Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

The Vintage Apple Computer That Belongs on Every Tech Lover’s Shelf, in LEGO Form

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In 1977, Steve Jobs walked through the kitchen appliance section of a Macy’s department store and came away with a vision for what a personal computer should look like. The result, shaped by industrial designer Jerry Manock and powered by Wozniak’s engineering genius, was the Apple II: a smooth, warm-beige enclosure that suggested domesticity rather than machinery. It belonged on a desk the way a telephone did. That calculated approachability helped sell millions of units across sixteen years of production.

LEGO Ideas builder BrickMechanic57 has translated that design philosophy into 1,772 pieces, and the attention to detail rewards anyone familiar with the original. The signature Pantone beige carries across the computer body, monitor, and dual Disk II drives. The rainbow Apple II badge sits front and center above the keyboard. Pull out the monitor screen and you get two display states: the authentic green-on-black DOS boot screen or a clean, powered-off black panel.

Designer: BrickMechanic57

Wozniak designed the Disk II floppy controller over the 1977 Christmas holidays and reduced the chip count from the industry standard of dozens down to six. Competing controllers from the same era used 50-plus chips and cost significantly more. Apple sold the Disk II for $495 in 1978, and the engineering inside that price point was borderline absurd. BrickMechanic57 stacks two of them beside the main unit, exactly as they appeared on real desks, and a brick-built floppy disk element actually inserts into the lower drive.

The real Apple II keyboard had no cursor keys in its original 1977 configuration, a REPT key for repeating characters, and RESET sitting exposed and dangerous in the top-right corner like a trap for clumsy typists. The close-up render of this build shows every one of those details reproduced faithfully, including the staggered layout, the CTRL and ESC placement, and the POWER button isolated at the lower left. The rainbow Apple II badge above it is sharp enough to make a vintage collector emotional.

The swappable monitor screen states are what separate a good LEGO set from a great one. The LEGO NES set had the working cartridge slot. The LEGO Atari 2600 had the joystick. This build has a DOS boot screen reading “APPLE II / DOS VERSION 3.3 SYSTEM MASTER / JANUARY 1, 1983” in green phosphor text, and that alone justifies the piece count. The monitor face pulls out cleanly, the off-state panel drops in, and suddenly you have two different display moments from the same machine’s life.

LEGO Ideas is the platform where fan-designed builds compete to become official retail sets. Any project that hits 10,000 supporter votes within its window gets reviewed by LEGO’s own designers, and the strongest candidates go into production. Previous successes include the NES, the Polaroid OneStep SX-70, and the Atari 2600. BrickMechanic57’s Apple II has 587 days left on the clock. Voting is free on the LEGO Ideas website, and if this one makes it to shelves, it will be because enough people who care about this history showed up.

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Nothing Phone (4a) Is the Most Confident Phone Nothing Has Ever Made

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The best thing that can happen to a design team is that they stop trying to go viral. Early Nothing had an almost anxious energy to it, products that felt engineered for the screenshot, for the unboxing video, for the moment of surprise. That produced some genuinely striking work, and some choices that aged less gracefully. The Phone (4a) suggests the team has moved past that entirely.

The Phone (4a) is the clearest expression of that shift yet. The pink colorway, the refined glyph interface, the periscope camera quietly migrating down to the base model, none of it screams for attention. It rewards it. This is a phone designed for people who will notice things gradually, over weeks of use, rather than in the first thirty seconds of an unboxing video.

Designer: Nothing

The pink is the first thing people will talk about, and most of them will get it slightly wrong. The phone reads pink, but the back panel is technically white. The color comes from tint layered inside the transparency, sitting between the glass and the resin underneath, which means the light has to travel through it before it bounces back to your eye. That gives it a depth and a luminosity that solid paint physically cannot produce. Nothing’s designers described it as starting with the resin being nearly identical to white, then adding a small amount of tint, then letting the tinted glass layer do the heavy lifting. The result shifts depending on the light you’re standing in, giving you a phone that changes ever so slightly in different lighting scenarios. It’s clever, considering Nothing’s done this in the past by playing with depth, relying on textures and components casting unique shadows based on the light source. Now, the company’s adding color to that formula.

Apple has been doing a version of this for years. The iMac G3 in the late nineties used translucent colored plastic to create that same sense of depth, and modern iPhones apply color to the inside surface of the rear glass rather than painting the outside. It’s a technique with a real legacy, and Nothing’s designers actually had a pink iMac on their mood board. That’s worth knowing, because it reframes the colorway from trend-chasing to something with genuine design lineage. The difference is that Nothing puts the engineering on display underneath it, so the tinted glass is also a window into the hardware, which layers the effect further.

The glyph interface on the (4a) is a 1×6 LED strip, and for the first time on an A series device, it includes the red recording indicator that has been on the numbered phones since the beginning. The team is almost protective about that red square, describing it as deserving its place on every device because being recorded carries real consequence. The animations have been rebuilt from scratch rather than ported from Phone (3), which matters because the linear format demands different thinking. The timer, for instance, uses a single falling column of light instead of the hourglass matrix on Phone (3). Same idea, different grammar. Glyph Progress now runs on Android 16’s live updates API, which means broader app compatibility across the board.

The camera doesn’t get talked about much, but it’s clearly an important part of any phone’s design and spec sheet. For starters, its design relies on a format set by its predecessor, the (3a). No fancy changes, no weird alignment like the (3a) Pro, just homogeneity… with a few upgrades. The periscope module in the (4a) uses a tetraprism design, bouncing light through multiple internal reflections to achieve optical zoom in a package compact enough to fit the base model’s profile. The (3a) Pro had a periscope too, but this one is significantly smaller. Nothing has been careful to represent the internal hardware authentically through the cover panel design, so what you see through the back is a stylized but honest reference to what’s actually underneath, including the PCB boundary, the FPC connectors, and the wireless charging coil.

Nothing announced there will be no flagship this year, and that decision reframes everything about the (4a). The A series carries the full weight of the brand’s hardware story in 2025, which means this phone needed to be genuinely good rather than good for the price. The same core design team has been on the A series since the 2A, and that continuity is visible in the way the (4a) sits between its predecessors, borrowing proportions from both without feeling like a compromise. They’ve stopped performing and started building, and the (4a) is the clearest evidence yet that those are very different things.

The post Nothing Phone (4a) Is the Most Confident Phone Nothing Has Ever Made first appeared on Yanko Design.

Forget Smart Pens. This Titanium Fidget Pen Writes, Clicks, Spins, and Delights.

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Your hands are restless by design. Even when you’re sitting still and supposedly focused, they want to press something, rotate something, click something into place. This tendency has been pathologized and productized in equal measure, first by disapproving teachers, then by the fidget spinner industry. But before any of that, there was just the pen. The clicking ballpoint. The cap you’d snap and unsnap. The barrel you’d roll between your knuckles during a long phone call. Pens have always had a secondary life as objects of physical preoccupation, and most people who’ve ever worked at a desk know exactly what that feels like.

SPINNX takes that secondary life and makes it the whole point. Built by WEIWIN out of aerospace-grade titanium and held together by magnets, the pen separates into three modules that each deliver a distinct tactile sensation. Snap them together and there’s a crisp magnetic click. Press the spring-loaded ball in the middle and it gives you another one. Spin the dice top and it rotates through a series of rhythmic mechanical detents. The pen tip deploys with a twist rather than a click, because even the functional part of the experience has been thought through. Three years of development, ten design revisions, and one very specific goal: a pen that writes and delights.

Designer: WEIWIN

Click Here to Buy Now: $59 $102 (42% off). Hurry, only 168/200! Raised over $46,000.

The three-part system allows you to reconfigure the pen’s entire sensory output. You can flip the middle module to put the spring-loaded ball on top for a different kind of thumb-actuated click. Each combination changes the weight distribution and the way the pen feels in motion, which creates a surprisingly deep rabbit hole of tactile experiences. The team claims over fifty different ways to spin and fidget with the thing, and that number feels plausible once you start playing with it. The design provides a whole palette of physical feedback, letting you find the specific sensation your brain needs at that moment to stay locked in.

The snap of two modules connecting sounds like a well-tuned mechanical keyboard switch, something the designers obsessed over to ensure the end-product has a strong audio-visual-tactile experience. WEIWIN engineered the acoustic and tactile response of each magnetic separation and reconnection as an intentional product feature, treating the sound with the same design attention as the geometry… sort of like how luxury car designers obsess over how the doors sound when they close. Most clicking pens produce their click as a mechanical consequence, with nobody sitting in a room deciding whether it needs to be crisper or more controlled. With SPINNX, somebody clearly did sit in that room, and the result is a snap that feels sound-designed for sheer satisfaction.

The dice module functions like a high-quality EDC spinner, rotating with a series of crisp, audible clicks that feel like running your thumb over the crown of a well-made watch. Its ceramic bearing ensures the rotation is smooth and completely unaffected by the precision-engineered magnets holding the pen together. Choosing a non-metallic bearing is the kind of small, deliberate decision that separates a durable tool from a simple toy. Beyond the satisfying spin, it serves as a simple decision-making device. When you’re stuck between two choices, a quick roll gives you an answer, which is a surprisingly effective way to get past minor mental roadblocks.

Choosing aerospace-grade titanium for the body does more than just add a premium feel. The material provides a specific heft and durability that aluminum or steel can’t quite match, giving the pen a reassuring presence in the hand without being overly heavy. This balance is critical for an object designed for constant manipulation. The pen tip itself deploys with a smooth twist mechanism, which feels more deliberate and controlled than a standard clicker. WEIWIN also engineered its own proprietary “Super Refill,” which they claim has up to six times the writing life of a standard refill. Sure, it won’t work with standard refills, but standard refills only last 1/6th as long as the one that comes with the SPINNX.

There’s an optional Maglev Pen Stand that completes the package for anyone who spends most of their day at a desk. The stand uses magnetic levitation to balance the pen perfectly upright, letting it float and glide with a gentle touch. It turns the pen into a kinetic sculpture when you’re not using it, a piece of interactive art that settles back to its center with precision. This stand isn’t just for storage; it’s an extension of the pen’s core philosophy. It’s another way to engage your hands and mind with a simple, satisfying physical interaction, turning a moment of pause into something quietly delightful.

The standard SPINNX comes in four finishes. The base model is a silver-colored aluminum for $59, while the premium versions are offered in natural titanium, matte black titanium, and a striking brass-colored titanium for $69. For those who want the complete experience, a $99 Professional Kit bundles the pen with a leather pouch and other accessories. There are also several add-ons available separately, including extra refills, a calfskin leather pouch for protection, a spiral module to swap with the dice cap for a different visual flow, and the magnetic fidget sticks for more desk-based play. The Maglev Pen Stand is also available as a standalone $35 purchase. All SPINNX variants ship worldwide starting April 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $59 $102 (42% off). Hurry, only 168/200! Raised over $46,000.

The post Forget Smart Pens. This Titanium Fidget Pen Writes, Clicks, Spins, and Delights. first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Resin Chair Has a Real iMac, Magic Keyboard, and Mouse Sealed Inside It… Because ‘Art’

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There’s a common saying that beauty hurts. Pretty shoes that blister your heels by noon. A dress cut so perfectly that breathing becomes a optional. The needle of a tattoo tracing something meaningful into your skin. Or even a surgical knife, for the dream of a better face or physique. People have always been willing to trade comfort for something that looks or feels transcendent, and the logic has always made a strange kind of sense. What I never anticipated was applying that same sentiment to sitting on an iMac.

Dip1, a chair by Korean designer Lim Wootek, takes that idea literally. The backrest is a real iMac monitor, its slim aluminum frame pressed against your spine as you settle in. It sounds wrong. It feels wrong. And somehow, that wrongness is exactly what makes it so addictive to look at. The keyboard, mouse, and storage bins are encased beneath the seat in a glowing block of cyan resin, visible through the haze like memories you recognize but can no longer touch. I guarantee you, you’ll grimace at the thought of sitting on the chair, as you lean back against what might be the most expensive and engineered backrest known to mankind.

Designer: Lim Wootek

The resin block is where the craft gets interesting. Lim sealed a full Apple Magic Keyboard, a Magic Mouse, and a set of colored desktop storage bins inside the body of the chair. The bins are the kind that live on studio shelves holding batteries, USB cables, and every small object that never quite found a permanent home. Through the semi-translucent resin, their shapes read clearly near the seat surface and dissolve into soft blur toward the base. That gradient from legible to ghosted is the whole thesis of the piece made physical, and it required real material control to pull off at this scale.

The iMac is a 27-inch model, the flat-chinned aluminum design that Apple ran from 2012 through 2022, with the display sitting at 68.6cm diagonally and the full unit standing around 65cm tall. These are not small numbers, and the chair has the presence to match. The monitor backrest positions the screen at exactly the height you would have once made eye contact with it, which means the sitter has literally turned their back on it. The screen now faces outward, away from the person in the chair, and that single spatial decision carries more conceptual weight than most designers manage in an entire project.

Standard seat height on the resin block sits at around 45cm, which is ergonomically normal, and that normality is part of what makes the piece so disorienting. You could actually sit in this. People do sit in this, as the campaign photos show. A figure in all black, hooded, leaning back against the aluminum monitor stand with the posture of someone who has fully accepted the situation. The chair functions, and that functionality makes the statement sharper rather than softer.

Lim Wootek’s studio works across industrial design, digital design, mold design, and CMF, and Dip1 has all four disciplines firing together. The resin body has soft radii on the seat edges and a gently tapered base that stops it from reading as a plain block. The cyan is specific, close to shallow tropical water, which is why the submerged objects feel genuinely drowned rather than just encased. Getting optical clarity, structural load capacity, and color depth to coexist in a resin cast this large is a serious material engineering problem, and the fact that it reads as effortless is the tell of someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

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Functional LEGO Sewing Machine actually moves a needle up and down when cranked

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There’s nothing from stopping this LEGO machine from actually sewing clothes, apart from the fact that attaching a real needle to it would make it an ‘illegal’ build. Illegal builds in LEGO are when you use bricks in unauthorized ways (wedging them, gluing them, using them upside down), or using non-brick parts in a LEGO build. Sadly, this rather outdated law is the only thing preventing BrickStability’s Sewing Machine from letting you stitch clothes, kerchiefs, and quilts together.

What I love about LEGO MOCs (My Own Creations) is that some people try to achieve aesthetic perfection, while others try to actually make LEGO builds functional. There’s a LEGO lawnmower that cuts grass, a LEGO Typewriter that types, and even a functional LEGO Turing Machine that ‘computes’. Add this sewing machine to that list because it isn’t just a visual masterpiece, it’s complicated, intricate, and to a great extent, functional.

Designer: BrickStability

It’s true that nobody can agree who first invented the ‘sewing machine’. Elias Howe is credited with the version we popularly use today, although Thomas Saint, Barthelemy Thimonnier, and Isaac Singer are all also attributed as key figures in helping create some version of the modern-day sewing machine. This particular version, the lockstitch sewing machine, was patented in 1846 by Elias Howe, and while the LEGO MOC isn’t exactly Howe’s patented design, it’s an antique machine that takes that lockstitch technology and packages it into a form factor a lot of us recognize even today.

There are multiple YouTube shorts and GIFs on how these machines actually ‘stitch’ clothes, but the simple explanation is that a rotating element (powered by a crank on the side or a foot-pedal at the bottom) moves a special needle up and down, while a spool feeds continuous thread directly to the needle. As you stitch, the machine creates that rhythmic noise associated with tailoring shops, while the spool gradually rotates too, feeding thread into the ever-hungry machine.

BrickStability’s version is gorgeously accurate. Not only is it functional (the crank rotates and the needle element moves up and down), it also comes with LEGO spools of colored thread, along with a tailoring scissor made from LEGO bricks too. The machine is black, just like almost every machine in that time (funnily enough I only remember the motorized ones as being white in color), and comes with some ornate gold brickwork, reminiscent of the detailing seen on vintage machines.

This MOC is different from the usual ones we feature on the website. It wasn’t created for LEGO Ideas the way we know it, but rather, was designed as a submission for a challenge hosted by LEGO on its Ideas website. Needless to say, it took home the grand prize, and one can only hope LEGO actually turns this build into a real retail box set!

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Modded Transparent iPhone Air with a Working SIM Slot Looks Like Apple and Nothing had a Dream Child

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12:28 AMHuaqiangbei operates on its own physics. The sprawling electronics market in Shenzhen is the place where flagship smartphones get dismantled, reimagined, and rebuilt into things their original manufacturers never approved and probably never imagined. It runs on American time, buzzes with microscopes and milling machines, and treats the word “warranty” as a polite suggestion. If you want something done to your phone that a brand explicitly decided against, this is where you go.

Taiwanese creator Linzin Tech went there with a blue iPhone Air, the thinnest iPhone Apple has ever made and the first one sold without a physical SIM slot anywhere in the world. He left with something that looks like a cyberpunk collector’s piece: a fully transparent-backed iPhone Air with a functioning nano-SIM tray carved directly into its frame, wired into the motherboard by hand, under a microscope, late at night. A Dbrand X-Ray case could never…

Designer: Linzin Tech

YouTuber Scotty Allen built an iPhone with a headphone jack in Huaqiangbei. He also assembled a working iPhone almost entirely from parts bought off the street there. The market has this reputation for turning Apple’s deliberate omissions into solved problems, and the community around it keeps raising the difficulty level. Linzin’s challenge was particularly gnarly because he wanted two separate modifications on Apple’s most space-constrained iPhone ever, one cosmetic and one structural, and both required touching parts of the phone that Apple engineers spent years optimizing down to the millimeter.

The transparent back came first, and the process was a laser job performed on the rear glass panel. Technicians at Changlong Technology stripped the internal paint layer without touching the MagSafe charging coil sitting directly beneath it, which is about as precise as it sounds. Once the coating was gone, the phone’s internals became fully visible through the glass: the battery, logic board, shielding, internal connectors, and the flexible cable running between the upper and lower assemblies with “Changlong Technology” printed right on it. The Apple logo floats above actual hardware now. It looks like a concept render that somehow got approved.

The iPhone Air has no physical SIM slot in any market, globally, which meant Changlong’s team had to use a CNC milling machine to carve a slot opening into the phone’s ultra-thin metal frame. The original Taptic Engine had to come out entirely because there was simply no room for both it and a SIM tray in that chassis. A smaller third-party linear motor went in its place. Linzin estimates the haptic feedback at around 98% of the original, with the main perceptible difference being less granularity between light and heavy vibration patterns. Apple’s Taptic Engine is genuinely one of the finest haptic systems in consumer electronics, so even a 2% degradation is something purists will notice.

Board-level microsoldering connected the new SIM reader to the motherboard, and after a reboot the phone recognized a physical nano-SIM and connected to a carrier on 5G. Hot-swapping requires a restart to register a new card, which is a minor workflow tax. The thermal picture is less rosy. The graphite heat spreader sheets were casualties of the laser process and were not fully reinstated, which pushed operating temperatures noticeably higher under sustained load. Linzin ran 20 rounds of stress testing and confirmed the throttling. IP68 water resistance is also gone the moment the frame gets milled. And on the morning he flew back to Taiwan, the microphone ribbon cable came loose, sending the phone back to Shenzhen for repairs.

Close-up of the machined SIM tray

Here is the thing though. Linzin paid real money for a phone Apple sells for a premium, then paid again to have it modified, accepted degraded thermals, lost water resistance, voided his warranty instantly, and still calls it worth it. His reason is genuinely practical: he changes phones weekly and eSIM-only means a carrier visit every single time. The modification solves a real problem for a specific kind of power user, and it does so with enough visual drama that you would probably auction this thing for three or four times its retail price. Huaqiangbei has been poking holes in Apple’s “impossible” list for years. This one just happens to be the most beautiful hole yet.

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This Hollow-Handle Titanium Kitchen Knife Actually Shifts Its Own Balance Point Toward the Blade

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That elongated oval cutout running through the handle of the Titanion APEX catches attention first. It reads almost like a tuning fork, or a beautifully machined piece of industrial hardware that ended up on a cutting board. The form is deliberate on multiple levels: it trims weight from the handle end, which naturally shifts the balance point forward toward the blade. For cooks who prefer that blade-forward feel, the shift is immediately noticeable. And because the whole knife is machined from a single continuous piece of TC4 titanium alloy, there are no separate components, no rivets to rust, no scales to loosen over years of daily use. The result is a full-tang construction by default, which, in a knife made from one of the strongest lightweight metals on the planet, makes for an exceptionally robust tool.

Titanion is a Hong Kong-based brand with three years of focused research into bringing aerospace-grade titanium materials into everyday kitchen use. Their previous tools have already attracted over 5,000 professional chefs and dessert masters as loyal users. The APEX series is their most knife-forward move yet: two serrated blades, a Titanium Bread Knife and a Titanium Multifunctional Serrated Knife. The blade is forged from high-performance 10Cr15MoV steel with precision serrated edges, boasting outstanding hardness, wear resistance, and long-lasting sharpness. Titanion claims this is the first serrated kitchen knife on the market to feature a titanium alloy handle.

Designer: Byron Ho

Click Here to Buy Now: $81 $116 (30% off). Hurry, only a few left!

The bread knife runs 13.98 inches (35.5cm) total, sitting on the longer end of the bread knife category, which means more stroke per pass and fewer awkward repositions on a large loaf. Titanion uses a segmented serration pattern: larger wavy serrations on the main cutting area for smooth strokes without crushing the crumb, and finer serrations at the tip for piercing hard outer crusts, croissant shells, and thick-skinned fruit. That dual-geometry setup sounds like marketing until you’ve worked through a dense sourdough and realized the tip teeth were doing actual work before the wavy section ever takes over. Blade thickness sits at 0.06 inches (0.15cm), keeping the profile lean enough for clean slicing without wedging. The longer format also makes it useful beyond bread, handling anything that benefits from a long, smooth sawing stroke.

The utility knife at 9.45 inches (24cm) takes a completely different approach: consistent serration from base to tip, the same tooth geometry across the entire blade for stable and uniform cutting performance on whatever it’s working through. That uniformity makes it a genuine generalist, handling root vegetables, steaks, small pastries, and protein foods with equal confidence. Roughly half the length of the bread knife, it’s maneuverable enough for intricate prep but substantial enough for harder cuts, and the compact size pairs well with the ergonomic titanium handle during active cooking. Consistent serration also makes future sharpening more predictable, something the bread knife’s dual-geometry complicates. The two knives fill completely different roles and work as actual complements in daily kitchen use.

TC4, or Grade 5 titanium alloy, runs about 40% lighter than stainless steel while combining superior strength, corrosion resistance, and heat tolerance. The same alloy shows up in aircraft structural frames and orthopedic implants, both of which make the kitchen counter look like a retirement post for the material. In a culinary context, the relevant properties are direct: no moisture absorption, no odor retention, no degradation over time, and full corrosion resistance against acidic ingredients like citrus or vinegar. The 10Cr15MoV steel on the blade side is a high-carbon, high-chromium martensitic stainless that maintains stable sharpness and holds its edge under heavy use significantly better than standard stainless steel options. Together, the materials spec reads closer to precision tooling than kitchen cutlery.

The hollow-out handle is an ergonomic device as much as a visual one. It enhances tactile feedback through the grip, ensures a secure hold even in damp or greasy environments, and significantly reduces fatigue during use. Titanion built in distinct finger grips and a thumb support area, with a flowing contour that allows users to naturally position their thumb and index finger close to the blade’s balance point for a comfortable and precise grip. The oval opening doubles as a hanging point for wall or rail storage, with no extra hardware required. On a knife that gets reached for multiple times a day, small ergonomic decisions like that compound quickly into meaningful quality of life.

Pricing runs $100 for the bread knife, $75 for the utility knife, and $175 for the twin set at the Super Early Bird tier, amounting to a 30% discount on the original price. A discount you should absolutely grab if you’ve made it this far. International shipping is a flat $15 worldwide, with knives delivering starting August 2026. That’s because machining single-piece titanium knives individually takes way more time than snapping components together with glue and rivets. Also, Titanion doesn’t necessarily provide a warranty on the knives, because they don’t need to. Rest assured your GR5 titanium knife will probably outlast you, and then your grandkids too. Wait, why are you still reading? The link’s down below!

Click Here to Buy Now: $81 $116 (30% off). Hurry, only a few left!

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8-Legged Shapeshifting Stool Features Fold-out ‘Tentacles’ That Turn Into Side-Tables

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I’ll admit, I’ve never seen ‘Cyberpunk’ furniture before I saw the Toadstool by Seongmin Kim. Inspired by poisonous mushrooms (hence the name), this futuristic piece of furniture is both appealing and unsettling at the same time. The stool features a sitting surface, but is also armed with (literally) 8 appendages that can be folded inwards or extended outwards. The reason? I honestly don’t know. The practicality? Well, with enough practice, the appendages could be used as tables, or even armrests/backrest.

If I told you to think of a stool inspired by a toadstool, chances are you absolutely would’ve never come up with something like this. This aesthetic is so alien and foreign to furniture design, it might just spark a new design movement. Think utilitarian, highly engineered office furniture but on steroids. There’s no cushioning, no fancy ergonomics. Just function and futuristic-form.

Designer: Seongmin Kim

The chair is made using a series of metal plates screwed together, with hinges to enable the moving action, and sandblasted acrylic plates for that matte aesthetic appeal. “I think the small limitation of crafts is that they are based on practicality,” Kim says. Practicality and maybe indigenous materials, I’d add. You don’t expect a stool to employ such ‘industrial’ materials, but once you try and imagine a chair made from metal plates and acrylic, a DNA quite similar to the Toadstool tends to form.

The chair’s unsettlingly beautiful arms are easily its most alluring feature. Keep them down if you want the toadstool to feel ‘shy’, or unfold them if you’re looking to have your furniture make a statement. Each arm is dual-hinged, and features three flaps that have the appeal of ‘fingers’, but work in a functional way. Keep the flaps horizontal and you’ve got a wider table surface. Fold them upwards and the smaller table has a lip around the edge, preventing things from falling down.

Once could assume that the hinges used on the Toadstool have friction-holding capabilities, which means they’ll retain their shape/position whenever opened or closed. Perfect for when you want to use the arms as a table for keeping light objects like your matcha latte, your phone, power bank, AirPods, notepad, etc. I doubt a laptop would fit on the arms, or even hold its position given how some laptops can weigh upwards of 3.5-4 lbs.

That being said, the closed Toadstool is useful too. Apparently when the arms are folded shut, they can be used to discreetly store items like your phone or wallet… turning the table into a cabinet of sorts. It’s convenient, given that each stool has 8 arms. Fold 4 out for using as tables, keep 4 more folded in to use as hidden cabinets to store bits and bobs.

Unfortunately, the Toadstool doesn’t have a website or a price tag. It’s merely a concept from the mind of a rather quirky designer with an odd blend of sensibilities. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. I find the Toadstool fascinating. Not just for its function, but also for its form. Like I said, you rarely (if never) hear Cyberpunk and furniture in the same sentence. With how Kim executed his design, maybe we should more often.

The post 8-Legged Shapeshifting Stool Features Fold-out ‘Tentacles’ That Turn Into Side-Tables first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Cheapest Mini PC Costs Under $100 And Uses An Old Samsung Phone to run Steam and PS2 Games

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You know what’s ridiculously expensive these days? RAM. You know what isn’t? A broken phone on eBay. ETA PRIME spent under $70 on a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE with a busted screen, stuffed it into a Raspberry Pi tower case, and ended up with a mini PC that boots into Samsung Dex and runs Steam games. It sounds like the setup to a joke. It very much is not.

The Snapdragon 865 inside that cheap, busted Galaxy handles more than you would expect. Game Native connects it straight to your Steam library, PS2 and GameCube emulation run well, and Minecraft performs so smoothly ETA PRIME had his Xbox controller paired over Bluetooth within minutes. The whole thing costs less than a single night of impulse online shopping, which makes it either a genius budget build or a very convincing argument to check your eBay saved searches.

Designer: ETA Prime

One Samsung Galaxy S20 FE with a broken screen runs about $70 on eBay. Add an aluminum Raspberry Pi tower case from Amazon, a USB-C to HDMI adapter, and a fan cooler strapped to the back for $10 to $15, and that is the entire bill of materials. ETA PRIME disassembled the phone and fitted the internals directly into the case, but he is clear that you can skip all of that, prop the phone on a stand, connect it to a dock, and get the identical Dex experience without touching a screwdriver. The screen, even busted, stays connected and functions as a secondary interface. Units with minor burn-in but an intact display are sitting at around $99 unlocked on eBay, fully updated with a security patch from October 2025.

Out of the box, the S20 FE runs Dex at 1080p on an external display. Install Good Lock from the Galaxy Store, grab the MultiStar plugin, enable high resolution for external displays, restart Dex, and the resolution options expand to 1440p, 1200p in 16:10, and 21:9 widescreen at 2560×1080. Windows resize, snap side by side, and you can run five apps simultaneously, more if you unlock it through MultiStar, though 6GB of RAM will start making its feelings known past a certain point. Chrome scales to a full desktop layout. So does Google Play. On a 1440p monitor this setup looks genuinely clean.

Hollow Knight: Silksong runs well on the 865. Left 4 Dead 2 was still downloading during ETA PRIME’s walkthrough but is expected to perform. Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps is a non-starter on this chip with 6GB of RAM, and he says so without hedging. PS2 emulation through NetherSX2 puts God of War 2 at 2x resolution scale with occasional frame dips, 1.75x is the more stable setting. GameCube and Wii hold up across most titles, with demanding stages in games like F-Zero GX pushing the limits when upscaling is involved. Dreamcast, PSP, and Sega Saturn run clean.

A Galaxy S21, S22, or S23 gives you better RAM configurations and newer Snapdragon silicon if you want more ceiling. The S24 and S25 are still priced too high to make the economics work. The S20 FE sits at the right intersection of price, performance, and availability right now, and the Snapdragon 865 is old enough to be cheap but capable enough to handle a surprisingly wide range of workloads without flinching.

The full build walkthrough has not been posted yet. ETA PRIME recorded the entire process, around three and a half hours of footage, and has said he will publish it on YouTube if there is enough interest in the comments. Given how much this build has going for it, that video getting made feels like a matter of when.

The post The Cheapest Mini PC Costs Under $100 And Uses An Old Samsung Phone to run Steam and PS2 Games first appeared on Yanko Design.

Forget a Second Screen, This $799 Portable Monitor Adds Three 18.5-Inch Displays to Your Laptop

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The average laptop screen sits somewhere between 13 and 15.6 inches, which sounds perfectly reasonable until you start juggling four browser tabs, a Figma file, a Slack thread, and a terminal window at the same time. At that point, a single screen stops feeling like a workspace and starts feeling like a peephole. The 13-inch MacBook is Apple’s most popular laptop, and on the Windows side, the 15.6-inch display dominates sales charts, meaning most of the world is trying to run increasingly complex workflows on a rectangle that was never designed to hold all of it. The obvious fix is a second monitor. That gets you to two screens and a semblance of breathing room, but it is still a compromise.

The MagHub Quad Max has a different idea entirely. Rather than giving your laptop one extra screen, it gives you three, each measuring 18.5 inches, unfolding from a single sleek unit to transform your laptop into a true multi-screen workstation anywhere you go. One cable connects the whole system. Four screens total, counting your laptop display. A setup that looks less like a productivity tool and more like mission control at a small space agency.

Designer: INVZI

Click Here to Buy Now: $799 $1199 ($400 off) Hurry! Only 5 of 255 left.

Most portable monitors top out at 14 to 15 inches because manufacturers are trading screen size for bag-friendliness. INVZI chose 18.5 inches per panel, putting 55.5 combined inches of display into a single foldable unit. Three full 1920×1080 FHD IPS panels means each screen holds a browser window, a terminal, or a dashboard at full reading size without zooming or stacking windows. The pixel density lands at around 119 PPI, solid office-monitor territory rather than Retina territory, but paired with 100% sRGB color gamut, 300 nits brightness, and Low Blue Light filtering, the panels are genuinely comfortable for extended sessions. For document work, code, or data feeds, screen area matters more than sheer pixel count.

At 8.8 lbs (4 kg), the Quad Max weighs quite a bit, but that’s sort of the price you pay for getting quadruple the screen estate. Your best bet is to pair this with a light laptop and not a bulky gaming laptop which can add another 2.5 kilos to the mix. INVZI includes a dedicated travel bag in the box, an implicit acknowledgment that “portable” here means moving between workspaces rather than walking to a coffee shop. Folded, the unit measures 17.7 x 10.7 x 1.7 inches and fits alongside your laptop in that bag. The buyer for this product is the person who already travels with dedicated gear and wants a real desk replacement on the road. For them, the 4kg is a mere footnote.

Three large 18.5-inch displays hanging off a single foldable unit create obvious structural engineering challenges, and the reinforced aluminum hinge system is where INVZI spent its design effort. Each panel holds its position without manual locking mechanisms, and the solid aluminum stand underneath keeps the whole structure stable during typing and interaction. The 360-degree rotation on the top screen lets you flip the upper display out to someone sitting ahead of you. The screen auto-orients when flipped, which means you can present to a client/superior with ease. Or if you’re in a multi-person meeting, fold the side displays over into a triangle for a unique triple-display presentation setup.

Developers get a dedicated code editor, terminal, documentation window, and live preview running simultaneously across three full-size panels, which is a different working experience from tab-switching on one screen. Traders and analysts can spread charts, order books, news feeds, and dashboards across all three displays in real time. Video editors get a proper timeline, preview window, and asset panel layout without compromise. The chassis fits laptops from 12 to 18 inches, with full support for Intel and Apple Silicon Macs plus Windows 10 and 11. The Mac Mini M4 also works with it, which opens up interesting configurations for people who want a powerful stationary setup without a traditional monitor.

Everything runs through a single USB-C cable at 10Gbps or higher, handling both video and power delivery simultaneously. Both USB-C ports on the unit are interchangeable, so there is no designated power port to figure out. Running all three external displays requires a 45W USB-C PD source, either a wall adapter or a compatible power bank, keeping it functional away from wall outlets. Windows handles driver installation automatically in most cases, while macOS needs a one-time manual install using a Racertech display driver from the included USB drive. After that first setup, both platforms run plug-and-play on every subsequent connection.

The MagHub Quad Max carries an MSRP of $1,199, with early pricing currently at $799. The box includes the display unit, a travel bag, a 45W PD power adapter, a 60cm USB-C to USB-C laptop cable, a 120cm USB-A to USB-C cable for older machines, a 120cm USB-C to USB-C power adapter cable, a USB-C/A driver stick, and a user manual. US orders ship from a domestic warehouse with no import fees, and EU and UK customers have VAT covered. At $799, there is no comparable triple-screen portable at this display size, which makes the price hard to benchmark and, frankly, hard to argue with…

Click Here to Buy Now: $799 $1199 ($400 off) Hurry! Only 5 of 255 left.

The post Forget a Second Screen, This $799 Portable Monitor Adds Three 18.5-Inch Displays to Your Laptop first appeared on Yanko Design.