Tag Archives: Appliances

This ceiling fan hides an 80W Hi-Fi speaker and smart lighting in one sleek unit

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You get light from above. You get wind from above too. So at some point, somebody was bound to ask the obvious next question, why not sound from above as well? Ceiling fans have spent years quietly doing side quests with built-in lamps, remote controls, and the occasional smart feature, but this feels like the first time one has aimed for proper living room territory. The lamp-plus-fan combo has always felt like a polite upgrade to an appliance nobody was particularly excited about.

WindGroove’s AirFi One takes that idea and runs with it, folding a Hi-Fi audio system, atmospheric lighting, and airflow into a single ceiling-mounted fixture. The audio setup is co-developed with Jamo, the Danish speaker brand founded in 1968, which gives the whole thing considerably more credibility than your average gadget trying to do five jobs at once. It’s one of those products that sounds slightly absurd for about three seconds, right up until you realize how much floor space your speakers and fans have been stealing this whole time.

Brand: WindGroove

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

Putting a speaker inside a spinning mechanical system is, acoustically speaking, a problem that mostly did not exist before. Motors generate vibration, and that vibration travels through metal housings and mounting hardware until it finds a speaker driver to rattle. At higher fan speeds, the blades also create periodic air pressure variations at blade-pass frequency, a rhythmic pulse that can cause a speaker cone to flutter and introduce distortion into the output. Positioning the speaker overhead compounds the issue further, because the ceiling acts as a large reflective surface, creating phase cancellation and comb filtering effects where certain frequencies pile up while others cancel out. Nailing clean Hi-Fi sound out of a product that is also spinning at variable speeds, mounted above a live listening environment, is a genuinely impressive engineering feat.

WindGroove’s entire design thesis rests on one idea: technology should dissolve into the room, not announce itself from it. Making that happen acoustically meant solving real engineering problems, because a spinning motor introduces vibration into a speaker chassis and rotating blades create periodic air pressure pulses that can rattle a driver into distortion. Intelligent DSP processing that corrects for ceiling reflection and overhead projection in real time is WindGroove’s most elegant solution, allowing the speaker to disappear into the architecture and still fill a room properly. Total harmonic distortion is rated at 1% or below, keeping music sounding like music rather than like hardware working hard. A motor running at under 32 decibels reduces mechanical vibration at the source, so the DSP has considerably less chaos to correct for.

Jamo has been building musically balanced speakers rooted in Scandinavian design since 1968, and that acoustic philosophy is what WindGroove borrowed for the tuning here. The 80W 3-way setup, twin 15W mid-high drivers plus a dedicated 50W subwoofer, carries real Hi-Fi ambitions rather than the polite background-audio compromise most integrated appliances settle for. Frequency response runs from 45Hz to 20kHz, wide enough to cover genuine bass texture and crisp high-frequency clarity across the full spectrum of recorded music. Bringing in a heritage audio brand rather than speccing the cheapest available driver stack reflects WindGroove’s conviction that invisible technology still needs to perform at the highest level when you actually sit down and listen. Putting a Jamo-tuned 80W Hi-Fi system inside a ceiling fan is the kind of product decision that only makes sense if you believe the room should come first, and the hardware should figure itself out.

The fan boasts a maximum airflow of 4621 CFM at under 32 decibels, quiet enough to run while music is playing without competing with it, and the blade direction reverses seasonally so the unit pulls its weight year-round. The dual-zone lighting system combines everyday illumination with immersive ambience. The lower section serves as the primary light source, providing bright, even illumination for the entire room. You can choose from three color temperatures – warm white for a cozy, relaxing glow, natural white for comfortable everyday lighting, or cool white for a crisp, energizing feel. Stepless dimming lets you fine-tune the brightness to suit everything from winding down at night to working, reading, or getting ready in the morning.

Picture a Friday evening where you dim the lights, the room shifts to a warm amber glow, the fan hums almost imperceptibly overhead, and the music you put on actually sounds like the artist intended it to. No speaker on a shelf eating into the bookcase. No standing fan taking up the corner you always meant to do something with. No three apps open at once trying to get everything to behave. The ceiling handles it, and the room just feels right in a way that is surprisingly hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.

AirFi One is priced at $499 at retail and is available for purchase right now on WindGroove’s website.. Sure, you could just duct-tape a Bluetooth speaker to your fan and call it a day – but having an 80W sound system built into your ceiling fan isn’t something everyone can boast of.

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate

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Daewoo’s Rose Portable Iron collapses into the profile of a classic clothes iron, except there’s no soleplate anywhere on it. The red dome is a 550kPa steam head that never touches your shirt, and the whole assembly parks on a desk in the footprint of a sheet of A4 paper. The black wand tucks flat against the body when you’re done, closing everything into one clean shape instead of leaving cords and heads scattered around. Fold it up and you get a glossy red teardrop that looks like it belongs on a shelf next to your hats and cufflinks, not shoved in a closet with the vacuum. It might be the best looking iron I have ever laid eyes on, full stop.

That’s kind of the point. Ironing has looked the same since your grandmother’s era, hot metal, heavy arm, burnt fingertips optional. Daewoo took the silhouette everyone recognizes and gutted the inside, swapping pressure for a fine mist of high pressure steam that hovers over the fabric instead of flattening it. The project comes out of Guangdong Daewoo’s in-house design team under Wang Jun, and it won Top Design honors in the Home Appliances: Small category at the 2025 European Product Design Award, a competition that judges shipping products rather than sketches. It’s a weird little magic trick, and somebody clearly thought it deserved a trophy for pulling it off.

Designer: Guangdong Daewoo Design Team

Design history has a name for this trick, skeuomorphism, when a new object borrows the shape of what it’s replacing so people instinctively know what to do with it. Digital cameras kept the shutter click, and early e-readers animated a page turn, small gestures borrowed from objects they were busy erasing. The Rose runs that instinct backward, keeping the exact wedge shape of a clothes iron even though nothing inside actually presses fabric anymore. It’s a strange kind of respect for a shape nobody thinks about, right up until someone guts everything underneath it and leaves the outline alone on purpose. The result looks familiar enough to trust and strange enough to stop your thumb mid-scroll.

Inside that dome is the actual news. A 550kPa pressurized system pushes steam through five stages of vaporization, dense enough to punch through fabric fibers without soaking them, so clothes come out warm and dry rather than damp. Daewoo’s own demo shows the head steaming a balloon without popping it, which is either a fun party trick or genuinely reassuring if you own anything silk. Five modes tune temperature and steam volume by fabric, running from 110°C for silk up to 210°C for wool, with a narrower precision tip built for touchy spots like coat buttons. None of that matters if the thing scorches your favorite shirt, but on paper, it is built to avoid exactly that.

The original Daewoo chaebol collapsed into bankruptcy in 1999, and this badge now belongs to Guangdong Daewoo, a licensed China based operation with a Korean trading office attached. That is not a knock on the product, plenty of legacy names live second lives this way, but the actual design credit sits with Wang Jun’s team, not the vintage logo. It is also a corded, mains powered unit rather than a battery gadget, so portable here means light enough to carry across a room, not cordless freedom. It currently ships only in China across a small ladder of trims, working out to roughly 140 to 196 dollars depending on exchange rate. No release outside China is confirmed yet, so importing one means budgeting for a plug adapter and a converter.

Most appliance makers chasing “reinvented” just bolt a screen onto something and call it smart. Daewoo instead looked at the single most recognizable silhouette in the laundry room and asked what would happen if everything under it changed while the outline stayed put. The answer folds down to the size of a sheet of paper and looks better on a dresser than most speakers do. Whether it actually out-irons a cheap steamer from the drugstore is a separate question nobody outside a Guangdong test lab has fully answered, but as a piece of industrial design humor, it is hard not to grin at.

The post Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate first appeared on Yanko Design.

Full-Color 3D Printing Once Cost $50,000+, HeyGears Brings It to 10% of the Cost

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True full-color 3D printing has always lived in industrial settings, with price tags starting at $50,000 and machinery too large for any studio shelf. Most desktop alternatives can’t close that gap on their own. The HeyGears G1 Series changes that, combining full-color 3D printing, 3D texture printing, 2D UV printing, and True DTF (Direct-to-Film) & DTG (Direct-to-Garment) fabric printing into one compact desktop machine anyone can actually set up at home or in a studio.

Beyond bringing full-color 3D printing to the desktop, the HeyGears G1X also delivers outstanding UV printing performance, offering up to 12× faster printing speeds with the Epson I3200-U1HD printhead, a 10× wider color gamut, more accurate color reproduction backed by G7 Colorspace’s highest-level color certification, and lower ink costs. What’s genuinely useful here is how fluidly the G1 Series moves between modes. A small gift shop, for instance, can run custom UV prints on mugs in the morning, emboss a leather journal cover in 3D texture mode in the afternoon, and print a full-color figurine in the evening, all from the same machine.

Designer: HeyGears

Click Here to Buy Now: HeyGears is currently offering G1X backers $500+ in additional promotional savings. Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $14.4 million.

The standout of the three is the full-color 3D printing. Using Precision Piezo Inkjet technology with instant UV curing, the G1X builds vibrant, paint-free models layer by layer at just 10 to 20 μm thick, roughly half the diameter of a human hair. Transparent and colored sections print in one continuous build, and there’s no post-print assembly to deal with since water-soluble supports simply dissolve in water.

A lot of that output quality comes down to the printhead. The G1X runs on an Epson i3200-U1HD, an industrial-grade unit with 3,200 high-density nozzles across eight ink channels, a maximum resolution of 1,440 x 2,400 DPI in UV printing, and over 10 million colors in its palette. The extra channels include light cyan and light magenta, which keep gradients and skin tones from going muddy.

The G1X also offers three UV printing modes to match different production priorities, whether you want maximum printing speed or a wider color gamut. Ultra-High-Speed Mode uses 4 white-ink channels to achieve up to 12× faster printing, while High-Speed Mode uses 2 white-ink + 2 varnish channels, reaching at least 6× faster printing. Finally, Wide-Gamut Mode utilizes Wide-Gamut inks, including Light Cyan (Lc) and Light Magenta (Lm) inks, for enhanced color reproduction, with printing speeds of at least 3× faster. Whether you prioritize speed or color performance, the G1X lets you choose the configuration that best fits your workflow.

For UV work, the machine isn’t limited to any single surface type. It works on wood, leather, glass, metal, acrylic, and ceramic, among over 400 compatible substrates in total. A rotary module handles cylindrical objects up to 245 mm tall, covering everything from mugs to tumblers, and an integrated line-scan camera auto-calibrates placement so curved surfaces print accurately without manual setup.

The 3D texture mode goes a step beyond standard UV printing, producing raised embossed effects, oil-painting-style relief, and wood-carved surfaces with a recommended height of 5mm (up to 150 mm). For apparel, the G1 Series supports True DTF and DTG printing with a water-based ink set built for wash durability, and that’s what makes it one of the few desktop platforms covering both hard-surface and fabric printing in a single unit.

HeyGears paired the hardware with a full software ecosystem that goes well beyond basic print management. Blueprint Studio handles everything from model preparation to batch layout, while HeyVerse adds AI tools for text-to-3D and image-to-3D generation. There’s also a LiDAR sensor in the print carriage that monitors layer thickness to within ±0.01mm in real time, helping maintain consistent output across longer production runs.

Printhead maintenance is often where UV systems let their owners down, and HeyGears hasn’t ignored that. A quad-layer anti-clogging system combines printhead heating, white-ink agitation, standby cleaning cycles, and a sealed moisturizing state during extended downtime. Three cleaning modes handle everything from a quick nozzle check to a thorough channel flush, and built-in air filtration captures ink mist and VOCs for cleaner indoor operation.

For someone running a small studio or a product-based creative business, the appeal goes beyond having one versatile machine. It means skipping three separate consumable budgets, three learning curves, and three maintenance routines. The i3200-equipped models carry a rated printhead lifespan of 12 to 24 months, while the open ink system offers material flexibility, and HeyGears’ lower-priced inks help keep material costs well below those of comparable industrial platforms. Turns out industrial-grade color doesn’t need an industrial-sized space after all. And with a limited-time $500+ cashback offer now available to G1X backers, you wouldn’t want to miss out on this opportunity to bring your designs to life, and in full color to boot!

Click Here to Buy Now: HeyGears is currently offering G1X backers $500+ in additional promotional savings. Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $14.4 million.

The post Full-Color 3D Printing Once Cost $50,000+, HeyGears Brings It to 10% of the Cost first appeared on Yanko Design.

CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks

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If you have ever charged a Xiaomi phone with the bundled brick, there is a decent chance CUKTECH’s engineers had a hand in it, even though the name never made it onto the packaging. The company started in 2016 as a straight up OEM, building chargers behind the scenes for Xiaomi and other big players, before merging with ZMI in 2022 and finally launching products under its own name. It is the classic story of a supplier deciding it was tired of being invisible.

That decision has paid off. The CUKTECH 30 Charging Station Ultra just picked up two wins at the European Product Design Award, one for computer accessories and one for office appliances, thanks to a 300W GaN powered design from Chong Wang and Ziyao Wang. We have followed the brand’s climb as its power banks and chargers kept getting screens, better materials, and sharper industrial design with every release. This latest charging station, with its five ports and a live readout of exactly what your gear is pulling, is the moment the sleeper brand stops sleeping.

Designers: Chong Wang & Ziyao Wang

Three USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and a dedicated DC output share the front face, and together they can push out up to 300W total. The two primary USB-C ports handle up to 140W each under PD 3.1, which covers most modern laptops without breaking a sweat, but the real number only shows up when you route power through the DC port. That single line is built to talk directly to compatible laptops and can hit the full 300W ceiling on its own, essentially replacing the oversized proprietary brick that usually ships in the box. I have three of those bricks sitting in a drawer right now doing absolutely nothing, and a single box that can outmuscle all of them at once is exactly the kind of consolidation I did not know I needed.

Third generation GaN sits at the core of the whole system, paired with what CUKTECH calls a PFC plus LLC dual architecture, a combination chosen specifically to keep five simultaneous charging sessions stable without the unit turning into a space heater. Gallium nitride has become the default material for anyone chasing high wattage in a small footprint, since it switches more efficiently than older silicon designs and sheds heat faster under sustained load. Thirteen fast charging protocols are baked in, including PD 3.1, PPS, Xiaomi’s own 120W standard, UFCS, Huawei SCP, and both QC and AFC, which is a genuinely broad net for a single charger to cast. Intelligent power allocation reads what is plugged in and redistributes wattage on the fly, with specific tuning for handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally that tend to confuse less sophisticated multi port chargers.

A 1.83 inch IPS display sits front and center, color coded per port, tracking wattage, voltage, and current across all five connections in real time, with a small running graph of total load underneath. Most chargers ask you to trust a single LED and hope for the best. This one just tells you, continuously, which is a small shift that changes how the object feels to live with on a desk. Nine layers of protection cover temperature, over-voltage, and over-current scenarios, which matters more than usual given how much power is moving through a chassis this size.

The form itself leans minimal, angled slightly on a magnetic tilting base so the screen stays readable without craning your neck, and finished in a two tone silver and black that reads more like studio monitor than power strip. A right angle DC cable keeps the desk tidier than the usual straight jack, and the grounded three pin AC cable is a small nod to safety that a lot of competitors skip to save a few cents.

None of this would matter much if the pricing did not make sense, and at $159.99 it lands right where a serious desk upgrade should, undercutting rivals capped at 140W or 200W while offering meaningfully more headroom. CUKTECH spent a decade building other companies’ chargers before it ever put its own name on a box. Two design award wins later, it is clear that decade taught them exactly which details actually matter.

The post CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks first appeared on Yanko Design.

The New $1,300 Espresso Machine That Sets Itself Up for You

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If you’ve ever spent twenty minutes dialing in your grinder before 8am, you already understand the particular madness of home espresso. It’s a hobby disguised as a morning routine, and a punishing one at that. Somewhere between the tamping pressure, the grind size, and the extraction time, the actual coffee gets lost. Datum is betting that most people are over it, and they might be right.

Datum is an Austrian startup founded by two 28-year-old mechanical engineers and designers, Christoph Konheisner and Nikolaus Potapow, out of Innsbruck. What they’ve built, or rather what they’re building, is an espresso machine and grinder designed as one cohesive system, paired with an open recipe platform that connects the machine directly to the roaster’s knowledge. The concept is deceptively simple: scan your coffee bag once, and the machine sets itself up to brew it exactly the way the roaster intended. No guesswork, no wasted shots.

Designer: Datum

The hardware is where Datum earns its design credibility. The espresso machine and grinder aren’t just sold together; they’re built to talk to each other. The machine heats up while the grinder is running, which means no standing around waiting for it to get up to temperature. The grinder itself uses 64mm flat burrs with digital grind size adjustment at micrometer precision, which on paper sounds like specialty coffee jargon and in practice means your grind is never accidentally off. The portafilter basket is a standard 58mm, which coffee purists will appreciate, but the real conversation-starter is the integrated auto-tamp function built directly into the brew head. Insert your portafilter, press start, and the machine takes care of tamping before brewing. Pressure, flow, and temperature are all handled automatically.

I’ll be honest: the auto-tamp alone feels slightly revolutionary to anyone who has ever pulled a bad shot because their tamp was uneven on a Monday morning. It’s such an obvious pain point in the home espresso experience that it’s almost surprising no one has tackled it this elegantly before.

Aesthetically, Datum is very much a product of its design moment. The palette is stark and monochromatic, a matte off-white and deep charcoal that reads more Scandinavian architecture than countertop appliance. Soft surfaces, clean geometry, and what the team describes as “small natural details” give it a quietly confident look. It photographs beautifully, which is not an accident when your target audience lives on Instagram and Pinterest, but it also seems to be built with intention beyond surface beauty. The machine is designed around circular economy principles: modular, dismantlable, and repairable. The continuous flow heating system reduces energy consumption, and even the compact footprint is deliberate, minimizing material use in the build.

The third layer of Datum, and arguably the most ambitious, is the platform. Datum wants to create an open ecosystem where roasters upload their ideal recipes and home brewers simply access them through a scan. Every coffee bag becomes a kind of instruction set. For roasters, it’s a way to extend their craft directly into a customer’s kitchen. For drinkers, it removes the barrier between buying excellent coffee and actually doing it justice. It’s the kind of idea that sounds almost too sensible, and it genuinely changes the relationship between the person who sources the bean and the person who drinks the cup.

Datum is still a prototype. The Kickstarter is planned for late 2026, with delivery expected sometime in 2027. The early bird price sits at €1,199 for the machine and grinder as a set, which, for what’s on offer, is actually competitive in a market where serious espresso setups regularly cost double that before you even account for the grinder. Whether it delivers on its promises at that price point remains to be seen.

But the concept is genuinely worth paying attention to. Coffee culture has spent years pushing consumers toward either expensive, complicated setups or oversimplified pod machines with no soul. Datum is reaching for the middle ground, and doing it with real design intelligence. That’s harder to pull off than it looks.

The post The New $1,300 Espresso Machine That Sets Itself Up for You first appeared on Yanko Design.

Xiaomi Now Sells Coffee Machines, and This One Costs Just $121

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Xiaomi sells phones, electric cars, rice cookers, robot vacuums, air fryers, and now a capsule coffee machine, which means the company has quietly built a catalogue capable of furnishing your entire apartment and then driving you out of the garage. The playbook has not changed since: pick a category ruled by expensive Western brands, strip it to the essentials, price it like a provocation, and make it look far better than the price suggests. The Mijia Capsule Coffee Machine has been a China exclusive since February 2025. It just went international at €104.90 ($121 USD), sold directly by Xiaomi.

Xiaomi designed it in-house under the Mijia sub-brand with no external studio credited, and the object measures 33.2 x 9.0 x 21.2cm, roughly an A4 sheet standing on its edge. Inside sits a 19-bar ULKA pump from Italian manufacturer CEME, the same pump family Nespresso machines have used for years, alongside a 650ml removable tank and a 25-second preheat. The detail that actually matters is a magnetic capsule rack holding 20 capsules, sitting flush against the machine’s flank or clipping straight onto your fridge door. At ¥499 in China, this thing was a weapon. At €104.90 it lands in Nespresso Essenza Mini territory, which makes the argument far more interesting.

Designer: Xiaomi

Most capsule machines are wide and squat, built to disappear into a corner counter next to the toaster. Xiaomi went the other direction and made this one narrow enough to stand like a book on a shelf, which is exactly how the brand shot it for launch, next to a picture frame rather than a fruit bowl. The front is split into a rounded brew head sitting above a column of fine vertical fluting, with a smoked panel at the back revealing the water level. Nothing here is flashy. It is the kind of quiet, considered grey object that photographs better than it has any right to, and Xiaomi clearly knew that when it wrote “extraordinary craftsmanship” into the marketing copy.

The rack is the smartest move in the whole design. Instead of selling capsule storage as a separate accessory the way Nespresso does, Xiaomi built it into the silhouette, a slab of twenty vertical slots that clips onto the machine’s side or peels off entirely to stick on a fridge door. It also happens to be the only place color shows up on the entire product, since every capsule you load is a small bright object against an otherwise monochrome machine. That is either genuinely clever industrial design or the tidiest lock-in mechanism I have seen on a kitchen appliance in a while, and honestly it can be both at once.

The internals are competent rather than flashy, which is fine, because this machine was never going to out-engineer a Breville. A 19-bar ULKA pump built by CEME S.P.A. in Italy handles pressure, paired with an NTC sensor and PID algorithm for temperature control, plus a 1400W heater and a 650ml tank you can pull off and rinse at the sink. Two cup sizes come preset at 40ml and 110ml, and both are adjustable by holding the button and tapping again once you hit your preferred pour. Xiaomi rates the whole thing at 55dB(A), quiet enough that it will not wake anyone sleeping down the hall. None of it screams for attention, and that restraint is sort of the point.

The internals are competent rather than flashy, which is fine, because this machine was never going to out-engineer a Breville. A 19-bar ULKA pump built by CEME S.P.A. in Italy handles pressure, paired with an NTC sensor and PID algorithm for temperature control, plus a 1400W heater and a 650ml tank you can pull off and rinse at the sink. Two cup sizes come preset at 40ml and 110ml, and both are adjustable by holding the button and tapping again once you hit your preferred pour. Xiaomi rates the whole thing at 55dB(A), quiet enough that it will not wake anyone sleeping down the hall. None of it screams for attention, and that restraint is sort of the point.

Worth saying plainly: Xiaomi never claims Nespresso compatibility. It lists four capsule diameter ranges instead and lets you do the math yourself, which is a neat bit of legal sidestepping dressed up as a spec sheet. It is also worth remembering that capsules cost more per cup than ground coffee and are harder on the planet, no matter how good the machine holding them looks. The bigger question is what happens to the price argument now that it has left China. At ¥499 this machine undercut everyone. At €104.90 it is going toe to toe with Nespresso on cost and betting the design carries the rest. Given what is actually sitting on that shelf, I would not bet against it.

The post Xiaomi Now Sells Coffee Machines, and This One Costs Just $121 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Weber Is Shutting Off the June Oven’s AI Camera, and a $90 Air Fryer Already Does The Same Thing

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Somewhere in a warehouse in Illinois, someone at Weber is about to flip a switch that turns a $999 oven back into a very expensive toaster. On September 22, the June Oven loses its cloud, its app, and the camera trick that made it famous in the first place. You can still push the manual buttons. You just lose the part where the oven looks at your chicken thighs and quietly figures out what to do with them.

Here’s the kicker. That exact party trick, the camera that scans your food and picks a cook program for you, now lives inside air fryers that cost less than a nice dinner out. June invented food recognition cooking in 2015 for fifteen hundred bucks. A decade later you can buy the same basic idea for under a hundred dollars on Amazon. The technology didn’t get worse. It just stopped being special enough to protect.

Daewoo Actuate

Weber hasn’t put out a press release about any of this, which tells you plenty on its own. Owners found out by email. Meanwhile the company has been actively expanding Weber Connect, the smart grilling platform June’s own engineers helped build, across its charcoal and gas lineup. So the message, whether Weber meant to send it or not, is that connected cooking tech is worth investing in when it’s attached to a grill, and worth quietly switching off when it’s attached to a toaster oven nobody’s manufacturing anymore.

Daewoo’s Actuate is the cheapest, dumbest version of June’s original idea, and I mean dumbest as a compliment. An internal camera peeks at whatever’s in the basket, matches it against twelve presets like chips, sausages, and chicken, and sets the time and temperature without asking you to tap through a menu. It runs about ninety to a hundred dollars depending on the retailer and the day. No app, no account, no subscription. It just watches your dinner and gets on with it.

Culinix 8.5QT AI air fryer

Here’s where it gets fun. Culinix sells an 8.5 quart fryer in the US with an AI camera that recognizes twelve foods, and the list reads like it was lifted straight off Daewoo’s spec sheet. Chicken goujon. Fish finger. Beef joint. Chick pea. That is oddly specific British supermarket vocabulary to land on two unrelated product pages by coincidence. My guess is neither brand invented this camera module, they just bought the same one off a factory shelf and slapped their own logo on the box, the same way every USB charger secretly comes from three factories in Shenzhen.

Emerson skipped the camera entirely and gave its SmartVoice fryers ears instead. Say “cook pork chops” and it just does it, no app, no wifi, all the processing happening locally on the device. It’s not glamorous, but it solves a real problem for people who find touchscreens fiddly, whether that’s arthritis, low vision, or just being elbow deep in raw chicken and unable to tap anything. I’d argue this is the most quietly useful of the three schools, even though it’ll never trend on a gadget blog.

Dreo ChefMaker

Xiaomi and Dreo took the opposite bet and gave up on guessing entirely. Xiaomi’s Mijia Pro adds a water tank so it can steam and sous vide alongside the usual hot air, which actually changes the physics of what comes out the other end. Dreo’s ChefMaker goes further and sticks a probe straight into the meat, measuring real internal temperature instead of inferring anything from a camera. It’s the only method here that isn’t a guess.

Which brings us back to June. Anova’s newer oven has the same food recognition camera, except the feature only works if you’re actively paying a subscription. So the actual choice in 2026 isn’t camera versus voice versus probe. It’s whether you own the smarts in your kitchen outright, or you’re just renting them from a company that can turn them off the second it stops making sense on a spreadsheet.

The post Weber Is Shutting Off the June Oven’s AI Camera, and a $90 Air Fryer Already Does The Same Thing first appeared on Yanko Design.

The World’s Slimmest Power Station (2.6″) Was Built for Your Fridge

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Backup power is one of those things most people don’t think about until they absolutely have to. You lose electricity during a storm, open the fridge out of habit, and then spend the next few days doing an anxious mental calculus on whether the leftovers are still safe to eat. It’s a frustratingly universal experience, and for all the innovation happening in home tech right now, it’s remarkable how little of it was pointed directly at the refrigerator. Jackery apparently noticed that gap too.

The FridgeGuard is a dedicated refrigerator backup battery, and the first thing that sets it apart is how thoroughly it was designed for the space it actually occupies. At just 2.6 inches thick and weighing around 23 pounds, Jackery calls it the world’s slimmest power station. Visually, you believe it. It looks less like industrial equipment and more like something an architect might quietly approve for a kitchen renovation. You can mount it on the wall behind your fridge, prop it vertically beside it, or lay it flat on top. That flexibility isn’t a minor feature; it’s a design decision that understands most people are not trying to add a bulky, yellow generator to their kitchen aesthetic.

Designer: Jackery

The technical side is where it gets genuinely interesting. The FridgeGuard runs on a 1,024Wh battery capacity and delivers power through a single 110V outlet, which sounds limiting until you remember this thing exists for one appliance and one appliance only. It delivers up to 1,600 watts of compressor-ready power, which is exactly what you need for a refrigerator’s startup surge. Jackery calls their system FridgeSafe Technology, and it covers the practical details: a switchover time of under 10 milliseconds so your fridge doesn’t even notice the grid went down, a Delay Start to protect the compressor, and surge protection built right in. Standard runtime is estimated at around 15 hours on a full charge, which doubles to roughly 30 hours if you pair it with the optional expansion battery that brings total capacity to 2,048Wh.

The lifespan claim is the detail that sticks with me. The battery cells are rated for 6,000 cycles, which Jackery projects translates to up to 16 years of use while retaining 70% of capacity. For context, most portable power stations don’t come close to that kind of longevity. It reframes the FridgeGuard from being a reactionary purchase after a bad storm to a genuine long-term home investment. That shift in positioning matters, and it’s the kind of thinking that tends to change who buys into a product category.

Cold weather performance deserves a mention too, especially for people in northern climates, remote cabin owners, RV users, or anyone planning to store the unit in an unheated garage. The FridgeGuard can both charge and discharge at temperatures as low as -20°C, a spec that puts it well ahead of many competitors that restrict operation in colder conditions. For a product meant to function year-round in unpredictable situations, that’s a more meaningful detail than it might initially seem.

Is it perfect? Not entirely. The single AC outlet means if you need to run anything else alongside your fridge during an outage, you’re out of luck. And since an average full-sized refrigerator draws roughly 1,300Wh per day, the standard battery alone won’t cover a full 24 hours without the expansion add-on. These are real constraints worth knowing before you buy.

But the bigger picture here is that Jackery figured out something the home backup industry has been surprisingly slow to grasp: people want solutions that fit their lives, not ones they have to build their lives around. The FridgeGuard doesn’t just solve a problem; it does it in a way that respects the space it lives in. That combination of smart form, solid function, and genuine forward-thinking is exactly the kind of product design worth paying attention to, whether you’re in the market for one or not.

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Xiaomi’s $281 Portable Projector is effectively cheaper than paying for Netflix for a year

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Here is what $281 buys you in an American projector aisle right now: TCL’s C1 at $250 with 230 ISO lumens, or XGIMI’s Vibe One at $269 with 250 ANSI lumens and zero HDR support. Both are decent little machines. Both also demand a room dark enough that you stub your toe finding the sofa. The sub-$300 bracket in the West has genuinely improved, but it improved into “acceptable,” which is a low ceiling for a category promising a 120-inch screen. Xiaomi’s newest budget projector landed in China this week and makes that ceiling look even lower.

The Redmi Projector 5 Pro sells for 1,899 yuan, roughly $281, against a 1,999 yuan list price. That buys native 1080p at up to 120 inches, 1,000 CVIA lumens, HDR10, a 120Hz refresh rate with 5ms latency, dual HDMI, Wi-Fi 6, and a metal gimbal arm that swings the body through 150 degrees. A year of Netflix Premium now runs $323.88 after March’s price hike, so the hardware costs less than the subscription. What holds my attention is that the industrial design survived the price target intact, which almost never happens down here.

Designer: Xiaomi

The body is a soft white wedge with a fabric-wrapped front panel, cradled in a U-arm carrying the REDMI wordmark along its cross-member. That arm is structural rather than a bracket bolted on afterward, so the silhouette holds together from every angle instead of looking like a box propped on a stand. Budget projectors usually betray themselves at the seams, with plastic that doesn’t look premium or boast of a perfect surface finish. Here the perforated grille wraps one flank as deliberate texture, and the white-and-grey split keeps the mass visually light. The posture borrows from a studio monitor on a yoke, a smarter reference than the black plastic router look most of this segment settles for.

A ToF sensor, an HD camera and Xiaomi’s algorithms handle focus, keystone, obstacle avoidance and screen alignment without you opening a menu, and wall colour adaptation reads your paint job to adjust the image. The 150-degree tilt lets you aim at the ceiling by nudging the body rather than stacking books under one end. Thirty degrees of side projection correction covers the reality that nobody’s coffee table sits square to the wall. Sealing the optical engine behind an all-glass lens keeps dust off the internals and, Xiaomi claims, sharpens the picture 10% over last year’s model. Both features used to be premium-tier boasts.

Temper expectations on brightness before you get excited. 1,000 CVIA lumens converts to roughly 700 ISO lumens, which puts this firmly in dim-room territory rather than sunlit-living-room territory. CVIA is a stricter Chinese standard than the fantasy figures printed on Amazon listings, where anonymous brands promise 10,000 lumens and deliver maybe 150. So the number is honest, and the honest number is modest. You will still be drawing the curtains.

The catch arrives at the end, as it always does with Redmi hardware. Xiaomi has said nothing about a global release, and Redmi projectors historically stay inside China while the Xiaomi-branded models travel. It runs HyperConnect and the XiaoAI assistant, meaning no Google TV, no Play Store, and no Netflix app. A projector that costs less than a year of Netflix and cannot run Netflix is the funniest possible ending to this story, and also the most frustrating one, because the rest of us are still shopping in a bracket that peaked at 250 lumens.

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A $150 Portable Espresso Machine That Heats Its Own Water in 135 Seconds

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Good coffee and travel have never really gotten along. At the hotel, there’s that sad drip machine on the counter producing something closer to warm brown water than an actual espresso. At the campsite, it’s instant granules and lukewarm hope. Even for commuters, the office coffee situation rarely inspires confidence. The demand for a proper cup of espresso away from home has always been real; the solutions, less so.

Fanttik’s Cafein 11 is the kind of portable coffee machine that takes that problem seriously. Rather than asking you to pack a separate kettle or hunt for an outlet, it handles heating, pressure, and extraction entirely on its own, running off a built-in rechargeable battery. Fanttik, a brand behind over 40 product design awards, including multiple iF Design Awards, didn’t approach this as a novelty gadget.

Designer: Fanttik

Weighing 825g, the Cafein 11 sits comfortably in the same mental category as a travel thermos, which makes packing it feel like a non-decision. It’s built from food-grade stainless steel, which keeps it durable and easy to clean, and its cylindrical silhouette slips neatly into a backpack without fuss. The machine doesn’t look or feel like a compromise, and that’s actually a harder design goal to hit than it sounds.

The most meaningful thing the Cafein 11 does is heat its own water. That might sound basic, but it’s the feature that separates a genuinely portable espresso machine from one that’s merely small. From room temperature, it reaches brewing heat in about 135 seconds, meaning a proper shot is ready before a campsite morning gets going, or before the next highway stretch begins. No kettle required.

On the extraction side, the Cafein 11 operates at 20 bar of pressure and runs an 8-second pre-infusion cycle before the main brew begins. Pre-infusion saturates the grounds before full pressure is applied, which generally leads to a more even extraction and a richer cup. It’s a detail that suggests Fanttik was thinking as much about what ends up in the cup as about how compact the machine could be.

What also helps is that the Cafein 11 works with both capsules and ground coffee. On a rushed office morning, a capsule is in and out in seconds with no measuring or cleanup required. On a slower weekend trip, freshly ground beans are equally welcome. Either way, the machine adapts to how you feel rather than asking you to commit to one kind of coffee ritual.

Charging works through USB-C, which sounds like a small detail but matters more in practice than you’d think. There’s no proprietary cable to track down or forget at home, since the cord you’re already using for your phone or laptop does the job. A triple 4,500 mAh battery configuration handles multiple shots per charge, so the machine doesn’t run out of steam faster than the average traveler’s patience does.

At $149.99, the Cafein 11 isn’t the cheapest addition to a bag, but the math shifts when you consider what it replaces: hunting for a decent café in unfamiliar places, hotel drip machines that have seen better days, and the persistent compromise between going somewhere and having a good espresso while you’re there. It’s the kind of thing you don’t realize you want until you’re somewhere without a decent cup.

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