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VZMORE AX9 Max Mini AI PC Review: Local AI Without Surrendering Your Desk

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PROS:


  • Compact, minimalist design with automotive-inspired detailing

  • Effective cooling system for sustained heavy workloads

  • Impressive performance for local AI use, graphics work, and light gaming

  • Great price value for its size and features

CONS:


  • Fan is clearly audible during high-performance tasks

  • USB-C ports are all at the back

RATINGS:

AESTHETICS
ERGONOMICS
PERFORMANCE
SUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITY
VALUE FOR MONEY

EDITOR'S QUOTE:

The VZMORE AX9 Max Mini AI PC pairs understated design with practical local AI performance and cooling that keeps demanding work moving.

A desktop computer shouldn’t have to dominate the desk it sits on, particularly when that space also holds a drawing tablet, reference books, and the occasional coffee cup. The VZMORE AX9 Max takes that idea in a promising direction, pairing an understated enclosure with hardware capable of running local AI models and tackling extended workloads. Its vapor-chamber cooling gives this small machine an appropriately serious engineering focus.

Of course, fitting ambitious hardware into a compact box doesn’t automatically make a great desktop. Our review configuration combines AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 processor with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. After testing local models, extended heavy tasks, display connections, and Fortnite, the more interesting story is how VZMORE balances those capabilities with everyday practicality, including a fan that makes its presence known.

Designer: VZMORE

Aesthetics

There’s a familiar language to the AX9 Max’s silver enclosure, rounded corners, and square footprint. Comparisons with the Mac mini are understandable, although VZMORE’s interpretation is boxier and taller, giving it a slightly more substantial presence. It remains compact enough to share a desk comfortably, without adopting the angular styling that often makes performance-focused hardware look as though it belongs beside a gaming chair.

The aluminum chassis and metallic finish provide the visual restraint, while the shield-shaped badge on top supplies a little personality. There’s something faintly automotive about it, like an emblem borrowed from a luxury car rather than a computer. It’s a playful detail on an otherwise straightforward design, and it keeps the AX9 Max from looking completely anonymous among the many silver boxes competing for desk space.

That restraint also makes the design easier to live with beyond a dedicated office. It wouldn’t look particularly out of place beside a living-room display or on a shared worktable. The darker base and ventilation openings supply some visual separation from the metal body, but they don’t turn the cooling hardware into decoration. Most of the personality stays on top, leaving the rest pleasantly businesslike.

Ergonomics

Measuring 5.31 x 5.19 x 2.27 inches and weighing approximately 1.71 pounds, the AX9 Max is easy to relocate between workspaces. The included VESA mount and screws also let it disappear behind a compatible monitor. That’s a kind of flexibility that you’ll want to have when the desk serves several purposes, although the external power adapter still needs a home. Small computers don’t magically make their cables disappear, much as we’d like them to.

The front panel is refreshingly generous with four USB-A ports, a headset jack, and a power button. A side-mounted SD card slot adds another practical convenience for a photography desk. USB-C, however, stays around the back, so regularly connecting a portable drive or another USB-C accessory involves a little reaching. It’s a workable arrangement, though a front USB-C port would have made those frequent swaps easier.

Those rear connections include two 40Gbps USB4 ports and dual 2.5GbE networking, giving a compact workstation useful flexibility for storage and wired connections. Placement still deserves some thought, especially behind a monitor. The bottom intake and rear exhaust need breathing room, so this is a machine to give a clear, firm surface rather than tuck into a fabric-lined corner just because it happens to fit.

Performance

Inside, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 brings 12 CPU cores, 24 threads, and boost speeds up to 5.2 GHz. Its integrated Radeon 890M has 16 compute units, while our configuration pairs that hardware with DDR5 memory and PCIe 4.0 storage. These are substantial ingredients for a compact desktop, but their usefulness depends on how effectively the enclosure handles the heat generated once work gets demanding.

That’s where the vapor chamber earns its attention. Inside this sealed heat spreader, a working fluid evaporates near the hot area, carries heat across the chamber, and condenses in cooler regions. The process helps distribute concentrated heat across the cooling assembly, where fins and a fan can release it. It doesn’t eliminate the need for active cooling, but it gives that cooling system a more useful surface to work with.

During our extended heavy tasks, the AX9 Max maintained performance without an observed sustained slowdown. The fan was clearly audible, although we wouldn’t describe it as exceptionally loud. That’s a trade-off worth understanding rather than disguising: this machine lets you hear some of the work going into keeping it running. For longer processing sessions, that steady output is more valuable to us than pursuing silence at any cost.

For a creative desk, that balance makes the AX9 Max an interesting candidate for editing footage, preparing graphics, or CPU-based rendering. We haven’t measured a specific video export or rendering project here, so there’s no promise that every creative application will behave alike. The appeal is a compact platform with useful processing headroom; demanding GPU effects and large 3D scenes still need expectations appropriate to integrated graphics.

Local AI gave us something more tangible to explore. With up to 24GB of system memory allocated to graphics, a 27-billion-parameter Qwen model at Q4 quantization produced about 16 tokens per second in our setup. Quantization reduces the model’s memory requirements by storing its weights at lower precision. The result makes experimenting with a larger local language model practical, without having to accommodate a separate graphics card.

A smaller nine-billion-parameter Qwen model reached about 22 tokens per second at Q4, with multi-token prediction enabled, 16GB allocated to graphics, and a configured 32K-token context window. These are setup-specific results, not a guarantee for every model. That allocated memory is shared with the rest of the computer, too, so leaving room for other applications remains part of the balancing act when building a local AI workspace.

Our display testing revealed a useful distinction between the available connections. The 5K and 6K monitors worked properly over USB-C DisplayPort, giving us the high-resolution workspace we’d wanted. HDMI was less cooperative with those setups, producing flickering before the image disappeared. We haven’t established the cause, so it wouldn’t be fair to declare a universal HDMI problem. USB-C was simply the reliable option with our tested displays.

Gaming fits into the picture as an enjoyable extra. Fortnite ran in the neighborhood of 80 fps at 1080p in our testing, and 1440p also delivered a very playable experience. At 4K, however, frame rates sometimes dropped into single digits. Settings matter, and these results shouldn’t become a blanket performance promise. The practical takeaway is to enjoy its gaming ability at sensible resolutions rather than chase maximum pixel counts.

Sustainability

The metal enclosure is a welcome starting point for durability, although plastic remains part of the construction, particularly around the airflow base. We don’t have verified recycled-content figures or a life-cycle assessment to attach to it. Its more convincing sustainability argument concerns keeping the computer useful, rather than treating a metallic finish as an environmental credential. That’s a less glamorous story, but a more meaningful one.

Replaceable SO-DIMM memory and two internal SSD slots give the AX9 Max room to grow. The storage slots use different sizes, M.2 2280 and M.2 2230, so an upgrade needs the appropriate drive. That flexibility can extend usefulness as projects expand. VZMORE also provides a three-year limited hardware warranty for official-site purchases, although upgradeable components and warranty coverage don’t establish that every part is equally repairable.

Value

At $1,499 for the 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD configuration, the AX9 Max belongs in the premium mini PC conversation. Its price makes sense when the cooling system, local AI capability, connectivity, and compact design all serve your work. A cheaper office computer or a larger graphics-focused desktop answers a different brief. Here, the attraction is having several useful capabilities gathered into one fairly unobtrusive object.

Discounts, when they’re available, make the package more appealing, but the full-price argument rests on what you need. I’d consider it worthwhile for a compact local AI and content-creation setup, with the creative-work qualifications already noted. Silence-first buyers have another calculation. VZMORE lists 45W, 54W, and 65W profiles, giving users alternatives to selecting the most aggressive performance setting for every task.

Verdict

The VZMORE AX9 Max’s most appealing quality is how little its appearance tells you about the work it can attempt. Under that restrained exterior sits a computer that ran substantial local models and kept going through our extended heavy tasks. The cooling system is central to that experience, even when it’s audible. There’s a coherent relationship between the small enclosure, the airflow design, and the machine’s practical ambitions.

USB-C proved the better partner for our high-resolution monitors, and gaming made more sense below 4K. Those boundaries leave plenty of room for a capable everyday workstation, particularly if local AI is part of the plan. I can see the appeal of keeping a machine like this beside a drawing tablet and a good display. The desk stays available for the work, rather than being surrendered to the computer.

The post VZMORE AX9 Max Mini AI PC Review: Local AI Without Surrendering Your Desk first appeared on Yanko Design.

HP EliteBoard G2a Hides a Windows PC in an Ordinary-Looking Keyboard

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Desktop computers have become smaller, but even a little box needs somewhere to sit and cables to connect it. HP’s EliteBoard G2a removes that separate enclosure by putting the computer inside a full-size keyboard. This Windows PC keeps the surface you already type on and gives it another job, making a compact workstation easier to carry between home and office.

The gray body measures 14.1 by 4.7 by 0.7 inches and weighs about 1.49 pounds, depending on configuration. Low-profile keys, a numeric keypad, and backlighting preserve the familiar business-keyboard layout rather than shrinking everything into a travel accessory. That makes the design’s restraint rather convincing: there’s no separate machine competing for attention, although you’re still setting aside space for a full keyboard.

Designer: HP

Of course, the missing piece is a screen. Connect the G2a to a compatible USB-C monitor and you can bring your computer to a desk where the display already lives. A single cable can carry video, data, and power, provided the monitor supplies the required 65W. Otherwise, the included power adapter is still needed. A USB-C socket alone doesn’t guarantee that tidy arrangement.

The cable itself comes in attached and detachable versions, a small choice with consequences when packing up. An attached lead stays with the machine, so there’s one less item to leave behind. A detachable cable separates from the keyboard for storage or replacement. The second USB-C connection handles accessories, but USB-A devices and wired Ethernet require adapters, adding clutter to the setup.

Underneath, AMD Ryzen AI 5 PRO 435 or Ryzen AI 7 PRO 450 processors distinguish this G2a from the older G1a. Both include a 50-TOPS neural processing unit for compatible local AI software. The listed configurations pair 16GB or 32GB of RAM with a 512GB SSD. These prove the existence of a powerful computer beneath the keys, not a keyboard controlling something hidden behind your monitor.

An optional 32Wh battery gives the arrangement another advantage when you’re changing desks: the computer can stay running while disconnected. That doesn’t turn it into a laptop, since you’ll still need a display when you arrive. Integrated speakers and microphones reduce the peripherals needed for audio calls, and a prepaired wireless mouse completes the controls. Video calls still need a separate camera, of course.

Putting everything beneath the keys could make a damaged keyboard an expensive problem, which is why serviceability matters here. HP makes the top-mounted keyboard replaceable, alongside the RAM, SSD, and optional battery. Two accessible memory slots support upgrades to 64GB. You don’t have to treat the computer as disposable because its most frequently touched part wears out, although repairs still require appropriate skills.

That said, the price is harder to hide than the computer. Listed US configurations start at $3,028, while the attached-cable version with 32GB of RAM is priced at $3,846. A compatible monitor remains a separate purchase. For someone moving between equipped workspaces, carrying a keyboard instead of a desktop makes sense. Paying that much to avoid a separate box, however, is a considerably bigger decision.

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Atari Made a $219 Retro Console You Can Actually Write Programs On

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There was a time when a computer invited you to do something before it told you what to buy. The Atari 800XL was built for that kind of curiosity, with a keyboard you could use for games or your first lines of code. THE 800XL brings that experience back at full size, rather than shrinking it into another little box beneath the television.

The original’s broad shape mattered because this was a machine you sat down to use, not simply a console to switch on. The recreation keeps that full-size desktop presence and puts a 57-key mechanical keyboard where your hands expect one. Those keys should make typing feel deliberate, but they also keep the computer’s most distinctive design feature from becoming a decorative prop.

Designers: Atari, Retro Games

Switch to Classic Mode and Atari BASIC turns that keyboard into a way to make something yourself. You can write, save, and run programs, then move back to games when the experiment is over. That changes the mood of a retro machine considerably: the keys aren’t there solely to make the housing look authentic. They invite the occasional curious detour between sessions.

Of course, some of the most satisfying rituals need no programming. If you still have an old Atari cartridge, the working slot supports most cartridges from the 400, 800, XL, and XE families. Sliding one into a computer feels different from scrolling through a menu, and it gives an old collection a reason to leave its storage box again.

You don’t need a box of cartridges to begin, though. There are 25 games built in, along with a joystick that adds buttons to the familiar design. That pairing keeps the first evening simple: connect the computer to a television, pick a game, and get reacquainted with a stick in your hand. The keyboard remains close by when play gives way to tinkering.

HDMI is the sensible concession to today’s living room, letting the machine connect to a modern screen without hunting for an old television. USB drives can carry cartridge, disk, and cassette images too, while save states and up to 30 seconds of rewind ease the occasional mistake. These conveniences sit alongside the physical cartridge slot instead of asking it to disappear.

There is a trade-off to keeping the computer at its original scale. THE 800XL takes up desk space that a miniature retro console wouldn’t, and its keyboard may go untouched if all you want is a quick game. At $219.99, it’s a more considered purchase than a novelty for one rainy afternoon, especially when shipping isn’t scheduled to begin until April 23, 2027.

But size is also why this revival makes sense as an object. You can sit down to it, reach for a cartridge, wrestle with a few lines of BASIC, and leave it ready for another evening. The new ports remove some of the friction of bringing an old computer home, while the keyboard keeps the part that made sitting at one interesting in the first place.

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Lenovo’s budget brand just dropped a 27-inch all-in-one PC for under $700

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Lenovo’s Lecoo brand started in 2018 selling smart cameras, a router, and a baby monitor. Nobody at that launch was picturing a 27-inch desktop computer. Eight years later, Lecoo sells laptops, tablets, mini PCs, and now a proper all-in-one. It’s a bit like a kid who began with a lemonade stand and now owns the whole street. My read is that Lecoo is Lenovo’s playground for affordable, good-looking hardware that doesn’t risk the bigger brand names.

The new Lecoo N27 Pro pairs a 27-inch, 2560×1440, 100Hz screen with a Core i5-13420H, 16GB of RAM, and a choice of 512GB or 1TB of storage. It arrives in Cloud Feather Black and Snow Feather White, with a wireless keyboard and mouse in the box. Prices run from ¥4,499 (about $671) to ¥4,999 (about $745). Lenovo has only launched it in China so far, and there’s no word on a US release. If it ever lands here, a lot of pricier 27-inch all-in-ones will start sweating.

Designer: Lecoo (Lenovo)

A Big Screen That Punches Up

Apple’s 27-inch iMac launched in 2009 with a 2560×1440 display, and the world gasped. That same resolution now shows up in an affordable all-in-one, at roughly 109 pixels per inch. The 100Hz refresh rate makes scrolling and window dragging feel smoother than on the usual 60Hz panel. Coverage of 99% sRGB keeps colors honest enough for photo edits and Netflix nights. The stand tilts back 15 degrees and forward 5, so you can angle it toward your slouch.

Since you can’t buy the Lecoo in the US, the nearest comparison is whatever Lenovo sells here. The 24-inch IdeaCentre AIO i with the same Intel CPU is listed at $999.99, per Notebookcheck. Apple’s 24-inch M4 iMac started at $1,299 and has a gorgeous 4.5K screen, though on a smaller canvas. Most 27-inch all-in-ones on US shelves still stop at 1080p. The Lecoo offers a bigger, sharper panel for about $671, which is the kind of math that makes you check the shipping options.

Looks Worth a Desk Spot

The N27 Pro sits on a tapering stalk with an oval foot, which gives it more personality than the usual slab-on-a-stick stance. In Lenovo’s renders, the black version’s stalk looks ribbed and twisted, while the white one reads soft and airy. Lenovo’s Chinese product copy roughly translates to “arcs that hold rhythm,” which is fancy talk for round shapes done nicely. Color is clearly the trend this year, and we covered Lenovo’s six-color IdeaCentre AIO lineup just last month. The Lecoo plays the same game with two shades instead of six.

The box includes a white wireless keyboard and mouse running on 2.4GHz, so a tiny receiver does the talking and there’s no Bluetooth pairing dance. The mouse tracks at 1200 DPI, and Lenovo says the keyboard shrugs off spills, which my coffee habit appreciates. On the ports front, you get five USB-A, one USB-C, HDMI, and Gigabit Ethernet. That’s enough for a printer, a webcam, a thumb drive, and the one ancient gadget everyone still owns. The cable nest on your desk gets evicted, with a single power cord left as the lone tenant.

Enough Power for Real Life

Under the hood is Intel’s Core i5-13420H, a 2023 Raptor Lake-H chip with eight cores (four performance, four efficiency) and twelve threads. That is plenty for spreadsheets, video calls, homework, and a browser with too many tabs. The integrated Intel UHD graphics, with 48 execution units (the little workers that crunch pixels), will handle light photo work but won’t impress your gaming friends. Sixteen gigabytes of RAM keeps multitasking from turning into a slideshow. There’s no USB4 or Thunderbolt, so external GPUs are off the table.

The N27 Pro costs ¥4,499 (about $671) with 512GB and ¥4,999 (about $745) with 1TB, and it’s on sale in China now. Lenovo hasn’t announced a US launch, though Notebookcheck says Lecoo all-in-ones often reach other markets under the IdeaCentre name. Weight and brightness figures haven’t been shared yet, so those details will have to wait. Still, the formula is clear: a big sharp screen, a friendly face, and a price that doesn’t make your wallet flinch. Not bad for a brand that started with a baby monitor.

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A full desktop PC is hiding inside this picture frame

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Dieter Rams famously said good design is honest. With all due respect to Dieter, Matt from DIY Perks has built something that lies through its teeth, and it is one of the better design ideas to come out of a YouTube build video this year. The project is a wall-mounted picture frame, painted with an original mountain landscape by Matt himself, that conceals a fully working PC workstation behind it. Nothing about the closed frame hints at what is inside, a monitor, a computer, a keyboard, a mouse, and a pair of salvaged speakers. It takes a gentle pull at the top to break the illusion and fold the whole thing down into a desk.

DIY Perks is Matt’s YouTube channel, sitting at nearly 5 million subscribers and built on exactly this kind of project, builds that solve a real problem while ignoring every conventional idea of what the solution should look like. This one hides an ultra-wide monitor stripped to its bare panel for minimum depth, a computer on a repurposed laptop motherboard, and TV speakers behind a veneer-clad wall panel finished in a warm 1970s dark-wood aesthetic. Power arrives via copper tape strips painted invisibly into the wall. The desk surface is MDF covered in oiled hardwood veneer, convincing enough to pass as solid wood. The whole setup runs Linux Mint, draws about 90 watts, and looks like a painting until it doesn’t.

Designer: DIY Perks

A Desktop With No Actual Desk

Desktop computers require a desktop, which is right there in the name, and this one provides one on demand. The hinge mechanism opens like a laptop, but there is no lap, the screen is not attached to the part you hold, and you are definitely not putting this on a plane tray table. It could qualify as a standing desk, except it sits at seated height and has no legs of any kind. The most accurate product name might be something like “wall-mounted fold-down all-in-one,” which sounds like a line item in a government procurement document. Matt just calls it a PC, and at a certain point that is as good as it gets.

The design works because it commits fully to the illusion. Closed up, it reads as furniture and decor first, tech never. Open it, and the whole thing shifts personality in one move, from framed artwork to compact workstation. That transformation is the hook, but it also says something interesting about the way we live with devices now. Plenty of people want a proper setup at home, but very few want their living room to look like a call center. This build solves that with sheer elegance. It gives you a desk without asking your room to look like it has one all day.

Built Like Furniture, Wired Like Hardware

Fitting a monitor, computer, speakers, and peripheral storage flush within a frame the depth of a painting required solutions at every layer. The monitor gets stripped to its bare panel, with the control board relocated below using low-profile HDMI connectors so the assembly sits nearly flush with the wall. The computer runs on a repurposed laptop motherboard, cooled by a server heatsink from an electronics recycling center, fitted with a copper shim Matt trimmed by hand with a hacksaw. A blower fan handles airflow through a small shroud. The entire assembly slots into its compartments without a CNC machine anywhere in the process, which is a deliberate choice that keeps this build within reach of a serious maker.

Most wall-mounted desks carry a laptop and nothing heavier, and the bracket design tends to reflect that. This one carries a monitor, computer, speakers, and the desk surface itself, distributed through the main wall panel via brackets sunk directly into wall studs, with piano hinges spreading load across the full desk connection. Power arrives via two strips of copper tape running up the wall surface, painted over with metal primer and standard wall emulsion until they completely vanish. The tape carries low-voltage DC, with the power brick at the bottom acting as short-circuit protection, and the voltage is low enough that shock risk is not a concern. Even standing directly in front of it, you cannot find the wires.

Art on the Outside, PC Inside

A mountain valley with a winding river, pine-covered slopes, rocky crags, morning mist, roaring rapids, and a steam engine pulling cargo through a mountain pass. Matt spent hours on that painting, which now lives on the front of his PC, and it reads convincingly as something out of a Bob Ross tutorial, warm and dense with detail. The frame sits surrounded by other paintings from family members on the same wall, completing the camouflage to the point where a visitor to the house would have no reason to look twice. That is what separates this from every other clever PC build and puts it squarely in design-object territory. The disguise is the design.

Most technology objects demand attention even at rest, the idle glow of a standby indicator, the visual mass of a monitor and its arm, the cord tangle underneath. Matt’s build refuses to participate, choosing instead to disappear completely into its domestic context and only announce itself when needed. That posture shows up far more often in high-end furniture design than in PC builds, where the prevailing instinct is to make hardware as visible as possible, preferably with RGB lighting aimed in multiple directions. The painting on the front is the punchline of the project, but it is also its most considered creative decision. Every other detail serves function; the painting serves the idea.

When a PC Forgets It Is Tech

Matt has been building invisible and fold-down PCs for over a decade, and the 2020 version of his invisible PC alone pulled in over 8 million views on YouTube. This iteration raises the stakes by making the camouflage the actual creative output, which shifts it from an engineering exercise into something closer to an art installation. The home workspace trend has been moving this way anyway, look at the DropTop desk by Pith and Stem or Anker Bak’s wall-mounted desk inspired by the logic of Japan’s compact homes. Matt’s build sits at the logical extreme of that movement, a workspace so thoroughly integrated into its surroundings that it ceases to exist until you ask it to. No commercial product has pulled that off.

The build is not a product you can buy, which is the one thing most people will find frustrating after watching the video. Matt points to Framework mainboards as an off-the-shelf shortcut for anyone attempting a recreation, and the documentation is thorough enough that a determined maker could get reasonably close. The painting, though, is entirely up to you. Either paint your own art, or print something online. Or if you really want to one-up Matt, add a glare-free screen instead of the painting and program it to work as a smart art frame!

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AFTERSHOCK Built a $14,200 Gaming PC Where 70 Petals Bloom With Heat

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Every gaming PC eventually reveals itself under load, fans spinning up, temperatures climbing, a quiet admission that something demanding is happening inside the case. Most builders spend their whole budget trying to hide that moment. AFTERSHOCK built an entire machine around celebrating it instead, planting a cherry blossom tree inside the chassis that physically opens its petals as the hardware gets hotter.

Seventy individual blossoms make up that tree, each one hand-formed and hand-painted from a titanium alloy engineered to react directly to heat. There’s no motor tucked behind the branches, no RGB lighting faking the motion, and no firmware quietly triggering an animation on cue. The metal itself just responds, curling open as the system’s internal temperature rises during a demanding session and folding shut again once things cool back down.

Designer: AFTERSHOCK

That mechanical honesty changes what “thermal performance” even means to look at. Most cooling systems exist purely to be invisible, judged only by numbers on a monitoring app nobody but the owner ever sees. Here, the exact opposite instinct wins out. Push the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and the Zotac RTX 5080 inside it through a genuinely demanding game, and the payoff is a slow, visible bloom happening in real time behind the glass.

AFTERSHOCK’s own demo reportedly shows the tree sitting fully closed at a resting 18°C, which suggests the blossoms don’t wait for some dramatic thermal spike before reacting. They likely ease open gradually as load builds, tracking the system’s actual temperature curve rather than snapping into a single dramatic pose. Idle back down to a lighter task, and the tree presumably eases shut again right along with it.

None of that sculpture would matter much sealed inside an opaque box, so the whole build sits inside an APNX V2 chassis wrapped in glass across a full 270 degrees. It’s a deliberate choice, given how little most case designers bother with rear or side visibility once a build is finished and pushed against a desk. This one seems built to be walked around and watched from nearly any angle in the room.

Underneath the sculpture sits a genuinely capable rig rather than a showpiece with hollow specs. Sixty-four gigabytes of DDR5-6000 memory, a 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD, and a 1300W Platinum power supply all point to a machine with real upgrade headroom beyond its current configuration. A custom open-loop liquid cooling system handles the actual thermal load quietly, doing the unglamorous work that lets the titanium blossoms take the visible credit instead.

At roughly $14,200, converted from the AU$19,995 asking price, the Cherry Bloom is available to order now rather than teased as a future concept. That price does not include shipping, and next-business-day dispatch confirms this is a real commercial build rather than a one-off showpiece kept behind glass at a trade show somewhere.

Most of that cost is clearly going toward 70 hand-finished metal petals and the engineering needed to make them react correctly, not toward the Ryzen chip or graphics card sitting underneath. It’s a strange kind of luxury, paying handsomely for a gaming PC’s exhaust heat to finally look like something worth watching.

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The $499 Lapis One Is A Tiny Mac mini Alternative Built Just to Run Your AI Agents

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Earlier this year, people were buying Mac minis by the cartload just to give their OpenClaw agents somewhere to live, and Apple Store staff reportedly started calling it the “OpenClaw machine.” Pamir’s Lapis One looked at that trend and asked a very reasonable question: what if the agent’s computer was actually designed for the agent? The answer is a coaster-sized Linux box with a Rabbit R1 orange cap, an iMac G3 two-tone body, and a pixel robot snoozing on its little screen. Your AI assistant gets its own desk, its own internet connection, and its own battery, while your laptop finally gets some peace. Frankly, it’s a nicer setup than my first apartment.

Under that playful shell sits a Rockchip RK3576 chip with a 6 TOPS NPU, 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 64GB of storage, and room for an M.2 SSD and a microSD card. The standout feature is Agent KVM, a dedicated USB-C port that captures another computer’s display and fakes a keyboard and mouse, letting your agent operate a second machine the way you would. Tailscale comes baked in, so you can check on your agent from your phone in the grocery store checkout line. Pamir, a San Francisco startup that previously shipped the Distiller dev kit, has pre-orders open at $499, with December shipping to the US. The regular price will be $599 once pre-order pricing ends.

Designer: Pamir AI

Pick the Lapis One up and the design lineage is impossible to miss. The orange wedge housing the screen is doing a very direct Rabbit R1 impression, right down to the color and the cute pixel-art creature that lives on the display. We covered the R1 when it launched, admiring how Teenage Engineering gave it a Tamagotchi-like charm, and the comparison mostly holds here too. Where the two devices split is purpose. The R1 tried to replace your phone and got clowned for it because your phone already does everything a phone needs to do. The Lapis One doesn’t compete with anything you own. It just wants a permanent outlet and a Wi-Fi password, which is a much easier ask.

The other reference point is the iMac G3, and it shows up less in the color and more in the attitude. Apple’s original iMac made a whole generation comfortable with computers by wrapping them in candy plastic and betting the farm on USB when almost nothing supported it yet. The Lapis One runs a similar play for Linux, a platform whose default personality is a bare green board and forty tabs of forum troubleshooting. Four labeled USB-C ports on the back handle power, video out, data, and the KVM function, and the whole thing boots into a clean, readable interface instead of a terminal prompt. That is a genuinely useful decision for anyone who wants Linux without becoming a systems administrator.

The screen is a Sharp memory LCD from the same panel family as Panic’s Playdate, a device we have written about more than once for its willingness to be delightfully impractical. That low-power panel means the Lapis One can sit there all day, idle screen glowing faintly, without murdering its 3,300mAh battery, and it doubles as a desk clock when your agent isn’t busy. It is a small detail, but it is the kind of small detail that separates a product from a dev board somebody forgot to case.

None of this erases the real questions. Battery life tops out around four hours, which turns the “personal UPS” pitch into more of a personal nap timer. Agent KVM hands your agent direct control of a second computer’s keyboard and mouse with zero software safety net on the target machine, so you are trusting your own judgment about what that agent is allowed to click. And $499 for what is, on paper, a mid-range ARM chip in a nice box will keep the Raspberry Pi comparisons coming, same as they did the day this thing launched.

Still, I like where Pamir landed. The industrial design does the job good industrial design is supposed to do, which is make a genuinely intimidating category of hardware feel like something you would not mind on your desk. Whether $499 buys enough agent to justify the coaster remains an open question until October’s first batch actually ships.

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The Mac mini Form Factor is So Perfect, Literally Everyone is Copying It

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Apple Mac mini at center surrounded by six lookalike mini PCs from ASUS, Slimbook, Lenovo, MSI, Geekom and AceMagic.

Apple’s Mac mini is a 127 by 127 by 50mm aluminum square, and the PC industry has spent 2026 rebuilding that square with different logos on top. ASUS’s ExpertCenter PN55 measures 130 by 130 by 34mm. Geekom’s A9 Max sits at 135 by 132 by 46mm. Japan’s Links LC3501 shrinks it to 100 by 100 by 34mm. Dell skipped the mini entirely and went for the Mac Studio, giving the XPS RTX Spark Desktop a dark gray boxy body with a removable lid underneath for the SSD. At this point nobody is even pretending.

The convergence gets funnier at the expensive end. Every RTX Spark mini PC shown at Computex 2026, from Dell, Lenovo, ASUS and MSI, turned up with four USB-C ports, one HDMI and 10Gb Ethernet in a near-identical gray box. ServeTheHome, which photographed all four on the show floor, reckoned Nvidia is keeping a heavy hand on the steering wheel and enforcing design requirements on its partners. Apple arrived at this shape through integration, drawing an enclosure around a chip it designed itself. Everyone else arrived by consensus, or possibly by memo. Same silhouette, wildly different reason for existing.

1. Geekom A9 Max

Geekom A9 Max Mini PC on a table

Geekom’s A9 Max lands at 135 by 132 by 46mm, which puts it within 8mm of the Mac mini on every axis, close enough that the tape measure tells its own story. The chassis is full metal with softly radiused corners and a flat top plate, carrying the visual weight along with the footprint, that sense of a machined block rather than a molded shell. Inside is AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with Radeon 890M graphics, up to 128GB of DDR5 across two SODIMM slots and a pair of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe slots, for around $1,000. Geekom has spent years positioning itself as the answer to Intel’s NUC line, which died in 2023 and left the reference shape unclaimed. Somebody was always going to pick it up.

The limits show up under load rather than on the spec sheet. Testers found the 890M and the memory ceiling holding back heavier creative work, and the fans announcing themselves during video editing, which is the cost of working inside Apple’s volume without Apple’s thermal budget. One review measured an NPU benchmark score less than half what the identical processor managed in a rival machine, a gap Geekom later traced to a UEFI bug and patched. Apple ships one firmware for one board while Geekom ships many, and that difference surfaces in software long before it surfaces in the aluminum. The metalwork is excellent, and the chassis is the part of this machine that needed no revision at all.

2. Minisforum AI X1 Pro

Minisforum AI X1 Pro Mini PC on a table

Minisforum built the AI X1 Pro around everything Apple leaves out, and the case swelled accordingly. You get three M.2 slots, dual 2.5GbE, two USB4 ports, Wi-Fi 7, an internal 135W power supply instead of a laptop brick, and an OCuLink connector for hanging a desktop GPU off the side. Configurations run from a Ryzen 7 H 255 up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, with sale pricing landing between $899 and $1,369 depending on memory and storage. The workmanship sits clearly above the class average, with properly machined surfaces rather than the painted-over castings this price bracket usually delivers. It is the most capable machine in this roundup and the least contained.

Reviewers logged what that ambition costs, noting that the swollen footprint makes it a harder sell against the M4 Mac mini, that it runs loud, and that the Wi-Fi needed attention out of the box. Every port is volume, every volume is airflow, and airflow is noise, which is the chain of consequences Apple sidestepped by declining to offer any of this in the first place. The AI X1 Pro is the honest version of the trade, and it tells you in cubic centimeters exactly what expandability costs. Anyone who has priced an external GPU enclosure knows OCuLink is the cheapest route to real graphics performance in a small box. You simply cannot have it inside a 127mm square.

3. ASUS ExpertCenter PN55

ASUS ExpertCenter PN55 Mini PC

ASUS measures the ExpertCenter PN55 at 130 by 130 by 34mm and 0.6kg, which is three millimeters off the Mac mini’s footprint in both directions and a full 16mm slimmer. The aluminum chassis carries finely etched lines across the top that run off the edge and resolve into the rear cooling vents, a detail doing real work by turning a functional grille into a graphic element. Inside is a Ryzen AI 400 Series processor with an NPU rated up to 55 TOPS, up to 96GB of DDR5, six USB ports and dual LAN, enough to drive four 4K displays. ASUS validated the whole thing to MIL-STD-810H for round-the-clock operation, which matters for the signage and kiosk deployments this line actually sells into. It was announced at CES 2026 and started shipping in Q2.

ASUS inherited the entire NUC program from Intel in 2023, which gives it more historical claim to the small desktop than anyone except Apple, and the PN55 still reads like a Mac mini that got a job in IT. Its own idea is the chassis mechanism, a hinged lever that pops the machine open for RAM and storage swaps without a single tool. That is a direct answer to Apple, whose 2024 redesign sealed the enclosure and turned memory into a decision you make once and live with for five years. An IT manager buying two hundred of these cares more about that lever than about anything else on the spec sheet. The footprint is borrowed; the service model is entirely its own.

4. Acer Veriton RI110

Acer Veriton RI110 Mini PC

Acer announced the Veriton RI110 at IFA in Berlin on September 2, making it the newest arrival in this convergence by a matter of days. The chassis measures 138.5 by 131.3 by 52.1mm and weighs 630 grams, so it sits 11mm wider than a Mac mini, 2mm taller, and marginally lighter at 1.39 pounds against Apple’s 1.5. Acer calls it a mini workstation, which is a lot of syllables for a box the size of a sandwich. Inside is Intel’s Core Ultra X7 358H with Arc B390 graphics, up to 96GB of dual-channel LPDDR5X and up to 4TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage, with 10GbE and 2.5GbE both fitted. Acer claims it will run AI models of up to 120 billion parameters locally.

Soldered LPDDR5X sets the ceiling here, because memory is fixed at the moment of purchase and stays fixed for the life of the machine, the same bargain Apple asks you to make. The OCuLink port is the counterweight, a PCIe 4.0 x4 link rated at 64Gbps that lets you hang a full desktop graphics card off the back, which is the most un-Apple gesture available in this form factor. That 120 billion parameter figure deserves a squint, since fitting a model that size into 96GB requires aggressive quantization Acer has not specified anywhere in its materials. North America gets it in Q4 2026, EMEA in Q1 2027, and no price has been announced. It is a Mac mini with a hole drilled in the back.

5. Links LC3501

Link LC3501 Mini PC

The Links LC3501 is 100 by 100 by 34mm, weighs 260 grams, and runs a four-core Ryzen 5 3501U that AMD shipped on the Zen+ architecture back in 2019. Scaling the square down to a 10cm footprint works visually, because the proportions hold and the thing reads as a deliberate object rather than a shrunken one. Japanese distributor Links sells it for ¥58,800 with 8GB of DDR4 and ¥64,800 with 16GB, roughly $367 and $404, with a 256GB SATA SSD and Windows 11 Pro preinstalled. It shipped in mid-September 2026 and is not coming to the US, so treat this one as evidence rather than as a purchase. The chip inside is seven years old and the case could not care less.

Putting a 2019 processor in a 2026 enclosure reads oddly until you look at where DRAM and NAND prices have gone, at which point the arithmetic makes sense. What the machine exposes is that the silicon has become the variable and the shape has become the constant. A 100mm footprint at 34mm tall is a genuinely lovely object, smaller than the Mac mini in every dimension, and the shape is doing considerably more of the work here than the hardware. Designers have a name for this moment, when a form outlives the constraints that produced it and carries on as pure style. The LC3501 is that moment, on sale now, for $367.

6. AceMagic F2A

AceMagic F2A Mini PC

AceMagic’s F2A measures 148 by 120 by 39mm in an all-plastic case, running a Core Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H with Intel Arc graphics, 32GB of DDR5 and a 1TB SSD for under $600. The proportions are a rectangle rather than a square, which changes the read entirely, because a square sits on a desk as an object and a rectangle sits there as a component. Plastic shifts it further, since much of the visual argument of this form factor rests on appearing to be a solid machined block. Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5Gb Ethernet are both fitted, there is a spare M.2 slot, and the ports are sensibly split across front and back. For the silicon on offer, the price is fair.

The port list is where the budget becomes visible, with no USB4 or Thunderbolt anywhere and every USB-A connector capped at 5Gbit/s. Dual fans get loud under sustained load, with no button or software toggle to bring them down. A plastic shell radiates far less heat than machined aluminum, so the fans work harder to compensate, which is a material decision producing an acoustic outcome. Apple’s aluminum enclosure functions as a heatsink that also happens to be a housing, and that double duty is the expensive part of this form factor. The outline is the cheap thing to reproduce. The substrate is not.

7. Slimbook ONE

Slimbook ONE Mini PC

Spanish builder Slimbook ships the ONE at 158 by 130 by 58mm in silver aluminum and black plastic, which is about as close to Cupertino as a color pairing can get without sharing a supplier. Configurations run to a Ryzen 7 H 255 or the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, with up to 128GB of RAM and up to 16TB of SSD storage, plus OCuLink, dual 2.5GbE, Wi-Fi 7 and USB4. Pricing starts at 649 € for the Hawk Point model, roughly $760, rising to 949 € for the Strix Point version. The order page is the real product here, because Slimbook preloads Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or Linux Mint for free and charges extra for Windows. There is no US retail presence, so buying one means ordering from Spain.

Putting a silver aluminum square on a desk and booting KDE Plasma on it is a small act of comedy, and Slimbook knows exactly what it is doing. The company built its identity on selling Apple-grade hardware to people who actively prefer Apple’s software stay out of it, which turns the shared shape into an argument rather than an accident. Its own spec sheet at one point listed the machine as 5.5mm tall, a decimal point slip that would have made this the thinnest desktop computer ever built. The real number is 58mm, which is 8mm taller than a Mac mini and precisely what fitting OCuLink inside costs you. Small Linux vendors rarely get the metalwork this right.

8. MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG

MSI Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG Mini PC

MSI has been building this box since 2015. The original Cubi arrived with a Broadwell chip, curved edges and a choice of black or white, nine years before Apple’s square settled into its current proportions. The current model is the Cubi NUC AI+ 3MG, announced at CES 2026 and shipping from May 1, measuring 119.6 by 115.2 by 37.5mm for a total volume of half a liter. That makes it smaller than the Mac mini on every single axis, which is an engineering result rather than a marketing one. Inside is an Intel Panther Lake chip up to the 16-core Core Ultra 9 386H, 32GB of DDR5, dual Thunderbolt 4, dual 2.5G LAN and Wi-Fi 7.

Matte black plastic and a fingerprint sensor set into the power button are the tells that this was drawn for an IT deployment rather than a display shelf, the finish flat and light-absorbing where anodized aluminum would catch an edge highlight. The compactness and the tool-free access to RAM and storage are the wins. The $1,999 price of a loaded configuration and the Xe3 integrated graphics are the limits, with barebones units starting at $569 for anyone supplying their own memory and storage. There is no USB-A connector anywhere on the rear panel, which anybody running a wired keyboard will notice on day one. MSI builds the chassis from post-consumer recycled plastics and ships it in FSC-certified packaging.

9. Lenovo ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2

Lenovo ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2 Mini PC

Lenovo aimed one product further up the Apple lineup here, because the ThinkCentre neo Ultra Gen 2 is chasing the Mac Studio, and the aim is uncomfortably good. It measures 195 by 191 by 108mm against the Mac Studio’s 197 by 197 by 95mm, landing within 6mm of Apple’s footprint on both axes and standing 13mm taller, which is roughly the height of a graphics card getting its own way. Inside that 3.6-liter box sits a full desktop GeForce RTX 5060 with 8GB of GDDR7, an Intel Core Ultra 9 285 vPro, 64GB of DDR5, three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and a 350W internal power supply rated at 92% efficiency. Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI 2.1 are both present. It weighs 8.2 pounds, or roughly five Mac minis.

Stuffing a desktop-class graphics card into Mac Studio proportions is the one thing Apple has never attempted, and it is the entire reason this machine exists. The chassis leaves room to swap the graphics card, the storage and the memory, making it the most serviceable object in this roundup by a distance, and the vents running down its flanks are doing considerably more visible work than Apple’s concealed underside intake. The costs are a 12-month warranty, no memory card reader of any kind, and pricing that has turned volatile, with one UK buyer paying £1,510 in late 2025 for a configuration listing above £3,400 by February. Configurations run from $1,919 to $2,409, which is Mac Studio money for Mac Studio dimensions. The square is the marketing; the RTX 5060 is the argument.

The post The Mac mini Form Factor is So Perfect, Literally Everyone is Copying It first appeared on Yanko Design.

Laptops Sealed Computers Shut, ARTISAN ALTO Snaps Them Back Open

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Home computers used to snap open like toolboxes, cartridges sliding in for a new game or a new skill. That idea mostly disappeared once sealed laptops took over, but the ARTISAN ALTO AT-101 brings it back with a vermilion shell that looks like it walked straight out of 1984 and a system built for how people actually tinker today. It’s a machine designed to grow alongside whatever you’re currently obsessed with.

The trapezoidal red housing wastes no time signaling its intentions. Sculpted, concave ivory keycaps sit beside red cooling louvres, and a keyboard opening cuts diagonally through the sloping side, turning what could’ve been a flat slab into something with genuine presence on a desk. This is a machine built to be looked at, not tucked behind a monitor.

Designer: Leo Botinelly

That vintage-inspired shell hides a distinctly modern expansion idea. Upright cartridges slot into place to add graphics power, sound capability, retrocomputing modes, or an AI companion, while smaller side modules handle specialist interfaces and individual projects. Recording a demo, building out a more ambitious scene, or reviving an old favorite game all become a matter of swapping in the right module rather than replacing the whole machine.

The standout pairing puts VECTOR, a compute cartridge, alongside COMPANION, an AI agent module with its own ivory-crowned housing. Together they form what the concept calls a personal cyberdeck, one where your context and your processing power both live in the same two bays. Everything from your conversation history to your working files stays local, an intentional counterpoint to how most AI tools currently function.

Five multifunction keys handle creative shortcuts without forcing a trip through a menu, while a dedicated PAUSE rocker lets you freeze, rewind, or speed through whatever’s running, treating time itself as something you can grab and adjust mid-task. A touchpad and four flush cursor keys merge into a single continuous surface on the right side, keeping navigation under the same hand that’s already resting there.

Flip the machine over and the same philosophy continues. Memory access sits in the open rather than buried under layers of casing, rear supports adjust to match your desk setup, and a single screw releases the service clamp entirely. Every one of these choices treats a computer’s insides as something worth respecting, not hiding behind warranty stickers and proprietary screws.

Around back, a compact connector panel handles the practical side of daily use. USB-C power sits alongside labeled ports for two cartridges, additional USB-C connections, LAN, HDMI, USB-A, and audio, all routed cleanly to keep cables from tangling across the front of a desk. Even the exhaust vents get a considered shape, flanking the connector panel like a pair of small turbines venting heat from all that cartridge-driven ambition.

The post Laptops Sealed Computers Shut, ARTISAN ALTO Snaps Them Back Open first appeared on Yanko Design.

Cloud AI Means Someone Else Has Your Data, MINISFORUM Fixes That

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Running a serious AI model at home usually means renting someone else’s cloud server and hoping your data stays private along the way. MINISFORUM built its newest pairing to remove that trade-off entirely. The AI Agent NAS N5 MAX-P495 and AI Mini Workstation MS-S1 MAX-P495 combine for up to 131 TOPS of AI compute performance, 192GB of memory at 8533 MT/s, and up to 160GB of graphics memory, enough headroom to keep the heavy lifting on a desk instead of in a data center.

The N5 MAX-P495 takes the shape of a compact black cube, but what it holds inside matters more than how it looks sitting on a shelf. It combines powerful AI computing with up to 200TB of local storage, enabling users to store, manage, and process large volumes of data within a single AI platform. That capacity turns a spare corner of an office into a private archive large enough to hold years of project files, footage, or research without ever touching a third-party server.

Designer: MINISFORUM

Storage alone doesn’t make an AI system useful, so MINISFORUM built the N5 to run the AI itself. From RAG knowledge bases and AI models to embeddings, databases, and AI agents such as OpenClaw and Hermes, N5 MAX-P495 keeps data and AI workloads local, enabling continuous and private AI operations. A small business could lean on that setup to run its own customer-support agent without routing conversations through an outside company’s servers.

That local-first approach extends to how the N5 fits into a larger setup. Designed to work alongside AI computing devices, N5 MAX-P495 serves as a centralized backend for data, models, knowledge, and long-running AI workloads, bringing storage and computing together at the edge. It’s less a standalone gadget and more a quiet engine room, built to keep working in the background while something faster handles the parts people actually interact with.

That faster half of the pairing is the MS-S1 MAX-P495, a compact tower wrapped in a ventilated, diamond-textured front panel that looks more like a piece of desk sculpture than a workstation. It delivers powerful local AI computing for demanding model inference, AI development, and computationally intensive workloads, built for intensive local AI tasks, engineering, and workflows in an ultra-compact footprint. Developers get workstation-class muscle without giving up desk space to a full tower case.

Speed matters just as much as raw power for certain jobs, and MINISFORUM designed the MS-S1 with that in mind. Designed for low-latency AI workloads, MS-S1 MAX-P495 enables responsive local inference for AI agents, computer vision, generative AI, and other real-time applications. A security camera system or a live creative tool built on generative AI benefits directly from that kind of immediate response instead of waiting on a round trip to the cloud.

Connectivity rounds out the workstation’s role in a larger setup. With extensive connectivity and expansion capabilities, MS-S1 MAX-P495 serves as a powerful AI compute frontend, supporting models, applications, and connected devices across flexible edge AI environments. That flexibility means the same box can sit at the center of a home lab or plug into a small studio’s existing hardware without forcing a rebuild.

Paired together, the two devices split the work the way a good team would. The MS-S1 MAX-P495 and N5 MAX-P495 form a complete edge AI computing system, delivering high-performance AI compute at the frontend while integrating compute, massive storage, data, and AI knowledge at the backend, providing a powerful foundation for real-time inference, persistent AI workloads, and scalable local AI applications. It’s a compact answer to a question more households and small teams are starting to ask: whether AI still needs to live somewhere else at all.

The post Cloud AI Means Someone Else Has Your Data, MINISFORUM Fixes That first appeared on Yanko Design.