Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Microsoft Broke the Only Thing That Actually Mattered

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Any tech nerd knows the unspoken contract that comes with being the only tech-literate person in the family. You get texts when someone’s laptop is slow, called over during the holidays to fix the router, and consulted every eighteen months when someone needs a new phone or computer. For years, the laptop question had a clean, confident answer: a Windows machine. Cheap entry points, massive software compatibility, games that actually run, no walled gardens, no ecosystem hostage situations, and enough flexibility that even a non-technical person could figure out the basics without feeling like they’d violated a terms of service agreement. But the last time someone asked me what laptop to get, I paused. For a good minute I asked myself, should I even recommend Windows anymore?

That pause is new, and it carries weight that no benchmark score or spec sheet can explain. The designated family tech person has historically been one of the most reliable organic distribution channels Windows ever had, recommending the same platform generation after generation because it worked, it was accessible, and there was nothing obviously better for normal people at a reasonable price. When that person hesitates, the platform has a problem. Microsoft built an empire on being the obvious, low-friction answer to the laptop question, and somewhere between Windows 10 and the Copilot era, they stopped protecting that position. And with Apple dropping a $599 MacBook just last week, that position seems even more in danger.

2024 CrowdStrike Outage

The OS that holds civilization together

Windows runs somewhere between 72 and 73 percent of the world’s desktops, and while that’s an impressive monopoly, it completely ignores the critical systems where Windows is actually even more prevalent and essential. Hospital admission systems, ATM networks, military command infrastructure, government offices, court systems, school networks, and banking operations across virtually every country on earth run on Windows. These institutions did not choose Windows out of preference; they are locked in through decades of infrastructure investment, software dependencies, and training costs that make switching systemically impractical at scale. The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident put a specific number on what this dependency looks like under pressure: one faulty content update to a single Windows security tool simultaneously bricked approximately 8.5 million machines, grounded over 8,500 flights globally, knocked hospital systems offline across multiple countries, and disabled 911 call centers across several US states. One third-party software layer, one bad update, and the operational skeleton of modern civic life visibly buckled.

That is the platform Microsoft has been treating as a vehicle for AI feature experiments. Recall, the AI tool Microsoft attempted to ship as part of Windows 11, worked by screenshotting the user’s screen every few seconds and storing those images locally to build a searchable timeline of everything they had ever done on the machine. Security researchers flagged it almost immediately as a catastrophic privacy liability: a permanent, silent, queryable record of every document, message, and webpage the screen had ever displayed. Microsoft paused the rollout after a fierce public backlash, but the revealing fact is that Recall cleared internal review in the first place. The teams approving that feature were not thinking about hospital clerks processing patient records, lawyers working with privileged communications, or government employees handling sensitive data. They were building a keynote demo.

The market is responding accordingly

Microsoft ended official Windows 10 support in October 2025, cutting off security patches for what was still the most widely used version of the OS. Months of upgrade campaigns, notification banners, and every available form of institutional pressure followed. The result: as of December 2025, Windows 10 sits at 44.68% market share and actually gained users after support ended, while Windows 11 dropped from 55.18% in October to 50.73% in December, shedding over four percentage points in two months while the officially dead OS clawed back ground. People are choosing to run a security-vulnerable, unsupported operating system rather than upgrade to the one Microsoft actively maintains, and that is not technophobia or inertia. It is a calculated judgment, made by millions of users independently, that the known risks of the old version beat the unknown risks of moving to the new one.

The TPM 2.0 hardware requirement blocked installation on millions of perfectly functional machines with no meaningful performance justification for everyday users, which meant the upgrade conversation started with resentment before it ever got to features. First-boot setup funnels new users toward a Microsoft account, with the offline bypass buried past the point where most non-technical people will ever find it. OneDrive integration sits deep enough in the OS that users regularly discover their Desktop files have been syncing to the cloud without understanding when or how they agreed to that. A fresh Windows 11 install in 2026 ships with TikTok, Instagram, Disney+, and a collection of Microsoft’s own unfinished apps pre-pinned to the Start menu, none of them arriving with any user consent. Copilot, which no consumer demand survey had identified as a priority, now appears in the OS sidebar, the taskbar, and since 2024, as a dedicated hardware key on new laptops, occupying real estate where a key with actual utility used to live.

Running alongside all of that is a separate update quality crisis that has been building its own track record. A January 2026 security update caused boot failures on certain Windows 11 machines, with Microsoft eventually tracing the issue to a botched December 2025 update that had left affected devices in what they diplomatically described as an “improper state.” An October 2025 security update broke VPN networking for enterprise users running OpenVPN and Cisco Secure Client, a bug that carried through the December patch cycle without a clean resolution. Security updates, the category Microsoft explicitly tells users they cannot afford to skip, became a threat to system stability in their own right. When the patch and the problem are indistinguishable from each other, the trust issue has moved well past inconvenience.

A modified version of a comic by Manu Cornet

Nadella is a great CEO. Just not for desktop operating systems.

Satya Nadella took Microsoft’s stock from roughly $35 in 2014 to over $400 at its peak, killed the Nokia disaster before it could fully metastasize, repositioned the entire company around cloud infrastructure, and placed an early bet on OpenAI when AI was still considered expensive academic theater. Azure’s consistent 30%-plus year-over-year growth commands complete executive attention and pulls the best engineering talent in the building toward it like gravity. By any honest standard corporate metric, Nadella’s Microsoft is a legitimate turnaround story, and the shareholder returns are not fabricated. But Nadella is a cloud and enterprise person at his core, and consumer Windows is a mature product in a saturated market, which in corporate strategy language translates cleanly to “managed asset.” The product that generates excitement gets the architects and the product visionaries; the one that just needs to keep working gets whoever is left after that allocation is done.

Paul Thurrott, who has covered Microsoft longer than most of the current Windows team has worked there, documented what that organizational reality looks like in practice. He wrote that Microsoft “relegated Windows to a backwater world led by B-teamers as the brightest minds at the company moved onto more lucrative career opportunities in Azure and AI.” That is an organizational autopsy, not editorial frustration, and it explains the product trajectory better than any feature changelog can. The talent followed the money and the excitement, and what remained shipped a redesigned Start menu nobody requested, a Copilot key nobody asked for, and a feature that the security community identified as dangerous within hours of its public announcement. The B-team does not ship bad decisions out of malice; they ship them because nobody senior enough to stop them is paying attention.

This pattern has a name

Nadella did not invent this behavioral tendency; it recurs reliably enough across modern tech to qualify as its own CEO archetype. Elon Musk built Tesla into the most culturally significant car company on earth, then spent the better part of two years fixated on Twitter, rebranding it to X, eliminating roughly 80% of staff, and torching advertiser relationships that took years to build, while Tesla’s stock dropped roughly 40% in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Now, he’s discontinued two Tesla models permanently while focusing efforts on an extremely polarizing AI chatbot. Mark Zuckerberg committed somewhere between $40 and $50 billion to the metaverse between 2021 and 2023, a virtual world that peaked at approximately 300,000 daily active users on Meta Horizon Worlds, before quietly pivoting to AI and becoming a public figure most associated with jiu-jitsu tournaments. The pattern is consistent enough to have a shape: a CEO builds something genuinely dominant, gets pulled toward the next big technological narrative, and hands the original product to the maintenance crew while energy and capital chase the new story. The difference with Nadella is the scale of what he handed off.

What separates his case from Musk and Zuckerberg is that he did not get distracted from Windows. He consciously stripped it for parts. Azure and AI received the budget, the senior talent pipeline, and the executive attention. Windows received the downstream output of that redistribution: mandatory AI integrations nobody requested, hardware specifications designed around Microsoft’s AI keynote roadmap rather than user needs, and a product direction driven more by investor narrative than by any user research that has ever been made public. The ordinary people buying $400 laptops are absorbing the cost of that sacrifice. The shareholders benefiting from Azure’s quarterly growth numbers are not.

Enshittification, documented

Cory Doctorow’s enshittification framework describes a platform lifecycle: start good for users, degrade toward serving business partners, then degrade further to extract maximum value for shareholders at everyone else’s expense. Windows 11 maps cleanly onto the third stage. The Start menu was rebuilt from scratch for the Windows 11 launch, stripping out Live Tiles that users had configured over years and replacing them with a static grid that is less functional and harder to customize, with no usability gain justifying the regression. Drag-and-drop onto taskbar applications was removed entirely at launch and only partially restored after months of sustained community pressure. Windows 11 originally shipped without the ability to right-click the taskbar to open Task Manager, a function that had existed since Windows NT 4.0 in 1996, and whose removal was not a redesign decision so much as evidence that nobody tested the product against the habits of actual users.

Control Panel, introduced in 1985, and the modern Settings app, first introduced in 2012 with Windows 8, still coexist in parallel inside Windows 11 in 2026. Basic system configuration requires jumping between both because neither is complete on its own, and the logic governing which settings live in which interface has never been consistently explained or resolved. Thirteen years of two competing tools sharing the same OS, and Microsoft never cared enough about the end-user experience to finish the job. This is not a legacy oversight or a technical debt problem that nobody knows how to solve. It is a choice, visible in its incompleteness, that reveals how little Windows product ownership has mattered to anyone with the authority to demand better.

Where this leaves ordinary people

Windows remains the most practical OS for most consumers, and that matters because it means there is no clean exit for the people being failed by it. MacOS is polished and stable but paternalistic by design: Apple creates deliberate friction around installing software from outside its ecosystem, the interface carries a genuine learning curve for anyone transitioning from Windows, and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400. Sure you can buy the $599 MacBook Neo too, but it’s genuinely less of a laptop and more of a netbook. The price difference between a regular MacBook and a similarly spec’d Windows laptop is not marginal in most of the world, particularly in the markets where Windows adoption is highest. Linux is genuinely improving year over year and deserves acknowledgment for it, but recommending Ubuntu to a non-technical family member invites more trouble than relief. The alternatives exist, but they serve a different user than the one who has to ask for a laptop recommendation.

A regular person can still buy an affordable Windows machine, install whatever software they want, run games across a hardware range that nothing else matches, plug in any peripheral without a compatibility interrogation, and operate without being treated as a security risk for opening a file from outside a curated store. Microsoft is eroding that value proposition methodically, one forced integration at a time, but the erosion has not yet reached full collapse. As of early 2026, reporting suggests Microsoft is pulling back from the AI-everywhere approach in Windows and refocusing on core stability, with Paul Thurrott describing the shift as “something happened,” which from a journalist who has spent years documenting Windows’ decline with the exhausted precision of someone watching a building settle incorrectly reads as cautious acknowledgment rather than optimism. Whether that represents genuine reprioritization or noise management ahead of a Windows 12 announcement nobody has officially confirmed is the question worth watching.

Rebuilding trust after Recall, after a year of destabilizing updates, after years of treating the world’s most consequential operating system as a demo environment for products the market never asked for, takes considerably longer than a few stable patches and a tonal reset in engineering blog posts. The millions of people still on Windows 10, knowingly running an unsupported OS past its expiration date, made a rational call: the known risks of yesterday’s software beat the unpredictable risks of an OS whose roadmap is driven by whatever Microsoft needs to show investors next quarter. That is not the normal frustration cycle where users grumble and eventually upgrade. It is a trust deficit built through years of consistent bad decisions, and a few good patch cycles will not close it. The easiest tech recommendation in the world has become a pause, and the people responsible for that pause are too deep in Azure dashboards to understand what it actually costs.

The post Microsoft Broke the Only Thing That Actually Mattered first appeared on Yanko Design.

Microsoft Broke the Only Thing That Actually Mattered

Posted on by

Any tech nerd knows the unspoken contract that comes with being the only tech-literate person in the family. You get texts when someone’s laptop is slow, called over during the holidays to fix the router, and consulted every eighteen months when someone needs a new phone or computer. For years, the laptop question had a clean, confident answer: a Windows machine. Cheap entry points, massive software compatibility, games that actually run, no walled gardens, no ecosystem hostage situations, and enough flexibility that even a non-technical person could figure out the basics without feeling like they’d violated a terms of service agreement. But the last time someone asked me what laptop to get, I paused. For a good minute I asked myself, should I even recommend Windows anymore?

That pause is new, and it carries weight that no benchmark score or spec sheet can explain. The designated family tech person has historically been one of the most reliable organic distribution channels Windows ever had, recommending the same platform generation after generation because it worked, it was accessible, and there was nothing obviously better for normal people at a reasonable price. When that person hesitates, the platform has a problem. Microsoft built an empire on being the obvious, low-friction answer to the laptop question, and somewhere between Windows 10 and the Copilot era, they stopped protecting that position. And with Apple dropping a $599 MacBook just last week, that position seems even more in danger.

2024 CrowdStrike Outage

The OS that holds civilization together

Windows runs somewhere between 72 and 73 percent of the world’s desktops, and while that’s an impressive monopoly, it completely ignores the critical systems where Windows is actually even more prevalent and essential. Hospital admission systems, ATM networks, military command infrastructure, government offices, court systems, school networks, and banking operations across virtually every country on earth run on Windows. These institutions did not choose Windows out of preference; they are locked in through decades of infrastructure investment, software dependencies, and training costs that make switching systemically impractical at scale. The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident put a specific number on what this dependency looks like under pressure: one faulty content update to a single Windows security tool simultaneously bricked approximately 8.5 million machines, grounded over 8,500 flights globally, knocked hospital systems offline across multiple countries, and disabled 911 call centers across several US states. One third-party software layer, one bad update, and the operational skeleton of modern civic life visibly buckled.

That is the platform Microsoft has been treating as a vehicle for AI feature experiments. Recall, the AI tool Microsoft attempted to ship as part of Windows 11, worked by screenshotting the user’s screen every few seconds and storing those images locally to build a searchable timeline of everything they had ever done on the machine. Security researchers flagged it almost immediately as a catastrophic privacy liability: a permanent, silent, queryable record of every document, message, and webpage the screen had ever displayed. Microsoft paused the rollout after a fierce public backlash, but the revealing fact is that Recall cleared internal review in the first place. The teams approving that feature were not thinking about hospital clerks processing patient records, lawyers working with privileged communications, or government employees handling sensitive data. They were building a keynote demo.

The market is responding accordingly

Microsoft ended official Windows 10 support in October 2025, cutting off security patches for what was still the most widely used version of the OS. Months of upgrade campaigns, notification banners, and every available form of institutional pressure followed. The result: as of December 2025, Windows 10 sits at 44.68% market share and actually gained users after support ended, while Windows 11 dropped from 55.18% in October to 50.73% in December, shedding over four percentage points in two months while the officially dead OS clawed back ground. People are choosing to run a security-vulnerable, unsupported operating system rather than upgrade to the one Microsoft actively maintains, and that is not technophobia or inertia. It is a calculated judgment, made by millions of users independently, that the known risks of the old version beat the unknown risks of moving to the new one.

The TPM 2.0 hardware requirement blocked installation on millions of perfectly functional machines with no meaningful performance justification for everyday users, which meant the upgrade conversation started with resentment before it ever got to features. First-boot setup funnels new users toward a Microsoft account, with the offline bypass buried past the point where most non-technical people will ever find it. OneDrive integration sits deep enough in the OS that users regularly discover their Desktop files have been syncing to the cloud without understanding when or how they agreed to that. A fresh Windows 11 install in 2026 ships with TikTok, Instagram, Disney+, and a collection of Microsoft’s own unfinished apps pre-pinned to the Start menu, none of them arriving with any user consent. Copilot, which no consumer demand survey had identified as a priority, now appears in the OS sidebar, the taskbar, and since 2024, as a dedicated hardware key on new laptops, occupying real estate where a key with actual utility used to live.

Running alongside all of that is a separate update quality crisis that has been building its own track record. A January 2026 security update caused boot failures on certain Windows 11 machines, with Microsoft eventually tracing the issue to a botched December 2025 update that had left affected devices in what they diplomatically described as an “improper state.” An October 2025 security update broke VPN networking for enterprise users running OpenVPN and Cisco Secure Client, a bug that carried through the December patch cycle without a clean resolution. Security updates, the category Microsoft explicitly tells users they cannot afford to skip, became a threat to system stability in their own right. When the patch and the problem are indistinguishable from each other, the trust issue has moved well past inconvenience.

A modified version of a comic by Manu Cornet

Nadella is a great CEO. Just not for desktop operating systems.

Satya Nadella took Microsoft’s stock from roughly $35 in 2014 to over $400 at its peak, killed the Nokia disaster before it could fully metastasize, repositioned the entire company around cloud infrastructure, and placed an early bet on OpenAI when AI was still considered expensive academic theater. Azure’s consistent 30%-plus year-over-year growth commands complete executive attention and pulls the best engineering talent in the building toward it like gravity. By any honest standard corporate metric, Nadella’s Microsoft is a legitimate turnaround story, and the shareholder returns are not fabricated. But Nadella is a cloud and enterprise person at his core, and consumer Windows is a mature product in a saturated market, which in corporate strategy language translates cleanly to “managed asset.” The product that generates excitement gets the architects and the product visionaries; the one that just needs to keep working gets whoever is left after that allocation is done.

Paul Thurrott, who has covered Microsoft longer than most of the current Windows team has worked there, documented what that organizational reality looks like in practice. He wrote that Microsoft “relegated Windows to a backwater world led by B-teamers as the brightest minds at the company moved onto more lucrative career opportunities in Azure and AI.” That is an organizational autopsy, not editorial frustration, and it explains the product trajectory better than any feature changelog can. The talent followed the money and the excitement, and what remained shipped a redesigned Start menu nobody requested, a Copilot key nobody asked for, and a feature that the security community identified as dangerous within hours of its public announcement. The B-team does not ship bad decisions out of malice; they ship them because nobody senior enough to stop them is paying attention.

This pattern has a name

Nadella did not invent this behavioral tendency; it recurs reliably enough across modern tech to qualify as its own CEO archetype. Elon Musk built Tesla into the most culturally significant car company on earth, then spent the better part of two years fixated on Twitter, rebranding it to X, eliminating roughly 80% of staff, and torching advertiser relationships that took years to build, while Tesla’s stock dropped roughly 40% in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Now, he’s discontinued two Tesla models permanently while focusing efforts on an extremely polarizing AI chatbot. Mark Zuckerberg committed somewhere between $40 and $50 billion to the metaverse between 2021 and 2023, a virtual world that peaked at approximately 300,000 daily active users on Meta Horizon Worlds, before quietly pivoting to AI and becoming a public figure most associated with jiu-jitsu tournaments. The pattern is consistent enough to have a shape: a CEO builds something genuinely dominant, gets pulled toward the next big technological narrative, and hands the original product to the maintenance crew while energy and capital chase the new story. The difference with Nadella is the scale of what he handed off.

What separates his case from Musk and Zuckerberg is that he did not get distracted from Windows. He consciously stripped it for parts. Azure and AI received the budget, the senior talent pipeline, and the executive attention. Windows received the downstream output of that redistribution: mandatory AI integrations nobody requested, hardware specifications designed around Microsoft’s AI keynote roadmap rather than user needs, and a product direction driven more by investor narrative than by any user research that has ever been made public. The ordinary people buying $400 laptops are absorbing the cost of that sacrifice. The shareholders benefiting from Azure’s quarterly growth numbers are not.

Enshittification, documented

Cory Doctorow’s enshittification framework describes a platform lifecycle: start good for users, degrade toward serving business partners, then degrade further to extract maximum value for shareholders at everyone else’s expense. Windows 11 maps cleanly onto the third stage. The Start menu was rebuilt from scratch for the Windows 11 launch, stripping out Live Tiles that users had configured over years and replacing them with a static grid that is less functional and harder to customize, with no usability gain justifying the regression. Drag-and-drop onto taskbar applications was removed entirely at launch and only partially restored after months of sustained community pressure. Windows 11 originally shipped without the ability to right-click the taskbar to open Task Manager, a function that had existed since Windows NT 4.0 in 1996, and whose removal was not a redesign decision so much as evidence that nobody tested the product against the habits of actual users.

Control Panel, introduced in 1985, and the modern Settings app, first introduced in 2012 with Windows 8, still coexist in parallel inside Windows 11 in 2026. Basic system configuration requires jumping between both because neither is complete on its own, and the logic governing which settings live in which interface has never been consistently explained or resolved. Thirteen years of two competing tools sharing the same OS, and Microsoft never cared enough about the end-user experience to finish the job. This is not a legacy oversight or a technical debt problem that nobody knows how to solve. It is a choice, visible in its incompleteness, that reveals how little Windows product ownership has mattered to anyone with the authority to demand better.

Where this leaves ordinary people

Windows remains the most practical OS for most consumers, and that matters because it means there is no clean exit for the people being failed by it. MacOS is polished and stable but paternalistic by design: Apple creates deliberate friction around installing software from outside its ecosystem, the interface carries a genuine learning curve for anyone transitioning from Windows, and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400. Sure you can buy the $599 MacBook Neo too, but it’s genuinely less of a laptop and more of a netbook. The price difference between a regular MacBook and a similarly spec’d Windows laptop is not marginal in most of the world, particularly in the markets where Windows adoption is highest. Linux is genuinely improving year over year and deserves acknowledgment for it, but recommending Ubuntu to a non-technical family member invites more trouble than relief. The alternatives exist, but they serve a different user than the one who has to ask for a laptop recommendation.

A regular person can still buy an affordable Windows machine, install whatever software they want, run games across a hardware range that nothing else matches, plug in any peripheral without a compatibility interrogation, and operate without being treated as a security risk for opening a file from outside a curated store. Microsoft is eroding that value proposition methodically, one forced integration at a time, but the erosion has not yet reached full collapse. As of early 2026, reporting suggests Microsoft is pulling back from the AI-everywhere approach in Windows and refocusing on core stability, with Paul Thurrott describing the shift as “something happened,” which from a journalist who has spent years documenting Windows’ decline with the exhausted precision of someone watching a building settle incorrectly reads as cautious acknowledgment rather than optimism. Whether that represents genuine reprioritization or noise management ahead of a Windows 12 announcement nobody has officially confirmed is the question worth watching.

Rebuilding trust after Recall, after a year of destabilizing updates, after years of treating the world’s most consequential operating system as a demo environment for products the market never asked for, takes considerably longer than a few stable patches and a tonal reset in engineering blog posts. The millions of people still on Windows 10, knowingly running an unsupported OS past its expiration date, made a rational call: the known risks of yesterday’s software beat the unpredictable risks of an OS whose roadmap is driven by whatever Microsoft needs to show investors next quarter. That is not the normal frustration cycle where users grumble and eventually upgrade. It is a trust deficit built through years of consistent bad decisions, and a few good patch cycles will not close it. The easiest tech recommendation in the world has become a pause, and the people responsible for that pause are too deep in Azure dashboards to understand what it actually costs.

The post Microsoft Broke the Only Thing That Actually Mattered first appeared on Yanko Design.

Alpine’s Wildest F1 Concept Car Concept Uses a Magnetic Levitation Cockpit to Protect Its Driver

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If Alpine’s 2026 season is about consolidation, about switching to Mercedes power units and clawing back from last place in the Constructors’ Championship, then HakHyeon Lee’s Alpine Horizon concept is the opposite impulse entirely. This is a designer throwing Alpine’s arrow logo onto a closed-cockpit hypercar with a magnetically levitating driver pod, wire-tethered to a chassis that borrows its DNA from Le Mans prototypes rather than anything on the F1 grid. Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto are busy trying to drag the real Alpine up the standings, but Lee’s concept lives in a universe where the brand already won everything and started experimenting with physics.

Alpine confirmed in February that it will withdraw from the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class after this season, ending a program that includes the A424’s maiden victory at Fuji in 2025. The historic Viry-Chatillon facility, home to Renault’s F1 engines for nearly 50 years, faces an uncertain future now that both the power unit program and the WEC effort are winding down. Lee’s Horizon arrives against that backdrop, a vision of Alpine as an endurance powerhouse while the real endurance team prepares for its final campaign with Charles Milesi, Ferdinand Habsburg, and Antonio Felix da Costa carrying the flag one last time.

Designer: HakHyeon Lee

The centerpiece of the Horizon is its magnetic levitation cockpit, and the idea is genuinely ambitious. Lee proposes using electromagnetic repulsion between rails on the chassis frame and magnetic devices in the cockpit pod to physically lift the driver compartment off the car’s body. The claimed benefit is a ride that absorbs sudden acceleration forces and jump sections in ways conventional suspension cannot, essentially decoupling the driver’s experience from the violence at the contact patches below. High-strength wire tethers prevent the cockpit from separating entirely, acting as a mechanical leash for what is otherwise a floating capsule.

From a safety perspective, the Horizon’s fully enclosed cockpit speaks to a debate that has followed Formula 1 since the Halo became mandatory in 2018. The FIA tested closed canopy designs before settling on the titanium Halo, and their reasoning came down to driver extraction: a closed cockpit with more structural complexity could trap a driver in a burning car. Romain Grosjean’s fiery 2020 Bahrain crash validated that thinking, with the Frenchman escaping largely unassisted while the Halo deflected the barrier from his head. But Lee’s Horizon sidesteps this entirely because closed cockpits are already standard in endurance racing, where LMDh and LMH cars run enclosed driver cells as a matter of course.

And that’s the critical distinction here. The Horizon shares almost nothing with a modern F1 car. Current F1 machines are narrow, open-wheeled, open-cockpit designs with exposed suspension and aggressive front wings dictated by FIA regulations. The Horizon sits low and wide with massive wheel arches that swallow the tires, a long rear overhang housing a substantial diffuser, and a front splitter that could double as a snowplow. Its silhouette reads as a Toyota GR010 or Porsche 963 cousin, filtered through Lee’s smooth, organic surfacing language where the canopy melts into the car’s spine without a single harsh panel gap.

Inside the cockpit, Lee imagines gimbal-mounted seats designed for what he calls “weightless racing,” working in concert with the floating pod to keep the driver’s body stable under extreme forces. It is a layered isolation system: the cockpit floats on magnets, the seat pivots on gimbals within it, and the driver theoretically experiences something closer to stillness while the car battles the track surface below. Batteries housed in the chassis power the entire magnetic levitation system, and cutaway views show them positioned low for center-of-gravity optimization.

Alpine’s real motorsport situation makes a concept like this hit differently. The F1 team finished dead last in the 2025 Constructors’ Championship, and Flavio Briatore’s stated ambition for 2026 is a modest climb to P6 on Mercedes customer power. The WEC team is running its farewell season before the Hypercar program shuts down permanently, with the Viry-Chatillon workforce of 300-plus employees facing reassignment or redundancy. Lee’s Horizon exists in none of that reality, and the gap between aspiration and circumstance is exactly what makes automotive concept design so compelling.

The post Alpine’s Wildest F1 Concept Car Concept Uses a Magnetic Levitation Cockpit to Protect Its Driver first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Custom BMW R 1300 R Superhooligan Pays Tribute To 50 Years Since Its First Daytona Victory

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Fifty years ago this month, a team of engineers and riders rolled three air-cooled German boxer twins into Daytona’s paddock and lined them up against a field of screaming Japanese inline-fours that everyone assumed would bury them. Butler & Smith, BMW’s US importer at the time, had hired an aerospace engineer named Udo Gietl to prepare the R 90 S race bikes, a man who had previously worked for NASA and on Polaris submarines before turning his attention to motorcycle tuning. Gietl shortened the boxer’s horizontal cylinders to buy lean angle clearance, fitted titanium connecting rods, and replaced the stock twin rear shocks with a custom Koni monoshock adapted from a Formula 1 car.

What the bikes lacked in horsepower against the Kawasakis and Ducatis, they more than recovered in stability and handling. On March 6, 1976, Butler & Smith rider Steve McLaughlin crossed the line first in the inaugural AMA Superbike Championship Series race, with teammate Reg Pridmore a photo finish behind him. A third Butler & Smith bike, ridden by Gary Fisher, had led for several laps before a gearbox failure ended what would have been a storybook 1-2-3 sweep. BMW won that race, Pridmore won the championship at season’s end, and the Teutonic touring machine that Cycle World had nicknamed a “stone axe” had beaten the field at its own game.

Designer: BMW Motorrad

BMW Motorrad has now built the R 1300 R Superhooligan to mark that half-century anniversary, and if there is a more appropriate way to honor a chapter of racing history, it is hard to imagine what it would be. The one-off custom was assembled by a small internal team from the BMW Motorrad Custom Speed Shop, including designer Andreas Martin and color designer Theresa Stukenbrock, working from a stock R 1300 R as the foundation. The orange over carbon livery on the finished bike is an unmistakable nod to McLaughlin’s #83 R 90 S, with the race number itself relocated to a front number board mounted in place of a headlamp, a detail that communicates the build’s intent without any ambiguity.

The Ilmberger carbon bodywork wraps the boxer’s cylinders so completely that the motor reads almost like a monoblock, dissolving the traditional visual separation between engine and frame that defines most naked bikes. Blue-anodized fork legs on the extended Wilbers USD front end and matching blue frame rails on the aluminum rear subframe pull the accent color directly from McLaughlin’s 1976 livery, with additional blue brake calipers sourced from the BMW M 1000 RR superbike reinforcing the connection across the front axle.

The R 1300 R is already a serious machine in standard form, producing 145 hp and 110 lb-ft of torque from its 1,300 cc twin-cylinder boxer, but the Superhooligan’s performance upgrades go further than cosmetics. The Wilbers fork has been lengthened by 30 mm to increase lean angle clearance, a modification that directly echoes the cylinder-shortening work Gietl did to the original R 90 S for the same purpose. The M 1000 RR carbon front wheel improves steering response and reduces unsprung weight, while the Akrapovic titanium exhaust system with its carbon end silencer saves mass at the rear and adds the kind of mechanical bark that a build like this demands. CNC footpegs and fully adjustable Advik levers complete the track-ready ergonomic package. With all of it together, BMW rates the Superhooligan at 171 mph. There is no headlamp, which makes it ineligible for road registration, and while that is a minor tragedy, the bike was always going to the track rather than the street.

McLaughlin’s legacy extends well beyond that single Daytona photo finish. As the AMA’s riders’ representative through the early 1970s, he was the primary force behind getting Superbike racing elevated to national championship status in the United States, working alongside promoters and publishers to build the infrastructure that made the 1976 series possible. He later became the central figure in creating the World Superbike Championship, which launched in 1988 and remains one of motorcycle racing’s premier international series today. The AMA inducted him into its Hall of Fame, noting that without McLaughlin’s organizational work, the racing landscape the Superhooligan now celebrates might not have existed at all.

BMW Motorrad brand ambassador Nate Kern is racing the Superhooligan in round one of the Mission Foods Super Hooligan National Championship at Daytona this year, putting a competition-spec descendant of McLaughlin’s race-winning machine back on the same circuit where it all started. During the Daytona 200 weekend, the Superhooligan was displayed in the paddock alongside the original 1976 Butler & Smith R 90 S race bikes, with McLaughlin, Pridmore, Gietl, and Fisher’s daughters Heidi and Kimberly all present for the occasion. Few anniversaries in motorsport get marked with this much honesty.

The post This Custom BMW R 1300 R Superhooligan Pays Tribute To 50 Years Since Its First Daytona Victory first appeared on Yanko Design.

One Galaxy S26 Ultra Case Glows in the Dark. The Other Has a Built-In Thermal Sensor. Pick One.

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Most people buy a phone case the same way they buy a phone. They want it to feel like them. Some people want basic, slim protection that keeps the phone looking as close to naked as possible. Others want rugged, military-grade armor that could survive a construction site. Some hunt for modular systems with swappable wallets and stands. Others obsess over grip texture, or thermal performance, or MagSafe ecosystem compatibility. The criteria are wildly personal, and the options are endless. It sounds like a trivial consumer category until you realize the global phone case market is worth tens of billions of dollars. People are buying identity as much as they are buying protection. Aulumu, the Shenzhen-based accessory brand with a growing cult following, seems to have understood this from day one.

Which is exactly why the brand showed up to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s launch with two cases that could hardly be more different from each other. The S26U Frosted Glow Case is a frosted TPU build with a photosensitive UFO disc on the back that charges under light and glows electric green in the dark, doubling as a MagSafe alignment guide. The S26U Ultra-Slim Aramid Fiber Case wraps the same phone in aerospace-grade 1500D woven fiber and hides a CoolHyper thermal management system inside, complete with a color-changing temperature indicator. One is for the person who wants their phone to have a personality. The other is for the person who treats their S26 Ultra like a workstation. Aulumu built both because the S26 Ultra owner is never just one type of person.

Designer: Aulumu

S26U Frosted Glow Case: A Glowing Case That Wants Your Attention (And Earns It)

The visual centerpiece of this case is the big glowing circle on the back. Aulumu calls it a “Glow UFO Design,” and it’s made from a photosensitive material that soaks up light during the day and gives off a bright green glow when the lights go out. It’s a neat trick that makes your phone easy to find on a nightstand and gives it a ton of personality. The graphic is printed using a two-layer IMD process, meaning it’s embedded inside the TPU plastic itself so you don’t have to worry about it fading or scratching off. The main body has a frosted, translucent finish, so you can still see a hint of the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s actual color, but with a diffused, softer look.

They also got the small details right, especially the parts you actually touch. Instead of turning the phone’s satisfyingly clicky buttons into mushy plastic bumps, Aulumu used separate aluminum alloy buttons that preserve that original tactile feel. That same metal is used to create a tough, raised lip around the entire camera module, giving you a solid barrier of protection that feels much more reassuring than a simple sliver of raised plastic.

That glowing ring isn’t just for looks, either; it’s the case’s built-in MagSafe magnet array. It’s a really clever way to integrate a functional feature into the core aesthetic, so you don’t have that generic white circle plastered on the back. All your MagSafe accessories, from chargers to wallets, snap right into place, guided by the UFO design. This thing is clearly built for someone who wants their phone to be a bit of a statement piece. It’s expressive and fun, but it doesn’t skimp on the practical stuff like good buttons and legitimate camera protection.

Why We Recommend It

You know a case design is working when the flashiest feature turns out to be the most functional one. The glowing UFO disc is a passive MagSafe alignment guide that charges under ambient light and radiates green in the dark, and it genuinely earns its place on the back of the phone. The 2-layer IMD construction keeps the embossed pattern from fading, the aluminum alloy buttons feel identical to the S26 Ultra’s own hardware, and the anti-slip dot texturing gives you real confidence holding a phone this large one-handed. All of that lands at $35.98. For someone who bought the S26 Ultra because they wanted their tech to have a personality, this case is the natural next step.

Click Here to Buy Now: $32.39 $35.98 (10% off, use coupon code “YANKO10OFF”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

S26U Ultra-Slim Aramid Fiber Case: A High-Performance Cover Built for the Power User

This case is wrapped in 1500D aramid fiber, which is the same family of high-strength synthetic material used in body armor and aerospace components. It’s incredibly thin and light, but it offers serious scratch resistance and rigidity that you just can’t get from plastic or silicone. The case barely adds any bulk to the Galaxy S26 Ultra, preserving its original form factor while giving it a stealthy, woven finish. The texture itself is smooth with just a hint of the interwoven pattern, providing a confident feel in the hand that isn’t exactly grippy, but certainly not slippery. It’s a piece of precision hardware for someone who appreciates advanced materials and wants protection that feels more engineered than simply molded.

What really separates this case from other aramid fiber options is the little tech-badge built into the back. Aulumu calls it the CoolHyper system, and it’s designed to help manage the S26 Ultra’s thermal output during heavy use. The system uses what the company calls “superconducting cooling” to pull heat away from the phone’s core. More practically, that little badge near the camera has a color-changing indicator that reacts to the phone’s temperature. It gives you a quick, visual cue when the device is heating up, making it a functional dashboard for power users who are gaming, editing video, or pushing the processor hard. It’s a genuinely nerdy feature that serves a real purpose.

Even with its focus on slimness and thermal tech, the case doesn’t neglect basic protection. The camera system is shielded by a raised aluminum alloy frame, providing a rigid barrier against drops and impacts right where the phone is most vulnerable. This metal accent adds to the case’s premium, industrial feel while serving a critical defensive role. The whole package is designed for the person who views their S26 Ultra as a high-performance tool. It offers a sophisticated, understated aesthetic backed by aerospace-grade materials and a clever, functional cooling monitor, delivering on the promise of being slim, strong, and genuinely smart.

Why We Recommend It

The S26 Ultra is a device people buy for peak performance, and most cases punish you for doing exactly that by trapping heat against an already warm chassis. The CoolHyper system changes that equation, with a silicone pad and aluminum alloy plate combination that Aulumu claims keeps temperatures up to 1-2°C cooler during heavy workloads. Add 1500D aramid fiber construction at 0.6mm on the frame and 1.2mm on the back, and you have a case that makes the phone feel barely dressed while actually making it thermally smarter than going naked. The color-changing temperature indicator is the kind of detail a power user appreciates immediately. At $69.98, this is the case for someone who treats their S26 Ultra like a tool and wants every component around it pulling its weight.

Click Here to Buy Now: $62.99 $69.98 (10% off, use coupon code “YANKO10OFF”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post One Galaxy S26 Ultra Case Glows in the Dark. The Other Has a Built-In Thermal Sensor. Pick One. first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Best iPad Pro Accessories for 2026 Are Not What Apple Wants You to Buy

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Apple has always had a talent for making hardware that feels complete right out of the box, and the iPad is perhaps the finest example of that philosophy. Sleek, powerful, and achingly well-designed, it arrives looking like the answer to every creative and productive need you could possibly have.

But here is the thing about potential: it needs the right conditions to fully bloom. The iPad’s best qualities, its precision display, its Apple Pencil sensitivity, its versatility as both a consumption and creation device, stay partially dormant until the right accessories step in. A great screen protector does not just guard glass. It transforms how the device feels in your hands, how your Pencil glides across the surface, how confidently you carry it into the world. The right accessories are where the iPad stops being impressive and starts being indispensable. That’s where ESR’s accessories come in.

ESR Shift Magnetic Case: Two Cases in One, Zero Compromises

Most iPad cases make you choose between traveling light and having a proper stand. The Shift sidesteps that entirely with a two-piece magnetic system where the lightweight inner shell works as a standalone case for days when you are just carrying the iPad around, and the outer magnetic cover snaps on when you actually need to prop the thing up and get work done. The magnets are strong enough that the two pieces feel unified when together, but separating them takes about a second. For the 13-inch configuration the combined weight sits around 187 grams, which is not ultralight, but the payoff justifies it.

That payoff is nine stand configurations spread across landscape and portrait orientations. Six landscape viewing angles sweep from 30 to 75 degrees, covering everything from upright movie-watching to comfortable reading. Three shallower angles between 15 and 25 degrees are specifically tuned for Apple Pencil use, keeping the writing surface at a tilt that feels natural rather than flat. Apple Pencil charges magnetically straight through the case the whole time.

Wirecutter called it one of their two best iPad Pro cases of 2026, and it is easy to see why when you consider the sheer range of use cases it handles. It fits iPad Pro 11-inch and 13-inch M4 and M5, and iPad Air 11-inch and 13-inch M2 and M3. ESR covers it with a 12-month warranty that extends to 24 months with registration.

Why We Recommend It

The modular approach is the winner here, and it is one that very few case makers have executed well at this price point. At around $46, you are getting two genuinely functional products in one: a slim everyday carry case and a multi-angle stand system that covers more configurations than most dedicated stand cases do on their own. The nine stand angles are not a gimmick, they cover real use cases… so if you own an iPad Pro or iPad Air and use it across multiple contexts in a single day, the Shift is one of the few cases that actually keeps up.

Click Here to Buy Now: $45.99.

ESR UltraFit Armorite Screen Protector: Damage-proof Clarity for the iPad You Actually Use

Screen protectors have a reputation problem. Most of them are thin sheets of mediocre glass that technically count as protection until something actually hits them, at which point you find out exactly how mediocre they were. ESR’s Armorite glass is built from high-alumina tempered material that withstands 110 pounds of pressure, hits 9H on the hardness scale, and absorbs impacts at seven times the rate of standard tempered glass. That impact figure comes from ESR’s own lab tests involving a 64-gram steel ball dropped from 5.7 feet, which is a more meaningful benchmark in this context. At 0.33mm thick, it adds virtually nothing to the profile of the iPad.

The UltraFit Tray installation system deserves its own mention because applying a screen protector to a large iPad without bubbles or dust is genuinely difficult, and ESR has basically solved it. You place the iPad face-down into a green plastic alignment frame, close the lid, press down, and pull a tab. Automatic dust removal and electrostatic adsorption do the rest. The result is a consistently clean, bubble-free application that takes about thirty seconds and requires no skill whatsoever. The tray is reusable, which is handy since each pack includes two protectors and two cleaning kits.

The finish here is high-gloss and fully transparent, preserving the iPad’s display exactly as Apple intended it. Colors stay accurate, brightness stays unaffected, and the oleophobic coating keeps fingerprints from building up in a way that is genuinely hard to wipe off. The one honest drawback is that glossy glass in direct sunlight becomes a mirror, which is less a product flaw and more just physics. The protector also stops just short of the device edges, though ESR’s own case lips cover that gap neatly. Pricing runs from $17.99 to $23.99 across the iPad Pro, iPad Air, and iPad 10th through 12th generation lineup.

Why We Recommend It

Seven times the impact absorption of standard tempered glass and a 110-pound pressure tolerance are numbers that matter on a device you are carrying daily and setting down on surfaces that are not always clean or soft. But the UltraFit Tray is equally significant, because a screen protector you apply badly is barely better than no screen protector at all, and ESR has made foolproof application genuinely accessible. For $17.99 for the iPad mini to $21.99 for the 11″ iPad Air going up to $28.99 for the 13″ iPad Pro, you are getting a level of protection and an installation experience that typically costs more when competing brands bother to offer it. The display stays completely unaffected. At this price, that combination is hard to beat.

Click Here to Buy Now: $18.69 $23.99 (22% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

ESR UltraFit Armorite Paper-Feel Screen Protector: The Tempered Glass That Thinks It’s a Sketchbook

Anyone who has tried drawing seriously on a standard glass screen knows the feeling: the Pencil glides too fast, lines overshoot, and the whole experience feels slightly disconnected from what your hand is trying to do. The Paper-Feel Armorite fixes that with a matte surface texture that introduces just enough friction to slow the Pencil tip down and ground the drawing experience in something that actually feels tactile. Underneath that texture is the same high-alumina Armorite glass as the clear version, with the same 9H hardness, the same 110-pound pressure tolerance, and the same 5x impact absorption over generic competitors. The matte treatment sits on top of a material that is genuinely engineered to protect.

The texture does a second thing that has nothing to do with drawing. It scatters incoming light instead of bouncing it straight back at you, which cuts glare dramatically compared to the clear version and makes outdoor or bright-room use considerably more comfortable. The tradeoff is that the diffusion layer softens the display slightly, pulling a little brightness and color saturation out of the picture. For illustrators and note-takers working in mixed lighting conditions, that is a trade worth making without much hesitation. For photographers doing color-critical editing or people who watch a lot of HDR video, the clear Armorite is the better fit.

Installation uses the same UltraFit Tray system as the rest of the Armorite line, with the same dust-removal mechanism and the same reliably bubble-free results. The textured protector does come with a caveat – buy it only if you’re looking to emulate the feel of paper against your Apple Pencil. The clarity you get with the regular glossy UltraFit Armorite gets a slight downgrade thanks to the matte microtexture, but that barely noticeable downgrade pays its dividends in giving your stylus a pencil-on-paper-like effect.

Why We Recommend It

Paper-feel protectors have historically meant a choice between good texture and good glass, with most budget options compromising heavily on the latter. The Armorite Paper-Feel closes that gap by putting a quality matte surface on top of the same high-alumina tempered glass that anchors the clear version. You get the drawing experience and the structural protection in the same product, which used to require spending significantly more. The glare reduction is a legitimate bonus on top of the tactile benefit, especially on the larger iPad Pro and Air models where screen real estate makes reflections particularly distracting. Starting at $20.99 for the small iPad mini and topping out at $30.99 for the 13-inch Pro configuration, it sits at a price that makes the clear-versus-paper decision easy to revisit if your needs change.

Click Here to Buy Now: $24.29 $26.99 (10% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post The Best iPad Pro Accessories for 2026 Are Not What Apple Wants You to Buy first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Self-Sustaining Building in China Grows Food on Every Floor, And It Was Built On A Farmland Plot

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China loses farmland to urbanization at a pace that makes most planners nervous, and the usual architectural response is to pour a slab and move on. Wei Dou took a different position with the Verdant Syndicate, a mixed-use complex in Henan designed around the premise that the agricultural identity of a site deserves to survive its redevelopment. The project occupies 4,269 square meters of former farmland and organizes itself as two offset stepped volumes flanking a shared courtyard, wrapped in warm timber cladding and draped in cascading vertical vegetation from ground level to roofline.

What makes the building function as a living system is a tenant-operated planting board system, where modular growing panels connect directly to embedded water and nutrition lines. People who work and gather inside the building are also tending it, turning every terrace and balcony into a productive growing surface. A gravity-powered rainwater collection system handles irrigation without mechanical pumping, closing the resource loop on a plot that once fed the surrounding community through entirely different means.

Designer: Wei Dou

Splitting the program across two volumes instead of one monolithic block gives the courtyard between them genuine solar access, which matters enormously when your facade is a vertical farm. The stepped terrace profile on the taller volume echoes terraced agricultural landscapes without being literal about it, and the offset placement of the two blocks creates a ground-level commons that functions as the social spine of the whole complex. At 60 by 71 meters, the site is compact enough that every planning decision carries weight, and Dou clearly understood that.

Tenants can install, reconfigure, or remove individual planting panels, each one tapping into water and nutrient lines built directly into the structure. The building’s productive surface is never fixed, it adapts to whoever is using it and what they want to grow, season by season. Most biophilic buildings treat greenery as a fixed aesthetic layer applied during construction and maintained by a facilities team. Here the maintenance is distributed, social, and intentional, which is a fundamentally different model and one that actually has a chance of working long term.

The facade runs slim vertical members in a warm timber tone, with terraces wide enough to support real planting depth rather than cosmetic window boxes. Solar panels sit integrated into a mid-level roof deck canopy under a mature tree, handling shade and energy harvesting simultaneously without dedicating separate real estate to either function. The ground floor activates with retail, and the renders show it occupied and commercially legible, not the ghostly pedestrian utopia that kills most concept presentations.

Henan is a province with deep agricultural history and rapid urbanization pressure, which makes it exactly the right place to ask whether a building can carry both realities at once. The Verdant Syndicate backs that argument with a gravity-fed water loop, a modular tenant farming system, GIS and CAD-optimized solar orientation, and a courtyard massing strategy that keeps the whole thing from tipping into greenwash territory. Whether the planting board system performs in practice the way it does in simulation is the real open question. The framework is sound, and the building looks extraordinary doing it.

The post This Self-Sustaining Building in China Grows Food on Every Floor, And It Was Built On A Farmland Plot first appeared on Yanko Design.

Meta better be worried. Qwen’s affordable AI Smart Glasses have cameras, speakers, and even a built-in display

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It was one of the more audacious moves at MWC 2026. Right across the aisle from Meta’s smart glasses booth at Fira Gran Via, Alibaba’s Qwen pavilion was anchored by a pair of glasses so oversized they were practically architecture, a giant sculptural prop that functioned as a very literal invitation to come over and look. People did. And once they got close enough to see the actual products, the conversation shifted fairly quickly from “interesting marketing stunt” to “wait, what exactly is this?”

What they found were two frame styles that could sit in any optician’s window without raising an eyebrow. A rectangular wayfarer in matte black, clean and understated. A rounded frame in warm tortoiseshell with a two-tone contrast that leans vintage without being self-conscious about it. Both carry the “Qwen” wordmark on the temple, small and unobtrusive. Both have cameras tucked discreetly at the hinge corners rather than mounted on the bridge. And inside the lenses, visible only when you look closely, is the faint shimmer of a waveguide display.

Designer: Qwen

That last detail is where the competitive context gets genuinely interesting. The smart glasses market in 2026 has essentially sorted itself into two camps. On one side, you have camera-and-speakers devices like the mainstream Ray-Ban Metas, starting around $299, which have been wildly successful because they figured out that looking normal matters more than most features. On the other, you have display-first devices like the Even Realities G1 and G2, which sit at $599 and offer binocular waveguide displays, but sacrifice the camera entirely and strip out the speakers to keep weight down to a remarkable 36 grams. Meta entered the premium display tier late last year with the $799 Ray-Ban Display, a full-colour waveguide in one eye, a 12MP camera, and open-ear audio. It’s a compelling package, but $799 is a significant ask for a first-generation product in a category most consumers are still on the fence about.

The Qwen glasses, if they land close to the pricing of Alibaba’s previous Quark AI Glasses at around $277, would be threading an entirely different needle. Camera, display, on-device AI, and a frame design that competes aesthetically with anything in this space, all at a price that undercuts the Even G2 by more than half and the Meta Display by almost two-thirds. On paper, that’s a serious value proposition. The technology powering it is a lightened version of Qwen 3.5, running directly on the device rather than offloading everything to the cloud, which matters both for latency and for use cases where connectivity is limited.

The honest caveat is the brand itself, and it’s worth sitting with. Qwen is well regarded within AI research circles, particularly since Alibaba open-sourced much of the model family and developers worldwide have built on it. But Qwen as a consumer product, as something you’d buy at a store or recommend to a friend in Europe or North America, carries essentially zero name recognition. The app ecosystem that Alibaba plans to migrate onto the glasses, things like food delivery and ride-hailing integrations, is deeply rooted in China’s domestic services infrastructure and doesn’t translate directly to international markets without significant rework. Meta spent years building the Ray-Ban brand before it put a chip inside the frame. Alibaba is trying to build hardware credibility and software trust simultaneously, in markets where it starts from a cold position.

None of that makes the product less interesting. The Qwen glasses are arguably the first device in this category to arrive with a camera, a waveguide display, on-device AI, and a design that doesn’t require the wearer to make aesthetic compromises, all at a price that could realistically attract mainstream buyers rather than just enthusiasts. With North America and Western Europe commanding the vast majority of global smart glasses demand, Alibaba is clearly going after the big markets, and the product is credible enough to deserve a proper hearing there. The harder work, convincing people in those markets to trust a brand they have never heard of with a face-worn AI device that has cameras and a display, is the challenge that no amount of giant sculpture at a trade show can solve on its own.

What MWC established is that the hardware is real, the ambition is real, and the timing is deliberate. Alibaba confirmed that AI earbuds and a smart ring are coming later this year under the same Qwen brand, building out a wearable ecosystem that mirrors the strategy Meta has been executing for several years. The glasses are the opening argument. Whether the rest of the world ends up listening is the part that plays out over the next twelve months.

The post Meta better be worried. Qwen’s affordable AI Smart Glasses have cameras, speakers, and even a built-in display first appeared on Yanko Design.

Rotary Tools Can Damage Fine Details, HOZO’s 13,000 SPM Micro Sander Cleanly Sands 3D Prints and Miniatures

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Scroll through any Gunpla forum, 3D printing subreddit, or miniature painting Discord, and you’ll find the same complaint surfacing like clockwork: detail sanding is the worst part of the hobby. Rotary tools spin too aggressively and melt plastic. Orbital sanders are physically too large to reach the spots that matter. And hand sanding with tiny strips of sandpaper taped to popsicle sticks or wrapped around toothpicks? It works, technically, in the same way that crossing an ocean in a rowboat technically works. Makers have been hacking together solutions for this problem forever, modifying dental picks, repurposing nail files, spending hours on finishing work that should take minutes. The tooling industry, meanwhile, has mostly responded by miniaturizing existing designs and hoping for the best. Smaller orbital. Smaller rotary. Same fundamental problems, just in a tinier package.

HOZO’s NeoSander takes a different route entirely. Rather than shrinking down a tool that was never meant for fine detail work, HOZO went back to the core question of what precision sanding actually requires and built around the answer. The result is a palm-sized, cordless reciprocating sander powered by a patented linear motor that delivers 13,000 strokes per minute of direct, gear-free motion, paired with a system of 8 swappable head shapes and 8 sandpaper grits that covers everything from rough shaping to mirror-smooth finishing. It’s the kind of purpose-built approach that makes you wonder why it took this long for someone to try it.

Designer: HOZO

Click Here to Buy Now: $69 $99 ($30 off). Hurry, only 291/2000 left! Raised over $2.2 million.

HOZO moves away from the traditional drivetrain; NeoSander’s vertically mounted reciprocating linear motor sends power straight to the tip with zero intermediary conversion from rotational to linear energy. That directness pays off in concentricity under 0.05mm, which in plain terms means the sanding head tracks true instead of wobbling like a bobblehead at speed. Competing sanders sit at 0.30mm or worse, and that difference is the gap between sanding where you intend and accidentally eating into a surface you just spent two hours painting.

The NeoSander holds a constant 13,000 SPM and lets you dial the stroke length between 0.6mm and 1.8mm, rather than using variable RPM that changes the tool’s rhythm and makes behavior harder to predict. Shorter strokes for delicate edges on resin prints, longer strokes when you’re leveling a seam line on a 1/100 scale kit. That translates to a linear speed range of 260 to 780 mm/s, giving you meaningful control over aggressiveness without the tool ever feeling inconsistent under your fingers. A counterweight inside the body moves opposite to the sanding head too, canceling out 85% of handle vibration, which matters enormously during the kind of 30-minute sanding sessions that detail work demands.

Eight sanding head shapes cover pointed tips for crevices, slim and wide flats for panel lines and broad surfaces, half-cylinders and arcs for curved geometry, and acute and right-angle heads for corners and recesses. Pair those with eight grits from coarse 180 all the way to 1500 for polishing, and you have up to 74 possible combinations when you factor in the optional foam-backed sandpapers that conform to irregular surfaces. A color-coded rack keeps everything sorted by grit so you’re not playing guessing games mid-session. HOZO also threw in two saw blades, a curved blade for rough cuts and a jigsaw blade for through-cuts, because the same reciprocating motion that sands also drives a 0.2mm micro-tooth saw with a patented anti-binding pattern.

The whole thing weighs 89 grams (3.13 oz) without a head attached, measures 104 x 53 x 28mm, and runs on a 3.7V 1,100 mAh battery that delivers 45 minutes of heavy use or up to 240 minutes of lighter work. The aluminum alloy and magnesium shell carries an IP54 splash rating, so wet sanding is on the table. Dock charging takes 30 minutes to full, and USB-C keeps things universal. HOZO has shipped eight successful products through Kickstarter before this, including the NeoBlade ultrasonic cutter, and they’ve built out companion tools like the NeoBlock for flat-surface sanding that pair with the NeoSander for a complete finishing workflow.

The NeoSander Pro starts at $69 (against a $99 MSRP) and includes the sander, a basic sanding head set, sandpaper kit, and a carrying case. The Premium Combo, priced at $129, comes with multicolor-coded heads, a saw collection, and a charging dock. For the deep-end makers, the $499 Maker Pro All-In Combo bundles the NeoSander, NeoBlock, and NeoBlade with their full accessory suites at 39% off retail. The campaign runs on Kickstarter with an estimated shipping date of May 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $69 $99 ($30 off). Hurry, only 291/2000 left! Raised over $2.2 million.

The post Rotary Tools Can Damage Fine Details, HOZO’s 13,000 SPM Micro Sander Cleanly Sands 3D Prints and Miniatures first appeared on Yanko Design.

Glyph Lights? Tecno Put Actual Plasma Lightning Inside One Of Its Phones At MWC 2026

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While Nothing flits with Glyph Matrixes and Bars, Tecno decided to infuse the soul of Thor into its latest phone concept. Dubbed the Pova Neon, this phone was possibly the most unique thing we’ve seen in the phone market in a while. Built inside the back of a phone is an inert gas chamber that emits beams of plasma thanks to high voltages that’s passed through the gas. Touch the glass panel separating you from the plasma, and the lightning gathers around your fingertips, quite like it would around a tesla coil, if you ever saw or owned one as a kid.

The detail (and the execution) is impressive, but it begs the question – who needs this?! Why does this exist? And what exactly is its purpose? Why must I have lightning trapped inside the back of my smartphone? Doesn’t it already do enough?? Or maybe the plasma lights are a great distraction from your doomscrolling habit. I’d probably pick staring at random beams of light than scroll through the news…

Designer: Tecno

The Pova Neon is just a concept. Tecno doesn’t plan on building this at all, not just because it’s complicated – it’s also fragile, fairly dangerous, and really doesn’t do much to make the phone better. Adding inert gases at the back removes the ability to add a wireless charging coil there, which means no MagSafe either. You put a case on the phone and you lose all novelty immediately. And drop the phone and you genuinely risk a fairly serious fire hazard.

But for what it’s worth, the phone is a bundle of fun. In the bright lights of MWC, the plasma wasn’t fairly visible. But the minute we put a coat around the phone to block light out, the lightning looked genuinely amazing. The random patterns, the interaction with your fingertip, it’s all entirely cosmetic, but it’s also somewhat cosmic! Good job flexing your tech chops, Tecno. I mean, besides the fact that they actually built a modular smartphone ecosystem which managed to win YD’s Best of MWC Award!

The post Glyph Lights? Tecno Put Actual Plasma Lightning Inside One Of Its Phones At MWC 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.