Sam Altman says OpenAI won’t file for IPO this year
OpenAI's CEO called it an "ill-advised moment to go public" in an interview with Fortune.
Monthly Archives: September 2026
Apple is Working on Two iPhone Game Controllers Under its Beats Brand
Apple and the gaming crowd have always had one of those relationships where you nod at each other across a party and never actually walk over. Apple makes the chips, brags about them beating a PS5 in some benchmark slide, then goes right back to talking about spreadsheets and stargazing apps. Gamers, meanwhile, buy a Steam Deck or a Switch and never think about the iPhone in their pocket as a gaming device at all. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman just reported that Apple wants to finally cross the room, having spent over a year quietly developing its own gaming controllers for the iPhone. The bigger twist is who gets to wear the name tag. Rather than an Apple logo, the hardware is reportedly launching under Beats, the audio label Apple has been slowly turning into its lifestyle catch-all since buying it in 2014.
Code unearthed in a leaked macOS 26.7 build gives the rumor real teeth, naming two unreleased devices, T6502 and T1057, each carrying its own dedicated controller profile instead of placeholder code. Both come with the standard gamepad vocabulary, sticks, triggers, a D-pad, face buttons, the stuff every controller on the planet already has. T6502 keeps things simple and wired. T1057 adds Bluetooth, motion sensors, and a noticeably different haptic engine, suggesting more than one idea is being tested at once. Nothing is priced, dated, or confirmed, but the code alone says this has moved well past a mood board.
Designer: Apple
Gurman’s sourcing on the branding is the part I keep chewing on. He says Beats executives are leading both the engineering and the product concept, not just slapping a logo on something Apple’s industrial design team already finished. His reasoning is that the culture and lifestyle around gaming controllers fits Beats better than it fits Apple, and that the sub-brand gives the company room to use cheaper materials and a louder design without dragging down the premium finish people expect from anything wearing the actual Apple logo. Read between the lines and that is Apple admitting its own aesthetic has a ceiling. Titanium and glass photograph beautifully, but nobody wants to grip a cold slab for a three-hour Genshin Impact session. Beats, with its glossy plastics and its very unserious relationship with color, is a far more honest home for an object designed to be squeezed, dropped, and thrown in a backpack pocket.
There is a decent trade-off lurking here too, and it is worth naming before anyone gets too excited. T6502, the wired one, is basic by design, which means it will likely be the cheaper, more disposable option with none of the motion sensing or richer haptics that make a controller feel alive. T1057 sounds like the one worth wanting, but Bluetooth controllers introduce pairing friction and battery anxiety that a simple USB-C plug-in never has to deal with. Apple will have to pick a lane, or price the two far enough apart that the choice makes sense, and so far there is no signal on either price or release window. History also isn’t fully on Apple’s side. The company has floated controller ideas for years without shipping one, and it once required developers to support the Siri Remote’s accelerometer as a de facto gaming input before quietly dropping that mandate. A leaked profile in a beta build is not a keynote slide.
Where this actually matters long term is the software Apple has already built around it. iOS 26 shipped a dedicated Games app that pulls your library, your Game Center friends, and Apple Arcade into one hub across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, and Arcade itself has quietly grown past 250 titles for $6.99 a month. A first-party controller, even a scrappy Beats-branded one, gives all of that infrastructure something physical to plug into, which is a very different goal from just selling more hardware. It also puts Apple in the odd position of competing with its own shelf space, since the Apple Store already sells the Backbone One and the SteelSeries Nimbus, and we covered how Backbone’s own Pro model already chases full-size ALPS sticks and forty-hour battery life at a premium price. Razer’s brand new Prio takes the opposite approach entirely, folding down to credit card size for people who would rather not carry a controller-shaped commitment at all. Apple showing up now, later than everyone, wearing someone else’s logo, says less about gaming and more about how Apple treats every category it enters late. Quietly, sideways, and only once it has found a version of itself that does not feel like Apple at all.
The post Apple is Working on Two iPhone Game Controllers Under its Beats Brand first appeared on Yanko Design.
How to adjust the Liquid Glass effect on your iPhone with iOS 27
If you've never been satisfied with Liquid Glass on your Phone, then you'll probably like some of the new customization options Apple offers in iOS 27.
This Chair Proves a $2.3M Hypercar & Your Living Room Have More in Common Than You Think
Most furniture doesn’t have a backstory worth telling. The Maniac Chair does. It looks, from across the room, like it wandered out of a 1950s Danish design studio — until you get close enough to realize it’s built from the same bloodline as a $2.35 million hypercar.
Oilstainlab is the California-based studio founded by Ukrainian-born twins Iliya and Nikita Bridan — high school dropouts trained in Italy and California, responsible in their previous lives for 6.5 million street cars. In 2018, they started Oilstainlab with a single promise: never to be sane. The result was the HF-11, a limited-production hypercar of which only 25 will ever exist. The Maniac Chair is the furniture-world extension of that same obsession, sold through House Dé Stains, Oilstainlab’s lifestyle brand.
Designer: Oilstainlab
The chair’s shell is built on a CNC-machined aluminum frame wrapped in a hand-laid carbon fiber shell. That detail matters. Hand-laid carbon fiber isn’t a production shortcut — it’s the language of motorsport, of race seats and monocoques shaped around bodies doing 200 mph. Here, it’s shaped around a body doing nothing more than sitting. That deliberate mismatch is the whole point. The midcentury silhouette is familiar enough to read as furniture; the material is foreign enough to make you question what you’re actually looking at.
The name traces back directly to the HF-11, which Oilstainlab offered in an exclusive “Maniac” package for 11 of its 25 cars. The chair carries that identity forward — it’s not merchandise, it’s an extension of a design philosophy that treats excess and restraint as two sides of the same surface. The carbon fiber reads as raw and technical; the form reads as warm and considered. Neither cancels the other out.
What Oilstainlab has done here is something furniture designers rarely attempt, and automotive designers rarely bother with: they’ve made a chair that has genuine provenance. It isn’t inspired by cars in the way that means “we added some aggressive lines.” It shares DNA with an actual race seat.
The prep process before upholstery even echoes motorsport fabrication. For a studio built on the idea that sanity is optional, the Maniac Chair is a surprisingly coherent object. It knows exactly what it is — a piece of furniture for people who want to sit inside a design argument — and it doesn’t flinch.
The post This Chair Proves a $2.3M Hypercar & Your Living Room Have More in Common Than You Think first appeared on Yanko Design.
Tesla’s second-gen Roadster is finally getting a debut nearly a decade later
The reveal is scheduled for October 10, so long as it's not delayed again.
What’s the difference between AppleCare+ and AppleCare One?
Should you get AppleCare+ or AppleCare One? We explain the difference in this post.
Apple’s rumored gaming controller for iPhone could feature Beats branding
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said there are two gaming controllers in the works.
Stop wasting your Wi-Fi router’s USB port — try this instead
If you have a USB port on the back of your router and don't know what to do with it, try some of these straightforward options.
Car manufacturers are ditching CarPlay in 2026: Here’s why
CarPlay lets you bypass your car's lousy infotainment system, but some manufacturers have decided they don't want you doing that anymore.
This Supercharged Grand Tourer Was Built Using a 90-Year-Old Metal-Shaping Tool
There is a tool called an English wheel that has been shaping aluminum car panels since roughly the 1930s. It is a big metal hoop with a roller in the middle, and you push sheet metal through it by hand until it curves the way you want. It sounds like something you would find in a blacksmith’s shed, not in the workshop of a car aiming for 1,200 horsepower. Yet that is exactly the tool Coventry Metalcraft used to hand-form the body of the new Jensen Interceptor GTX, alongside laptops running computational fluid dynamics software. Old-world muscle meets new-world math, and somehow both sides showed up to the same car without arguing.
Jensen International Automotive unveiled the GTX in early September, and it is a strange beast by design. It is Jensen’s first ever clean-sheet car, built to preview a whole new Interceptor lineup, and it gets there using ten English wheels worked by more than 30 artisans, alongside digital design data from studio Avant Design and mixed-reality checks nobody in 1966 could have dreamed of. The result is a 960 bhp supercharged V8 grand tourer wearing hand-beaten aluminum panels shaped partly by algorithms. Britain’s oldest car-forming trick just got a very modern wingman.
Designer: Avant Design
Avant Design, based out of Royal Leamington Spa, is the studio responsible for translating the original 1966 Interceptor’s proportions into something that reads as contemporary rather than costume. The long bonnet survives, the tightly drawn greenhouse survives, and the wraparound rear glass that made the original such a distinctive shape is still there, even if a towering rear wing now partially blocks the view of it. What is new is the front end, with slim horizontal LED lighting and enormous carbon intakes replacing the old car’s chrome-heavy face. Interestingly, this is not Avant’s first crack at reimagining this exact silhouette. Back in 2023, the studio quietly published a concept called the E-Ceptor, an electric take on the Interceptor with reworked rear glazing and a fresh grille graphic. The GTX effectively took that speculative sketch and gave it a supercharged V8 instead of a battery pack.
The aluminum decision, both for the chassis and the body, was not driven by sentiment. David Duerden, Jensen International’s managing director, put it plainly when explaining why the GTX skipped carbon fiber entirely. He does not want the car riding like “a skateboard,” which is a fair concern given how punishing a stiff carbon tub can feel on a road built for a Sixties grand tourer, not a modern track special. Aluminum chassis structures are also considerably cheaper to produce in small batches, since they avoid the expensive tooling that carbon fiber demands before a single panel gets made. For a car expected to sell in the dozens rather than the thousands, that economic math matters more than bragging rights about carbon weave.
That economic logic is exactly why the English wheel earns its keep here. Hand-forming panels sidesteps the tooling costs that would sink a low-volume carbon fiber program before it ever reached a customer. Coventry Metalcraft’s artisans still shape every piece the old-fashioned way, but they are working from digital surfaces that Avant Design refined using CFD modeling, chasing the 350 kilograms of downforce the GTX needs to behave itself at speed. It is a genuinely odd combination of a seventy-year-old forming technique and simulation software that did not exist when the original Interceptor left the Kelvin Way factory. Jensen is betting its entire comeback on that combination holding together, and so far, from what we have seen, it seems to be working rather beautifully.
The post This Supercharged Grand Tourer Was Built Using a 90-Year-Old Metal-Shaping Tool first appeared on Yanko Design.