Someone Built a Handheld PS4 Twice Because Sony Never Will

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Sony’s PlayStation has always been a home console first and only. The PlayStation Portal, which came closest to answering the demand for a portable PlayStation, streams games from a PS5 rather than running them on the device itself. That gap, an actual PlayStation that plays its own library locally, has stayed open long enough that at least one person decided to fill it themselves, twice.

The PS4P v2 is the second version of a DIY handheld built around a real PS4 Slim motherboard, trimmed and modified to fit inside a 3D-printed shell. The first version, completed earlier this year, was a functional proof of concept that came in at around 1.5 kg and looked more like a prototype than a finished product. This second build is a step up in almost every meaningful way, and the jump in refinement between the two is obvious from the build photos alone.

Designer: wewillmakeitnow

The core remains a cut-down PS4 Slim board, but the second version draws less power than the first, which helps push the battery life a bit further. Six 21700 cells, each rated at 5,000 mAh, power the whole thing for anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours depending on what’s being played. It can also run off external power for longer sessions, and HDMI output means the whole unit can connect to a television with a real DualShock controller attached.

PS4P V1

The display is a 7-inch 1080p OLED panel, which puts it in a different category from most handheld screens at this scale. Cooling is handled by a fan pulled from a retired GTX 750 graphics card, mounted on the rear of the unit. A removable guard sits over the fan, and pulling it off improves airflow when the game demands it; leaving it on protects the fan from dust and impacts during storage or travel.

The finished unit weighs 1.3 kg, which is heavy by any commercial standard. A Steam Deck is considerably lighter. But the honest comparison isn’t really with a Steam Deck, which runs PC games through an x86 processor. This runs the PS4’s actual hardware, which means native execution of the PS4’s library without emulation, streaming, or compatibility layers getting between the player and the game.

The build sits closer to a real commercial product than most DIY console conversions manage. The 3D-printed shell holds everything together cleanly enough that, at a glance, it reads as something you might actually find in a store. That it came out of a single person’s workshop rather than an engineering team with a production budget makes the result even harder to dismiss.

For now, it remains a one-off. Making it smaller, lighter, or more energy-efficient would require changes to the PS4 Slim’s motherboard that go beyond what any single modder can reasonably achieve. The constraints are baked into the hardware. But as a demonstration of what dedication to a specific piece of gaming hardware looks like when Sony won’t build it themselves, the PS4P v2 makes its point clearly.

The post Someone Built a Handheld PS4 Twice Because Sony Never Will first appeared on Yanko Design.

After 14 Years, LEGO’s SpongeBob Is Back and Fully Grown Up

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The last time LEGO released a SpongeBob set, most of the people who grew up watching the show were still in school. That was 2012. A lot has changed since then, and apparently, so has LEGO’s understanding of who actually wants to spend an afternoon building Bikini Bottom.

The LEGO Icons SpongeBob SquarePants: Bikini Bottom (set 11386) opened for pre-order on July 14, 2026, with a September 1 release date, and it is emphatically not a kids’ set. The matte black box, the 18+ label, 1,794 pieces, a $219.99 price tag. LEGO is speaking directly to the adults who spent their Saturday mornings watching SpongeBob annoy Squidward and never really stopped finding it funny. I think that’s a genuinely interesting creative bet.

Designer: LEGO

The set is a cross-section display of Conch Street, the fictional neighborhood that anchored most of the show’s iconic early episodes. SpongeBob’s pineapple house comes with a living room and bedroom. Squidward’s Easter Island head has a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and a rooftop lounge (very Squidward). Patrick’s rock has a detailed interior, which is almost funnier than any deliberate joke in the set, because Patrick’s house was famously nothing but sand and a TV. Rounding things out is a Jellyfish Fields scene. The whole display measures about 21 inches wide and under 10 inches tall, which means it can sit on a shelf without completely taking over a room.

The character lineup does not disappoint. SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward, Gary the Snail, and DoodleBob are all accounted for, along with props like Squidward’s clarinet and music stand, the boatmobile, and a portrait of Gary. For anyone who has seen those early seasons more times than they’d like to admit, these details feel less like features on a spec sheet and more like inside jokes rendered in brick.

Now, the price. $219.99 for 1,794 pieces works out to roughly 12.3 cents per piece, which sits on the higher end even within the LEGO Icons range. That number is dominating most of the early conversation around this set, and it’s a fair point to raise. LEGO has been leaning hard into the adult collector market over the past several years, and that shift has come with a noticeable climb in price across the board. Whether Bikini Bottom is worth $220 depends entirely on how much weight you put on nostalgia, and that’s a question only you can answer.

One additional note worth flagging for collectors: the set uses stickers for some of its graphic details rather than fully printed parts. At this price point, that tends to be the kind of decision that bothers dedicated fans significantly more than casual builders. It’s worth knowing before you pre-order.

What the set gets right is tonal accuracy. LEGO had to make real decisions about how to translate SpongeBob’s deliberately absurd, almost surrealist visual language into physical bricks, and from what’s visible, they leaned in rather than softening anything. The pineapple looks like the pineapple. Patrick’s rock looks like Patrick’s rock. The set doesn’t try to reframe SpongeBob as something more sophisticated or collector-worthy than it is, and that commitment to staying true to the source material is probably the most important thing it does right.

The LEGO Icons line has spent the last few years building out a library of sets designed to function as display objects with personal significance. The Simpsons. The Botanical Collection. Hogwarts. SpongeBob belongs in that conversation in a way that might have seemed unlikely a decade ago but makes complete sense now. The show premiered in 1999, meaning its core audience is solidly in their 30s and actively spending money on things that connect them back to the culture they grew up with. That’s not nostalgia bait. That’s just an audience that has always been there.

Pre-orders are open now, exclusively at LEGO.com. The set ships September 1, 2026.

The post After 14 Years, LEGO’s SpongeBob Is Back and Fully Grown Up first appeared on Yanko Design.