Apple reportedly plans an OLED iPad mini for October, followed by refreshed entry-level, Air, and Pro models through 2027.

The post Apple Reportedly Plans OLED iPad Mini, More iPad Refreshes Through 2027 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Pencils don’t usually make people emotional. But Blackwing pencils have always been a little different. The brand, which revived the legendary Blackwing 602 after its original discontinuation in 1998, has spent years building something that goes beyond the pencil itself. It’s a whole philosophy about the act of writing by hand. And with the new Blackwing Crate Gift Set, priced at $400, they’ve essentially packaged that philosophy into a matte black box and sent it out into the world.

Let’s talk about what’s inside, because it’s genuinely a lot. The Crate includes 24 Blackwing pencils housed inside a walnut gift box, a One-Step Long Point Sharpener, a desktop sharpener, replacement erasers, a handheld eraser, three point guards, a pencil extender, a notebook clip, a Medium Slate Notebook in dot-grid, and an A4 spiral notebook in blank. If you’ve ever casually shopped the Blackwing site and found yourself adding one thing after another to your cart, this is essentially that cart, but curated and given a walnut home.

Designer: Blackwing

The walnut box alone is something worth pausing on. It has a cork-lined interior and a satisfying magnetic closure. It’s the kind of object you want to leave on your desk not because it needs to be there, but because it makes the desk look like it belongs to someone who takes their work seriously.

Blackwing’s four core pencils are all represented here: the 602, the firm-graphite original that built the brand’s reputation and was beloved by creatives from John Steinbeck to Stephen Sondheim; the Matte, which shares the same soft and expressive formula as the very first Blackwing; the Pearl, with its smooth and balanced Japanese graphite; and the Natural, a stripped-back version with an uncoated cedar body for a rawer, more honest feel. Each one writes differently. That variety isn’t just a marketing point. It means the set can genuinely work for a writer, an artist, a student, or someone who just wants their notes to feel a little more intentional.

I’ll admit there’s a case to be made that $400 is a lot for what is, technically, a pencil set. But I think that argument misses the point of what Blackwing has always been doing. These aren’t pencils in the same way a yellow No. 2 is a pencil. The brand occupies the same space as a well-made fountain pen or a leather-bound notebook: objects that are ordinary in function but considered in execution. When you buy something from Blackwing, you’re buying into a certain idea of how writing should feel, and the Crate makes that idea as complete and giftable as it’s ever been.

The packaging itself shows thought. The outer box is matte black with the Blackwing name in white. Clean, confident, minimal. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t need to. The layered reveal inside, with a pull-out drawer for the notebooks, feels like the kind of unboxing experience that design enthusiasts and stationery lovers will genuinely appreciate. Gift sets at this price point need to justify themselves beyond just the contents, and the presentation here does a lot of that work.

What makes the Crate feel special rather than just expensive is how it covers every phase of the writing process. You have your pencils, your sharpeners for both at-desk and on-the-go use, your erasers, protection for your pencil tips when they’re not in use, and actual notebooks to write in. Nothing feels like filler. Everything has a job.

If you’re shopping for someone who already loves Blackwing, this is a clear yes. If you’re introducing someone to the brand for the first time and want to do it properly, this is also the move. And if you’ve been slowly accumulating Blackwing products one purchase at a time and wondering when you’ll finally have it all, the Crate is the answer to that question in one very satisfying delivery. The Blackwing Crate Gift Set is available now at blackwing602.com for $400.

The post Blackwing’s $400 Crate Is Every Writer’s Dream Gift Set first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most desk objects get ignored. They sit there doing their one job, collecting dust around the edges, and we never really think about them again. NEST, a conceptual pencil sharpener designed by a team of five students from TUST, UNNC, and CAU, is a direct challenge to that dynamic. It recently took home the winner prize at the 2025 European Product Design Award in the Conceptual Work & Office Product Design category, and the reason it won feels obvious the moment you understand what it actually does.

The concept is deceptively simple. A small bird figurine sits inside a rounded, bowl-shaped container. As you sharpen your pencil, the curling wood shavings collect beneath the bird, gradually building up like the gathered material of a real nest. By the time the container needs emptying, the little bird looks as if it has been nesting all along, settled into a soft, spiraling bed of wood ribbons. It is a beautifully accidental image that the design deliberately engineers into being, and once you picture it, it is very hard to unsee.

Designers: Zebin Qiao, Kaishuo Liu, Hongchen Guo, Zicheng Zhao, XiaoTongPan

The real strength of NEST is the intelligence of its metaphor. Lead designer Zebin Qiao and the team didn’t just borrow a visual from nature and paste it onto a product. They found a genuine structural parallel between the act of using the sharpener and the act of nest-building, then made sure the user experiences that parallel in real time. That is not an easy thing to pull off. Most product design that reaches for nature ends up with surface decoration or an illustrative graphic on a box. NEST earns its metaphor because the metaphor lives in the function, not on top of it.

The second layer of the design is the lid. It doubles as a perch, fitted with a minimal branch element. When you are not sharpening, the tiny bird figurine can be lifted out of the interior and placed on the branch, transforming the whole object into a quiet desktop ornament. This dual-state approach means the product shifts personality depending on how you use it. It is a working tool when you need it, and a miniature sculpture the rest of the time. I genuinely appreciate designs that respect both modes of being at a desk, the productive and the contemplative.

I will admit my first instinct when I encounter “award-winning conceptual product” is mild skepticism. Conceptual work can drift toward spectacle and lose interest in whether the thing would actually function. NEST sidesteps that problem by grounding every design choice in real, physical behavior. The shavings accumulate because that is what shavings do. The bird sits because the container holds it. Nothing is forced or artificially staged. The charm is a byproduct of the function, which is exactly the right way around. It gives the design an integrity that a lot of more expensive, more elaborate objects simply do not have.

The color variants are worth noting too. The design comes in white, a warm terracotta tone, and a soft powder blue, each with a matching bird. It is a small decision that makes the object feel personal rather than clinical, and it opens the door to something close to a collecting impulse. You are not just buying a sharpener. You are picking a companion for your desk, which is a particular kind of intimacy that few office products ever manage to create.

At its core, NEST is making an argument that utility does not have to be neutral. That the objects we interact with daily can carry meaning, invite attention, and reward a small amount of patience. A student design team from three Chinese universities made that argument with a pencil sharpener, and they made it convincingly enough to win a major European award. That is not nothing. If anything, it is the kind of design thinking we need more of, the sort that finds poetry in the ordinary without making you feel like you are trying too hard to appreciate it.

The post Pencil Shavings Have Never Looked This Beautiful first appeared on Yanko Design.