Casa del Loro translates to House of the Parrot. The name alone tells you where the heart of this project lives. Designed by Francisco Bernés Aranda and Fabián Gutiérrez Cetina of Workshop, Diseño y Construcción, the 360-square-meter studio-house sits on the outskirts of Mérida, Yucatán, carved into dense jungle steps away from a crumbling henequen hacienda. The owners’ deep affection for rescued wild birds didn’t just inspire the name — it shaped every architectural decision made.

The firm calls their approach “modern Yucatecan,” a phrase that does a lot of lifting. Contemporary volumes meet traditional regional elements, pulling the structure into a dialogue between what Mérida has always been and what it’s quietly becoming. The result doesn’t feel like architecture dropping into a landscape — it feels grown from one. The narrow, elongated form sequences domestic spaces, open patios, and two large aviaries in a single fluid sweep, letting humans and rescued birds share a roof without either feeling like a guest.

Designer: Workshop, Diseño y Construcción

Cross-ventilation was non-negotiable. A clear north-to-south airflow runs throughout the entire property, achieved not through mechanical systems but through deliberate spatial logic — large windows, folding cedar wood doors, and double-height volumes that keep the jungle air moving. The main entrance sets the tone immediately: four cedar wood folding doors open the foyer completely to the entrance garden, dissolving the boundary between inside and out before you’ve even stepped through. It’s a gesture that reads as casual but is anything but.

Inside, the curation is just as considered. Antiques, family heirlooms, European design pieces, and locally sourced crafts share walls and shelves without competing. The standout object is a custom tzalam wood bookshelf — a native hardwood — built specifically for the property, holding books alongside objects of personal significance. It’s the kind of detail that keeps a space from feeling like a showroom. The materials throughout — concrete, wood, glass, and metal — carry the same tension between refinement and rawness that defines the best tropical architecture.

Photographed by Manolo R. Solís, Casa del Loro landed on Domus in September 2026, which says something about its reach beyond regional architecture circles. But the project’s real resonance is quieter than press coverage. This is a house that was built around a love for birds, and you feel that — in every open door, every borrowed breeze, every inch of jungle left deliberately intact.

The post This Jungle House in Mexico Was Designed Around Two Aviaries for Rescued Parrots first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most of us know the feeling. You pick up your phone to check one notification, and forty-five minutes later you’re three hundred posts deep into content you didn’t choose and can’t remember. It isn’t a willpower problem so much as a design problem. The apps on your phone are built by teams whose entire job is to keep your eyes on the screen a little longer, and they’re very good at it. Screen time limits and app blockers try to fight that with rules, and rules are easy to ignore when nobody’s watching. That’s the real gap. We need something that makes the cost of scrolling feel immediate and personal, not a stat buried in a settings menu.

A YouTuber who goes by brenpoly figured out a clever way to do that, and it involves guilt-tripping you with a tiny plastic creature. The project is called PolyMO, and it works like a 90s Tamagotchi with a very different agenda. Feed it, talk to it, keep it company, and it thrives. Doomscroll for too long, and it gets visibly sick. Keep ignoring it, and it can die. If that sounds a little dramatic for a hunk of plastic and code, that’s kind of the point. Nostalgia is doing real emotional labor here, and it works because most of us who grew up with a Tamagotchi still remember the specific guilt of killing one.

Designer: brenpoly

What makes PolyMO worth paying attention to isn’t the emotional trick alone, though. It’s the engineering underneath it. The device runs on a cheap ESP32 board tucked into a friendly 3D-printed shell, paired with an Android phone that handles the heavier computing. Brenpoly calls it a split-brain setup: the phone quietly runs a local language model, a Whisper speech recognition model, and a Piper text-to-speech model, while the ESP32 manages the pet’s face, its animations, and the Bluetooth link between the two. None of it touches a server. Every conversation, every mood swing, every “my tummy feels yucky” moment happens entirely on your own hardware.

That detail matters more than it might seem at first glance. We’ve spent years handing our data to companies in exchange for convenience, often without thinking too hard about where it goes. A project like this refuses that trade entirely. There’s no subscription, no cloud account, no company harvesting your screen habits to sell you something later. You build it once, for around fifty dollars in parts, and it belongs to you in the fullest sense of that word.

The personality layer is where it gets genuinely charming. You can pick from a handful of pet moods, set quiet hours so it isn’t nagging you at 2 a.m., and even flip on a dark mode for the display. It’s a small, playful layer on top of something that’s actually addressing a real problem, and that balance is hard to get right. Too preachy and people abandon it in a drawer. Too cute and it does nothing. PolyMO seems to land in between, closer to a companion than a scold.

I don’t think a virtual pet is going to single-handedly fix anyone’s relationship with their phone, and brenpoly doesn’t claim that either. He’s been open about the fact that this comes on the heels of real conversations about social media addiction, including recent lawsuits that put the industry’s design choices under a spotlight. A device like this isn’t a cure. It’s friction, and sometimes friction is exactly what a habit needs to break.

What I appreciate most is that the whole thing is open source. Brenpoly posted the build files, the code, and the assembly steps on GitHub, so anyone with a soldering iron and a free weekend can make their own version, or tweak it into something better. That’s a very different model from the apps we’re trying to escape, where the incentive is always to keep you inside a walled garden. PolyMO hands you the keys instead. It’s a strange kind of comfort, being kept honest by something smaller than your hand and dumber than your phone. But maybe that’s exactly why it works.

The post Virtual Pet That Won’t Let You Waste Your Life Scrolling first appeared on Yanko Design.

When I listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks outside my house, earbuds are usually my go-to. But sometimes I switch to headphones because they feel more immersive. I like the sensation of shutting out the world completely when I put a pair on. Plus, let’s be honest, they look cooler. My issue has always been that most headphones I’ve tried are heavy and uncomfortable, even the ones that sound noticeably better than my everyday earbuds.

StillFrame Headphones seem to solve that problem. At 103 grams, they’re one of the lightest over-ear headphones on the market today. The stainless steel headband and overall design give them a clean, minimalist look, with no logos, no exposed hardware, and no decorative flourishes anywhere on the frame. It comes across as a confident design decision, not a shortcut taken to cut costs.

Click Here to Buy Now: $245.00

StillFrame was designed by Tatsufumi Funayama as the third chapter in a series built around his philosophy of “Music in Every Way,” the idea that listening should be something you see and touch, not just hear. That mindset shows up in the shape itself. The squared-off audio housing sitting above round, fabric ear cushions echoes the quiet geometry of CDs from the ’80s and ’90s, and it shares a visual language with the ClearFrame CD Player, almost like a companion piece from the same era of music culture. The styling isn’t only for show, either. Resting on your collarbone or shoulders when you’re not wearing them, StillFrame doesn’t feel like a burden or look out of place. It was built to disappear into your outfit rather than stick out.

StillFrame also runs up to 24 hours per charge, so you won’t have to worry about low-battery anxiety if you forget your cable before heading out. The 40mm drivers deliver a wide, open soundstage, and you can toggle Noise Cancelling mode when you want to tune everything out or switch to Transparency Mode with a tap when you need to stay aware of your surroundings. It connects over Bluetooth 5.4 for a stable wireless signal, and it includes a USB-C cable if you’d rather plug in for high-resolution, low-latency listening. For calls, dual microphones with noise control keep your voice clear even in a noisy room.

One of my favorite touches is the ear cushions. They attach magnetically, so swapping them takes seconds and gives a satisfying little click when they snap into place. Every white model ships with an extra light gray pair and a turquoise pair, so you can match your headphones to your mood instead of settling for whatever color happened to be in stock.

It’s hard not to think of Sony’s WH-1000XM6 when a new pair of over-ear headphones shows up, since Sony has more or less set the standard for noise-canceling headphones for years. The WH-1000XM6 are excellent, with some of the best active noise cancellation available and about 30 hours of battery life. That performance comes at a cost, though. They weigh around 253 grams, more than double StillFrame’s 103 grams, and typically sell for $429 to $459. StillFrame, at $245, trades a bit of that top-tier ANC muscle for a headphone that’s dramatically lighter, more distinctive to look at, and still delivers real noise cancelling, Transparency Mode, and all-day battery life. If your priority is blocking out every bit of noise on a long flight, Sony still wins. But if you want something that feels effortless on your head and looks intentional even when it’s sitting on your desk, StillFrame makes a strong case for itself.

At the end of the day, the StillFrame Headphones aren’t trying to win a spec-sheet battle. It’s aiming for something more personal: a pair you actually want to be seen wearing, and one you don’t mind leaving out on your desk between tracks. For anyone who’s had to choose between “sounds great” and “feels light,” or between “looks minimal” and “looks cheap,” this might be the pair that finally doesn’t ask you to compromise. At $245, it’s priced like a considered upgrade rather than a flagship splurge, which makes it an easy recommendation for anyone ready to trade their earbuds for something with a little more presence and a lot less weight on their head.

The post 103g Over-Ears That Actually Disappear Into Your Outfit first appeared on Yanko Design.

Walk down almost any street in an American city without your headphones in, and you will notice how little of that walk actually belongs to you sonically. The traffic has its own noise, the storefronts have their looped playlists, and if you want communal music, you generally have to buy a ticket, walk into a bar, or wait for a permitted block party. Public space in this country is loud, but it is rarely shared, and shared sound almost always costs something.

That is the quiet problem sitting underneath Mariami Kurtishvili’s graduate thesis at Berlin’s Universität der Künste. Public sound, whether staged in ancient amphitheaters, Renaissance opera houses with their tiered balconies of privilege, or today’s private venues, has always been organized around who gets to listen and who pays to host the listening. In ancient amphitheaters, the best seats were reserved outright for the political and religious elite, a hierarchy of hearing built directly into the architecture. Building anything permanent on a public street, meanwhile, means permits, city approval, drilled holes, and money most students and artists simply do not have. So how do you hand a city communal sound without owning a wall, renting a stage, or damaging a single streetlamp?

Designer: Mariami Kurtishvili

Kurtishvili’s answer, developed under architect Gustav Düsing at UdK Berlin, is the Orchid Sound System, a set of stainless steel high frequency horns clipped onto galvanized steel buckles, the same kind used to hold together scaffolding or shipping crates. She presented the project, titled “Sound Systems: Building Sonic Territories,” as her master’s thesis in the design-build track this past October, advised by Düsing alongside Dr. Susanne Hauser and Julian Schubert. Instead of speakers bolted into walls or drilled onto poles, these horns wrap around whatever the city already has standing, light poles, traffic signal posts, exposed pipes, and hold on without a single screw or drill mark. When the installation ends, the pole looks exactly as it did before anyone arrived.

The name is not decorative. Epiphytic orchids grow on trees but never draw nutrients from them the way a parasite would; they simply use the tree as a place to exist, giving nothing back but their presence. Kurtishvili’s horns behave the same way toward a city’s infrastructure. They borrow a pole’s height and stability for a few hours, and in exchange they hand back sound, message, and a kind of temporary meaning to a piece of street furniture nobody usually looks at twice.

I like that the project refuses to be monumental. It would have been easy to design a sculptural, permanent object meant to announce itself as art. Instead, the horns are meant to disappear once the show ends, and the listening sessions Kurtishvili staged around Berlin worked because of that restraint. People did not gather to admire an object. They gathered because sound had, briefly, become public property again, attached to a pole a few dozen strangers happened to already be standing near, and that shared presence is exactly what she says the project was chasing.

Americans already understand a version of this instinct, the boombox on a stoop, the car stereo at a cookout, the speaker someone drags to the park. What Kurtishvili adds is intention, plus an actual design solution to the cost and damage those informal gestures usually require once you try to scale them into something organized. Nobody has to own the pole. Nobody has to rent a venue. The horns simply attach, perform for an evening, and disappear.

Whether the Orchid Sound System ever leaves the thesis stage for actual manufacturing is still an open question, and student design-build projects rarely make that leap cleanly. But the underlying claim, that a city’s existing bones can host culture without a single new structure being poured or permanently bolted down, is worth borrowing regardless of who eventually builds it. Public space keeps getting more commercial and more watched. A speaker that clips onto a lamppost, plays for a night, and vanishes without a trace is a small, hopeful answer to that drift.

The post A Speaker That Clips to City Poles and Leaves No Mark first appeared on Yanko Design.

Anyone who has wandered Tokyo’s Nakano Broadway knows the joy of a cramped shop stacked floor to ceiling with secondhand manga. Those shops smell like old paper and feel like treasure hunts, and Lumibricks has imagined what one might look like in a neon cyberpunk future. The Manga Shop is a 1,699-piece building block set where a wooden Japanese bookstore gets retrofitted with neon signs, exposed cables, and a robot raccoon on the roof. The tiled roof and lattice windows stay proudly old school while the billboard out front glows like a Shibuya crossing at midnight. It’s a street corner caught somewhere between the Showa era and a sci-fi anime.

In the set’s backstory, paper manga is nearly extinct, and a collector named Eiji Fushimi scans rare volumes with a vintage eye implant to keep the stories alive. He shares the shop with Akira Tachibana, a genius hacker, and Yuzu Kurose, an office worker who spends every free minute buried in manga. Two interior sections slide out, revealing a browsing aisle stocked with printed manga covers and a VIP reading room upstairs. The set also connects to Lumibricks’ existing Izakaya set, letting the two buildings share one power supply and form a glowing little street. At $119.99, it’s a pretty convincing excuse to start building your own Neoncity block by block.

Designer: Lumibricks

A translucent red torii gate frames the entrance, and above it hangs a NEUVA billboard whose printed anime artwork glows blue and magenta. A tall orange MANGA sign climbs the corner, while a pink ドキドキ neon (the Japanese sound effect for a racing heartbeat) sits over the lower eave. Up top, red and blue cables run from a dish on the tiled roof into the billboard, basically the set’s whole theme summed up in two tubes. Then there’s the raccoon, a heart-eyed robot sprawled across the roof with a fan bolted to its arm and a manga page in its paw. Street level gets a gashapon machine, an arcade cabinet, a red lantern, and a black cat guarding its food bowl.

Cyberpunk has always borrowed from Japan, going back to Ridley Scott filling Blade Runner’s Los Angeles with Japanese billboards and Katsuhiro Otomo drawing Neo-Tokyo in Akira. The Manga Shop flips that around by starting with a traditional Japanese shopfront and letting the future creep in through the wiring. The tiled gable, lattice windows, and wooden eaves look like a neighborhood store your grandparents might have shopped at. The neon and tech feel bolted on rather than built in, which is exactly the point of the story. It’s a smart bit of worldbuilding for a toy, and it gives the design a logic beyond simply piling on glowing bits.

The lighting runs off a single USB-C cable or a battery box that takes three AA batteries, though you’ll need to supply your own batteries or power adapter. Getting there takes patience, since Brick Fanatics scored the build a rough 3 out of 10 in its review, citing unclear instructions and tiny wire connectors. The wires thread between studs with the included tweezers, and one step asks you to apply a minuscule contact strip with copper markings the right way round. That’s an odd exception in a set that otherwise skips stickers entirely, using 81 printed pieces and 35 metallic spray-painted parts instead. Budget around eight hours, and maybe a snack.

At $119.99, the Manga Shop undercuts Lumibricks’ 2,227-piece Neon Tech Tower, which sells for $150, and buying direct currently adds a free 388-piece micro version of the Izakaya and Manga Shop while supplies last. Up to four compatible sets can share one power supply, so your Neoncity street has a natural cap before you need another plug. Brick Fanatics still found the finished model worth the cursing once the neon came on, and the photos make that easy to believe. My only real gripe is the three included figures, whose hands can’t hold any of the manga the shop is built around. For a store dedicated to paper, nobody inside can actually read.

The post This $120 Lumibricks Manga Shop Glows Like Cyberpunk Shibuya at Midnight first appeared on Yanko Design.

Cookware is one of those product categories where familiarity can easily disguise bad design. A pan heats up, a lid comes off, a handle gets held. These actions are so routine that small frustrations are often accepted as part of cooking. Gresland Benc Artisan Cast Cookware approaches the category differently, treating each of these familiar interactions as an opportunity to reconsider how cookware should perform, feel, and age in a contemporary kitchen.

The cookware, designed by Christophe Paul Gresland for Gresland Benc Technology, was recognized as a 2025 European Product Design Award winner in the Home and Kitchen Accessories category. Much of its innovation sits beneath a deliberately restrained exterior. Its revolutionary multi-layered core, developed through advanced metallurgy, achieves greater thermal responsiveness and retention, heating 40% faster and distributing heat 30% more evenly than traditional cast counterparts while eliminating hotspots. For the cook, those numbers translate into something much more tangible: less waiting, more predictable results, and fewer areas of the cooking surface demanding constant attention.

Designer: Gresland-Benc Technology (Foshan) Co., Ltd., United Kingdom

That performance is paired with some surprisingly thoughtful decisions around everyday use. The sculpted handle has been engineered for balance and comfort, but its more interesting contribution is how it responds to one of cooking’s most common and rarely addressed hazards. Removing a lid can release a concentrated burst of steam directly toward the hand. Here, the handle geometry has been considered specifically to reduce the risk of scalding from lid release steam. It is a small interaction, but one that reveals where the product’s priorities lie. Good kitchen design is rarely about adding more features. Often, it is about noticing where the user has quietly learned to compensate for the product.

The same thinking appears in details that are less dramatic but equally relevant. A flat base makes the cookware suitable for induction cooking ranges as well as conventional stovetops. It may seem like an expected feature today, yet it matters because cookware is usually purchased to last much longer than the appliance beneath it. Designing for different cooking environments makes the object more adaptable to changing kitchens and a broader range of users.

The external chamfered edges also bring function and form closer together. When the cookware is cold, the softened geometry provides a more comfortable surface to grip and maneuver. Visually, those edges prevent the form from appearing unnecessarily heavy, giving an otherwise substantial piece of cast cookware a more considered profile. It is an example of detailing that earns its place because it improves both handling and character.

Material choices extend that thinking beyond the immediate cooking experience. The cookware uses 85% recycled stainless steel alongside locally sourced components, while its zero-waste casting process is stated to meet B Corp environmental standards. For an object whose value is tied to durability, this feels particularly relevant. Sustainability is more convincing when it is embedded into how a product is manufactured rather than treated as an additional feature attached to it afterward.

There is still one consideration that deserves attention. A metal handle can potentially absorb and retain heat during prolonged cooking. Depending on the final thermal isolation and construction of the handle, users may still need to remain aware of its temperature, particularly during extended stovetop use. It does not undo the strength of the design, but it is exactly the kind of practical behavior that matters in a product built around everyday physical interaction.

What makes Gresland Benc Artisan Cast Cookware compelling is that its most meaningful decisions are not limited to one headline innovation. Thermal performance, safer lid handling, induction compatibility, comfortable edges, material responsibility, and visual restraint all contribute to the same experience. It is cookware designed with an understanding that refinement often happens in the moments people barely notice, until someone designs them better.

The post Genius Saucepan Lid Design Sits Vertically On Your Kitchen Counter While You Cook first appeared on Yanko Design.

Almost every guitar ever made, acoustic or electric, comes from wood, which means the genre names have been lying to us the whole time. Rock guitar is not made from rock. Heavy metal is not made from iron ore. Somebody finally got tired of that gap between name and material, and a YouTuber going by BeBeau Builds decided the phrase “rock guitar” had the potential to be the greatest dad joke ever attempted with a table saw. So he sacrificed a perfectly good acoustic guitar, kept the fretboard, and built the rest of the instrument out of actual slate stone. It works. It plays. It is somehow real.

Repurposing the neck and fretboard from a donor acoustic, BeBeau built an internal armature to hold the stone in place, then pieced together individual slabs of slate into a guitar body that looks like the spiritual cousin of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Eighteen separate stone pieces went into the shape, cut and glued over a 3D printed skeleton, because free handing eighteen matching slabs by eye would have ended several friendships. The finished instrument weighs just under 49 pounds, which is closer to a car battery than a guitar. Somehow it still sounds like one.

Designer: BeBeau Builds

Slate was not exactly the obvious pick here, but it makes more sense for purely logistical reasons. The stone splits into clean, flat sheets naturally, which is exactly why it has been used for roofing tiles and pool tables for centuries, and that same property made it possible to cut consistent slabs for a guitar body instead of fighting a shapeless boulder. A tile saw got tried first and overheated almost immediately on material this thick, which tells you slate was never meant to be machined like plywood. The build leaned on 3D printed templates to keep eighteen individually cut pieces close enough in dimension to actually fit the internal skeleton. Even with that help, thickness varied enough across slabs that small angle errors piled up until the whole assembly stopped lining up, forcing a redo.

The first full glue attempt failed outright and had to be scraped clean by hand, a multi hour job that nobody signs up for twice. The fix was smarter the second time around, using hot glue as a temporary skeleton while construction adhesive filled the gaps and did the actual structural work over several days of curing. One piece of the soundboard cracked during shaping, which is the kind of moment that ends most builds, except a spare slab was on hand and it turned out to have even better tone than the original. Mineral oil went on at the end, both to protect the stone and to give it the same worn, wet look you would expect from a countertop rather than a guitar.

Here is the part that actually surprised me. Strummed unplugged, this thing sounds a lot closer to a normal wooden acoustic than a 49 pound rock guitar has any business sounding, trading off mostly in reduced volume and shorter sustain rather than some completely alien tone. Compare that to steel bodied resonators like the Dobro, which change an instrument’s voice dramatically even at a fraction of this weight, and slate starts looking less like a stunt and more like a real data point on how much a guitar’s material actually shapes its sound. The trade-off is obvious and unavoidable. Nobody is retiring their dreadnought for a slab of rock that weighs as much as a mini fridge shelf, and the neck angle on this build is slightly off, which stretches the strings sharp under fretting pressure.

Still, as a proof of concept, it lands. Burls Art has made a habit of testing whether guitars actually need to be guitar shaped materials at all, and we covered his cardboard guitar, built from laminated corrugated sheets and resin, which he engineered by studying the alternating grain structure of the Wiggle Side Chair to survive real string tension. Before that there was a fully functional bass built from 2000 LEGO bricks, and a guitar whose body was cast from 5,000 roasted coffee beans suspended in epoxy, so a rock guitar fits an established pattern of testing lutherie against materials that have no business holding a string. BeBeau’s slate build earns its place in that lineup by actually working as an instrument instead of just posing as one. A trained player still needs to put this through its paces before anyone calls the tonal verdict final. Until then, the dad joke holds up, and honestly, that might be the best review it needed.

The post Finally someone made a ‘Rock Guitar’ out of actual rock… And it honestly sounds good! first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Porsche 550 Spyder occupies a special place in the brand’s motorsport history. Developed specifically for racing, the lightweight mid-engined sports car proved that clever engineering and low weight could challenge competitors with considerably larger engines. At the 1954 Carrera Panamericana, factory drivers Hans Herrmann and Jaroslav Juhan took their 550 Spyders to third and fourth overall while winning their class, covering the demanding 3,077-kilometre race route.

For the 75th anniversary of Porsche Motorsport, Hedley Studios has reinterpreted that racing icon as the Porsche 550 J, an officially licensed electric replica built at approximately 80 percent of the original’s size. The “J” stands for Junior, but this is not a toy. It is a handcrafted two-seater intended for collectors and enthusiasts who want to experience the character of a historic Porsche in a much smaller package. Only 250 examples will be produced.

Designer: Hedley Studios and Porsche

The compact proportions measure around 2.9 metres long and 1.2 metres wide, yet the scaled-down body still accommodates two adults. Porsche provided Hedley Studios with access to its corporate archives and an original 550 during development, helping the British company capture the proportions and details of the original without simply producing a museum-style replica. The carbon-fibre body sits over a steel space-frame chassis, while the battery pack is positioned behind the seats to recreate the weight distribution and mid-engined character of the original.

Electric power gives the 550 J a distinctly modern interpretation of the classic formula. Its 48-volt drivetrain produces 8 kW in standard form, with an RS Package increasing output to 16 kW. The standard version can reach approximately 80 km/h, while the RS version raises the top speed to around 50 mph. The RS Package also adds drilled brakes and adjustable dampers, while four drive modes—Novice, Comfort, Sport and Race—bring a contemporary interface to the otherwise vintage-inspired cockpit.

The chassis is equally important to the experience. Hedley has adapted the original 550’s trailing-arm suspension for the smaller car, combining it with Bilstein coilover dampers, Eibach springs and Brembo brakes. Custom switchgear inspired by Porsche’s modern Taycan adds another subtle connection between the 1950s original and its electric successor.

Visually, the 550 J stays close to the elegant simplicity that made the original distinctive. Buyers can choose Porsche Silver alongside heritage-inspired blue, white, yellow and red finishes, while Hedley’s Bespoke programme opens up further paint, livery and detail combinations. Every example is handcrafted at Hedley Studios in Bicester, UK.

The Porsche 550 J is not road legal, so its natural home is a private estate, closed course or suitable track environment. Pricing starts at £69,500 (approximately $93,500), with deliveries expected from spring 2027.

The post Porsche’s 550 J is a racing legend shrunk into an electric track-day car first appeared on Yanko Design.

PROS:

• Exceptionally comfortable fit


• Great overall performance for the price point


• Nebula Pink gives the design real personality


• Pleasant, well-rounded sound

CONS:

• Some Huawei smartwatch features were not available during testing

RATINGS:

AESTHETICS

ERGONOMICS

PERFORMANCE

SUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITY

VALUE FOR MONEY

EDITOR'S QUOTE:

The FreeBuds Neo are not about chasing flagship bragging rights. They are about getting the everyday essentials right, and doing it with a bit more style than most.

Huawei has been on a bit of an audio expansion streak lately. It now offers everything from traditional in-ear earbuds to open-ear and clip-style designs, and the company has openly said it wants to become the number one audio brand. In many ways, it feels like Huawei is trying to repeat the kind of success it has already had with smartwatches, building out a wider ecosystem instead of relying on just one or two standout products.

That bigger push has also made the lineup more crowded. On the in-ear side, Huawei already has the premium FreeBuds Pro, the comfort-focused FreeBuds, the more affordable FreeBuds i, and the entry-level FreeBuds SE. The FreeBuds Neo feel like the pair meant to fill the gap in between, offering something a little more polished and feature-packed without tipping too far into premium pricing.

Designer: Huawei

That alone makes them interesting. I went into this review with fairly high expectations because the Huawei FreeBuds Pro 5 are still one of my favorite earbuds for ANC and sound quality. The FreeBuds Neo are clearly not trying to play in that league, but they do feel like an important part of Huawei’s bigger audio plan, and a pair that could end up appealing to a much wider audience.

Aesthetics

The Huawei FreeBuds Neo brings a bit more personality than the usual square or pebble-shaped earbud case. The case has an elongated oval shape, almost like a small American football, which gives it a more distinctive look than most budget rivals. It feels a little more sculpted than the norm, while still fitting nicely in the palm.

Nebula Pink is easily the most interesting finish in the lineup. Most of the case is a soft pink with a muted metallic sheen, while the bottom fades into a pale light green with a gentle gradient between the two. It adds more depth than a flat single-tone finish and helps this version feel less generic than the plainer Stellar Silver, Ice White, and Starry Black options.

The earbuds themselves follow a familiar stem-based design, but the stems are relatively short, which helps them look tidier in the ear. They are finished in the same pink tone, with light green accents that tie in neatly with the case. In this color, the FreeBuds Neo feel more expressive than many affordable earbuds, while the other finishes are much more straightforward.

Ergonomics

The case is easy to live with. Its elongated oval shape sits nicely in the palm, and the smooth curves make it easy to slip into a pocket or small bag. It is compact without feeling fiddly, which is exactly what you want from something you will be reaching for throughout the day.

The earbuds are also very light at just 0.17 ounces, or 4.9g, each, and that helps a lot with comfort. The short stems are not just there for looks. They improve weight distribution, so the earbuds feel more balanced in the ear instead of hanging downward like some longer-stem designs. The downside is that they are not quite as easy to handle when adjusting them or placing them back into the case, simply because there is less stem to grab.

For me, these are among the most comfortable earbuds I have used. I actually found them more comfortable than the Huawei FreeBuds Pro 5, even though that is the more premium model in Huawei’s lineup. The short stems make a bigger difference than expected, especially when lying back or resting your head to one side. On an overnight flight, I could lean against my neck pillow without them digging in or becoming annoying, which is not something I can say about every pair of stem-based earbuds.

Huawei includes extra silicone tips in XS, S, and L sizes, which is about what you would expect for in-ear earbuds. The companion app also includes a tip fit test, which can tell you whether the seal is good or not. It is a simple feature, but a useful one if you are unsure about fit.

Performance

The FreeBuds Neo are tuned for easy everyday listening rather than showy first impressions. They sound clean, balanced, and generally pleasant across music, videos, podcasts, and calls. Vocals come through clearly, there is enough bass to give tracks some weight, and the overall tuning avoids sounding too sharp or tiring over longer sessions. They also support LDAC and Hi-Res Audio, which is a nice bonus on a pair of earbuds at this level, especially for listeners who want access to higher-quality wireless audio.

The ANC is good for the price. It does a solid job softening the usual background hum of travel or public spaces, though it does not match the stronger, more complete effect you get from premium models like the Huawei FreeBuds Pro 5. For everyday commuting or working in mildly noisy places, though, it is useful enough to make a real difference.

Awareness mode works well too, and it feels genuinely useful rather than just included for the sake of it. I especially liked the voice mode within Awareness, which seems to let speech through more clearly. That made it easier to catch announcements or have a quick conversation without taking the earbuds out.

Controls are another area where the FreeBuds Neo do well. Even with the short stems, gesture controls worked reliably for me. You get double tap, triple tap, press and hold, plus swipe up and down, which gives you a fairly complete set of controls without constantly reaching for your phone. Head controls are here too, letting you nod to answer calls or shake your head to decline them.

Dual device connection is one of the more practical features. Being able to stay connected to two devices at once makes the earbuds much easier to slot into daily life, especially if you switch between a phone and a laptop or tablet. They also support Bluetooth 6.0, which helps keep the overall feature set feeling current.

Huawei also says that if you have a Huawei smartwatch, you can control music playback from the watch, hear workout notifications through the earbuds while listening from your phone, and adjust settings like ANC and EQ from your wrist. In my testing, though, those extra features were not available with the Watch GT 7 Pro.

Battery life is solid. Huawei rates the FreeBuds Neo for up to 10 hours with ANC off or 6.5 hours with ANC on, with up to 38 hours in total when you include the case. That should be more than enough for most people, especially since these are the kind of earbuds that will usually be topped up in the case between listening sessions anyway.

Overall, the FreeBuds Neo gets the important things right. The sound is easy to enjoy, ANC is useful, Awareness mode works well, the touch controls are reliable, and dual device support adds real convenience. They may not feel as polished or as powerful as Huawei’s more expensive earbuds, but for everyday use, they offer a well-rounded set of features without becoming complicated.

Sustainability

Sustainability is not a major part of the Huawei FreeBuds Neo story. Huawei does not make any notable environmental claims here, and like most true wireless earbuds, they are built in a compact, sealed form that is not really designed for easy repair.

The main durability point is the IP55 rating for the earbuds themselves, which adds some protection against dust and splashes. That should help them hold up better in daily use. As with most earbuds in this category, the best way to get long-term value is simply to take care of them and keep them in use for as long as possible.

Value

At £119.99 (approximately $160), the Huawei FreeBuds Neo sit in the middle of the market, but they offer a fairly complete package for the price. They are not exactly cheap, though they still come in below more premium earbuds, so the value is less about one headline feature and more about how well everything comes together.

What you get is a strong all-rounder. There is good ANC, a useful Awareness mode, reliable gesture controls, dual device connection, LDAC support, and a design that feels more distinctive than many rivals, especially in Nebula Pink. In markets like the UK, Huawei is also offering a £20 discount before October 26, which makes them even more appealing.

They may not be the first choice if you are only chasing the strongest ANC or the absolute best sound for the money. But as a stylish, comfortable, and easy-to-use pair of everyday earbuds, the FreeBuds Neo offer solid value and feel like a well-judged package overall.

Verdict

The Huawei FreeBuds Neo get a lot right for a pair of everyday wireless earbuds. They are comfortable, easy to use, and come with enough useful features to feel like a well-rounded option. The short stems, lightweight fit, and palm-friendly case make them especially easy to live with day to day.

Nebula Pink also gives them more personality than most earbuds in this price range. Add in good ANC for the price, a useful Awareness mode, reliable gesture controls, dual device connection, and strong battery life, and there is plenty here to like.

The ANC does not reach the level of Huawei’s more premium earbuds, but that is easy to accept given the price. Even so, at £119.99, or about $160, and less if you catch the early bird discount in some markets, the FreeBuds Neo are an easy pair to like and an easy pair to recommend for everyday use.

The post Huawei FreeBuds Neo Review: Style, Comfort, and a Strong Feature Set first appeared on Yanko Design.

Caviar is taking pre-orders for iPhone Duo starting at $15,990, well ahead of the official availability of the new phone form factor Apple unveiled earlier this month. Apple gave us a glimpse of its first foldable iPhone on September 9, with deliveries slated to start in mid-October. But Caviar already has a Jobs-inspired take on the iPhone Duo (as the foldable iPhone is called), and it’s really a peach to behold.

For this one, Caviar has gone a little ahead of leather and other trims it usually uses for pimping up the smartphones, borrowing a scrap from Steve Jobs black turtleneck. Making it more than a collector’s item: a piece of historical significance that you would want to own as an Apple and Jobs fan.

Designer: Caviar

As you would have guessed already, this is not a run-of-the-mill creation. It’s a limited-edition build, and the company says only nine of these Jobs iPhone Duo editions will be made. Each of them will be made to order and will be shipped with a personalized international certificate of authenticity. Production of the iPhone Duo will start in the Caviar workshop only after the full payment has been received against the device. The order will then be fully crafted and completed by technicians before being dispatched your way within four days of your order.

Caviar suggests its customized iPhone Duo is for collectors and those who appreciate artifacts and historic memorabilia. But if you’re a Jobs fan with a deep pocket, I don’t see why you would need another reason to get hands on this Duo engraved with the autograph of the man himself: Steve Jobs, if you will.

Each iPhone Duo with Caviar antics will cost at least $15,990, almost eight times the price of the otherwise expensive iPhone Duo, which Apple confirmed it will sell starting at $1,999. A tribute to Jobs and his lasting influence on Apple as a company, the device wears a three-dimensional Apple logo in the middle of its back panel, while a fragment of Jobs’ black turtleneck sits on it.

This rare detail is complemented by Jobs’ engraved signature in metal just below the letters reading 50 Anniversary Edition. The surface of the central panel is black in color and is made from PVD-coated titanium. The upper panel, the frame, and the decorative elements are made from polished titanium and feature guilloché engraving, Caviar notes.

Caviar refrains from making any changes to the hardware of the iPhone Duo. So, despite the Jobs-inspired Caviar treatment, the phone still has the same (displayed) 5.4-inch Super Retina XDR screen on the outside and an inner display, which folds out to become a 7.6-inch slate. It’s the biggest display on an iPhone ever. The Caviar Jobs iPhone Duo comes with specially designed “Supreme Packaging.” This comprises a lockable outer case with 24K gold plating and a blue gift box made from leather and wood. It includes a Caviar coin plated with 24K gold.

The post Caviar’s $15,990 iPhone Duo contains a piece of Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck first appeared on Yanko Design.