Tag Archives: Modular

The Mac Mini Belongs on a Desk, This Build Runs It From Your Hands

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Most people who outgrow a Mac Mini just buy a bigger one. One builder went the opposite direction, gutting an M4 Mac Mini down to its bare motherboard and squeezing the entire machine into something you hold in two hands. The result runs full macOS, plays games with real controllers, and never touches a wall outlet, proving Apple’s desktop silicon was never actually tied to a desk in the first place.

The trick starts with restraint rather than miniaturization. Instead of ripping out Apple’s factory heatsink and blower fan to save space, the build keeps that original cooling setup intact, letting the M4 chip run demanding workloads without throttling under heat. The motherboard and its cooling system then slide into a custom 3D-printed shell nicknamed the Mac Nano, treating Apple’s silicon less like a sealed product and more like a component waiting to be rehoused.

Designer: Shing Solutions

That shell doesn’t bolt permanently into the cyberdeck’s body. It slides in and out on rails instead, resembling something closer to a Game Boy cartridge than a soldered motherboard. Pull it free, and the rest of the handheld, its screen, its keyboard, its controllers, stays behind as a shell ready for whatever core gets slotted in next, whether that’s a repair, an upgrade, or an entirely different chip generation down the line.

Up front sits a 7-inch touchscreen running at 120Hz, paired with a shrunken QWERTY keyboard that includes its own built-in touchpad. That keyboard began as a wireless accessory, but its battery got pulled and rewired to draw power straight from USB instead, trimming both weight and one more thing that could run out of charge mid-session.

Gaming input came from an unexpected donor. Circuit boards pulled from genuine Nintendo Joy-Con charging grips now sit on rails built into both sides of the cyberdeck, wired directly rather than paired over Bluetooth. Since macOS has no native support for wired Joy-Cons, Steam’s controller mapping layer bridges that gap, turning what looks like a stripped-down laptop into something that plays games with console-grade tactile controls in hand.

Wiring that many peripherals into one small chassis created its own bottleneck. The fix came from combining two miniature USB splitter boards into a single custom three-port hub, stripped of their bulky original connectors to fit the tight internal layout. A bank of rechargeable cells rounds out the build, feeding a custom power delivery setup that keeps the whole machine running for hours without a cable in sight.

None of these choices were about making the smallest possible Mac Mini. They were about proving a desktop chip could be pulled apart, rehoused, and handed a battery without losing what made it worth owning in the first place. That kind of modular thinking, where the computer becomes a swappable cartridge rather than a sealed box, points toward a version of portable computing that upgrades in pieces instead of getting replaced whole.

The post The Mac Mini Belongs on a Desk, This Build Runs It From Your Hands first appeared on Yanko Design.

Finally, One Tower Replaces Your Speaker, Lamp, and Wine Fridge

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Anyone who has tried to furnish a studio apartment knows the specific defeat of running out of surfaces before you run out of gadgets. The speaker needs an outlet and a shelf. The lamp needs its own corner. The mini fridge for wine wants counter space that doesn’t exist. Each object is fine on its own, but stacked together on a single console table, they start to look like a garage sale that lost an argument with a design magazine. That is the exact problem South Korean designer Jung Hyun Kim set out to solve with Babel, a concept he built for people who live in small rooms but refuse to shrink their idea of what home should feel like.

Kim designed Babel for a very specific and very real slice of the population, twenty somethings through mid thirties starting their independent lives in modest apartments, often around 500 to 550 square feet, the kind of footprint that is common from Seoul to Brooklyn to any first apartment in a city with real rent. His answer wasn’t to make each device smaller. It was to stop thinking about furniture and electronics as separate categories entirely, and instead build a single vertical column where every function gets its own segment, stacked like a totem instead of scattered like clutter.

Designer: Jung Hyun Kim

The tower reads almost like a figure standing in the room. At the top sits an eye shaped ambient lamp, its lens glowing warm and soft, the kind of light you’d want next to a couch at eleven at night. Below that, a red, fabric wrapped module houses the main speaker drivers, angled like a face with two eyes looking back at you, which is a genuinely clever piece of anthropomorphism for an object meant to live in your peripheral vision all day. The tapered midsection functions as the control hub, complete with a discreet volume display, and the whole thing terminates in a rounded black base that turns out to be a hidden drawer, a small cooling compartment for a couple of wine bottles. Four completely different jobs, one silhouette.

What makes this more than a novelty is the modularity built into the stacking logic. Nothing about Babel demands you use all four segments in one order. You can pull pieces apart, rearrange them, or run just the parts you need that week. A studio dweller might want the lamp and speaker without the bar module. Someone hosting more often might stack the drawer higher for easier reach. The design treats a small home the way a good capsule wardrobe treats a small closet, fewer pieces, each one doing more, none of them wasted.

I like that Babel doesn’t pretend the solution to small space living is owning less. It assumes you still want a good lamp, a good speaker, and a cold bottle of wine within reach, and it simply refuses to let those wants cost you three separate footprints. That feels more honest than most minimalist design advice, which tends to ask people to want less rather than design better. The name is a nice touch too, a nod to the biblical tower where many languages tried to reach the same point, which tracks neatly onto a product where lighting, sound, cooling, and control all speak different technical languages but rise from the same base.

Whether Babel ever becomes a shippable product is beside the point right now. It exists as a Behance concept, a portfolio piece from a designer who clearly thinks in systems rather than single objects, and that thinking is worth paying attention to regardless of manufacturing timelines. Apartment living isn’t getting more spacious anywhere, and the appetite for objects that look intentional rather than accumulated is only growing, especially among people who grew up curating every shelf for how it photographs. A stacked, sculptural answer to gadget clutter fits that mood perfectly.

Babel won’t fit every home, and a four function tower is a commitment, not an impulse buy. But as a piece of thinking about how to live well in less square footage, it’s one of the more clear headed ideas I’ve seen come out of a design program in a while. Sometimes the fix for too many objects isn’t fewer objects. It’s better posture.

The post Finally, One Tower Replaces Your Speaker, Lamp, and Wine Fridge first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 8BitDo Ultimate 3E Is the LEGO Set of Gaming Controllers

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Most controllers ask you to adapt to them. The 8BitDo Ultimate 3E flips that arrangement entirely, building a controller around the idea that your hands, your genre, and your platform should decide its shape instead of the factory floor. The face buttons, the d-pad, and even the joystick tops snap in and out as swappable modules, turning what’s usually a sealed, one-size-fits-all object into something closer to a toolkit.

Pop off the magnetic faceplate and the accessory pack reveals its real purpose. A silicone membrane d-pad sits next to a tactile micro-switch version, and the joysticks come in tall, dome, and thick-neck shapes, each suited to a different grip or genre. Racing games favor a different thumb position than platformers, and for once, the hardware bends to match instead of forcing a single compromise across everything you play.

Designer: 8BitDo

Underneath those swappable caps, the joysticks themselves run on Tunneling Magnetoresistance sensors, a technology built specifically to resist the drift that eventually creeps into analog sticks after enough hours of use. Interactive RGB fire rings pulse around the base of each stick, translating movement into visual feedback in real time, a small touch that turns an otherwise invisible input into something you can actually watch respond.

The triggers carry their own bit of adaptability. Hall-effect sensors power two selectable trigger-stop positions, letting a shooter’s hair-trigger tap coexist with a racing game’s need for a longer, more gradual pull. Switching between them takes a flick of a physical switch, not a trip through a menu, which matters when a genre change happens mid-session rather than between them.

Connectivity spreads just as wide as the physical customization. The Ultimate 3E runs 2.4G wireless and wired modes for Xbox and PC, and switches to Bluetooth for mobile devices, now backed by a USB-C signal adapter for steadier range across more rooms and setups. Apple has officially signed off on compatibility too, covering iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and even Apple Vision Pro, stretching the controller’s use well past the console it was designed around.

An integrated wireless charging dock handles power without cables cluttering a desk, while two pro-level back buttons and a pair of extra-fast bumpers add inputs for players who map more complex combinations. Three custom profiles let different games, or different people, keep their own configuration ready to load instantly, and a 3.5mm jack keeps wired headphones in the mix for anyone who still prefers a physical connection over Bluetooth audio.

None of this treats customization as an afterthought bolted onto a finished product. Every swappable piece, every sensor choice, feels like it was scoped out before the shell was ever molded, built around the idea that serious players tend to have very specific, very personal preferences about how a controller should feel in their hands.

The post The 8BitDo Ultimate 3E Is the LEGO Set of Gaming Controllers first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Drawer That Actually Becomes 5 Portable Trays

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Most storage furniture in an American home falls into one of two categories: too heavy to move without hurting yourself, or too flimsy to trust with anything heavier than folded T-shirts. You buy a dresser, it picks a room, and it stays there until you sell the house or drag it to the curb. There is rarely a middle option, something built to be light, mobile, and honest about the fact that furniture should adapt to how people actually live, not the other way around.

That gap is exactly where Keiji Ashizawa’s “Bon Drawer” sits, even though it was designed back in 2012 and never made it past the prototype stage. The piece is a lightweight steel frame on two wheels holding five stacked trays veneered in oak, and “bon” is simply the word for tray in Japanese, which tells you most of what you need to know about the concept. Pull a tray out of the frame and it stops being a drawer entirely. It becomes an object you can carry across a room, set on a table, hand to a guest. Push it back in and the frame does its job again, quietly, without asking for credit.

Designer: Keiji Ashizawa

I like that Ashizawa came to this from an unusual angle. He trained as an architect but spent time early on at a metalworking shop that made furniture and lighting, and you can feel that in how sparingly steel gets used here. The rail system is nothing more than a flat bar attached to gestural side supports, with small stops so the trays do not slide out when the whole unit gets tipped back onto its wheels for moving. No hidden mechanisms, no soft-close hardware, no reason to call a repair person in five years. The frame even comes apart for flat storage, which is a small detail that says a lot about how the whole thing was thought through from the start rather than bolted on at the end.

What strikes me is how differently we tend to approach the same problem. American design has spent the last decade chasing modularity through plastic bins, stackable cubes, and closet systems sold in kits. Functional, sure, but rarely something you would want visible in a living room. Bon Drawer solves the same problem of flexible storage without pretending the solution has to look disposable. It reads more like a piece of furniture that happens to be practical than a storage product that happens to look nice.

The part of this story that stayed with me is that it never got made. Ashizawa had it prototyped through Tanseisya and then it sat, undocumented outside a handful of design blogs, for over a decade, until Core77 resurfaced it late last month alongside a sibling piece called SLYBOX. Fourteen years is a long time for a good idea to wait for its moment, and I do not think that delay says anything bad about the design. If anything, it says something about how manufacturing decisions rarely track with how clever an idea actually is. Plenty of forgettable furniture gets mass produced every year. Plenty of smart, useful pieces sit in a portfolio because nobody made the case for them at the right time to the right buyer.

There is a reason Japanese design keeps finding new audiences in America right now, from Muji’s steady expansion to the wave of minimalist kitchenware showing up in design-forward apartments from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. It is not really about aesthetics. It is about restraint as a design principle, about trusting that a good idea does not need extra material to prove it is finished. Bon Drawer never sold a single unit, and it still manages to say more about smart storage than most of what is actually on the market. That is worth sitting with for a moment, especially the next time you are hauling a dresser up a narrow staircase and wondering why furniture has to be this heavy in the first place.

The post The Drawer That Actually Becomes 5 Portable Trays first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hisense Just Made an E Ink Phone With a Color Screen That Snaps Off

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Every smartphone screen is a compromise, built to do everything reasonably well and nothing perfectly. The Hisense A10 Ultra rejects that premise outright. Instead of one panel stretched thin across every task, it pairs a 6.13-inch E Ink display with a 4.96-inch color touchscreen that clips onto the back magnetically, then walks away again the moment you don’t need it.

The E Ink layer is the phone’s permanent identity, a 300 PPI Carta 1300 panel that renders text with the same paper-like calm as a dedicated e-reader. A 36-level front light shifts between warm and cool tones without flickering, so a page read at noon and one read at midnight both stay comfortable on the eyes. Nothing about this half of the phone asks for your attention beyond what you came to read.

Designer: Hisense

Snap the color module onto the back, held by magnetic pogo pins, and the same device suddenly handles video, maps, and camera framing without fighting the E Ink panel’s slower refresh. A dedicated T2000 controller chip in the main display keeps scrolling responsive, but color and motion still belong to the LCD module. The two screens divide labor instead of splitting attention, which is a distinction worth sitting with.

Imagine spending a long commute finishing a chapter on the E Ink side, then arriving at a destination and needing turn-by-turn directions or a quick selfie. Rather than tolerating a grayscale map or waiting through refresh lag, the color module goes on for exactly as long as the task requires. Afterward, it comes right back off, and the phone returns to its lighter, quieter default state around 190g.

That detachability is the real design statement here. Most phone makers treat a second screen as permanent architecture, bolted in and powered whether you use it or not. Hisense instead treats it as optional equipment, closer to a lens you’d attach to a camera than a component soldered into a chassis. The color panel exists for exactly the moments that call for it, then disappears when it doesn’t.

An “Ink Smart Button” on the side backs this up practically, letting you switch modes, wake an assistant, or force a full refresh without digging through menus. Paired with a Qualcomm QCM6690 processor, up to 12GB of RAM, and a 4,000 mAh battery, the hardware underneath doesn’t feel like an afterthought bolted onto a gimmick. It reads more like a phone that happens to know when to get out of its own way.

There’s something clarifying about a device willing to admit that no single screen does everything well. The A10 Ultra doesn’t try to hide that tension behind clever software or a single do-it-all panel. It just hands you the two halves separately and lets you decide, task by task, which one earns a place on your phone that day.

The post Hisense Just Made an E Ink Phone With a Color Screen That Snaps Off first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most Gaming Handhelds Make You Choose, But the Win Max 3 Doesn’t

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Most handheld gaming PCs ask you to accept a single, fixed compromise between power, battery life, and weight. The GPD Win Max 3 refuses that trade-off entirely. Its clamshell body is built around a base chassis that can be reconfigured with a snap-on battery pack, an external cooling module, or both, turning one small laptop into several different machines depending on what the moment calls for.

Strip it down to its lightest form and the Win Max 3 weighs just 815g, closer to a paperback novel than a gaming rig. Clip on the 97Wh battery module and it grows to 1,220g, trading some portability for hours of unplugged play. Swap that for the cooling module instead, and the machine settles at 985g while unlocking sustained performance that would otherwise cook a chassis this size. Every configuration reshapes the same 207mm x 147mm footprint.

Designer: GPD

That flexibility exists because the hardware inside earns it. An AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 or 388 processor drives Radeon 8060S graphics, paired with up to 128GB of LPDDR5x memory that can allocate as much as 96GB directly to the GPU. GPD claims the chip can hold 100W at 88°C with no fan module attached at all, and adding one, or a pair of them, pushes sustained output to 110 W without needing a dock nearby.

Picture a commute where the base unit alone slips into a bag, light enough to ignore until a layover turns into three hours of downtime. Clip on the battery module then, and a handheld built for a quick match becomes one built to survive an entire flight without hunting for an outlet. Back at a desk, pull the battery off and attach the cooling module instead, and the same chassis stops sipping power and starts pushing toward its ceiling.

The 9.06-inch AMOLED display carries its own share of the workload, running at up to 165Hz with HDR10 active at the same time, a pairing few handhelds manage without dimming one to preserve the other. Underneath the screen, a full-size keyboard sits below two Xbox-style control clusters, with the touchpad placed above the keys instead of below them, an arrangement that keeps typing and gaming postures from fighting each other.

Storage follows the same modular logic as everything else, with M.2 2280, M.2 2230, and Mini SSD 1517 slots available at once rather than forcing a single-drive ceiling. A USB4 port supports GPD’s own G2 graphics dock, so the same unit that fits in a jacket pocket can also feed a full external GPU setup at a desk. None of these pieces work in isolation; they’re designed to be added, removed, and swapped as the day’s task changes.

What the Win Max 3 ultimately sells isn’t a spec sheet. It’s the idea that a device this size doesn’t have to pick a single identity. Battery life, raw wattage, and portability usually fight each other inside a sealed shell, and here they’ve been separated into parts you attach only when you need them, and left off entirely when you don’t.

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This Face Massager Also Does Your Scalp and Neck Without Swapping Tools

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The gua sha routine, for all its appeal, has always come with a quiet inconvenience. A flat jade stone for the face. A ridged roller for the scalp. Something else entirely for the neck and shoulders. Most people who commit to the practice end up with a small arsenal of tools, each optimized for a single body area and all sitting in a bathroom drawer they have to rummage through before getting started. The RE2AL by GENIERR asks whether all of that needs to be separate in the first place.

The RE2AL is a dual-function gua sha built into a single compact object. One end carries a stainless steel roll-on ball for facial work; the other is a ceramic protrusion head shaped for the scalp, neck, and body. The two halves separate cleanly at the midpoint, with the upper cap housing and protecting the roll-on when it isn’t in use. What looks like one small, rounded form is actually two distinct massage tools sharing the same silhouette.

Designers: Yezin Shin, Dongmin Chung, Dohui Kang, Taeyeon Kim for GENIERR

The facial end uses stainless steel deliberately. The material conducts temperature efficiently, so the ball arrives cool against the skin and stays that way through the session. That cooling effect reduces puffiness and enhances the lifting quality of the massage, especially around the eye area and jawline where gua sha tends to make the most noticeable difference. There’s no ice pack required, no refrigerator step before the routine begins.

The ceramic lower section handles everything below the neck, and the material logic is just as intentional. Ceramic’s natural weight gives the massage a substantive feel without the user having to press hard, while its inherent coolness extends that same calm, unhurried tactile quality to broader muscle work. The protrusions themselves went through iterative refinement to land on a curvature and density that stimulates circulation without irritating skin, which is the particular balance that mass-market scalp tools tend to get wrong.

The form is unified entirely in soft pink with a matte finish, which means the ceramic head and the coated body read as one object rather than two different components sharing space. A silicone loop at the top of the cap makes it easy to hold during the facial pass and doubles as a travel-friendly hanging point. The whole thing is compact enough to keep on a bathroom counter without visually cluttering the space, or slip into a bag without needing a separate case.

For GENIERR, the dual tool also serves a larger purpose. The brand’s shampoos, essences, and serums address hair and skin separately, but a single ritual tool that moves between scalp and face gives users a physical through line connecting those products into one practice. The RE2AL doesn’t just reduce clutter; it gives the daily routine a more coherent shape.

Most beauty tools are designed for one moment of a routine and then set aside. This one travels with you from the scalp down to the face without stopping to swap instruments, and that uninterrupted continuity turns out to be a more meaningful improvement to the self-care experience than any single material upgrade could have been on its own. The RE2AL makes the argument that the most useful tool is the one that’s already in your hand.

The post This Face Massager Also Does Your Scalp and Neck Without Swapping Tools first appeared on Yanko Design.

The No-Drill Plywood Shelf System Every Renter Has Been Waiting For

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Most shelves come with a decision baked into their design: find a wall, drill some holes, and commit to a location that will outlast most furniture arrangements. Wall-mounted storage has its advantages, but it tends to dictate how a room organizes itself rather than the other way around. Freestanding alternatives often compensate with bulk, trading flexibility for a kind of permanence that doesn’t feel all that different.

The Repisa 01 approaches that problem from a different angle. It’s a modular shelf system built around the idea that storage should adapt to the space it occupies, not the other way around. Made from CNC-cut plywood with an interlocking joint system, it stands without screws, brackets, or wall anchors, and reconfigures into entirely different layouts depending on what a space needs from it at any given point.

Designer: Lorenzo Vega

Everything here reduces to four interchangeable pieces: two tops and two sets of legs. These plywood components lock together through notched cutouts that let the legs slot directly into the shelf tops, with no hardware or tools required. Assembly is straightforward, and so is breaking it down. The simplicity of the connection is what keeps the whole system flexible rather than fixed in one form.

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From those same base components, the Repisa 01 assembles into layouts that look quite different from one another. A wider, lower arrangement works naturally as a living room display shelf for books, plants, and framed pieces. The same parts, rearranged taller, shift it toward something that reads more like a room divider, creating a soft visual partition in open-plan spaces without committing to anything structural.

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Smaller configurations bring it down to something suited to a bedroom corner or a compact apartment’s entryway, holding a few books or a cluster of plants without crowding the room. The natural plywood finish sits comfortably next to most interior palettes without needing to match them precisely. A shelf that follows you between apartments and living situations can’t afford to be too particular about its aesthetic surroundings.

This flexibility extends to what the shelf holds as well. There’s no fixed shelf spacing or depth to work around, so the arrangement scales up or down depending on what needs displaying. A household that favors tall ceramics has different priorities than one focused on paperback books or small indoor plants, and the Repisa 01 doesn’t try to resolve those differences with a single fixed configuration.

That also makes it a natural fit for renters or anyone who moves often. Most modular shelving available on the market still anchors somewhere eventually, even if only at the back panel or through a top-shelf bracket. The Repisa 01 removes that requirement entirely, which quietly changes the relationship between the shelf and the room, giving the room back its walls without giving anything up.

The post The No-Drill Plywood Shelf System Every Renter Has Been Waiting For first appeared on Yanko Design.

The $180 Razer Mouse That Makes a Second Gaming Mouse Pointless

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Gaming mice have always had a specialization problem. The ones built for MMOs come loaded with thumb buttons that feel excessive the moment you switch to a shooter. FPS mice are clean and fast but leave MOBA players reaching for keyboard shortcuts that shouldn’t need to be there. Buying two mice for two genres has been the practical answer, which is also the least satisfying one.

The Razer Naga V3 Pro addresses that directly. It ships with three magnetic side plates that swap out in seconds, each designed for a different genre of play. The 12-button grid suits MMOs, the six-button layout covers MOBAs and battle royale games, and the two-button plate clears the side for FPS use. One mouse, three configurations, and the same right-handed ergonomic shape throughout all of them.

Designer: Razer

The side button system itself isn’t new to the Naga line, but the V3 Pro brings the rest of the hardware up to the same level as what’s inside Razer’s top-tier esports mice. The Focus Pro 50K Optical Sensor Gen-3 powers tracking with up to 50,000 DPI and 390 IPS, the same sensor found in Razer’s dedicated competitive mice. Gen-4 optical switches handle clicks with a rated life of 100 million actuations and are designed to eliminate the bounce clicks that can misfire at the worst moments.

The scroll wheel also gets a meaningful upgrade here. The HyperScroll Tilt Wheel Gen-2 offers four distinct modes: Free-Spin for fast document scrolling, Tactile for click-by-click precision, Precision Tactile for finer steps, and Smart-Reel for automatic switching between modes. In an MMO, cycling through inventory with Free-Spin feels different from navigating a skill tree in Tactile mode, and having that level of control in the wheel itself is something most mice don’t bother offering.

Battery life holds up across both wireless modes. On HyperSpeed 2.4 GHz, the Naga V3 Pro runs for up to 155 hours; switch to Bluetooth and that extends to 280 hours. The mouse body weighs 112 g without a side plate, with the 12-button plate adding 20 g, the six-button adding 17 g, and the two-button adding 15 g. That last configuration brings the total down to where FPS players tend to want it, and the weight difference is noticeable enough in practice.

Up to 23 programmable buttons are available depending on the active plate, down from 23 to just two when the FPS plate is on. The pinky rest is also a button, lockable from the underside when not wanted, which adds one more control point without requiring any reach. Double-injection molded legends on the side buttons ensure the labels don’t wear off under daily use.

What the Naga V3 Pro argues, quietly but consistently, is that genre-specific peripherals don’t have to mean genre-specific hardware purchases. The plates snap off and on without tools, the transition between configurations takes less time than a loading screen, and the underlying hardware is good enough that nothing feels like a compromise.

The post The $180 Razer Mouse That Makes a Second Gaming Mouse Pointless first appeared on Yanko Design.

This flexible mouse works in both standard and vertical configuration without breaking a sweat

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Most of us content creators have to juggle between two different types of mice for specific tasks. A normal mouse is the default choice for competitive gaming, graphic design, or video editing for its fast movements and better control for pixel-level accuracy. On the other hand, a vertical mouse is the ideal choice for office workers, coders, and writers like me who have to constantly deal with strain in the arms and shoulders.

Anyone who has to work on their PC for long hours has to either choose one of them or keep both handy for different working styles. Won’t it be better if there was a mouse that could perform double duty? This concept lets us believe so with an intuitive design that lets the user decide what configuration of the mouse to utilize for specific tasks.

Designer: Taehyeong Kim

Rightly called the DUO flexible mouse, the modular peripheral is designed to adapt to different usage styles with a foldable form factor. Just by folding or unfolding the rear of the device, a standard mouse shape or a vertical configuration is achieved. This adaptable form responds to the wrist angle and the grip level of the hand for the most comfortable ergonomic positioning. Extra sensors are placed on one side of the mouse to enable the vertical working position, which relieves strain by keeping the hand in a natural handshake posture.

DUO comes with an in-built rechargeable system to eliminate the need for disposable batteries, while keeping the overall weight down. This is important because having a disposable AA or AAA battery inside can offset the balance while working in the vertical position. The mouse also gets a magnetic system for the flexible leg to easily detach the old component and attach the new one when it goes rouge; thereby making it highly repairable. That’s a mindful design addition as eventually the folding and unfolding action will wear down the magnetic parts and the outer plastic shell.

The vertical position of the mouse can be adjusted for ergonomic grip, as the flexible leg can be folded up until the level it feels just right for use. The standard mouse configuration, however, doesn’t have that liberty, as the fully folded position makes the mouse flat from the bottom, which is crucial for smooth operation on any kind of surface. The only apprehension I have as a neutral user is how much physical damage the mouse will sustain being in the vertical position, being dragged on the working surface over time.

Other than that, the overall concept design is highly practical and valid enough to be labelled a daily driver for power users like me. Although it is still in the concept stage, the idea is a good bet for PC accessories makers like Microsoft who’ve tinkered with the idea of a flexible mouse in the past.

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