capacitive sticks, Hall Effect triggers, gyro aiming, and a 10-hour battery. Both retail under $90, roughly one-ninth of a Steam Deck these days, and for anyone whose gaming happens on commutes and couches, that math is hard to argue with.

Designer: abxylute

Click Here to Buy Now: $65 $84.99 (24% off) Hurry! Only limited units available.

A slider rail from the Nokia era, rebuilt for modern phones

Sliding rails nearly went extinct when touchscreen slabs replaced slider phones, and so did most of the factories that made them. abxylute eventually tracked down a manufacturer that once built rails for Nokia and Sony, then asked it to do something those phones never needed. A slider from 2010 only had to carry a lightweight screen half, while the M5 and M6 have to hold a phone and case weighing up to around 10.6 ounces (300g). The resulting bidirectional damped rail glides smoothly both ways, with magnets snapping it into the fully open and closed positions. That makes for a calmer motion than the spring-loaded slide on the OhSnap MCON, which fires the phone open at a button press.

The phone attaches through an adjustable magnetic mount rated at 4,098 gf, roughly 9 pounds of pull and comfortably above the 2,500 to 3,500 gf abxylute quotes for Apple’s MagSafe. Both mounts clear camera bumps up to 0.28 inches (7mm), and the plate shifts to suit different phone sizes. Supported phones include the iPhone 18 series, Galaxy S26, Pixel 11, OnePlus 15, and Xiaomi 17, with a magnetic adhesive ring in the box for anything lacking MagSafe. Thick cases will sap some of that grip, so slimmer cases make the safer pairing. Lightning iPhones sit out the M5 entirely, since that model needs a USB-C port to work.

The M5 goes wired and thin for pocket duty

The M5 began life as a DIY build by Jinjiang, an independent maker who handled the 3D modeling, PCB design, and programming himself before abxylute partnered with him to engineer it for mass production. Its connection is wired USB-C, which means no Bluetooth pairing, no battery to charge, and pass-through charging so your phone can top up mid-session. The sticks are low-profile carbon-film sliders modeled on the PSP, PSP Go, and Nintendo 3DS, recessed nearly flat to keep the controller slim. Because sliders can’t click, abxylute added dedicated LS and RS buttons that double as programmable macro keys. Micro-switch triggers with short travel and a crisp click round out the inputs.

Those choices produce a controller that weighs about 6 ounces (170g) and measures 0.91 inches (23mm) thick with the mount, thinning to 0.45 inches (11.5mm) at the grip area. It spans 5.9 inches (149.5mm) wide, about the width of a large phone, so it slips into a jacket pocket easily. I appreciate a product that commits this fully to one idea, and the M5 commits to portability. Slider sticks offer less throw than full-size ones, so they favor retro titles and platformers over twitchy shooters. A limited M5 Founder’s Edition, capped at 1,000 units, comes in translucent retro green with a customizable two-letter badge replacing the abxylute logo.

The M6 packs full-size controller features into the slide

The M6 took nearly three years to develop, long enough to earn the internal nickname “little Nezha,” and most of that effort went into the controls. Its capacitive sticks, developed with component maker K-Silver, tilt 20 degrees against the roughly 23 degrees of a full-size controller stick, and they click for L3 and R3. abxylute also built them to resist magnetic interference, a smart call given the strong magnet array sliding a few millimeters above them. Instead of sinking the sticks into deep wells, a stepped surface around each one frees up room for your thumbs. Stick output switches between circular and square modes, handy for racing games and emulators.

Hall Effect linear triggers with 0.22 inches (5.5mm) of travel handle racing games, and a Fast Trigger Mode shortens actuation for shooters. A face-mounted Z button takes remaps and multi-button macros, so a fighting game special move or a jump-and-shoot combo fits under one thumb. There’s also a 6-axis gyroscope for motion aiming, and Bluetooth 5.3 backed by a 500mAh battery rated for up to 10 hours. The lighting is diffused, bouncing off the controller’s surface instead of shining at your eyes, and its color changes with each mode. All this comes in at 6.7 ounces (191g) and 1.02 inches (26mm) thick, a modest premium over the M5.

Shared features, the abxy app, and what each model costs

Both controllers share a physical mode switch that flips between NS, XInput, and PS layouts, covering Switch emulators, Android and cloud gaming, and iPhone titles respectively. Each gets dual Z-axis linear vibration motors with four intensity levels, plus a Turbo function paired to the M button. The free abxy Game App doubles as a launcher for emulators and cloud services, and it handles remapping, dead zones, macros, lighting, and vibration. Virtual touch mapping lets you assign on-screen controls to physical buttons for games that never bothered with controller support. Detachable magnetic grips, held by magnets plus a mechanical shear lock, add full-size handles for longer sessions, though they aren’t listed among the box contents.

Kickstarter pricing currently sits at $65 for the M5 and $69 for the M6, against retail prices of $84.99 and $89.99, both well under the $169.99 Backbone Pro. A bundle with one of each costs $119, down from $174.98. The M6 is estimated to ship in November 2026 and the M5 in December 2026, with worldwide delivery. The M5 box adds a USB-C cable to the controller, adhesive ring, and manual that both models share. Valve wants $789 for a handheld. abxylute wants $69 to upgrade the one you already own.

Click Here to Buy Now: $65 $84.99 (24% off) Hurry! Only limited units available.

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Apple’s next iPad mini could lose the speaker grilles — and finally gain water resistance

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Apple has a long history of deleting holes. The headphone jack went in 2016, the same year the MacBook Pro traded its HDMI, SD card, and USB-A ports for a row of Thunderbolt 3 ports and a lifetime supply of dongles. US iPhones lost the SIM tray in 2022, and now the speaker grilles on the iPad mini appear to be next on the chopping block. Leaked images in Apple’s own code, spotted by MacRumors, show the iPad mini 8 with a single slim slot at the top of its display glass, much like an iPhone earpiece. That slot lines up with Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman’s reporting on a new vibration-based speaker system, and sealing up the holes buys the mini its first-ever water resistance.

This time, though, removing holes actually gives you something back. Phones have played with the trick before, with Xiaomi’s original Mi MIX using a piezoelectric driver to push sound through its body back in 2016. Apple’s version arrives alongside an A20 Pro chip, a landscape front camera, and a rumored 8.4-inch OLED display. The whole package is expected at Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event in Los Angeles on October 28. Gurman thinks it could cost closer to $799, so let’s see if Apple has the courage to call that a bargain.

Apple Spent Years Fighting Vibration. Now It’s Making Music With It.

The 24-inch iMac packs two pairs of force-cancelling woofers into its 11.5mm body, with each pair moving in opposite directions so their vibrations cancel out before they rattle the chassis. The 16-inch MacBook Pro and Studio Display use the same trick, since Apple spent years treating vibration as a problem to engineer away. The iPad mini 8 reportedly flips that thinking, using vibration as the sound source itself. Apple hasn’t revealed how its system works, so the exact driver and where it lives inside the chassis remain unknown. The leaked images show one slim groove in the glass where the stereo grilles used to be, with the power and volume buttons still on the top edge.

To make the Apple Watch Series 2 swim-proof to 50 meters (164 feet) in 2016, Apple sealed every opening except the speaker, which needs air to make sound. Its fix was to make that speaker vibrate any water back out after a swim, a feature anyone who has heard Water Lock’s little burst of beeps already knows. The iPad mini 8 looks like the next chapter of that story, shrinking the speaker opening to a single slit. Gurman reports water resistance for the first time on an iPad mini, though no IP rating (the standard dust and water score) has leaked yet. Even modest splash protection would cover the kitchen counter, the poolside lounger, and that nightly bath read.

An iPhone 18 Pro Brain, an OLED Face, and a $799 Question Mark

Apple’s code also lists the A20 Pro from the iPhone 18 Pro, built on TSMC’s 2nm process. That leapfrogs two generations past today’s A17 Pro, and MacRumors expects RAM to climb from 8GB to 12GB. More memory means bigger on-device AI models and fewer apps reloading as you bounce between notes, a PDF, and Procreate. The front camera moves to the landscape edge, so video calls stop featuring your left ear. A new Smart Folio (model A3632) in Apple’s French product filings packs two-thirds more magnet material than the 6th-gen mini’s folio, a hint the body has changed enough to need its own cover.

An 8.4-inch OLED panel, up from today’s 8.3-inch LCD, would give late-night reading true blacks and far richer contrast. The refresh rate (how often the screen redraws each second) is still a coin toss, with Gurman reporting Apple tested both 60Hz and 120Hz versions. A Korean supply-chain tipster insists the production panels are locked at 60Hz, which would leave this tablet scrolling less smoothly than a base iPhone 17. The current mini already jumped from $499 to $599 in June on rising memory costs, and Gurman’s guess for the new one lands closer to $799. Apple can seal nearly every hole in this tablet, but the one it might leave in your wallet looks wide open.

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Daft Punk’s iconic Coachella pyramid stage is becoming an official LEGO set in 2027

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Daft Punk’s debut album Homework turns 30 on January 20, 2027, and the robots have picked a pretty good year to show up in LEGO form. That record gave us “Da Funk,” “Revolution 909,” and “Around the World,” a song that repeats its own title 144 times and somehow never gets old. Building something out of one element over and over is pretty much LEGO’s whole thing, so the match was always sitting there. On October 22, LEGO and Daft Punk finally made it official with a brand new partnership. Its first product is a set based on the pyramid stage that glowed over the duo’s Alive tour, arriving in 2027.

The set traces back to Patrick Harboun, a Luxembourgish builder who grew up playing Homework on his Walkman. In 2020, he and his then 8-year-old son built a brick version of the pyramid during lockdown, and it won the Grand Prize in LEGO Ideas’ Music to Our Ears challenge. A box set didn’t follow, so they resubmitted it in 2024, hit 10,000 supporters in 2025, and spent about a year in LEGO’s review Parking Lot. That wait ended this week, and LEGO’s designers are now reworking the fan build into a retail set. I’ve been rooting for this box since I first saw the MOC in 2024, so forgive me for feeling a little smug.

Designers: Patrick Harboun (Robotrock) & LEGO Design Team

The real pyramid debuted on April 29, 2006, inside Coachella’s Sahara Tent, a space built for 10,000 people that roughly 40,000 tried to squeeze into. Martin Phillips of the LA production company Bionic League designed it, taking cues from the “Technologic” music video he had also worked on. The funny part is that Phillips used no bespoke technology at all, building the towering structure from off-the-shelf Barco OLite LED panels. Standard parts, clever assembly, legendary result, which honestly sounds like a LEGO tagline. The pyramid then toured the world as Alive 2006/2007, and the Grammy-winning Alive 2007 album was recorded under it at Paris-Bercy in June 2007.

Harboun’s original Daft Punk Concert MOC (My Own Creation, in LEGO-speak) recreates that stage in roughly 2,000 pieces, with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo perched at their console in custom robot helmets. Triangles are famously awkward for a system built on right angles, and Harboun admitted that making all those angles click took some creative problem-solving. His son built the first prototype from bricks lying around the house, and Harboun expanded it digitally from there. The helmets were a gray area at the time, since LEGO had never sold official Daft Punk minifigures. The duo had only appeared in brick form in Pharrell’s LEGO-animated biopic Piece by Piece, which Harboun happily pointed to as a loophole.

My favorite detail, though, is the motorized core, where a spinning box of transparent bricks and a set of dangling lights fake the shifting LED patterns of the real pyramid. That one trick does two jobs. It stands in for the stage’s entire video rig, and it delivers on Harboun’s original goal of simulating what he called LEGO’s upcoming Night Mode. LEGO has said the retail set will differ from the fan submission, so the final details are still anyone’s guess. I’m crossing my fingers that the spinning core survives the trip from MOC to box.

This will be the first physical LEGO Daft Punk set, following the duo’s digital debut as minifigures and a music-reactive pyramid kit in LEGO Fortnite in 2025. LEGO’s Julia Goldin called the partnership “just the beginning of a bigger journey,” with more content and brand experiences promised alongside the set. Price, set number, piece count, minifigures, and regional availability, including the US, are all still unannounced. Daft Punk’s creative director Cédric Hervet described the pyramid as “one of the most recognizable expressions of Daft Punk’s visual world,” so at least everyone agrees on the centerpiece. Thirty years after Homework, the robots finally have some building homework of their own.

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Moisture is the secret ingredient in Midea’s award-winning air fryer

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Steaming is about as old as Chinese cooking gets. Bamboo baskets stacked over a wok have been turning out buns, dumplings, and whole fish for centuries, so it makes sense that a Chinese appliance giant would want that steam inside its air fryer. Midea’s new Humidity-Controlled Air Fryer does exactly that, pairing hot air with Smart Moisture Technology that can air fry, steam, or blend the two. The pitch is simple: crunch where you want crunch, juice where you want juice. Your bao and your chicken wings can finally share a counter spot, and nobody has to fight over the steamer.

Smeg’s steam air fryer and Xiaomi’s Mijia Pro Steam and Bake both bolted water tanks onto air fryers this year, and both leaned hard on the crispy wings pitch. Midea treats steaming as a full cooking mode, which tracks for a product designed around China’s multi-person households. The 8-liter (about 8.5-quart) cooker comes from Midea’s Shunde-based cooking division and won a 2026 Red Dot in the Design Concept competition’s Ready For Market category, reserved for designs that are nearly or fully developed but not yet on sale. Two transparent windows let you watch dinner without letting the steam out. There’s no price or US release date yet, which is my only complaint so far.

Designers: Peng Xi, Wang Jin, Ma Yufeng, Jo Jeongmin, Peng Yunyun & Chen Hailong (Midea)

Midea has been sneaking water into air fryers for a while now. Its European 7.5-liter model offers separate Moisture and Air Fry functions with automatic steam injection, and in China the 6-liter KZC6019D steam air fryer sells on JD for 308 yuan, roughly $43. The new design scales that idea up to 8 liters and hands humidity control to Smart Moisture Technology, which dynamically regulates moisture so the chamber can run wet, dry, or a mix of both in one cycle. In practice, that could mean steaming a batch of frozen dumplings until tender, then switching to dry heat so their bottoms crisp up, potsticker style. Your standalone steamer can finally retire.

The two transparent windows do serious functional work on a steam cooker. Every time you yank open an air fryer basket to check on dinner, you dump the hot, humid air the machine just spent minutes building up. Midea’s lower window looks straight into the basket, so you can watch the browning happen without breaking the seal. Above it sits a tinted, translucent hood that gives a second view into the cavity, with a conical housing glowing amber behind it. Chronic basket-pullers like me finally get to keep our hands to ourselves, and the steam gets to stay put.

A sharp diagonal seam runs down each side, splitting the translucent upper hood from the solid lower body and giving it a forward lean, like it’s mid-stride toward your plate. The handle, a champagne-finished pill, sits on that seam at the center of the side panel. Centering it makes sense for an 8-liter basket loaded with a family dinner, since the weight stays balanced instead of tipping toward your wrist. On top, a glass deck carries touch controls and a timer display, with a Smart Moisture module and what looks like a water fill cap at the back. Midea renders it in warm white and dark gunmetal, a welcome break from the glossy black boxes crowding most counters.

The steam air fryer category now has three clear personalities. Xiaomi’s 6.5-liter Mijia Pro chases value after crowdfunding in China at 559 yuan, around $81, Smeg’s 7-liter AFC01 chases style at £199.95 in the UK, roughly $265, and Midea’s 8-liter design chases capacity and visibility. Midea already sells dual-zone air fryers in the US, though it hasn’t announced US plans for this one. Red Dot’s Ready For Market jurors judge whether a product can ship within about 12 months, and the China-first brief hints at where it lands first. Somewhere, a bamboo steamer is watching all this with mild amusement, having figured out wet heat centuries before anyone plugged it in.

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DIY Modded Game Boy Color has an OLED screen, USB-C, and wireless charging

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Last year Zac Builds took a fifth-gen iPod, gutted it, and handed it back to the world with USB-C, Bluetooth, and a transparent face that made it look like a mechanical watch. You all loved it, and so did I. Now the Canadian YouTuber has turned his tri-wing screwdriver on Nintendo, and the Game Boy Color is getting the resurrection treatment. Same playbook, same clear plastic, same refusal to let a beloved gadget die of old age. At this rate I’m genuinely curious which 90s icon he rescues next, and my money is on the Tamagotchi.

The 1998 Game Boy Color had a lot going for it (Pokémon, mostly), but its hardware hasn’t aged gracefully. The screen had no backlight, the mono speaker was weak, and two AA batteries ran the whole show. Zac keeps the original Nintendo motherboard and rebuilds everything around it, starting with a vivid OLED display that makes the old reflective panel look like a sheet of wet cardboard. A lithium-ion battery brings USB-C and wireless charging, a dedicated amp and regulator make the speaker louder and practically hiss-free, and RGB lights glow under every button. An EZ Flash Jr cartridge then squeezes the whole game library onto a single microSD card.

Designer: Zac Builds

A 2013 phone screen gives the Game Boy Color its eyes back

Zac calls the OLED display the best single upgrade you can give a Game Boy Color, and the side-by-side shots back him up. The panel fills a larger window than Nintendo’s original, and its self-lit pixels let Super Mario Bros. Deluxe pop without a desk lamp overhead. It also sits under real glass, which looks more premium and holds up better than the old plastic lens. Zac suspects the panel started life in a phone, and kits like his are reported to use screens from the BlackBerry Q10. A phone that lost the smartphone war ended up rescuing a Game Boy, which is karma working overtime.

A touch menu on the screen itself handles settings, letting Zac adjust brightness, add faux scan lines, and change the color of the glowing Game Boy Color logo under the display. He finds the touch controls a bit clunky, which is fair, since jabbing at your game screen feels very 2026 for a 1998 console. Installation is refreshingly simple by modding standards. The screen presses into a precut shell at a slight angle, an adhesive ring holds it in place, and a single power wire runs to the power switch’s C pin, held down with Kapton tape. Pokémon Red has honestly never looked this crisp.

USB-C charging, with weird ‘Magic Mouse’ port placement

On first boot, the modded console played audio while the OLED stayed black, and fresh AAs fixed it instantly. The culprit was voltage sag, with the new hardware’s startup load dragging tired batteries below what the screen needed. Zac’s permanent fix is a lithium-ion pack with more capacity, a higher voltage, USB-C charging, and a wireless charging coil, good for what he estimates is well over eight hours of play. The USB-C port lives on the back panel, so charging sends a cable sprouting out the rear like a tail, which gives off serious Magic Mouse energy. Thankfully that coil lets you skip the cable and drop the console on a wireless charging pad instead.

The new speaker and its flex-PCB amp brought extra volume along with a loud hiss, because Nintendo’s 28-year-old regulator was never meant to feed an OLED, an amp, and a set of RGB LEDs at once. Zac’s answer is a replacement regulator from Helder, a longtime name in the Game Boy modding scene, which smooths out ripple on the console’s shared 5V rail. The board also brings a solid-state capacitor with more than five times the capacitance of the part it replaces. The hiss dropped to a trace you can only hear with the speaker an inch from your ear. Every flashy upgrade here leans on unglamorous power hardware, and Zac is refreshingly upfront about that.

RGB buttons and a smoke shell that puts everything on display

An individually addressable RGB LED sits under each button and replaces the original power LED, with the colors controlled through button commands. In the photos, the D-pad gets a blue ring, A and B glow red, and Select and Start pick up green and amber. Installing it takes roughly a dozen solder joints, and Zac recommends anchoring the 5V and ground pads first so everything else lines up. Before any of that, he cleaned the board with isopropyl alcohol, swapped all three aging capacitors, and fitted fresh white silicone membranes to fix the sticky buttons. The finished console still feels crisp, despite all the wiring now packed beneath those buttons.

The precut smoke-transparent shell ties the build together, putting the lighting, the amp’s ribbon, and the motherboard on full view. It also brings a larger screen opening and drops the original battery divider to make room for the new pack. Clear plastic has deep roots here, since Nintendo sold the Game Boy Color in Atomic Purple back in 1998, the same year Apple’s Bondi Blue iMac G3 made translucency cool. Modders have pushed that idea hard lately, with Natalie the Nerd’s fully transparent Game Boy Color even swapping in a see-through circuit board. Zac’s version keeps Nintendo’s original green board in plain sight, which suits a build that celebrates the real hardware.

An overclock that breaks the screen, and a cartridge that holds everything

Zac’s most ambitious mod replaces the crystal oscillator with a variable clock board, letting the console run slower or up to 50% faster with a button combo. Getting the old crystal off took hot air, heat shielding, and Kapton tape, and Zac flat out tells beginners to skip it. Underclocking works great and turns tricky platforming into slow motion. Overclocking keeps the game running, but the OLED loses sync and shows nothing, since the clock also governs display timing. Some IPS kits reportedly handle 1.3x or 1.5x speed, though Zac didn’t test one, and the OLED looks too good to give up anyway.

An EZ Flash Jr cartridge handles the games, loading Game Boy and Game Boy Color ROMs, homebrew, and hacks from a FAT32 microSD card, and Zac says even 8GB covers the whole library. Leave out the overclock and he reckons a similar build takes a couple of afternoons, mostly with off-the-shelf kits on an original motherboard. ModRetro’s $149.99 transparent Chromatic offers a ready-made route to a similar look, while Zac’s approach keeps Nintendo’s actual silicon at the heart of it. That makes this build feel closer to restoration than replacement. Nintendo built the Game Boy Color for AA batteries and sunlight. Zac rebuilt it for USB-C and midnight.

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Meet Draco, the 90mm smart telescope that wakes itself up to shoot the night while you sleep

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About 4,500 years ago, while the Egyptians were busy stacking pyramids, the North Star was a completely different star called Thuban. It sat in the constellation Draco, the dragon, and it held the job for centuries before Earth’s wobble handed the title to Polaris. Astrophotographers have spent the last hundred-odd years obsessing over that pole, because lining a mount up with it (a ritual called polar alignment) is the price of admission for long, sharp exposures. It’s fiddly, it’s cold, and it usually happens in the dark with a red flashlight in your teeth. So I find it delightful that DWARFLAB named its new flagship smart telescope Draco, because the whole point of this thing is letting you skip that ritual altogether.

Draco is a 90mm smart telescope from DWARFLAB, the team behind the pocketable DWARF II and DWARF 3, and it argues that serious imagers no longer have to trade ambition for convenience. It packs a folded f/3.8 optical system, a 50MP telephoto camera, a wide-angle camera for Milky Way shots, and a dedicated guide camera into a 12.1-pound (5.5kg) body you carry with one hand. The headline trick is a sensor that physically rotates to cancel out the sky’s spin, which lets Draco hold single exposures for up to 300 seconds on a simple alt-azimuth mount. Your phone handles the rest, from finding the target to stacking the final image. The SHO Edition is up for pre-order at $1,599, while the $1,399 Standard Edition has already sold out.

Click Here to Buy Now: $1599

A sensor that spins with the sky for five-minute exposures

Polar alignment exists because of field rotation. On a simple alt-azimuth mount (the up-down, left-right kind every smart telescope uses), the stars slowly twirl around the center of your frame during a long exposure, turning sharp points into little smears. Draco’s fix is wonderfully direct: the CMOS sensor itself rotates in step with the sky. A separate monochrome guide camera watches for drift and nudges the tracking in real time. The payoff is single frames of up to 300 seconds, when most smart telescopes have topped out around 60, which puts the category in traditional deep-sky territory. The guiding gear that normally takes an hour to balance in the cold now lives inside.

A traditional deep-sky rig is a parts list: optical tube, equatorial mount, polar alignment, guide scope, guide camera, filter wheel, mini-PC, and a nest of cables. Draco folds the optics, mount, guide camera, filters, field rotation, and onboard computing into one 5.5kg body, so the system stops being your homework. Early smart scopes won over beginners with short exposures and heavy stacking, so serious imagers kept their real rigs. For targets almost directly overhead, where rotation speeds up, the all-metal base tilts into Equatorial Mode and the app walks you through the angle. The aluminum tripod weighs about 17 ounces (480g) and opens to a preset angle.

Ninety millimeters of aperture and a sensor that bins four pixels into one

Going from the 50mm aperture common in smart telescopes to Draco’s 90mm gives you roughly 3.2 times the light-collecting area, which is the optical threshold serious imagers demand. The folded optics land at a 340mm focal length and f/3.8, a fast ratio that gathers light quickly, so faint targets build up sooner. An aberration-corrected design keeps stars pin sharp from the center of the frame to the edge. For context, ZWO’s Seestar S50 Pro ($999) runs a 50mm, f/5.2 setup. Draco costs a few hundred dollars more for nearly twice the aperture.

The 1/1.3-inch, 50MP sensor works in two modes. For nebulae and galaxies, it bins 2×2, merging four 1.2µm pixels into one 2.4µm pixel for roughly 12MP images with cleaner faint detail. For the Sun, Moon, and planets, it switches to the full native readout and crops around the target, which is how you get craters, sunspots, Saturn’s rings, and Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. A second camera with a 23.3mm equivalent focal length shoots at the same time, covering an 85.74° diagonal for Milky Way panoramas and star trails. Active TEC cooling and waste-heat dew prevention make thermal management part of the design instead of an accessory bolted on.

The SHO Edition automates Hubble Palette imaging

In 1995, Hubble’s Pillars of Creation image made sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen glow like a gold-and-teal cathedral, and amateurs have chased that look ever since. The recipe maps sulfur II to red, hydrogen-alpha to green, and oxygen III to blue, each captured through a narrowband filter (one that passes only a thin slice of color, 13nm wide here). The SHO Edition carries an Hα + O III filter and an S II + O III filter, runs them in sequence, and merges the data automatically. Doing this by hand usually means a filter wheel, a laptop, and a weekend lost inside editing software. Draco makes it a native capability, calibration included, and asks for one tap.

Both editions share the Astro filter, a dark-frame shutter, and the Hα + O III filter, which also helps with emission nebulae under light-polluted skies. The Standard Edition ($1,399) adds a built-in ND filter (think sunglasses for a telescope) that swaps into place with one tap for solar imaging. The SHO Edition ($1,599) trades that for the sulfur filter and includes a magnetic external ND filter you snap on before aiming at the Sun. Solar System Mode then centers, focuses, and locks onto the Sun or Moon, so sunspots and eclipses are fair game. Galaxies and the Milky Way still shine brightest under dark skies, which is a fine excuse for a road trip.

A capsule you carry like a lantern and control remotely

The body is a smooth capsule column with the optical tube hinged off one side, and stowed away it looks like a very expensive thermos or, in the right light, an Among Us crewmate. A recessed grip lets you carry it one-handed from the backyard to the car, and the all-metal base locks into a metal frame for a rigid stance on the tripod. Tap your phone to the body and NFC launches the app, where an AR Sky Finder shows what’s visible overhead, obstructions included. Pick a target, tap GoTo, and Draco handles focus, calibration, tracking, and stacking. The 10,000mAh battery runs roughly five hours.

PhotonLink remote control lets you run Draco from anywhere through the app, and Ethernet over USB gives it a wired connection for long deployments. Schedule a target and it wakes up, finds it, and shoots under clear skies while you sleep, so the hardware runs the session instead of you babysitting it, with Mega Stacking combining nights and Astro Mosaic widening the view. Stellar Studio in the app handles star reduction, star removal, and the Hubble Palette effect, with FITS and TIFF export for your own workflow. Pre-orders are open at dwarflab.com/us, with the SHO Edition at $1,599 and shipping estimated within three months. Traditional astrophotography exposes the system to the user. Draco turns the system into the product.

Click Here to Buy Now: $1599

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