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Apple revived the glowing logo, and turned it into the ultimate status symbol

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If you owned a MacBook before 2016, you remember the glowing apple on the lid. It lit up dorm rooms, airport gates, and every TV show where someone typed dramatically in a cafe, and it told the whole room you’d spent real money on your laptop. Apple started switching it off in 2015 with the 12-inch MacBook, and the MacBook Pro followed in 2016, all in the name of thinner lids. Eleven years later, the light is back on the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, Apple’s first touchscreen Mac. This time, Apple has turned it into a full-blown status symbol.

OLED made the comeback harder, because the old logo ran on spare light from the LCD backlight, and OLED pixels make their own light with nothing to spare. So Apple had to rig up a separate light source just for the badge, and it hasn’t explained how. It even kept the old behavior, with the logo dimming and brightening along with your screen. Then it put the glow on exactly one model, leaving the standard MacBook Pro and the $1,999 M6 version with plain mirror logos. Nostalgia is officially a premium feature now, and it starts at $2,899.

Designer: Apple

Thinness killed the glow in 2015

The old glow cost Apple nothing. An Apple-shaped hole was cut into the aluminum lid, filled with translucent plastic, and lit by leftover light from the LCD backlight sitting right behind it. That free light came with baggage, though, because the cutout was an extra layer Apple had to make room for in a lid it badly wanted thinner. As panels got slimmer, there were reportedly worries about the cutout creating a bright hot spot on the display, a nightmare for a screen Apple sells on uniform brightness. So when the 12-inch MacBook arrived in 2015, thinness won, and a polished, unlit logo took over.

Losing the glow meant losing the best billboard Apple ever owned. Apple always knew that logo was aimed at onlookers, and Steve Jobs proved it years earlier. Early PowerBooks and iBooks placed the apple so it faced the owner with the lid closed, which made it look upside down to everyone else once the laptop opened. Jobs eventually reversed that, reasoning that opening a laptop from the wrong end fixes itself in seconds while an upside-down logo stays upside down forever. Hollywood reportedly played a part too, since some filmmakers were sticking decals over loaned laptops so the apple looked right on camera.

Apple now pays for a light it used to get free

OLED changed the math, because each pixel makes its own light and nothing spills out the back of the panel for a logo to borrow. The best clue to Apple’s fix is a 2022 patent for a backlit, partially reflective mirror that looks shiny when off and lets internal light through when lit. That lines up with what people saw at the launch, a mirror-finish apple that glows when the lid opens and goes dark when it shuts. Apple hasn’t confirmed the patent is the one in use, so treat it as an educated guess. Either way, somebody in Cupertino had to design, source, and power a light whose only job is to be admired by strangers.

Then Apple made that light exclusive. The standard MacBook Pro and the $1,999 M6 model keep unlit mirror logos, so the glow only shows up on machines starting at $2,899. Luxury carmakers have run this play for over a decade, ever since Mercedes dealers started offering an illuminated three-pointed star in 2013. BMW answered with its Iconic Glow kidney grilles, Rolls-Royce lit up its grille, and Bentley made its winged B glow. Those lights do almost nothing for driving, and Apple’s logo does nothing for rendering, which is exactly the point. A badge that glows is a badge people paid for.

Apple is in the status symbol business again

Apple used to sell status by default. Owning an iPod in the 2000s turned those white earbuds into a flex, and standing in line for the first iPhone in 2007 made you the most interesting person at dinner. Under Tim Cook, Apple shifted toward putting a slice of the pie in every hand, with cheaper SE iPhones, budget iPads, and a $999 MacBook Air. That strategy sold a staggering number of devices, and I’d argue it also made owning an Apple product feel ordinary. When everyone has the apple, the apple stops saying much about you.

The Ternus era looks like a deliberate correction. The $1,999 iPhone Duo folds in half and announces itself every time you open it, and the glowing logo now marks the one MacBook Pro that costs $2,899 and up. Ternus clearly knows what he’s selling, because his launch-morning teaser was a wordless clip of that logo lighting up. Jobs, who spent years fussing over which way the apple faced, would have understood the instinct completely. The apple spent 11 years in the dark, and it came back as a velvet rope.

The post Apple revived the glowing logo, and turned it into the ultimate status symbol first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis

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If the iPad were a person, this would be the week it checked its phone and found out its friends had started a group chat without it. On October 28, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen. Back in September, it revealed the iPhone Duo, a $1,999 foldable that opens into a 7.6-inch tablet-ish screen. One goes after the iPad Pro’s job of being a pro machine you can touch, and the other goes after the iPad mini’s job of being a small screen you carry everywhere. That’s two iPads made redundant in about seven weeks, which feels like a personal record for Apple.

The MacBook makes the louder case, with tandem OLED panels hitting 2,000 nits, a Dynamic Island replacing the notch, and a starting price of $2,899. The Duo makes the sneakier one, since it runs the same A20 Pro chip as Apple’s new $699 OLED iPad mini and packs an extra rear camera for good measure. Craig Federighi even conceded that the Duo can fill the space an iPad mini used to hold. Apple did keep one door shut, though, because the touchscreen MacBook has no Apple Pencil support. Call it a coincidence if you like, but it looks a lot like Apple left the iPad one job so it wouldn’t feel completely useless.

Designer: Apple

Half a pound lighter, with every port still on board

The new MacBook Pro weighs 3 pounds (1.36kg) as a 14-inch and 4 pounds (1.81kg) as a 16-inch, shedding half a pound and 0.7 pounds respectively. Thickness barely moves, landing at 0.59 inches (15mm) and 0.63 inches (16mm). OLED does most of the heavy lifting, since self-lit pixels let Apple ditch the backlight layers that mini-LED needs. Slimmer bezels also stretch the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches inside a slightly smaller footprint. A redesigned thermal system keeps sustained performance intact and pushes warm air away from the display, a smart call because OLED panels age faster when they run hot.

Apple kept every port the 2021 redesign brought back, so you still get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack. Up to three external displays work on M5 Pro, or four on M5 Max. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 run off Apple’s N1 chip, and a fast charge gets you to 50 percent in 30 minutes, which covers a layover. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours on the 16-inch with M5 Pro and 22 on the 14-inch, enough for a workday and a movie on the flight home. The lid’s Apple logo glows again too, but that comeback is a story for another day.

A tandem OLED that doubles as a reference monitor

PROLED XDR is a tandem OLED, which stacks two light-emitting layers so the panel can get brighter and last longer than a single-layer OLED. Apple rates it at 2,000 nits peak for both HDR and SDR, up from 1,600 and 1,000 nits on the mini-LED model, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. In practice, a spreadsheet stays readable at a sunny cafe table, and dark scenes stay properly black without the halo blooming mini-LED throws around bright objects. ProMotion runs from 10Hz to 120Hz, idling low on static pages to save battery. Resolution lands at 3024 x 1986 on the 14-inch and 3472 x 2266 on the 16-inch.

The panel covers both P3 and Adobe RGB, the color space print work lives in, so print designers can finally proof on a laptop without second-guessing their greens. Apple also claims more than 80 percent coverage of Rec. 2020, the wider gamut used for grading HDR video. Every panel gets factory calibrated, and built-in reference modes cover film, photography, print, and even DICOM medical imaging for research use. Genlock support syncs the display’s refresh rate to a camera’s capture, which stops flicker and tearing on virtual production sets. Add the nano-texture option, now etched straight into the cover glass, and Apple has basically folded a reference monitor into a laptop lid.

Sixteen years after Steve Jobs said no, the Mac gets touch

In 2010, Steve Jobs told a room full of press that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea, because reaching up to a vertical screen gets tiring until your arm gives up. Apple spent the next decade and a half agreeing with him. The closest the MacBook Pro got was the Touch Bar, a thin OLED strip above the keyboard that ran from 2016 until Apple retired it in 2023. The PROLED model finally breaks the rule, with a touch sensor built directly into the display panel instead of laminated on top as a separate layer. That cuts latency, so your finger feels glued to whatever it drags.

Day to day, you swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom a photo, drag slides between presentations, and double-tap a window to fill the screen. Pros get the fun stuff, with Logic Pro turning the display into a Multi-Touch polyphonic keyboard with tappable chord and drum pads, and Final Cut Pro letting editors pinch into a cut and drop clips into place by hand. The hinge has been reworked for extra stability, so the screen stays put under all that prodding. Apple even added video stabilization for calls, so your webcam feed stops shaking every time you tap something mid-meeting. It’s a very Apple fix for a very Apple problem.

macOS learns finger manners and gets a Dynamic Island

macOS 27 handles touch by translating taps into clicks, so many existing apps work on day one without an update. Apple also tweaked the interface for fingers, so touching near a window’s close button makes the controls swell up and saves you from needing surgical precision. Updated gesture APIs let developers build proper touch interactions, and Apple has lined up Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, and Shapr3D, all arriving later this year. Flicking a window to snap it against an edge feels lifted straight from iPadOS and the iPhone Duo. It’s the first visible sign of two operating systems drifting toward each other.

The Dynamic Island borrows the iPhone’s trick of turning a camera cutout into a live status bar. It now houses Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI, so search, live updates, and your assistant all sit in one pill at the top of the screen. You can accept an AirDrop, pause a song, or pick up a call with a tap, which makes the island the most natural touch target on the entire display. There’s a small catch, since Spotlight only moves into the island if Siri AI is enabled, and Siri AI is still in beta in macOS 27.2. Even so, the island turns a dead strip of pixels into something useful, which the notch never managed.

The missing Apple Pencil and the iPad’s last wall

For all the touch talk, the MacBook Pro has no Apple Pencil support. Apple’s own press release pitches the display as a full canvas for graphic designers, which makes finger-only drawing on a $2,899 reference-grade screen feel bizarre. The iPhone Duo, which is a phone, gets Apple Pencil (USB-C) support later this year, while the iPad keeps Apple Pencil Pro to itself. My read is that Apple saw how close it was to making the iPad irrelevant and left that one wall standing on purpose. Precision input is the last thing the iPad does better than anything else Apple sells.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch with M5 Pro, climbing to $4,499 and $4,799 with M5 Max, shipping November 6. That’s a $400 premium over the standard MacBook Pro, and it lands against Microsoft’s $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra, which also packs a 2,000-nit mini-LED touchscreen. Apple now sells touch on a foldable phone that opens into a tablet and on a laptop that wants to be one, all inside two months. Somewhere in Cupertino, the iPadOS team is probably refreshing Slack a little nervously. If macOS keeps picking up iPad tricks at this rate, iPadOS will need a very good answer for why it exists.

The post Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis

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If the iPad were a person, this would be the week it checked its phone and found out its friends had started a group chat without it. On October 28, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen. Back in September, it revealed the iPhone Duo, a $1,999 foldable that opens into a 7.6-inch tablet-ish screen. One goes after the iPad Pro’s job of being a pro machine you can touch, and the other goes after the iPad mini’s job of being a small screen you carry everywhere. That’s two iPads made redundant in about seven weeks, which feels like a personal record for Apple.

The MacBook makes the louder case, with tandem OLED panels hitting 2,000 nits, a Dynamic Island replacing the notch, and a starting price of $2,899. The Duo makes the sneakier one, since it runs the same A20 Pro chip as Apple’s new $699 OLED iPad mini and packs an extra rear camera for good measure. Craig Federighi even conceded that the Duo can fill the space an iPad mini used to hold. Apple did keep one door shut, though, because the touchscreen MacBook has no Apple Pencil support. Call it a coincidence if you like, but it looks a lot like Apple left the iPad one job so it wouldn’t feel completely useless.

Designer: Apple

Half a pound lighter, with every port still on board

The new MacBook Pro weighs 3 pounds (1.36kg) as a 14-inch and 4 pounds (1.81kg) as a 16-inch, shedding half a pound and 0.7 pounds respectively. Thickness barely moves, landing at 0.59 inches (15mm) and 0.63 inches (16mm). OLED does most of the heavy lifting, since self-lit pixels let Apple ditch the backlight layers that mini-LED needs. Slimmer bezels also stretch the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches inside a slightly smaller footprint. A redesigned thermal system keeps sustained performance intact and pushes warm air away from the display, a smart call because OLED panels age faster when they run hot.

Apple kept every port the 2021 redesign brought back, so you still get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack. Up to three external displays work on M5 Pro, or four on M5 Max. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 run off Apple’s N1 chip, and a fast charge gets you to 50 percent in 30 minutes, which covers a layover. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours on the 16-inch with M5 Pro and 22 on the 14-inch, enough for a workday and a movie on the flight home. The lid’s Apple logo glows again too, but that comeback is a story for another day.

A tandem OLED that doubles as a reference monitor

PROLED XDR is a tandem OLED, which stacks two light-emitting layers so the panel can get brighter and last longer than a single-layer OLED. Apple rates it at 2,000 nits peak for both HDR and SDR, up from 1,600 and 1,000 nits on the mini-LED model, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. In practice, a spreadsheet stays readable at a sunny cafe table, and dark scenes stay properly black without the halo blooming mini-LED throws around bright objects. ProMotion runs from 10Hz to 120Hz, idling low on static pages to save battery. Resolution lands at 3024 x 1986 on the 14-inch and 3472 x 2266 on the 16-inch.

The panel covers both P3 and Adobe RGB, the color space print work lives in, so print designers can finally proof on a laptop without second-guessing their greens. Apple also claims more than 80 percent coverage of Rec. 2020, the wider gamut used for grading HDR video. Every panel gets factory calibrated, and built-in reference modes cover film, photography, print, and even DICOM medical imaging for research use. Genlock support syncs the display’s refresh rate to a camera’s capture, which stops flicker and tearing on virtual production sets. Add the nano-texture option, now etched straight into the cover glass, and Apple has basically folded a reference monitor into a laptop lid.

Sixteen years after Steve Jobs said no, the Mac gets touch

In 2010, Steve Jobs told a room full of press that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea, because reaching up to a vertical screen gets tiring until your arm gives up. Apple spent the next decade and a half agreeing with him. The closest the MacBook Pro got was the Touch Bar, a thin OLED strip above the keyboard that ran from 2016 until Apple retired it in 2023. The PROLED model finally breaks the rule, with a touch sensor built directly into the display panel instead of laminated on top as a separate layer. That cuts latency, so your finger feels glued to whatever it drags.

Day to day, you swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom a photo, drag slides between presentations, and double-tap a window to fill the screen. Pros get the fun stuff, with Logic Pro turning the display into a Multi-Touch polyphonic keyboard with tappable chord and drum pads, and Final Cut Pro letting editors pinch into a cut and drop clips into place by hand. The hinge has been reworked for extra stability, so the screen stays put under all that prodding. Apple even added video stabilization for calls, so your webcam feed stops shaking every time you tap something mid-meeting. It’s a very Apple fix for a very Apple problem.

macOS learns finger manners and gets a Dynamic Island

macOS 27 handles touch by translating taps into clicks, so many existing apps work on day one without an update. Apple also tweaked the interface for fingers, so touching near a window’s close button makes the controls swell up and saves you from needing surgical precision. Updated gesture APIs let developers build proper touch interactions, and Apple has lined up Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, and Shapr3D, all arriving later this year. Flicking a window to snap it against an edge feels lifted straight from iPadOS and the iPhone Duo. It’s the first visible sign of two operating systems drifting toward each other.

The Dynamic Island borrows the iPhone’s trick of turning a camera cutout into a live status bar. It now houses Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI, so search, live updates, and your assistant all sit in one pill at the top of the screen. You can accept an AirDrop, pause a song, or pick up a call with a tap, which makes the island the most natural touch target on the entire display. There’s a small catch, since Spotlight only moves into the island if Siri AI is enabled, and Siri AI is still in beta in macOS 27.2. Even so, the island turns a dead strip of pixels into something useful, which the notch never managed.

The missing Apple Pencil and the iPad’s last wall

For all the touch talk, the MacBook Pro has no Apple Pencil support. Apple’s own press release pitches the display as a full canvas for graphic designers, which makes finger-only drawing on a $2,899 reference-grade screen feel bizarre. The iPhone Duo, which is a phone, gets Apple Pencil (USB-C) support later this year, while the iPad keeps Apple Pencil Pro to itself. My read is that Apple saw how close it was to making the iPad irrelevant and left that one wall standing on purpose. Precision input is the last thing the iPad does better than anything else Apple sells.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch with M5 Pro, climbing to $4,499 and $4,799 with M5 Max, shipping November 6. That’s a $400 premium over the standard MacBook Pro, and it lands against Microsoft’s $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra, which also packs a 2,000-nit mini-LED touchscreen. Apple now sells touch on a foldable phone that opens into a tablet and on a laptop that wants to be one, all inside two months. Somewhere in Cupertino, the iPadOS team is probably refreshing Slack a little nervously. If macOS keeps picking up iPad tricks at this rate, iPadOS will need a very good answer for why it exists.

The post Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook leaves the iPad with an identity crisis first appeared on Yanko Design.

Do yourself a favor and buy a power station now, before the energy crisis gets worse

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Every crisis has its panic buy. In 2020 it was toilet paper and N95 masks, in 2021 it was graphics cards, in 2025 it was RAM chips, and in 2026 my money is on lithium iron phosphate. With Iran attacking tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, gas sitting at a record-for-October $4.36 a gallon, and heating oil bills forecast to climb 21% this winter, the case for keeping your own stash of electrons has never been stronger. A portable power station from Anker, EcoFlow, or Jackery keeps your fridge cold and your lights on when the grid gives up. It also runs indoors without trying to poison you, and it never needs a trip to the gas station.

Stockpiling toilet paper made you look a little unhinged. Owning a power station makes you the neighbor everyone suddenly wants to befriend during an outage. Black Friday could knock a few more dollars off, sure, but fall sale prices are already the best we’ve seen this season, and winter storms rarely wait for a coupon code. I’ve narrowed the field to one value pick from each brand, all hovering around the 2kWh mark, enough to keep a fridge humming for well over a day. Anker gets first crack, because its S2000 squeezes 2,010Wh into a 35.7-pound body that costs less than a decent espresso machine.

[Editor’s Pick] Anker S2000 2,010Wh Portable Power Station: $699.99

Anker announced at IFA 2026 that its SOLIX power station brand is folding into the Anker name, so you’ll still spot “SOLIX” on boxes and Amazon listings while the switch plays out over the next couple of years. Same company, same warranty, simpler logo. The S2000 makes a great poster child for the new identity, because it looks like it wandered over from the home appliance aisle. At 8.2 x 11.1 x 12.7 inches (208 x 282 x 323mm) and 35.7 pounds (16.2kg), it takes up roughly the counter space of a coffee maker. That makes it nearly 4 pounds lighter than Jackery’s Explorer 2000 v2 and 9 pounds lighter than EcoFlow’s DELTA 3 Max.

Inside are 314Ah lithium iron phosphate cells rated for 6,000 cycles to 80% capacity and 10,000 to 60%, the same chunky format used in grid-scale storage. Anker estimates a 15-year design life, so this thing could easily outlast your fridge. Output tops out at 1,500W continuous with a 3,000W surge, plenty for a fridge, router, lights, laptops, and a CPAP. The real magic is efficiency, with idle draw of just 6W, which helped it keep a fridge running for 34 hours and 15 minutes in GearJunkie’s testing. At $599.99 for subscribers, that works out to roughly $300 per kilowatt-hour, the cheapest of our three picks by a wide margin.

Click Here to Buy Now

What we like

  • At 35.7 pounds, it’s the lightest 2kWh station you can buy right now, and compact enough to live on a kitchen counter.
  • A UPS switchover of 10ms or less keeps your router and desktop online the moment the grid drops.
  • Long-life cells and roughly $300 per kWh make it the best value of the three.

What we dislike

  • Solar input caps at 400W, which means about five hours of ideal sunshine to refill, and winter rarely delivers ideal.
  • It isn’t expandable, so 2kWh is your ceiling.
  • 1,500W of output rules out running a space heater alongside much of anything else.

Jackery Explorer 2000 v2 2,042Wh Portable Power Station: $899

Jackery’s orange-trimmed Explorers were the default power station for years, long before Anker, EcoFlow, and Bluetti started crowding the category. The Explorer 2000 v2 keeps that familiar look but trims the bulk, measuring 13.2 x 10.4 x 11.5 inches (335 x 264 x 292mm) and weighing 39.5 pounds (17.9kg). Its proportions are squatter and more cube-like than the Anker’s, which makes it easier to tuck under a desk or beside a fridge. Jackery marketed it as the lightest and most compact 2kWh LiFePO4 station around, a crown the S2000 snatched this year by shedding nearly four more pounds. The two brands are basically locked in a very nerdy weight-loss competition.

Output is where the Jackery pulls ahead of the Anker, with 2,200W continuous and a 4,400W peak spread across three AC outlets. That’s enough headroom for a sump pump, a fridge compressor, or a microwave without the station breaking a sweat. Jackery’s ChargeShield 2.0 system layers in 62 protection mechanisms, and Silent Charging Mode keeps noise under 30dB, roughly a whisper, which is handy if it ends up in your bedroom during an outage. The cells are rated for 4,000 cycles and a 10-year lifespan, fewer than Anker promises but still plenty for daily use well into the 2030s. At $899, you’re paying about $440 per kilowatt-hour, dropping to $416 when it dips to $849.

Click Here to Buy Now

What we like

  • 2,200W of continuous output handles bigger appliances than the Anker can.
  • Silent Charging Mode stays under 30dB, so it won’t keep you up at night.
  • A 3-year standard warranty plus a 2-year extension covers you for five years total.

What we dislike

  • Only three AC outlets, so a power strip becomes part of the kit.
  • It isn’t expandable, and solar input maxes out at 400W.
  • It won’t charge below 32°F (0°C), so an unheated garage in January is a bad home for it.

EcoFlow DELTA 3 Max 2,048Wh Portable Power Station: $899

EcoFlow’s DELTA family is the brand’s bread and butter, and the DELTA 3 Max is the 2kWh sweet spot of the current lineup. It’s also the chunkiest of our three picks, measuring 19.45 x 9.41 x 12.01 inches (494 x 239 x 305mm) and weighing 44.8 pounds (20.3kg). That long, low, suitcase-like shape belongs on the floor next to the fridge, and you’ll want two hands whenever you move it. EcoFlow spends that extra bulk on muscle, and the trade feels fair once you see the output numbers. The Halloween sale has it at $899, down from $1,199, which puts it neck and neck with the Jackery on price.

You get 2,400W continuous across four AC outlets, the most of our three picks, plus EcoFlow’s X-Boost mode for resistive appliances up to 3,400W. X-Boost works by dropping the voltage, so a kettle or hair dryer runs a little slower instead of tripping the station. That’s enough headroom to run a 1,500W space heater with the fridge and router still plugged in. EcoFlow also rates it at 25dB or less when charging or discharging at 600W, which is quieter than a library. At $899, it lands at about $439 per kilowatt-hour, essentially tied with the Jackery, so the choice comes down to extra watts versus a lighter box.

Click Here to Buy Now

What we like

  • 2,400W continuous output, with X-Boost up to 3,400W, makes it the most powerful of the trio.
  • Four AC outlets, one more than the Jackery.
  • It stays under 25dB at moderate loads, so it’s easy to live with indoors.

What we dislike

  • At 44.8 pounds, it’s the heaviest of the three, roughly 9 pounds more than the Anker.
  • The long footprint eats more floor space than its boxier rivals.

The post Do yourself a favor and buy a power station now, before the energy crisis gets worse first appeared on Yanko Design.

Tesla’s New Roadster Can Fly. Its CEO’s Reputation Cannot.

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Nine years. It took Elon nine years to remember he was supposed to ship a Roadster. Announced in 2017, the second-generation car came with bold promises. Promises Elon made and conveniently forgot, like the crewed Mars mission he targeted for 2024, or the coast-to-coast self-driving demo he promised by the end of 2017. He’s a genius at moving the goalpost, and he has the attention span of a toddler. In those nine years, he moved Tesla HQ to Texas, launched a Roadster into outer space, bought Twitter, bankrolled a presidential campaign to the tune of $200 million, fronted DOGE, and folded xAI into SpaceX, whose IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire. Somehow, delivering the second Roadster never made the list.

On Thursday, he remembered the Roadster still had reservations sitting for nearly a decade. So he did what he always does: razzle-dazzle, fanfare, and a stunt big enough to bury nine years of broken timelines. The car Tesla showed on October 15 differs from the 2017 pitch, though not in ways worth cheering. Range drops from 620 miles to over 300, and seats drop from four to two at most. The 0-60 is better, with Tesla claiming under 1.6 seconds on the base car, under 0.9 on Thrust, and under 0.59 on Rocket, but the last two trims aren’t approved for road use. Impressive on paper, but just like the 2017 Roadster, all this is only on paper.

The flying trim has no reserve button and no road approval

Tesla is selling the Roadster in three trims, and the one that flies is the one you can’t reserve. The Rocket trim seats one, runs ten cold-gas thrusters fed by 600 liters (roughly 158 gallons) of compressed air, and carries an invite only label where the reserve button should be. The $250,000 Thrust trim adds rear thrusters for sub-one-second launches (sort of like afterburners on a jet), meanwhile the $50,000 Performance trim reservation gets no thrusters. Tesla says none of the thruster packs are approved for road use, and no human was driving during the Waco demo. There’s still no price, battery size, or powertrain info for any trim. My bet is that Rocket ends up a mod a handful of invitees get 5-6 years after the base car.

Design school drills one question into you early: who is this for? A feature Tesla itself says isn’t approved for road use, offered to people who can’t even reserve it, answers with a shrug. Tesla credits the SR-71 and F-35, though the wedge owes a visible debt to the Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me, which Musk owns and put on display. Every usable void in the car is packed with carbon fiber overwrapped pressure vessels, the same type behind multiple SpaceX rocket explosions. Musk has said safety is not the main goal, which at least explains the packaging. It’s like ordering a sofa and receiving a trampoline show: great theater, and still no price.

Nine years of slipped dates and a spec sheet that shrank

Tesla revealed this Roadster as a surprise at the end of the 2017 Semi event and promised deliveries within a few years. Buyers put down $50,000 deposits, and some paid $250,000 for one of 1,000 Founders Series cars. Musk then delayed the car in 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024, while Tesla fought through Model 3 production hell and moved on to the Model Y and Cybertruck. Last year he promised a reveal by the end of 2025, then pushed it to April 1, 2026, saying an April Fools’ event would give him some deniability. Planning your own launch around deniability is a bold strategy. Severe weather bumped the October 1 date, and the real show finally happened October 15.

The 2017 pitch listed 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, four seats, and a $200,000 base price. Today’s version quotes over 300 miles of range (Tesla’s figure, with no test cycle named), over 230 mph, two seats at most, and no price at all. The deposit is still $50,000, so anyone holding a 2017 reservation has been lending Tesla that money interest free since before the Model Y existed. In fairness, the base car now beats the 1.9-second 0-60 promised in 2017, and the stunt car clearly works. Marques Brownlee, one of the customers vocal about the delays, summed up the mood by asking whether the whole thing was a prank.

Elon’s graveyard of dead promises

In 2016, Tesla told buyers every car it built had the hardware for full self-driving, and it later sold the package for up to $15,000. In April 2019, Musk promised over a million robotaxis on the road by 2020. He has since admitted that the HW3 computer in millions of those cars can’t deliver unsupervised driving. A California judge ruled the name itself misleading. The DMV gave Tesla 60 days to fix its marketing or face a 30-day sales suspension. Tesla now sells it as Full Self-Driving (Supervised), which is a lot of parentheses for a promise that began without any.

Musk targeted a crewed Mars mission for 2024, then floated an uncrewed 50-50 shot at late 2026, and in February SpaceX shifted its focus to the Moon. He said Mars would now take 20 years or more. On Optimus, he promised 1,000 or more robots working at Tesla in 2025, then said in January 2026 they were still R&D units doing no useful work. Robotaxis are the bright spot, since they now run without safety drivers in a few cities. That’s still a long way from the half of the country he promised. Each broken promise gets swapped for a bigger one, which is a handy way to keep the old ones from getting audited.

Why a flying car won’t change Elon’s true legacy

Back in December 2024 before DOGE officially existed, Musk and Trump attacked a bipartisan spending deal as bloated, and Republican leaders dropped it, resulting in the gutting of funding for pediatric cancer research. The casualties included an extension for the NIH’s Gabriella Miller Kids First program, named for a 10-year-old who died of a brain tumor. Nancy Goodman, who lost her own child to cancer at 10, asked how anyone cuts cancer research in the name of efficiency. The Senate passed a pared-back version two days later, but the Give Kids a Chance Act took until February 2026 to become law. Once DOGE got going, NIH announced a 15% overhead cap that Fred Hutch said would erase about $125 million a year for its cancer center.

USDA canceled about $660 million for Local Food for Schools and $420 million for a companion food bank program, just as the administration and DOGE said they were slashing waste. One school district lost $100,000 it had planned to spend on local beef and produce for student meals. The Waco crowd cheered a car leaping over a Cybertruck, and I sat there in admiration too. A good design improves someone’s life, and a stunt car with no price, no road approval, and a 2028 date hasn’t improved anyone’s yet. The Roadster can fly. Its CEO’s reputation stays on the ground, parked next to the cancer bill and the school food money.

The post Tesla’s New Roadster Can Fly. Its CEO’s Reputation Cannot. first appeared on Yanko Design.

5 Reasons why a foldable iPad Duo is a BAD Idea

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Exactly a month and 2 days ago, John Ternus unveiled Apple’s first foldable phone. It’s been a decade in the making, Apple’s done a whole bunch in the interim, hit $1 trillion in 2018, and subsequently grown to a $3 trillion brand, shifted from a hardware company to a hardware AND services company, launched a spatial computing headset, pretty much worked on and shelved their Apple Car. Rumors are tracking a few more devices that Apple’s been secretly working on. A smart ring that does the same job as a watch, or alternatively a screen-less Watch Air that competes with the likes of Whoop and Fitbit, and even a foldable single-screen laptop modeled on the same design of the iPhone Duo.

I’m not entirely sure whether Apple’s truly working on a larger folding device, but scaling the iPhone Duo up to a larger hardware unit isn’t a good idea for a bunch of reasons. Aside from the fact that it would cannibalize a whole slew of existing products, it would also create a bit of a UX nightmare for the iPadOS developer community. An iPad Duo (let’s just call it that) is nothing but a MacBook Neo with extra screens. The MacBook Neo ITSELF is designed to be compact and handle compact tasks, giving it a foldable design with maybe iPad Pro-level power achieves nothing. Here are a few reasons why the foldable iPad Duo isn’t the best idea.

1. The foldable Android tablet doesn’t exist for a reason

Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Google, Motorola, and a bunch of other makers have folding phones on their roster – yet nobody’s tried to push a folding tablet beyond maybe just 1 iteration. Huawei unveiled the MateBook Fold last year and hasn’t done much to work on a v2.0. It cost around $3,300 when it launched and occupied headlines for precisely a month before becoming yesterday’s news (partially because of its China-only distribution platform). The point I’m making is that companies haven’t explored the foldable tablet space because there’s little merit to it. Lenovo’s worked on a ThinkPad X1 Fold too, but here’s the hilarious bit – they’re marketing it more as a laptop than as a traditional tablet.

Tablets aren’t designed to be carried in pockets, therefore a smaller tablet that turns into a bigger one isn’t really a pressing need. Even if they were, the size of a pocket confines you to a very limited bounding box, giving you a folding phone template rather than a folding tablet one. Tablets themselves aren’t as popular as phones are, and folding phones are already a niche to begin with – making folding tablets mainstream would cost more money than it’s worth.

2. The aspect ratio nightmare

Of all the companies that have worked in the foldable space, there’s always been one question they’ve struggled to answer. What aspect ratio do we make? Because a foldable device exists in two states – a shut state and an open state. With phones, there are broadly 3 templates – the flip style foldable, which offers a square aspect ratio that turns into a vertical screen when opened. The second is the long book ratio that turns squarish when opened sideways. The third one, which Apple’s popularizing, is the middle ground – a book-shaped design that’s short and stout and has a repeating aspect ratio like the A4 and A3 paper so that the OS can scale meaningfully.

At least in this concept, we’re looking at what I believe is one of the most bizarre aspect ratios ever. This concept by Krishnavi Anand Krishnavi opts for an almost 1:1 ratio when shut, opening to reveal what feels like a widescreen 16:9 device. Both versions have their caveats – a 1:1 tablet doesn’t exist and it shouldn’t. Nobody works on a square screen, content isn’t optimized for it, heck even physical notebooks are vertical (who writes on square paper). Open it and you have a socially acceptable 16:9 device, but tablets are usually one of two things – they’re either big and 4:3 or they’re small and 16:9. Nobody makes a large 16:9 tablet because carrying it is a nuisance – you might as well just buy a laptop with a convertible design. A large 4:3 foldable tablet would fold down to a small 3:2 device, which still feels palpable, but continue reading and you’ll realize why the odds are stacked against a foldable tablet.

3. Building a massive hinge + flexible screen is cost-prohibitive

Apple’s poured hundreds of millions, if not billions into R&D for its titanium hinge. Every company has its own workaround for a hinge, ensuring durability, reliability, and the ability to conceal/remove the crease. It works well in flip phones, it’s tricky with book style foldables but companies have still come a long way in all these years. Scale that up to a device that needs a 7-8-inch long hinge and the engineering problems compound significantly. The hinge needs to uniformly open from one end to the other. Any discrepancy and the screen could stretch/tear. Any damage and the device could get stuck in a closed or open position for life. Laptops have suffered from hinge problems for years now, they’re the first mechanical part to fail on a laptop), so you can only imagine how much more work a tablet has to do – while still ensuring you can open/close it 10-20 times a day.

Not only is the hinge a problem, the screen is too. The screen used on a foldable phone is very different from the one used on you 15.6″ laptop. Companies work with suppliers to find the right kind of OLED that can take daily bending without the pixels suffering failure. The crease has to vanish when open and allow the screen to meaningfully bend when shut. A laptop display also doesn’t get touched hundreds of times a day the way a tablet or phone does. So it’s easier for a company to commission hundreds of thousands of small 6″ or larger OLED displays. Scale that up to a 12-15″ OLED display and you aren’t doubling the price, you’re quadrupling it (hold your phone to your laptop and see, four of its 6″ screens will fit in your 13″ laptop). A 4x pricier display eats up all your profits on a folding tablet.

4. The iPad Duo doesn’t have a target audience

This might be the biggest problem yet. We’re still struggling to find a mainstream audience for folding phones – so you can imagine how difficult it’ll be to find someone willing to shell out upwards of $3k on a folding tablet. The audience doesn’t exist because the use-case doesn’t exist and neither does the appetite (more on the appetite later). What would you do on an iPad Duo that you can’t already do on a laptop or a tablet? Phones need to be compact for a reason so the idea of folding your phone for easy carrying still holds up logically – folding a tablet makes absolutely no sense when it isn’t fitting into a constrained space like your pants pocket.

People buy their pants regardless of the phone they carry so the phone has to work backwards to fit into pants. With tablets and laptops, it’s the other way around – you buy a sleeve or a backpack based on the size of device you have. A larger laptop demands a larger bag, a sleeker, smaller tablet works great with a sling. Nobody buys the sling before they own the tablet. But I digress – the foldable tablet doesn’t exist because the market doesn’t. In over 10 years of working for Yanko Design, I’ve seen dozens of folding phone concepts, but even concept designers don’t work on foldable tablet concepts because there’s honestly nothing to desire there!

5. People want affordable computing, not foldable computing

This year, when Apple launched the MacBook Neo, we wrote about how it proved Apple wrong in one fundamental way. Apple’s always priced their products at a premium, thinking that they get to choose their audience – it worked when the economy was in a steadier state, when diesel wasn’t more than $6 a gallon. When Apple launched the MacBook Neo, the laptop literally flew off shelves, proving that there was a VERY strong demand for affordable computing. Especially when RAM and storage prices are already so high thanks to this AI boom that nobody asked for.

The MacBook Neo’s success with the Vision Pro’s silent failure proved that it’s time for tech to be democratic again. To focus less on shareholder value and more on actual consumer value. The iPhone Duo already costs upwards of most people’s salaries (globally speaking), so building an iPad Duo that would probably touch $3.5-4k in price makes no sense for a product that’s supposed to be for consumers, not enterprises. The iPad Duo doesn’t exist, and from the rumor mill, it probably won’t for the aforementioned reasons. John Ternus has proved to be an astute consumer-centric design lead, realizing what products fill the current gaps in Apple’s offerings. Speaking of which, I’m still waiting on that smarter Siri 2.0…

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Designers Already Prototype Hardware – Now They’re Prototyping Demand Too

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Every product that finds its way onto these pages eventually meets the same crossroads: the moment a designer takes the thing public. For physical product creators chasing something original enough that established retailers won’t touch it, Kickstarter remains the most democratic proving ground available. The platform has hosted more than 654,000 campaigns since 2009, drawing over $8.5 billion in pledges from more than 23 million backers, with 2025 marking its strongest year on record. That momentum creates a seductive and specific trap: creators see the platform’s gravity and assume a beautiful product with a compelling story will naturally convert into backers. A crowdfunding agency called TCF (The Crowdfunding Formula), which holds Kickstarter Premier Partner status and has facilitated more than $520M raised across campaigns, has spent years watching that assumption fail in real time, and what they built to counter it is one of the more disciplined pre-launch processes in the business.

TCF’s methodology, recently published in full detail, centers on a single observation that most campaigns never act on: interest and purchase intent are not the same signal. Emails, follows, and comments cost nothing to give, which is why none of them predict whether a product sells. Validation asks for money, not opinions, and a small deposit on a product that does not exist yet is the closest available proxy for a real backer, because the act of paying is what carries the information, not the amount. The resulting data resolves three decisions most creators make by guesswork: the price, the positioning, and the audience, all settled before a campaign page exists, before ad spend, and before the outcome is locked in, because those are the three things most likely to break a launch and the three most often decided by assumption. It is a design methodology applied to the market, and it deserves the same respect that designers already extend to physical prototyping.

Circular Ring 2

How a $2 Deposit Separates the Buyers from the Browsers

The process runs on Prelaunch.com. A product page goes live showing the product, the visuals, what it does, how it works, and the characteristics that make it different, with no price. Visitors who want to know more leave their email address, which is the interest signal and only that. A second page then opens, presenting the price alongside an offer: put down a deposit today and receive a discount when it launches. Someone who pays has moved from liking the product to paying for a product with no campaign page, no ship date, and no reviews. Someone who does not pay is interested but not convinced, and that is a result too.

The pushback the deposit mechanism reliably attracts is predictable: does $2 actually prove anything about future purchase behavior? The deposit is the part people push back on, but the $2 is not the point. The act is the point. Getting up, finding a card, and typing the numbers in for something with no campaign page, no ship date, and no reviews is a different order of behavior from tapping a heart, and the people who do it are the closest thing to your future backers that exists before you have any. The Circular Ring 2, a smart health ring, funded in just four minutes and crossed $2.5 million in pledges in under 40 days. Products that open with that kind of velocity tend to do so because the audience already knows it wants the thing, and that certainty is built long before a campaign goes live.

Image Credits: TCF

The Rejection Data Is the Brief

The survey is where validation stops being a scoreboard and starts being useful. From the people who reserved, you learn what actually moved them: whether it was the color, the form, a specific function, the price, or the promise, and which features are carrying the product versus which ones you have been overselling. From the people who left an email and then did not pay, you learn something you cannot get anywhere else: exactly where you lost them, and what would change their mind. The color they wanted was not there. The shape was wrong. It looked too heavy. The price was too high. These are the people who were close enough to care and honest enough to walk away, and their answers are a list of things you can fix before the fix costs anything.

This is co-creation in the most literal sense: meeting your potential buyers before you launch, and letting them tell you what to build. A creator who learns that 60% of their non-converting subscribers balked at weight has a design brief, not a marketing problem. A creator who discovers that two colorways were widely expected but absent has a specification list, not a gap in their ad copy. The survey turns a theoretical audience into an actively contributing one, delivering feedback while the product can still absorb it. Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns tend to share that structure: they do not open to strangers, they open to people who were already consulted.

BB-777 Boombox

Why Validation Doesn’t Always Mean Lowering Your Price

Creators tend to assume validation exists to talk them down. It does not. One agency ran validation on a pet product priced at $30 a unit, and the data showed the right price was $40. The creator had been leaving money on the table, and no amount of instinct would have told them that, because instinct in that situation almost always argues for the safer, lower number. No stated-preference survey, no focus group, and no amount of social engagement would have surfaced it, because stated preference and paid behavior are different instruments measuring entirely different things. Validation is where you settle positioning and audience rather than guessing at them, running price variations, testing different messaging, and finding which audience responds before you have committed to a single frame of campaign video. The point is to find the price, the position, and the audience that let the product reach its full potential, and then launch into that.

The validated price sets reward tiers, and the early discount tested during validation is a trigger that has already been watched working, rather than one you hope will. The reserver surveys told you which characteristics did the persuading, which decides your headline, your hero shot, and the order of your video. You are not inventing arguments for the product; you are repeating the ones your buyers already made. Running price variations and messaging tests before a single production decision is committed changes the campaign from a bet into a brief. The learning does not expire when the campaign closes. A validated price, position, and audience are the same three things an e-commerce store runs on, which is what lets a product keep scaling after the campaign instead of peaking with it.

Kode Dot

The Designer’s Instinct Problem and Why Demand Needs Its Own Prototype

The design process and the validation process ask for decisions in different orders, and that difference matters more than it first appears. A designer who arrives at a product through material, form, and function is not naturally thinking about reservation rates. Validation is the design loop pointed at the three things a physical prototype cannot test: what people will pay, how the product should be framed, and who it is really for. Designers already accept this discipline everywhere else; nobody tools up an injection mold without a prototype. A “do not launch” result from this process is a success, saving a creator a year, a production run, and the damage of a public failure. A careful launch protects more than the person running it; it protects the shared resource of backer trust, which every quiet project erodes.

The question worth answering before a launch is not how big a campaign you can build. It is what you can prove before you build it. Whether that discipline becomes standard practice across the crowdfunding ecosystem or remains the habit of the more methodical subset of creators, the underlying argument is one any designer can recognize. You do not ship a mechanism you have not tested. Treating the market as the final untested component, rather than an assumption baked into launch day, is the shift the methodology is asking for. Across hundreds of millions of dollars raised in crowdfunding projects, the cases where testing these three things costs more than getting them wrong are functionally nonexistent.

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Whirlpool Spent 60 Years in an Italian Engineering Lab Just to Make Its Ovens Quieter

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Here’s a fun rule of thumb: the less effort something takes to use, the more effort someone spent making sure it works. Good waiters make service invisible. Good editing makes a movie feel like it was never touched. Good design, generally, hides its own homework. Weirdly enough, that exact rule is now showing up in kitchen appliances, of all places. Whirlpool has spent the last few years chasing that kind of invisibility, building ovens and hobs that do more while asking you to do less. Its new premium lineup for Europe is basically one giant bet that simplicity is the hardest thing in the room to engineer.

That bet has a name and an address. The name is 6TH SENSE, the sensor-driven backbone tying together Whirlpool’s W Collection Kitchen Suite, a built-in range of ovens, hobs, dishwashers and fridges. The address is Cassinetta di Biandronno, a 60-year-old campus in northern Italy where design studios, food scientists and materials labs work out exactly how much invisible effort a “simple” appliance actually requires. The suite got its biggest showcase yet at EuroCucina 2026 in Milan, where Whirlpool shared a pavilion with sister brands Beko, Hotpoint and Bauknecht for the first time. It’s part of a wider premium push across a European built-in market worth around 6 billion dollars in 2024, expected to clear 9 billion by 2030. Turns out making an oven feel effortless takes a small army.

Designer: Whirlpool Global Industrial Design Centre, Cassinetta di Biandronno, led by Massimo Pedrazzini

The five-hour chocolate test that explains the whole strategy

A pan of chocolate sat melting on a Whirlpool induction hob for five straight hours during the brand’s EuroCucina demonstrations, and came off glossy, smooth and completely unbroken. HeatControl is the reason, letting you set an actual target temperature between roughly 113°F and 392°F (45 to 200 degrees Celsius) in small increments instead of guessing at a power level between one and nine. Conventional induction asks you to translate “gentle simmer” into an abstract number, then keep wandering back to check whether you guessed right. HeatControl deletes the translation step. Its Hide & Touch interface goes one further and disappears entirely when the hob is switched off, leaving black glass and nothing else to look at.

The oven that switches itself off before you remember to check it

The self-supporting Food Sensing Probe tracks the internal temperature of whatever sits in the 73-liter cavity, and once your target is reached, the oven ends the cycle by itself. You pick a doneness, walk away, and the appliance handles the endgame. Cook4 runs the same logic sideways, cooking up to four dishes at once without flavors migrating between them, which Whirlpool says saves up to 72% of the time and 53% of the energy of doing them in sequence. The test behind that number involved cooking a full meal twice, a tart, roast potatoes, lasagna and chicken pasta, once simultaneously and once one after another. Pizza Party stretches it to four fresh 12-inch pizzas in roughly 15 minutes, preheat excluded.

Beko called it the invisible kitchen, and Whirlpool took it a layer deeper

Beko named the theme of its EuroCucina pavilion the invisible kitchen, applying the phrase to hardware: flush surfaces, concealed hinges and handleless doors, all arranged under an undulating textile canopy designed by Mario Cucinella Architects. The staging was genuinely lovely, with each brand assigned its own palette, cream for Whirlpool against navy, terracotta and mineral for the others. Whirlpool then ran the same idea one layer deeper than the cabinet fronts. Visual invisibility is the easier half of the job, and plenty of the handleless minimalism sold as quiet luxury stops there while still asking for constant attention. Making the interaction disappear is the harder version of that idea, and it is the one the W Collection actually attempts.

Why removing a dial costs more engineering than adding one

Every decision an appliance makes on your behalf is a decision someone else had to get right in advance, permanently, for millions of households and every recipe they might attempt. A power dial hands that responsibility to you. A temperature target absorbs it. That absorption is why a story about simplification keeps leading back to a 1.25-million-square-meter campus founded in 1965, where Whirlpool runs three production plants alongside industrial design, cooking R&D, food science and materials research. Roughly 1,480 people work there, with an average tenure of 19 years, which is its own quiet argument about how long this kind of knowledge takes to accumulate.

The design studio that reached for light instead of another screen

Massimo Pedrazzini leads a 31-person team at Cassinetta spanning industrial design, CMF, UI, ergonomics and prototyping, working from hand sketches through CAD and rendered finishes to physical models. Their brief for the latest built-in cooking platforms included a new cavity, a redesigned door mechanism, an internal divider to improve energy efficiency, and light used as the element that guides a user through cooking. That last one is the tell. Handed an opportunity to add another display, the team reached for illumination instead, a guidance layer that communicates without requiring anyone to read. The UX group behind it pulls from psychology, ergonomics, interaction design and product design, and still builds multitouch screens when a product genuinely earns one.

The lab that measures browning so you don’t have to stand there watching

Food Technology landed at Cassinetta in 2003 as a discipline connecting appliance engineering to how food physically behaves, studied chemically, nutritionally and microbiologically. The team measures color, browning, crispness and texture through objective methods, which is the only honest way an oven can decide something is done. MaterialsLAB handles the parallel job on surfaces, and its output shows up as MatteProtect, a matte induction finish Whirlpool claims is around three times more scratch resistant than standard ceramic glass while hiding halos and fingerprints. CleanProtect, a nanotech hob treatment, targets cleaning without detergents at all. X-Lab closes the loop with robotics, machine vision and additive manufacturing, bridging research and the actual production line.

The industry is split, and Whirlpool picked the harder side

Hisense turned up at CES 2026 with a smart induction range carrying a seven-inch cooktop display and AI agents coordinating timing between oven and stovetop, an opposite bet placed with equal confidence. One camp is adding a screen to the hob while the other removes the one already sitting there. AEG reached Whirlpool’s conclusion independently, launching four products at IFA 2026 built around never babysitting an appliance again, which suggests a genuine movement rather than one brand’s marketing angle. Even within Beko Europe the instincts vary, since sister brand Beko’s HomeWhiz platform makes energy and water use more visible per cycle. Whirlpool committed to attention as the scarce resource, and committed across an entire suite.

Who this suits, and why the intelligence sits where it does

Sensor-led cooking fits anyone who treats dinner as something to get done well rather than a craft to practice, which honestly describes most weeknights in most houses. Cooks who enjoy the fiddling lose nothing, because HeatControl exposes exact temperatures and the 6TH SENSE menu can be ignored entirely. There is a second point in Whirlpool’s favor that became obvious this summer, when Weber switched off the June Oven’s AI camera and turned a $999 appliance back into a box that heats. Intelligence running on the device ages considerably better than intelligence running on somebody’s server. Whirlpool’s sensing lives in the hardware you paid for.

Appliance marketing has spent a decade answering what a machine can do, and that answer stopped being interesting somewhere around the fridge with a television bolted to the door. The more useful question now is how much of that capability you are never asked to supervise. Whirlpool’s answer required a 60-year-old Italian campus, four laboratories and a team of 31 designers to arrive at a hob you can comfortably walk away from. Measured in effort spent per decision removed, that ratio looks gloriously lopsided. Measured by what makes a kitchen pleasant to actually live in, it might be the only ratio worth counting.

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5 Things Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 Does Better Than Apple’s iPhone Duo

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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 vs. Apple iPhone Duo

Apple’s first foldable was always going to be a spectacle, and the iPhone Duo delivered. Titanium frame, a hinge built from over 100 components, a 7.6-inch inner display Apple calls the largest and sharpest they’ve ever shipped, and an IP68 rating that no current Samsung foldable can match. The debut made a strong case, and we laid out five specific things it got right in our companion piece last week, which predictably sent a portion of the comments section into a very productive Saturday. Every honest design audit has a flip side, though. The iPhone Duo, for all its first-generation confidence, left a meaningful number of things unresolved, and some of those gaps are more significant than launch-week coverage has made them seem.

Samsung has been folding phones since 2019, and the Galaxy Z Fold8 is what that long runway looks like after years of hinge tweaks, crease complaints, software refinements, and repeated attempts to make a folding phone feel normal. It does not win every category, and Apple absolutely deserves credit for solving a few long-standing foldable annoyances on its first try. Even so, there are still several places where Samsung’s latest Fold feels more complete, more practical, or simply better thought through as an everyday device. Some are obvious the moment you compare the two side by side. Others only start to matter after the honeymoon phase wears off.

Keeps the SIM Tray, Despite What Anyone Says

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 SIM Tray

When we covered the iPhone Duo’s announcement, one of the hardware elements Apple dropped was the physical SIM tray, a decision the company framed as part of a broader design simplification agenda. Apple went full eSIM, keeping the chassis cleaner, eliminating a cut line in the frame, and folding the decision into the same purity narrative behind the iPhone Air’s extreme thinness. For users in markets where eSIM support is solid and carrier switching is painless, this is genuinely fine and probably the right long-term direction. The problem is that a $1,999 foldable probably should not be making hardware convenience trade-offs that actively complicate life for international travelers, anyone running two numbers, or users whose carriers still make eSIM provisioning feel like homework.

Traveling internationally and swapping to a local carrier SIM is a very different experience when you are not navigating eSIM setup through a foreign carrier’s app on spotty airport WiFi. The Z Fold8 keeps the physical SIM tray, and that decision is more forgiving than it is glamorous. Moving a number between devices is faster with a tray, carrier flexibility requires fewer account management steps, and the hardware workaround for eSIM friction simply does not exist. Samsung is not winning any design philosophy debates by pointing at a metal drawer. But the Fold 8’s willingness to keep that hardware in place reflects a different set of priorities than Apple’s, one that bets user convenience should edge out aesthetic reduction, and across a wider range of real-world situations, that bet holds up.

Weighs Noticeably Less Over a Full Day (53 Grams Less, to be precise)

The Galaxy Z Fold8 weighs 201 grams, which is the figure Samsung’s product page leads with, and it earns the emphasis because it makes the Fold 8 the lightest book-style foldable currently on the market. The iPhone Duo comes in at 254 grams. At a 53-gram gap, the difference sits closer to a full AA battery than a rounding error, and the foldable category is already asking more of you than a standard slab phone before the weight conversation even starts. Foldables are physically larger, structurally more complex, and thicker in the pocket by default. Stacking substantial extra mass on top of all that is a real ask, and the Duo makes it.

Apple’s grade 5 titanium frame and hinge housing are premium materials decisions that contribute directly to the device’s rigidity and structural confidence, and directly to its number on the scale as well. Samsung came in lighter, and that shows up in the most boring and most honest way possible, in how aware you are of the phone in your pocket across a full day. A lighter foldable is a foldable that has had more generations of mass reduction applied to it, and the Fold 8’s 201 grams is the current best result of that sustained process. The Duo’s weight is a first-generation structural reality, and Samsung simply has more iterations of solving those demands behind it.

Folds Thinner for Better Pocket-ability

The Galaxy Z Fold8 closes to 9.7mm. The iPhone Duo closes to 11.3mm. The 1.6mm gap sounds mild, and it lands less mildly in a pocket, because the book-style form factor makes closed thickness something you register physically every time the phone goes in or out of a pocket, gets set on a desk, or is gripped shut in one hand. Small dimensional differences accumulate across hundreds of daily interactions in a way that flat spec comparisons do not fully communicate. 9.7mm versus 11.3mm is a material gap in this context, not a footnote.

Opened flat, the Fold 8 measures 4.5mm against the Duo’s 5.2mm. Apple tried hard on the thinness front, and for a first-generation foldable carrying a dual-battery system and a 100-plus component hinge, 5.2mm open is legitimately impressive engineering. Samsung just has more attempts behind it. Years of shaving fractions of a millimeter off the Fold form factor across successive generations produce gains that compound, and the Fold 8’s dimensional figures are the accumulated result of that process. The Duo is not there yet, and that is a first-generation reality rather than a permanent condition.

A More Refined, Battle-tested Multitasking Software

The Taskbar on the Z Fold8 holds eight app slots, and dragging any one of them into a running screen split takes a single gesture rather than a full trip back to the home screen. App Pairs let users save specific two-app workflows and relaunch them together in a single tap. Three-way split-screen and floating pop-up windows give the inner display real workspace flexibility, while AI Results View places AI output in a separate panel so source content stays visible alongside it rather than disappearing behind the response. These features are specific because the problems they solve are specific, and that specificity usually means someone already ran into that friction point on an earlier Fold and the feedback made it into the next build.

Apple’s Duo software looks like a genuinely strong first draft, and side-by-side multitasking on a 7.6-inch inner display is a compelling foundation for what iOS on a foldable can eventually become. What it does not yet carry is the institutional knowledge that comes from shipping foldable hardware in volume for years and learning where real users find the edges of the experience. Samsung knows, from behavioral patterns observed across the Fold 3 through Fold 7, that people using a foldable for actual work want to move windows around without returning to the launcher constantly. Apple will develop that understanding across future software generations. Samsung already developed it, and the current One UI reflects that directly.

The Hinge Comes From Eight Generations of Experimenting

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Hinge Close-up

The Z Fold8 moves to a dual-rail hinge design, where two parallel contact rails distribute fold stress more evenly across the display than the single-rail approach used through the Fold 7. The practical payoffs are reduced delamination risk over long-term use and a 0.6mm reduction in folded thickness compared to last year’s model. The dual-rail architecture exists because the single-rail design produced failure patterns in field data, and Samsung engineered the fix after watching those problems accumulate at scale. Samsung rates the updated hinge at 200,000 fold cycles, which works out to roughly 7 to 10 years of daily use at realistic fold rates, a number that carries credibility specifically because Samsung has the service history to know what foldable hinge failure actually looks like.

Apple’s hinge uses over 100 components including carbon fiber support plates, a grade 5 titanium housing, and an integrated magnet array for closure, and for a first-generation attempt from a company with no prior foldable track record, it is a serious piece of engineering. What it does not have is field history, and in a category where the hinge is the single most consequential mechanical component, field history is what separates a confident launch spec from a genuinely proven design. Samsung’s dual-rail approach did not emerge from a thought experiment. It came from hinge failures, teardown data, warranty claims, and years of iterative engineering against failure modes that only reveal themselves after real-world shipping at volume. Apple’s Duo hinge may age beautifully. Samsung’s already has.

The post 5 Things Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 Does Better Than Apple’s iPhone Duo first appeared on Yanko Design.

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.