At $270, ASUS’s New Chromebook Has No Business Being This Good

The budget laptop category has a long reputation for disappointing displays, short battery life, and builds that feel provisional rather than considered. Most sub-$300 machines get you to the internet and not much further before something creaks or slows down. It’s a price bracket that tends to ask buyers to accept tradeoffs that shouldn’t really be necessary in 2026, and ChromeOS devices have historically been no exception.

The ASUS Chromebook CM15 and Chromebook CM32 Detachable take a different approach to that bracket. Both run on the MediaTek Kompanio 540 processor with up to 8 GB of LPDDR5X memory, pass 24 MIL-STD-810H military-grade durability tests, and come with a three-month Google AI Pro trial bundled in. They aren’t trimmed-down machines trying to look complete. They’re designed to cover the full range of what most people actually do on a laptop.

Designer: ASUS

The CM15 is the larger of the two, a 15.6-inch clamshell with an FHD anti-glare panel, a 180-degree lay-flat hinge, and a chassis that weighs 3.26 lbs and comes in four colors: Pure Grey, Fabric Blue, Cream Pink, and Misty Green. Each has a washi-paper-inspired texture that gives it a bit more character than the usual matte plastic. The port selection includes HDMI alongside two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C ports and a USB Type-A, and ASUS specifically flags HDMI as an unusual inclusion at this price point.

The CM32 Detachable is smaller and considerably more flexible, at 1.41 lbs without the keyboard attached. Its 12.1-inch, 2.5K 120 Hz touchscreen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass, and it comes with a magnetically attached stand, a detachable keyboard with 1.35 mm key travel, and a wirelessly charged stylus shaped like a traditional ballpoint pen. The whole system connects and disconnects cleanly without any of the fussiness that detachable keyboards often carry.

Both devices boot in under ten seconds, handle background updates automatically, and run Android apps from Google Play, which in practice means Netflix, Adobe Lightroom, Zoom, and Microsoft 365 are all accessible out of the box. The Google AI Pro trial includes NotebookLM and Gemini integration across Gmail and Docs, adding genuine productivity value without requiring a separate subscription to access.

Where the two models diverge is in their use case and price. The CM15 starts at $269.99 and suits anyone who wants a wide screen with a full-size keyboard for daily tasks at home or school. The CM32 at $579.00 is the pick for people who need the flexibility of a tablet one moment and a laptop the next, particularly given the stylus and the 120 Hz display. The CM15 body is also made with 30% recycled plastics and sustainable packaging, a commitment that extends the value of the machine beyond its shelf life.

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China’s New Coastal Installation Looks Like It Belongs in Space

Not every art installation earns the right to exist in a landscape. Most feel like intrusions, objects dropped into nature rather than grown from it. OAS/S-AETHER, the latest work from Beijing-based Zhide Architectural Design Consulting (ZDC), is one of the rare exceptions. Standing on the sandy coastline of Aranya in Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, this winged structure of interconnected metal rods and glowing acrylic lightboxes manages to feel both ancient and alien at the same time, and that tension is the whole point.

The installation was created for the “Migratory Birds 300” section of the 2026 Aranya Theater Festival, led by architects Zhengdong Li, Rubing Bai, and Xu Wen. The concept draws from “Aether,” the fifth element in classical philosophy, that invisible, luminous substance believed by the ancient Greeks to fill the heavens beyond the earthly realm. It’s a heady starting point, but ZDC pulls it off. The piece doesn’t just reference the idea of Aether. It actually makes you feel it.

Designer: Zhide Architectural Design Consulting (Beijing) Co., Ltd.

At first glance, OAS/S-AETHER reads as a geometric silhouette against the sky, a skeletal wing shape built from precisely arranged metal rods that catch light differently depending on the hour. Get closer, and the details reveal themselves. Embedded within the framework are acrylic lightboxes that glow from within, engraved copper plates that bring texture and a sense of history to the industrial structure, and, perhaps most surprisingly, living plants tucked inside the illuminated boxes. That last element is the one I keep turning over in my mind. Placing living, breathing vegetation inside a steel and acrylic structure is not a subtle gesture. It’s a declaration. Life and industry don’t just coexist here; they hold each other up.

The choice of location matters too. Aranya is not just any beach town. The coastal community in Qinhuangdao has quietly become something of a pilgrimage site for design-conscious travelers and cultural tourists across China, recognized for its commitment to thoughtful architecture and carefully curated experiences. Placing a work of this ambition in that environment makes sense, but it also raises the stakes. When the bar is already high, every new installation has to work harder to justify itself.

OAS/S-AETHER justifies itself. The way the piece interacts with its natural setting over the course of a single day is genuinely impressive. Sunlight shifts the shadows cast by the metal rods across the sand in slow, changing patterns. At night, the acrylic panels take over, turning the structure into something closer to a lantern than a sculpture. The piece never looks exactly the same twice, which keeps it from becoming the kind of static landmark that gets photographed once and forgotten.

ZDC has been building this design vocabulary for a while now. Their OAS/S series, which also includes OAS/S-NEST in Qinhuangdao and OAS/S-NOMAD in Inner Mongolia, consistently explores what happens when temporary structures are made to feel permanent, and when materials that should clash somehow harmonize instead. AETHER is the most ambitious entry in that series so far, and it shows. There is a quiet confidence to the design that feels earned rather than assumed.

What makes all of this worth discussing beyond the architecture world is the broader question it raises. As public art becomes more globally visible through social media, the pressure on installations to be photogenic often overshadows the pressure to be meaningful. OAS/S-AETHER manages to be both, but the meaning clearly comes first. You can feel the thought behind it before you even see it in full. That is a harder thing to achieve than most people realize, and it is precisely why the work stands out.

Whether you encounter it in person on that Hebei coastline or through photographs shared online, OAS/S-AETHER leaves an impression that is hard to shake. It asks what it means to exist between worlds, between the man-made and the natural, between the visible and the intangible. Most art asks questions. The best art makes you forget it is asking at all.

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XPENG L03 Brings Ex-Ferrari Designer and 520 km Range to Europe

Xpeng picked Munich for the L03’s big moment, and that setting says almost as much as the car itself. Unveiled on July 17, the L03 arrives as a global-facing SUV coupe that mixes sleek design, family-friendly practicality, and a heavy dose of software-first ambition. For Xpeng, it is more than just another model launch. It is a clear statement of intent for Europe.

Xpeng calls the L03 a next-generation AI SUV coupe, and the design leans hard into that promise with a low, flowing roofline, flush detailing, and a drag coefficient of 0.228. Developed by a global design team led by former Ferrari exterior design chief JuanMa López, the L03 is clearly meant to look more polished and aspirational than a typical mainstream family SUV. At 4,650 mm long with a 2,850 mm wheelbase, it sits in a sweet spot that should give it broad appeal across urban buyers, young families, and tech-minded upgraders. Xpeng is also giving buyers a broader visual palette than usual, with five nature-inspired exterior colors: Phantom Purple, Rock Gray, Arctic White, Midnight Black, and Silver Frost, plus a Global Black Edition with full black body color, darkened calipers, and darker wheels.

Designer: Xpeng

Inside, Xpeng is trying to make the L03 feel more lounge than machine. The cabin centers on a 15.6-inch display and layers in 256-color ambient lighting, AI-enabled climate control, and active noise cancellation, while the seating package aims squarely at comfort with ventilated, heated, and massage-equipped front seats. The rear bench folds in a 40/20/40 split, and practicality looks like a genuine strength rather than an afterthought, with 539 liters of rear luggage space including underfloor storage, a 102-liter front trunk on EV variants, and a further 102-liter rear underseat drawer.

That usefulness extends beyond the cabin. Xpeng says the L03 has been designed with expansion and adventure in mind, featuring eight flush magnetic attachment points, five 1/4-inch threaded mounting points for accessories such as action cameras, and front passenger expansion docks for added flexibility. The company also says the system supports roof racks, helping position the L03 as something more versatile than a style-led urban crossover. Towing capacity is rated at up to 1,500 kg with an optional market-specific manual tow hook.

The bigger story, though, is software. Xpeng is using the L03 to showcase its latest XOS 6.0 cockpit platform and a more advanced intelligent driving pitch built around VLA 2.0 and NGP. The L03 also brings direct Google Maps integration, adding a familiar layer of usability to Xpeng’s latest cockpit experience. Xpeng said it plans to bring its next-generation assisted driving technology to Europe in early 2027, making the L03 not just a new model but an early marker for the brand’s next software chapter in the region.

Xpeng is also casting a wide net on powertrain choice. The battery-electric version is rated for up to 520 km of WLTP range, while the EREV version stretches to more than 1,000 km of combined range. Fast charging is another headline figure, with Xpeng claiming a 10 to 80 percent top-up in around 20 minutes under 3C charging conditions. That helps the L03 look less like a niche style play and more like a serious attempt to cover multiple use cases with one global product. With its current pricing, the L03 looks strikingly competitive in Europe, particularly given its range, technology, and day-to-day usability.

Taken together, those elements make the L03 more than just another new model. It is a statement car for a brand that wants to prove it can speak the language of European design, global software, and everyday usability all at once. In Munich, Xpeng did not just unveil a new SUV coupe. It unveiled a model designed to carry its international ambitions much further.

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Motorola Just Built the Android Phone Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Almost Was

Wireless charging on Android has been a bit of a mess. Most phones support it, but the speeds tend to lag behind proprietary fast-charging standards, and the Qi2 situation has been particularly awkward. Samsung’s Galaxy S26 series supports Qi2 speeds but skips the built-in magnets, meaning you still need a special case to get the alignment right. Other Android phones that did include magnets weren’t hitting the full 25W Qi2 ceiling. It was always one or the other.

The Motorola Edge 70 Max closes that gap. It’s the first mainstream Android phone outside of Google’s Pixel line to offer true Qi2 wireless charging with built-in magnets and the full 25W MPP25 speed, no magnetic case required, no extra ring to stick on the back. Drop it on a Qi2 pad, and it snaps into position and charges at the maximum rate the standard allows. That’s a more meaningful distinction than it might sound.

Designer: Motorola

For anyone who keeps a charging pad on a nightstand or desk, alignment has always been the friction point of wireless charging. Miss the coil slightly, and speeds drop, or charging stops entirely without any notification. Built-in magnets solve that by locking the phone into position automatically, the same way MagSafe works on an iPhone. Android users have had to use workarounds for years to get the same result, and most still don’t bother.

Beyond the charging story, the Edge 70 Max arrives with serious hardware throughout. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip delivers a 36% CPU improvement and 11% GPU improvement over its predecessor, and a vapor chamber cooling system with liquid metal and a 5,500 mm² chamber keeps temperatures in check during sustained loads. Up to 12 GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 1 TB of storage round out the platform.

The 7100 mAh silicon-carbon battery earned a DXOMARK Gold Label with 160 points, and 90W TurboPower wired charging adds enough for a full day in just six minutes. The 50MP Sony LYTIA 710 main camera handles photography with AI-assisted processing, and the phone debuts Motorola Qira, a unified AI system shared across Lenovo PCs and tablets that carries context between devices.

The Quad HD+ (2K) display is rated as the brightest in its category, and the build is aircraft-grade aluminum framed with matte premium glass and MIL-STD-810H certification. Motorola has also made clear that the packaging is fully recyclable and printed with soy-based inks, a detail that reflects the broader Lenovo sustainability push rather than just a spec-sheet line.

The Android wireless charging ecosystem has needed a phone willing to commit fully to Qi2 rather than taking the halfway approach that most manufacturers have favored. The Edge 70 Max is the first non-Pixel Android flagship to do it without compromise, and with the rest of the hardware backing it up, the charging system stops being a headline curiosity and becomes a genuinely practical reason to pick one platform over another.

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See-Through Speaker with a 21.5-inch Transparent Display Turns Your Songs Into Lyric Videos

Bang & Olufsen perfected the idea of audio equipment as art, creating speakers so sculptural and beautiful they demand to be looked at long before they are ever heard. This approach turned hi-fi systems into statement pieces, architectural elements that shape a room’s aesthetic just as much as they fill it with sound. The price for such artistry, however, often places it in the realm of museum-worthy gallery objects. A new design is taking a similar run at that “look at me” audio philosophy, finding its visual hook through an entirely different and arguably more dynamic method, without the five-figure price tag.

The MorningBlues SonicGlass A1 achieves its visual identity through engineered transparency. Instead of relying on exotic woods or polished aluminum, its beauty comes from revealing the inner workings of sound itself. The speaker’s main diaphragm is a sheet of clear glass, letting you watch the physical driver move and vibrate with the music. This turns the hardware into a performance, a living object that makes sound tangible. MorningBlues calls this “Visualized Music” – a vision where sound, lyrics, motion, and visuals become part of one unified experience rather than separate elements. It’s a clever way to create a decorative speaker that feels both technical and artistic, designed for people who appreciate seeing how their favorite things work.

Designer: MorningBlues

Click Here to Buy Now: $646 $999 (35% off). Hurry, only 7/395 left! Raised over $794,000.

This focus on a meaningful visual is a refreshing change of pace. We are, after all, intensely visual creatures. For decades, speaker companies have tried to give our eyes something to do while we listen, but the solutions have been uniformly uninspired. We’ve been served an endless buffet of dancing digital equalizers and pulsing RGB lights that flash along to the beat. These features feel disconnected from the soul of the music, reducing a complex song to a simple, repetitive light show. The SonicGlass A1 offers something far more compelling because it taps into the most human element of any track: the story.

It’s basically captions for your music, an idea so immediately brilliant it’s a wonder it took this long to happen. Let’s be honest, almost nobody watches movies anymore without subtitles. Between mumbled dialogue and our own fractured attention spans, seeing the words has become essential. The SonicGlass A1 applies that same logic to listening. It uses its 21.5-inch transparent display to make lyrics appear to float in mid-air, animating and shifting with the rhythm and mood of the song. You can finally catch that one line you’ve been mishearing for years or appreciate the poetry of a verse without breaking the spell to look at your phone.

The real magic here is that the display isn’t just a screen sitting behind glass; the glass is the speaker. The entire front panel is an ultra-thin German Schott glass diaphragm, which vibrates to create sound. This panel is moved by a powerful neodymium magnetic system, turning the whole assembly into a transparent driver. It’s a remarkable piece of acoustic engineering that makes the visual effect feel earned, not tacked on. The transparency goes beyond just the surface, revealing the acoustic movement behind every note and creating a direct, physical link between what you hear and what you see.

This commitment to engineering extends to the audio quality. Inside the sealed enclosure are dual 4-inch full-range drivers powered by a pair of 80W Class-D amplifiers, delivering clean, room-filling stereo sound. The design prioritizes clarity and a balanced, natural reproduction, ensuring vocals are crisp and instruments feel distinct. It also features three different tuning modes, allowing you to tailor the sound profile to your room or your mood. It’s a system designed to prove that a speaker built around a visual novelty can also be a genuinely capable piece of hi-fi equipment.

While the speaker is a stunning object on its own, its personality is shaped through the MorningBlues smartphone app. This is the creative command center where you control the entire visual experience. The app’s “Lyric Lab” lets you customize the fonts, effects, and animations of the floating lyrics, tailoring them to your exact taste. It’s also where you can access the more futuristic AI features, like generating a music video for a favorite song or using a Face Swap tool to put yourself in the performance. For quieter moments, the app lets you display personal photos and videos or choose from a library of mindful meditation scenes, turning the speaker into a dynamic digital canvas.

If the app is the creative hub, the optional Music Hub is the tactile command deck for your entire audio ecosystem. This physical controller is a serious piece of kit, designed to manage your listening experience with dedicated controls. It features a prominent vocal removal button that instantly preps any song for karaoke. More impressively, it acts as a bridge to your existing audio gear, allowing you to pair the SonicGlass A1 with up to three other Bluetooth speakers from any brand. With its own enhanced audio decoding, the Hub ensures all connected speakers sound their best while giving you a single, elegant interface to control your multi-room setup.

This transforms the speaker from a standalone device into a social centerpiece. The combination of easy vocal removal and synchronized lyrics makes it an incredibly fun and intuitive karaoke machine. It’s an artful object for your daily listening, a conversation-starting decor piece when it’s quiet, and an interactive entertainment system when you have friends over. It’s one of the few devices that feels equally at home providing background music for a quiet evening or being the main event at a party.

The standard retail price for the SonicGlass A1 Lyric Speaker is $999. For its launch, MorningBlues is offering a super early bird price of $649. Several bundles are also available to build out a more complete system. A Stereo Pair of two speakers is offered at $1,299, down from a retail of $1,998. The Smart Audio Bundle, which includes one speaker and the Music Hub controller, is available for $849. For those looking to go all-in on the social features, a Karaoke Special bundle includes the speaker, the Music Hub, and a microphone for $879.

Click Here to Buy Now: $646 $999 (35% off). Hurry, only 7/395 left! Raised over $794,000.

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The Open-Source Printer With No Ink Locks Now Has a Prototype

Nearly a year after Open Tools first introduced the idea, the Paris-based startup has released its first video of a working prototype of the Open Printer, a fully open-source inkjet that prints in both monochrome and full color. For a project that’s been generating buzz since its Crowd Supply debut in 2025, actually watching the thing print is a meaningful moment. Concepts are easy. Hardware is hard.

That said, the prototype arriving is only part of the story. Pricing hasn’t been confirmed, a shipping timeline hasn’t been locked in, and print speed figures are still undisclosed. So while the milestone is real, it’s also a reminder that the road from working prototype to finished product is rarely a short one. Still, the fact that the machine exists and functions is worth paying attention to, because what Open Tools is trying to do is genuinely unusual in a category that has spent decades doing the opposite.

Designer: Open Tools

Most of us have a complicated relationship with our printers. Not a love-hate situation so much as a hostage situation. The ink runs dry, and suddenly you’re buying a cartridge that costs more than the printer itself, only to get a pop-up warning that it’s been chipped to stop you from refilling it. It is, when you think about it, a strange arrangement to just accept. And yet, for decades, we have.

The Open Printer is built as a direct response to that. No proprietary drivers. No cartridge DRM locking you to a single brand. No subscription fees or ink-monitoring systems quietly draining your wallet. It runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, uses refillable HP cartridges with no digital restrictions attached, and connects to Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS through CUPS, an open-source print server. The whole point is that once you own it, you actually own it.

The design has a refreshingly honest quality to it. It’s modular, built from standard mechanical components, and comes either as a self-assembly kit or pre-assembled. It can sit on a desktop or mount to a wall. You can even 3D print custom parts and choose from different color finishes. These feel like small details, but they collectively signal something: the people behind this actually considered the user as someone with preferences and agency, rather than a recurring revenue stream.

Open Tools has released the project under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensing, which means you can use, share, and modify it freely for non-commercial purposes. There has been debate in open-source communities about whether this fully qualifies under the strictest definitions of “open source,” and that’s a legitimate conversation. The non-commercial clause does limit what some users can do with it. But for a hardware startup trying to build something sustainable while keeping it genuinely accessible, the approach is at least pointed in the right direction. The project has also been nominated for a French Design Award in two categories, which suggests the idea is resonating well beyond just the maker community.

Printing might feel like a solved problem, so mundane it barely registers as a design category worth getting excited about. But the fact that it has become so reliably frustrating and expensive is itself a design failure, one that’s been normalized so gradually that most people stopped questioning it. We just assumed that’s what printers are.

The working prototype doesn’t change the industry overnight, and there are still plenty of unknowns before anyone can actually order one. But it does prove the concept is more than a crowdfunding pitch. For a project asking people to imagine a printer that works for them instead of against them, that’s not nothing.

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The Fortune Teller Just Got an AI Upgrade and It Knows Too Much

Remember the movie Big? Tom Hanks, the carnival Zoltar machine, a kid who just wanted to grow up overnight. That film had a way of making wish-granting feel both magical and slightly unsettling, because the machine didn’t really know you. It just read the room and gave you what you asked for. Now, almost four decades later, Australian art and technology studio ENESS has built something that does the same thing but with significantly more data points, and the result is one of the more thought-provoking design pieces to come out of the 2026 festival circuit.

HP*ATM, which stands for Human Psyche AI Teller Machine, debuted at Illuminate Adelaide 2026 as part of an exhibition called Automation Bias. It looks exactly like what you’d expect from an old ATM, boxy and vintage, with colored buttons and a telephone handset forming part of the interface. But instead of dispensing cash, it dispenses something far more personal: a psychological reading based on your face, your palm, and a series of choices you make in the moment. ENESS founder Nimrod Weis drew direct inspiration from the Zoltar machine in Big, and the connection makes complete sense once you’re standing in front of it.

Designer: ENESS

The premise is deceptively simple. You walk up, you consent (the screen literally asks, which is already more than most apps do), and the machine reads you. It analyzes your face and your palm, processes your button selections, and produces what the studio calls a “lyrical psychological reading.” You get a portrait of yourself, filtered through AI. And maybe that portrait is accurate. Maybe it’s not. But the more interesting question is: does it even matter? The moment you step up and say yes, you’ve already told the machine something about yourself.

That’s exactly the territory ENESS is navigating here, and they do it in a way that feels playful rather than preachy. The installation isn’t trying to scare you about AI. It’s asking you to notice something you’re already doing in your daily life, handing over intimate data to systems that claim to understand you, often without the ceremony of a formal machine with colored buttons formally asking for your consent. The irony is that HP*ATM might be the most transparent AI interaction many people have ever had, because at least it’s honest about what it’s doing.

There’s a layer of humor baked into the whole thing, which is very much part of ENESS’ design language. The vintage ATM aesthetic is a deliberate choice. Weis has said the installation is meant to remind visitors that current AI systems might eventually look as dated as cash machines and landline phones. That’s a point worth sitting with. The technologies we currently regard with either reverence or a low-grade anxiety tend to look a lot less intimidating in hindsight, and ENESS is nudging you toward that perspective while you’re still in the middle of it all.

The act of not participating also becomes part of the artwork, and that’s where the piece gets genuinely interesting. If you walk up and decide not to engage, that choice still belongs to the installation. The machine doesn’t require you to perform for it, but it does invite you to think about why you’d hesitate. Why would you say no to an AI reading your face when you’ve already handed that same data to your phone, your laptop camera, and roughly half the apps you downloaded last year without bothering to read the terms? The answer probably says more about you than the machine ever could. The question isn’t rhetorical. It’s just honest.

HP*ATM runs through August 30, 2026, at FutureJuice in Adelaide, Australia. If you happen to be near it, stepping up to that machine and choosing yes or no is probably more thought-provoking than most things you’ll do on your phone that day. And if you’re not in Adelaide, the work still travels with you, because the questions it raises don’t stay in the gallery. They follow you home.

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Snøhetta’s Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Looks Like It Was Carved From the Badlands Themselves

Some buildings sit on a landscape, and then there are buildings that seem to belong to it. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, designed by Oslo and New York-based studio Snøhetta, is firmly the latter. Rising from the dramatic terrain of Medora, North Dakota — just outside the boundaries of Theodore Roosevelt National Park — the structure feels less like architecture imposed on the land and more like something the Badlands quietly exhaled.

Snøhetta won the international design competition for the project in 2020, and it is easy to understand why. The firm has long demonstrated a rare ability to make monumental buildings feel humble, from the Oslo Opera House, where the roof doubles as a public plaza, to the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. With TRPL, the challenge was different: how do you honor a president whose greatest legacy was the preservation of wild land, without contradicting that legacy with your building?

Designer: Snøhetta

Their answer was to look at the geology beneath their feet. The Badlands are a study in layered time — striated buttes, eroded canyons, and sedimentary formations that read like pages of a very old book. The library’s form echoes this language directly. The building’s curving silhouette mirrors the surrounding ridgelines, and its material palette draws from the warm ochres and earth tones of the regional rock. From certain angles, the structure practically dissolves into the horizon.

The interior logic follows the same idea. Visitors move through the building in a sequence meant to mirror Roosevelt’s own relationship with the West — arriving from the cultivated, ordered world and gradually moving deeper into something wilder and more elemental. The spatial progression is deliberate, cinematic, and designed to make the surrounding landscape the dominant feature at every turn. Windows are positioned not just for light but for framing: a specific butte, a stretch of prairie, a sky that goes on longer than feels reasonable.

Beyond the architecture, TRPL is positioned to become the first net-zero presidential library in the United States. Solar energy, geothermal systems, and a building envelope optimized for the extreme temperature swings of North Dakota all contribute to that goal. The commitment feels right for a library honoring a man who signed into protection of over 230 million acres of public land.

What Snøhetta has designed here is not a monument to power. It is something quieter and, ultimately, more resonant: a building that asks you to look past it, toward the land Roosevelt spent his life trying to protect. In a genre prone to grandeur for its own sake, that restraint is the most radical design choice of all.

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This $79 Kids’ Wi-Fi Phone Brings Back the Ability to Slam Down a Receiver Like It’s 1995

The landline died because of the wire, not because of the idea. A physical phone tethered to a wall socket made sense in 1985 and made increasingly less sense every year after, until entire households simply stopped bothering to replace them. Pinwheel’s new release makes the case that the object itself, the tactile handset, the dedicated cradle, the single purpose design, was worth keeping around long after the copper wiring became a liability. Strip out the jack and run the whole thing over Wi-Fi instead, and suddenly a nostalgia object becomes a genuinely practical piece of furniture again. That is the quiet design insight buried inside what looks, at first glance, like a novelty throwback.

Called Pinwheel Home, the device targets kids aged 5 to 10 who need a way to reach approved contacts without inheriting a full smartphone. It plugs into any outlet and pairs with Wi-Fi, meaning it can sit on a kitchen counter or a bedroom shelf without a technician ever showing up. Two versions exist, the smaller Home Spark at 68 dollars and the larger, more decorated Home Classic at 79 dollars, both sold directly through Pinwheel ahead of an Amazon release this fall. Parents control the whole experience through Pinwheel’s Caregiver Portal, approving every contact and setting the hours calls are allowed. The company already makes kid smartwatches, so this slots into a lineup built specifically around delaying smartphone ownership.

Designer: Pinwheel

That oversized handset is not just a styling choice, it is the entire emotional payload of the product. Somewhere in the last two decades, ending a phone call turned into touching a red icon on glass, a gesture with all the drama of dismissing a notification. Home Classic hands a kid an actual weighted receiver and an actual spring loaded cradle, and the moment a call ends, physics takes over. Slam it down hard enough after telling a sibling they are wrong about something, and the whole base rattles. Rest it gently after a call with grandma, and it clicks shut soft as a whisper. That range, from petty dramatic slam to quiet contented click, is a form of emotional expression a swipe gesture has never once offered a five year old, and Pinwheel built the entire handset geometry around making that range possible.

Calling another Pinwheel Home device is free, routed through the company’s own Circle network using a short internal code instead of a standard phone number. Reaching an actual mobile number, like a grandparent’s cell phone, requires a subscription, either 6.99 dollars monthly for a real 10-digit number and five approved contacts, or 9.99 dollars monthly to remove that contact ceiling. Emergency calling stays free no matter what plan a family is on, which is the one place Pinwheel clearly refused to charge across. Home Classic’s stickers might be the hook that gets a kid excited, but the free-versus-paid split is the part parents will actually feel every month.

Pinwheel has already teased three-way calling and tighter integration with its kids’ smartwatches, hinting that a child’s number and approved contacts could eventually follow them from the countertop straight onto their wrist as they get older. That continuity is the real long game here, not the retro shell. A phone that lets a kid slam down a receiver like they mean it sounds like a gimmick, until you realize it might be the only piece of hardware left teaching an entire generation how satisfying hanging up used to feel.

The post This $79 Kids’ Wi-Fi Phone Brings Back the Ability to Slam Down a Receiver Like It’s 1995 first appeared on Yanko Design.

This 4-Player LEGO Chessboard Turns The Game Into Strategic Chaos

Four-player chess is not some internet-era gimmick dreamed up for group game nights. Variants of it have existed for centuries, from Indian Chaturaji played with dice, to Victorian England’s fascination with elaborate cross-shaped boards designed specifically to seat four rivals at once. The format never quite dethroned standard chess in popularity, mostly because building a proper four-sided board was always a pain, and because the rules needed serious rethinking to keep games from spiraling into total mayhem. It is a format that rewards ambition and punishes anyone who tries to wing it.

That is precisely the gap LEGO Ideas creator CozyBuildingBlocks7126 decided to fill, with a physical, brick-built four-player chessboard that revives the format for a new generation of players, dice optional. The design leans into a cross-shaped layout, four full armies in distinct colors, and, most interestingly, a scoring system engineered specifically to make four-way chess feel less like chaos and more like calculated risk. It is a smart, tactile answer to a format that has always deserved better hardware.

Designer: CozyBuildingBlocks7126

The board itself is the first thing that grabs you, a cross-shaped slab built from 852 pieces and measuring a generous 51.2 by 51.2 centimeters, large enough to comfortably seat four full armies without anyone’s rooks bumping elbows. Blue, yellow, green, and red pieces line up along their respective arms of the cross, and the notched corners where each arm meets the central board are a genuinely clever piece of structural design, letting four ranks sit flush against each other without any awkward diagonal overlap. It reads almost like a plus sign built out of chessboard, which is exactly the kind of geometric problem-solving that separates a thoughtful MOC (my own creation) from a simple recolor job.

My favorite detail, though, is the scoring system, because this is where the design stops being a novelty and starts being a genuine strategic rethink. Pawns promote at the eighth rank instead of the fourteenth, landing them mid-board rather than at the enemy’s doorstep. Bishops are worth five points instead of three, queens born from promoted pawns are quietly capped at just one point, and a checkmate alone is worth a hefty twenty points. Captured kings leave their armies “dead” on the board, meaning their pieces can still be captured but no longer award points to whoever takes them. The result is a game where getting checkmated does not necessarily mean losing, since a well-timed capture can vault you into first or second place even after your king falls. That is a wonderfully devious wrinkle for a build that could have coasted on novelty alone.

The set is still early in its LEGO Ideas run, sitting at 105 supporters with 424 days left on the clock to reach the first milestone of 1,000. It has a long runway ahead before the official 10,000-vote threshold that triggers a LEGO review, but for anyone who has ever wanted to drag chess off the screen and back onto a real table, four opponents included, this is a build worth rallying behind. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote here.

The post This 4-Player LEGO Chessboard Turns The Game Into Strategic Chaos first appeared on Yanko Design.