Tag Archives: desktops

Dwarf Factory’s Hyper-real 4/20 Resin Keycaps Are Handcrafted Miniature Gardens You Can Type On

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The countdown to 4/20 has begun, and if you’re the type who celebrates by upgrading your workspace aesthetics rather than raiding the nearest dispensary, Dwarf Factory sees you. The Vietnamese artisan keycap maker has built a reputation for encasing impossibly detailed miniature scenes in resin, transforming individual keyboard keys into tiny dioramas. Their Terrarium V2 collection has featured everything from succulents to seasonal florals, each one hand-painted and assembled at a scale that borders on obsessive. Their latest drop leans into the holiday with zero subtlety and maximum craft.

Rasta Jardin swaps the usual botanical lineup for miniature ‘ahem’ plants, complete with serrated leaves, decorative baskets, and what looks like actual soil composition at microscopic scale. Each keycap gets hand-painted, which means every Rasta Jardin has slight variations in how the leaves angle, how the rocks settle, how the light catches the resin dome. Standing 16mm tall in SA profile and compatible with Cherry MX switches, these caps are designed for your top row function keys or Escape, where they can sit pretty without making your fingers work harder to reach them.
Designer: Dwarf Factory

Designer: Dwarf Factory

The Rasta Jardin construction starts with hand-assembled miniature plant elements, built at a scale where individual leaf serrations actually matter. The plants get positioned inside tiny woven baskets, the kind of detail that requires steady hands and magnification. Substrate gets added at the base, rocks get arranged for visual balance, and then the entire assembly gets encased in layers of transparent resin, cast in a way that avoids bubbles and maintains optical clarity.

Dwarf Factory’s command over resin is truly impressive (go check out their other work too). The dome shape creates a lens effect, magnifying the scene inside while also playing with light refraction depending on your viewing angle. Sit directly above your keyboard and you see one composition. Lean back slightly and the light shifts, catching different facets of the leaves and basket weave. The transparency means RGB backlighting (if your board has it) will glow through the keycap, turning the whole thing into a tiny illuminated terrarium when you’re typing in the dark.

The hand-painting step happens after the resin casting, adding color gradients to the leaves that give them depth and realism. The plants have a specific visual language, those jagged leaf edges and the way the foliage clusters around the stem, and Dwarf Factory nails it at a scale where most makers would just paint a green blob and call it done. The baskets get individual weave lines. The soil gets color variation. Even the rocks have shadows and highlights that suggest three-dimensional form rather than flat decoration.

Dwarf Factory ships each Rasta Jardin in a sliding kraft paper box with rubber finger gloves, because resin surfaces and fingerprint oils are enemies. You also get a user guide, which feels almost comically formal for a single keycap but reinforces the idea that you’re buying a miniature art piece that happens to be functional. At roughly $73, pricing sits in line with other premium artisan caps from established makers. You’re paying for the labor-intensive handwork and the design execution that makes these feel like gallery-quality miniatures rather than novelty garbage.

What makes the Rasta Jardin compelling is how it treats the 420 aesthetic with the same design rigor Dwarf Factory applies to cherry blossoms or desert flora. There’s no cartoonish stoner imagery here, no neon green gimmicks or Rastafarian color blocking that screams cheap novelty. Just meticulous botanical miniaturization that happens to feature a plant with significant cultural weight. Your productivity won’t improve, but your keyboard will have a story worth telling when Monday rolls around and someone asks what the hell is on your Escape key.

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This $146 Raspberry Pi 5 Case Has a Touchscreen and Runs AI Locally

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The Raspberry Pi has always been a tinkerer’s dream, a tiny board that can become almost anything with enough creativity. Over the years, its growing capabilities have attracted developers, home automation enthusiasts, and even edge AI experimenters who want real processing power in a compact, low-cost package. The persistent challenge has been housing all of that potential in something that looks and works like a proper desktop.

SunFounder’s Pironman 5 Pro Max takes a direct swing at that problem. It’s a dark anodized aluminum tower case designed exclusively for the Raspberry Pi 5, surrounding it with enough hardware to make it a genuinely capable desktop machine. The case and all its bundled accessories start at $145.99 without the Pi itself, which is a lot of kit for something technically sold as a bare enclosure.

Designer: SunFounder

The most visible feature is the 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen on the front (or side, depending on your point of reference), giving direct, tactile access to whatever you’re running. Alongside it are a 5MP adjustable camera module, stereo speakers, a USB microphone, and a 3.5mm audio jack, all included in the box. Together, they open the door to voice interfaces, video recording, and interactive displays without requiring a single extra module or dangling cable.

Storage and AI expansion come from dual NVMe M.2 slots driven by a PCIe Gen 2 switch. They support RAID 0 for speed or RAID 1 for redundancy, making the Pironman a surprisingly capable home NAS. The same slots are also compatible with Hailo-8 and Hailo-8L AI accelerators for running local language models like DeepSeek or Ollama without a cloud connection.

SunFounder’s OpenClaw platform ties a lot of that together, letting you build a personal AI agent directly on the hardware. You can connect it to cloud-based services like ChatGPT and Gemini, or keep everything local with Grok, Ollama, and DeepSeek. It’s a bold pitch for a single-board computer, but one the Raspberry Pi 5’s improved architecture was quietly building toward.

Cooling is managed by a PWM tower cooler with dual RGB fans, keeping the Pi 5, NVMe drives, and any attached Hailo accelerator stable under sustained load. A front-facing OLED display shows real-time CPU usage, RAM, temperature, and IP address, while a metal power button handles safe shutdowns and an RTC battery holder supports projects that can’t afford unexpected downtime.

The chassis measures 140.9mm x 77.0mm x 138.7 mm and includes a GPIO extender, a spring-loaded microSD slot, rear USB 2.0 ports, and a 27W USB-C power input. It runs on Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu, Kali, and Homebridge OS, giving it the range to serve as a media center, development workstation, or smart home hub without needing to swap hardware between projects.

For $145.99, the Pironman 5 Pro Max is selling the hardware to build a finished computer around a board that already fits in your pocket. That gap between bare single-board computer and fully equipped desktop has always been the Raspberry Pi community’s favorite problem to tackle, and few cases have gone after it with quite this much ambition.

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Lenovo’s $799 Puck-Shaped PC Weighs 600g and Drives 4 Displays

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The traditional desktop PC has been losing ground for years, not to laptops or tablets, but to a growing class of machines that ask a surprisingly simple question: why does a powerful computer have to be big? Mini PCs have carved out a real niche, attracting everyone from home office workers to creative professionals who’d rather not surrender half their desk to a tower.

Most mini PCs, however, don’t quite look like they belong in the spaces they’re meant to save. They’re functional, sure, but rarely memorable. Lenovo’s Yoga Mini i Gen 11 tries to do something about that. First shown at CES 2026 and now moving toward a global release, it arrives as a circular, aluminum-clad machine with a polished Seashell finish, designed to feel as considered as it is compact.

Designer: Lenovo

The chassis weighs just 600 grams and occupies only 0.65 liters of space, small enough to perch on a desk corner, mount behind a monitor, or move between rooms without a second thought. Lenovo describes the circular form as a deliberate design choice, meant to create a cleaner, more efficient footprint both physically and visually, rather than simply shrinking a conventional rectangular box.

Under the hood, the Yoga Mini i Gen 11 runs on Intel’s Panther Lake platform, one of the first consumer chips built on the company’s 18A manufacturing process. The top-tier configuration uses the Core Ultra X7 358H, a 16-core processor that boosts up to 4.8 GHz with 18 MB of smart cache. Both the X7 and the base Core Ultra 5 325 chip include an onboard NPU for AI-accelerated tasks.

The NPU on the X7 model delivers up to 50 TOPS, enough to keep AI tasks running without taxing the main processor. Supporting it are up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 2 TB of NVMe storage, paired with Intel Arc B390 graphics. That combination makes it capable of handling light creative work, video editing, and multi-application workflows without breaking a sweat.

Connectivity is where the Yoga Mini i Gen 11 gets genuinely impressive for a machine this size. It supports up to four simultaneous displays through dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, multiple USB-C ports with DisplayPort, and HDMI 2.1 at 4K and 60 Hz. USB-A, 2.5 GbE Ethernet, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 6.0 round out a connectivity lineup that punches well above its weight.

A few smart touches add a layer of intelligence to the everyday experience. Wi-Fi Sensing detects nearby presence to wake or lock the machine automatically. Adaptive Lighting adjusts to surrounding sound and activity, while touch controls and an onboard accelerometer enable gesture-based inputs. A fingerprint reader in the power button, Microsoft Pluton, and Secured-core PC certification handle security for users with more sensitive data requirements.

Lenovo has already launched the Yoga Mini i Gen 11 in China ahead of its originally planned July 2026 global release window, with an entry-level model priced at CNY 5,499, roughly $799. Broader availability across other regions is expected before mid-year. It also carries ENERGY STAR, FSC, and carbon-neutral certifications, which add a sustainability angle to its otherwise performance-driven pitch.

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This all-in-one PC concept reimagines how the monitor looks and functions

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It’s not easy to create a workstation that reflects your personality, and it’s even harder to keep one organized. While the former is entirely a personal choice involving handpicked equipment, the latter depends on readily available solutions that make decluttering possible. Kakao, an all-in-one PC that utilizes the space behind the monitor for storage, presents itself as a godsend for achieving just that.

At the rendering stage at the time of writing, Kakao has a long way to go, if ever, to see the light of day. But from how it appears in pictures shared on the internet, this is a desk setup of the future, which draws some inspiration from the past when monitors or all-in-one PCs were more than slim panels we own these days.

Designer: Design Burger

Conceived on two metal stands, this all-in-one PC appears in a boxy form with storage and computer innards tucked behind the monitor. If you are someone who is often bothered by the awkward space behind the monitor, which has no purpose because it’s either too shallow to store something or too cluttered with wires, and you don’t want to add to the visual displeasure, then the Kakao is what you should be looking at with interest.

It turns the often-ignored space behind the monitor into a useful space with its design that is a combination of a PC and a storage cabinet. The furniture integrated all-in-one PC reimagines how the monitor looks and functions: instead of leaving the space vacant, Kakao extends the screen into a horizontal enclosure that houses computer parts along with storage for everyday things.

I am not definite about how we are supposed to use the Kakao on the desk with all that bulk, but once it is there, there is definitely going to be less clutter. I can already see my Bluetooth speaker, power strip, gaming controller, pen stand, and other stationery disappearing from my desk into the cabinet.

I’m not sure about the monitor’s screen size or the computing components we are getting with it. However, that the PC has a mirror-polished stainless steel frame with PVD finish. The horizontal cabinet is completely closed on the side where the computer innards sit, while the other half has a mesh panel that ensures the heat can flow out and there’s no hindrance in using the computer.

On the front, the monitor slides sideways to reveal or conceal the storage shelves inside. The Kakao speakers and power slot are placed on the bottom panel, while the connectivity ports are seen on the side. The latter I believe, is a terrible idea. Ports on the side of the storage cabinet will end up allowing cables to clutter outside the all-in-one PC, defying its actual purpose. I think overall it is a decent idea, and the designer will think about getting the ports on the inside with cable cutouts to ensure decluttering.

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LEGO Minesweeper Captures the Windows 95 Game That Ruined Office Productivity

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If you worked in an office during the Windows 95 era, you knew the drill. The boss walks past, you alt-tab from Solitaire to a spreadsheet, and if you’re feeling particularly bold, you minimize Minesweeper and hope nobody notices the gray grid burned into your retinas. The game was a workplace epidemic, a logic puzzle disguised as a productivity killer, and it came free with every copy of Windows from 1992 onwards. Robert Donner and Curt Johnson created it for Microsoft in 1990, and within a few years, conservative pundits were literally calling it a threat to American business productivity.

LEGO builder carlos_silva94 has taken that gray grid of anxiety and turned it into something you can hold, a fully functional brick-built recreation of the classic game complete with textured tiles, working digital displays, and that iconic yellow smiley face that judged your every click. The build captures the aesthetic of Windows 95 with surprising accuracy, from the raised tile surfaces to the seven-segment displays counting down your mines and ticking up your time. It’s desk toy nostalgia executed in the exact medium that makes sense for anyone who spent their childhood (or their entire career) staring at numbered squares and sweating over where to click next.

Designer: carlos_silva94

The grid itself uses LEGO’s textured tiles to differentiate between covered squares (those nerve-wracking gray unknowns) and revealed tiles showing the numbered clues. The numbers themselves appear to be rendered using printed tiles or stickers, capturing that chunky digital font that defined early computer graphics. The digital displays at the top, showing both the mine counter and the timer, are built using classic seven-segment configurations, the kind that would tick up second by second while you frantically tried to deduce which square was safe and which one would end your game in a shower of pixelated explosions.

My favorite detail, however, is that yellow smiley face sitting front and center. In the original game, that face was your emotional barometer. Click a tile and it would wince in anticipation. Hit a mine and it would go cross-eyed with cartoon death. Clear the board and it would throw on sunglasses like it had just won a prize. Here, rendered in LEGO form, it just sits there with that same placid expression, a tiny plastic reminder of all the times you gambled on a 50/50 guess and lost spectacularly.

The build is designed to be customizable, which is a smart move given the nature of the game. Carlos mentions that builders could easily swap tiles to create their own puzzles, turning this from a static display piece into something you could actually interact with. Whether that means physically rearranging LEGO tiles to simulate a Minesweeper game or just using it as a conversation starter on your desk, the modularity adds a layer of functionality that elevates it beyond pure nostalgia bait.

What makes this particularly appealing as a potential LEGO Ideas set is how perfectly it fits the “desk toy for adults who grew up with this stuff” category. It’s compact, rectangular, instantly recognizable, and carries enough cultural weight that anyone who spent time on a Windows PC between 1992 and 2012 will immediately get it. LEGO has leaned into retro tech and gaming nostalgia before with sets like the NES and the Atari 2600, and Minesweeper occupies that same cultural real estate. It’s a piece of digital history that defined an era of computing, rendered in a format that actually makes sense to build with bricks.

The MOC currently sits at just over 1,100 supporters on the LEGO Ideas platform, with 578 days left to reach the 10,000 vote threshold that triggers an official LEGO review. If this brings back memories of frantic clicking, pattern recognition, and the cold dread of accidentally right-clicking when you meant to left-click, head over to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote. Just try not to lose an entire afternoon doing it.

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This All-In-One Ryzen MiniPC Packs 12 Ports, 4.5-Inch Display, and 15W Wireless Charging

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Your desk has too much stuff on it. A mini PC sits next to a USB hub, which sits next to a wireless charging pad, which sits next to a dock that barely has enough ports anyway. You bought each piece to solve a specific problem, and together they created a new one: a workspace that looks like a Best Buy exploded across your desktop. Cable management becomes a part-time job. Every device needs its own power brick, its own real estate, its own moment of your attention when something inevitably stops working.

ViewDock Gen2 collapses that entire ecosystem into a single 175mm aluminum block. The Hong Kong-based team designed a vertical mini PC that integrates a 4.5-inch adjustable display, 15W Qi wireless charging, and a full 12-port I/O layout into a form factor that weighs 2.3 pounds and takes up less desk space than a coffee mug. Inside, AMD Ryzen processors from the 6000, 7000, and 8000 series (including options like the 6900HX, 7735H, 7640H, 7840H, 7940H, and 8845H) handle everything from productivity to light gaming, with boost speeds reaching up to 4.9GHz. ViewDock hasn’t published which specific processor ships with each configuration, and performance gaps exist between these chips, so you’ll want to confirm your exact SKU before backing. Dual M.2 slots support up to 4TB of combined storage, and units start at a discounted $639 during the Kickstarter campaign.

Designer: ViewDock

Click Here to Buy Now: $639 $1079 (41% off) Hurry! Only 185 units left.

The hinged 4.5-inch display on top of the chassis deserves its own paragraph because it represents a genuine design fork in how you interact with a desktop computer. Most secondary displays are external accessories you buy separately, mount awkwardly, and power independently. ViewDock built one directly into the machine and made it adjustable through 90 degrees, so you can angle it toward your eyeline or fold it flat when you don’t need it. The panel outputs at 480 x 854 pixels, which sounds low until you remember this is a dashboard, not a workstation monitor. You’re using it for system stats, chat windows, calendars, or media previews while your main displays handle the heavy lifting. The screen powers on and off automatically with the system, syncs without configuration, and eliminates yet another cable from your setup. It’s a small decision that compounds across daily use.

The aluminum alloy chassis does more than look good, though it does look good. Most mini PCs default to plastic because it’s cheap and easy to mold, and most mini PCs run hot because plastic doesn’t dissipate heat well and manufacturers cheap out on cooling. ViewDock went the opposite direction. The precision-machined aluminum body acts as a passive heatsink, pulling warmth away from internal components and spreading it across a larger surface area. Inside, a 4000 RPM fan with a vapor chamber design moves air through optimized vents on all sides, keeping the CPU between 30 and 45 degrees Celsius even under sustained workloads. That thermal engineering is the reason the G2 can pack this much performance into a 51mm-tall enclosure without throttling or sounding like a jet engine. You don’t see it, but you benefit from it every time the system stays quiet during a render or stays stable during an overnight compile.

The I/O layout splits across front and rear panels, and ViewDock clearly thought about which ports you reach for often versus which ones you set and forget. The front gives you two USB-A 3.0 ports, one USB-C, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a power button. The rear houses the 40Gbps USB4 Type-C port, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, two more USB-A ports, dual 2.5G Ethernet jacks, and the DC power input. All video outputs support 4K at 120Hz, and you can drive three external monitors simultaneously while using the built-in display as a fourth screen. That’s a legitimate triple-monitor workstation powered by something you can fit in a backpack. The wireless charging pad on top supports the universal Qi standard at 15W, so any compatible phone or earbuds drops onto the surface and charges without fumbling for a cable.

ViewDock also built the G2 to be user-upgradeable, which is increasingly rare in this product category. The chassis opens to reveal two DDR5 SODIMM slots that accept up to 64GB of RAM at 4800MHz or 5600MHz, and two M.2 2280 slots that support SATA3, PCIe 3.0/4.0, and NVMe protocols. Each SSD slot can take a 2TB drive, giving you 4TB of total storage if you max it out. That kind of expandability extends the useful life of the machine well beyond its initial configuration, which matters when you’re spending $600 to $1,200 on a desktop system. WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 come standard, and the unit ships with a Windows 10/11 trial pre-installed, though it’s fully Linux-compatible if you’d rather run Ubuntu.

The G2 launched on Kickstarter in March 2026 with four main configurations. The Creative Edition starts at $639 with base specs, while the 16GB RAM with 512GB storage model sits at $889. Step up to 16GB with 1TB storage for $999, or go all the way to 32GB with 1TB for $1,229. Those prices represent 40 to 50 percent discounts off projected retail, which is typical for crowdfunding campaigns. ViewDock plans to ship all units in August 2026, with expected delivery in September. Shipping costs vary by region, starting at $20 for Asia and scaling up to $50 for three-unit orders to the US or Canada. The team successfully delivered their first-generation ViewDock docking station to backers last year, which gives this campaign more credibility than most hardware Kickstarters manage on day one.

Click Here to Buy Now: $639 $1079 (41% off) Hurry! Only 185 units left.

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Mac Neo Concept Imagines a Cheaper, A18 Pro-powered Apple Desktop Built for the OpenClaw Era

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Apple’s MacBook Neo opened the door to a new kind of Mac, one that trades raw power for accessibility, color, and mass appeal. The A18 Pro chip powering it has already proven capable enough for a full laptop experience, which makes the logical next question an obvious one: what happens when that same formula moves to the desktop? The timing couldn’t be sharper. OpenClaw’s rise as a locally-run AI agent has sent Mac Mini demand into a frenzy, with high-memory units backordered for up to six weeks and stock selling out across multiple markets. People clearly want affordable Apple silicon desktops, and supply simply hasn’t caught up.

That gap is exactly where a Mac Neo would land. Sitting below the Mac Mini in price while carrying the same cheerful color identity as the MacBook Neo, it fills a slot in Apple’s lineup that currently doesn’t exist but arguably should. Students, first-time Mac buyers, and anyone running lightweight local AI workloads would have a natural home in the Mac Neo. Apple already has the MacBook Neo pulling switchers in from the laptop side, and a matching desktop completes the picture. It carries the MacBook Neo’s spirit forward into the living room, the dorm room, and the home office, completing a product family that right now feels one piece short.

Designer: Apple
Images Created Using AI

That Mac Mini silhouette in blush pink or citrus yellow feels like the iMac G3’s spiritual successor. The color makes it feel personal rather than utilitarian, which is exactly what Jobs and Ive were aiming for with the iMacs back in the pre-aluminium days. The color-matched aluminum shell mirrors the same four-finish palette as the MacBook Neo, which means Apple could market these as a set to schools and first-time buyers with minimal effort. What’s visually notable is the slim profile, noticeably thinner than the current Mac Mini, which tracks given the A18 Pro runs completely fanless in laptop form. A desktop chassis with even modest passive cooling could push that chip harder and longer than any laptop allows.

The A18 Pro ships with a 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process. In the MacBook Neo, it runs completely fanless through photo editing, streaming, and light AI inference. Drop it into a desktop with a real power brick and passive cooling, and the chip gains the thermal headroom to sustain performance a laptop chassis simply cannot hold. Apple’s own benchmarks show the A18 Pro outperforming Intel Core Ultra 5 PCs in the same class, and a desktop form factor with better cooling only reinforces that. Configure it with 16GB of unified memory and you have something that runs local model inference comfortably and covers the full Apple Intelligence feature set.

 

Apple’s current Mac lineup has no desktop entry below $599, leaving the budget switcher market completely unaddressed. A Mac Neo at $399 puts macOS in the same price bracket as Chromebooks, which have dominated education for over a decade largely because Apple never showed up at that price with a desktop. The OpenClaw surge sharpens the argument: Mac Mini shortages stretching six weeks on high-memory units confirm massive pent-up demand for affordable Apple silicon desktops. These buyers want local AI on hardware they own, and the Mac Mini’s $599 floor prices many of them out. A Mac Neo with 16GB unified memory, Apple Intelligence support, and a $399 starting price addresses all of that and does it in a package that actually looks like it belongs on a desk.

 

 

 

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This $959 Mini PC Looks Like an NES But Runs 70B AI Models

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There is something quietly absurd about building a serious PC in the shape of a 1980s game console. Not absurd in a dismissive way, but more in the way that a very good idea sometimes sounds ridiculous until you see it sitting on a desk. The ACEMAGIC Retro X5 is exactly that kind of object: a compact Windows 11 Pro machine dressed in the rectangular geometry of classic cartridge-loading hardware, with a red power button where the reset button probably lived in your memory.

At 138mm x 128mm x 45 mm, the Retro X5 occupies roughly the footprint of a thick paperback. The body follows a black, white, and gray palette, with mechanical-style grilles cut into the cooling vents. A removable snap-fit panel lets you access the internals without tools, which signals something deliberate about the design: the whole thing is meant to be touched, handled, and opened rather than just admired from across a shelf.

Designer: ACEMAGIC

Inside that nostalgic shell sits AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, a 12-core, 24-thread processor paired with the Radeon 890M GPU running at 2,900 MHz. The base configuration ships with 32 GB of DDR5 5,600 MT/s memory and a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. For anyone who has watched mini PCs ship with soldered RAM and single storage slots for years, the two M.2 2280 slots, expandable to 4TB total, are a more practical detail than the retro styling gets credit for.

The port selection makes the Retro X5 less of a novelty and more of a credible desk workhorse. The front has two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a USB4 Type-C, and a 3.5 mm audio jack. The rear adds two more Type-A ports, a second Type-C, dual 2.5 GbE Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.0; altogether, the machine supports up to four screens at once, with both HDMI and DP capable of 8K at 60 Hz.

ACEMAGIC also positions the Retro X5 around local AI workloads, citing support for models like DeepSeek R1 70B and LLaMA. The HX 370’s neural processing unit makes that plausible on paper, but running a 70B-parameter model on 32 GB of shared memory depends heavily on quantization levels. That distance between the spec sheet and actual large-model performance is the part that the product page, understandably, does not get into.

At $959 for the 32 GB and 1 TB pre-order configuration, the Retro X5 sits at the upper end of the mini PC category, where other AMD Strix Point machines without the retro treatment tend to start closer to $600 or even $700. The premium covers partly the HX 370’s stronger GPU tier and partly the design itself. Whether that casing reads as a charming object worth the difference, or just a clever coat of paint on familiar hardware, is probably the right question to ponder before hitting that Checkout button.

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TECNO and Tonino Lamborghini Built the Smallest Water-Cooled Gaming PC

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Tech collaborations with fashion and luxury brands usually follow a familiar, slightly tired script. A logo goes on the back of an otherwise unchanged device, a press release says something about “shared values,” and that’s more or less it. So when TECNO announced its partnership with Tonino Lamborghini at MWC 2026 in Barcelona, it was fair to be skeptical about what “Italian design meets cutting-edge technology” would actually look like in practice.

It turns out the answer involves water-cooling tubes, a 241-pixel LED matrix on the back of a phone, and a mini gaming PC that looks like it belongs on the set of a science fiction film. The collaboration goes beyond a branding exercise. It’s a full product line with a consistent visual language running across all of it.

Designer: TECNO x Tonino Lamborghini

The centerpiece is the Tonino Lamborghini TECNO TAURUS, officially the MEGA Mini G1 Pro, the follow-up to the MEGA Mini G1, which TECNO claimed as the world’s first and smallest water-cooled gaming PC. The TAURUS keeps that cooling system, building around a roughly 10,000 mm² pure copper cold plate and a triple-fan setup inside a gunmetal all-metal chassis.

Through the transparent side panel, you can see the red water-cooling tubes looping around the internals, glowing under orange-tinted fans. Rather than hiding the engineering, it’s deliberately flaunting it. A small status screen on the front body lets you monitor CPU and GPU performance in real time, without opening a separate dashboard on another screen.

The second launched product is the TECNO POVA Metal Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition, which TECNO is calling the world’s first full-metal unibody 5G phone. The camera module takes a triangular form, housing the Lamborghini “L” badge at its center, sitting flush against an uninterrupted metal back with bezels down to 0.99 mm.

A vertical slot running down the body doubles as a pulse light strip. The rear also features a 241-pixel independent LED dot matrix that can display call alerts, notifications, and custom animations. It sounds like a gimmick, but it’s one of the few times a phone’s notification system has been treated as a surface design decision. The phone runs on a Snapdragon processor and comes in silver, matte black, and red colorways.

Beyond these two, TECNO showed a concept AIoT ecosystem extending the design language to laptops, tablets, and open-ear earphones, all carrying the same red-and-gunmetal palette and the Tonino Lamborghini shield badge. The laptops feature a sharp V-shaped crease across the lid, the tablets get red-ringed cameras, and the earphone case is angular enough to feel at home next to the rest of the lineup.

The real question this collaboration leaves open is whether the Tonino Lamborghini aesthetic, bold as it is, adds genuine character to these devices or just visual noise. Luxury branding on tech hardware has a long and uneven track record, and most of it ages poorly once the novelty fades. TECNO is betting the design has enough substance to outlast the MWC spotlight.

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

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

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

Designer: BrickMechanic57

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

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

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

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

The post The Vintage Apple Computer That Belongs on Every Tech Lover’s Shelf, in LEGO Form first appeared on Yanko Design.