This Tiny Home Fits a Downstairs Bedroom and Two Lofts Into 24 Feet

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The updated Avalon 24 gives its most useful space-saving move to the bedroom: it keeps it downstairs. Dragon Tiny Homes pairs that main-level sleeping area with two lofts inside a 24-foot home on wheels, offering 204 square feet of floor space before counting the lofts. The completed, upgraded build is listed for sale, with built-in furniture and storage already fitted.

Outside, blue and lavender wood cladding gives this version a cheerful identity, topped by a metal roof and supported by a double-axle trailer. The color makes a welcome departure from the monochrome finishes common in compact housing, but the more consequential decisions happen inside. Here, sleeping space takes priority over a sprawling lounge.

Designer: Dragon Tiny Homes

The downstairs bedroom accommodates a double bed, a dedicated storage cabinet, and a wall-mounted television. Keeping the primary bed at floor level removes the nightly ladder climb, although the room remains snug. Above it sits the main sleeping loft, while a smaller loft over the bathroom provides another potential sleeping area or storage space. Removable ladders serve both upper levels, so these spaces demand more agility than the downstairs room.

The living area uses a built-in couch platform rather than leaving furniture placement entirely to the owner. Integrated sofa storage adds another place to tuck belongings away, and a large picture window opens the room toward the outdoors. White horizontal wall paneling and dark loft railings keep the interior visually legible, with the upper sleeping platform clearly separate from the space below.

In the kitchen, the upgraded build includes a 7.1-cubic-foot refrigerator housed in cabinetry with three drawers, alongside upper cupboards, a floating shelf, and a range hood. The Avalon’s induction cooktop has two burners, and its quartz surfaces include a bar top intended for dining or work. Laundry space is provided in the layout, though buyers should confirm the appliance package for their particular build. The cabinetry gives everyday objects assigned homes instead of relying entirely on loose shelving.

The bathroom contains a shower, vanity, and flushing toilet, with the upgraded unit adding a mirrored medicine cabinet and accent finishes. Dragon also lists upgraded insulation, a ceiling fan, and LED lighting with a night-light function. Those are useful specification details, though the listing doesn’t establish measured thermal performance or energy savings.

The featured inventory home is advertised at $63,500, including $10,100 in selected upgrades and a $6,600 discount from its configured price. Dragon lists a weight of 14,000 pounds and recommends an F350 or similar towing vehicle. That combination makes the Avalon’s tradeoff clear: its downstairs bedroom is appealing, but moving this small home still requires serious equipment.

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Twelve New Designs in Six Weeks: Why I Love the new Apple under John Ternus

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For fifteen years, Apple was the friend who shows up to the party an hour late and then insists it brought the best snacks. Tim Cook even had a motto for it, saying Apple was perfectly fine with not being first. Then John Ternus took over on September 1, and the snack table got crowded fast. In six weeks Apple has revealed the foldable iPhone Duo, a HomeView smart display in tabletop and wall-mounted versions, and nine smart home accessories. That makes twelve fresh designs, a wild number for a company that used to agonize over one hinge.

HomeView and the foldable will get the splashy coverage, but the real fun is the smart home gear. LG Electronics and Schneider Electric helped Apple build a video doorbell, a floodlight cam, outdoor and indoor cams, a deadbolt, two thermostats, and two sensors. They start arriving in December, with prices running from $39.95 for a sensor to $399.95 for the floodlight cam. Apple’s fingerprints are all over them, from the aluminum to the black glass to the rounded shapes. I am here to tell you why that deserves a small celebration.

Designers: LG and Schneider for Apple

The ROKR Taught Apple to Keep the Design and Rent the Factory

In September 2005, Steve Jobs launched the Motorola ROKR E1, a rebadged Motorola phone with an iTunes button and a cap of 100 songs. The demo stumbled and the phone flopped. Jobs looked pained onstage, and you can see why, since Apple’s software was riding around in someone else’s hardware. Roughly sixteen months later he unveiled the iPhone. The ROKR was a stepping stone he needed, taken at exactly the moment he needed it.

Ternus gets to run that play with the lesson already learned. Bloomberg reports that Apple shaped the design, features, and engineering of the LG gear, while LG handles manufacturing and support. The ROKR was Motorola’s design wearing Apple’s software. This is Apple’s design wearing LG’s factory. Ternus joined Apple in 2001, so he watched the ROKR saga from the inside, and the LG deal likely began on Cook’s watch but ships under Ternus, which puts it in his column.

Nine Products, One Family Look From Two Different Companies

Line up the lock, camera, thermostat, and doorbell from Apple’s photo and the family resemblance is hard to miss. The Smart Deadbolt pairs a black glass keypad with a pill-shaped aluminum plate, and the Video Doorbell is an aluminum column capped in black glass. The Indoor Cam’s round head swivels on a chrome pivot that echoes the hinge on HomeView. The big 68 on the thermostat belongs to Schneider, yet it shares the same soft rounded-square body. Two companies, one look.

The Indoor Cam physically tilts down to stop watching the moment the first person gets home, which is the friendliest privacy gesture I have seen on a camera. The doorbell carries a 2.5K front camera plus a 1080p lens aimed at the doorstep for packages. The deadbolt uses Ultra Wideband (a precise short-range radio) to unlock as you walk up with your iPhone or Apple Watch, and it keeps working without internet. Everything sets up with one tap on your iPhone. There is no extra app and no extra account.

Ternus Ships What Is Ready Instead of Waiting for Perfect

Cook’s way was to wait until Apple could do it perfectly, and the home hub paid for it, slipping from spring 2025 while Siri caught up. Ternus, per Bloomberg, wants Apple to ship faster, experiment more, and spread launches through the year instead of two big events. HomeView still waited for Siri AI, so the rulebook did not change overnight. What changed is that the wait no longer stalls everything around it. The doorbell, lock, cameras, and thermostats are ready now, and Apple is shipping them.

The Home Collection starts at $39.95 for a sensor, with the lock at $349.95 and the floodlight cam topping out at $399.95. It arrives in December in the U.S. and Canada, the cameras and doorbell are also heading to the UK, and select items slip to early 2027. You can see the full lineup in Apple’s Home Collection announcement. Cook’s Apple was the friend who showed up late with the best snacks. Ternus’s Apple shows up on time, brings the snacks, and lets someone else carry the cooler.

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Extra wide street-legal Ford hatchback takes on-lookers by surprise

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The world’s narrowest Fiat Panda caught me off guard the first time I saw it. I had to double-check if this was a vision anomaly, but it was not, and out of pure instinct had to cover it. Now we are going polar opposites with the widest street-legal car, which is the work of Tyler Fever (from the YouTube channel Prop Department), who loves his unique automotive DIY projects. After surprising everyone with the world’s thinnest car, for this one he collaborated with Bamboo Lab to bring the project to life.

This DIY project kicks off with the acquisition of three old Ford Festiva sub-compact hatchbacks for $200 each. After stripping one of the cars from the dead center with a portable fiber laser, the next step is taking both halves apart. Then the idea is to stretch the vehicle to the width of a truck, but keeping it within street-legal limits. After a bit of figuring out, Tyler went with a 10 feet width to have the best balance of structural integrity and ability to drive it on roads with some special permits.

Designer: Prop Department

To fill in the space between the two halves, he added structural bars to the floor and the roof. On top go the sheet metals – 10 gauge on the floor and 18 gauge on the roof. This makes the structure form into a single solid structure welded together while preserving the original body panels on the sides. One of the challenges was to expand the suspension and drivetrain to cope with the new form factor. For the front-wheel drive side, the CV axle is stretched five feet with precise welding and controlled cooling. He decided to add steering shafts from the other donor Festivas, so that both front seaters can steer the vehicle. Freakin awesome, don’t you think?

Next came the crafting of the car’s parts like the front grille and the stretched-up dashboard parts using the Bambu Lab H2C 3D printer. Now that the car has plenty of space inside, the modifications came in the shape of a big center console with 14 cup holders. Under the hood, there is enough space to put the engine to one side, an air conditioner with a generator (now that’s wild), and all the other mechanical components to make the machine go. The last step involved painting the sunshine yellow paint and installing the plastic windows.

The front angle of this stretched-out Ford is crazy, and so are the ignition buttons on the inside. Driving it out of the garage for the first time makes Tyler go bonkers as he tests the brakes and the limits of the wide body, grazing it against the road limits. The last surprise came in the form of an officially licensed number plate that’s equally wide. The fun part begins when the car rolls on the highway and then on dirt roads for more than two hours of driving. To check the car’s boot space, he loads it with wooden sleepers and whatnot!

 

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Meet Apple HomeView: A weirdly genius combination of the iMac, Watch, iPad, and HomePod

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Apple’s design team apparently raided four different family albums and stitched the best bits into one object. HomeView has the iMac G4’s floating-screen silhouette, Apple Watch-style faces, the iPad’s slab of glass, and a speaker base that recalls the HomePod. I have a soft spot for that sunflower-lamp iMac, so seeing a dome and a tilting display make a comeback in 2026 made me unreasonably happy. Somehow the pile of parts works visually. It looks like a lamp, has a tablet’s touchscreen, and doubles as a speaker.

Apple announced HomeView on October 13, 2026. It pairs a 7-inch Liquid Retina screen with a domed aluminum speaker base and a stainless steel hinge that lets you tilt the display. An A18 chip and the rebuilt Siri AI run the show, and Apple says it recognizes up to six enrolled users, each with a personalized experience. A wall-mounted version offers the same screen and core functions, though its speaker hardware differs. Both models cost $299 in the U.S., with preorders open and availability scheduled for November 13, 2026.

Designer: Apple

The iMac G4’s Dome and Personality Make a Comeback

The iMac G4 arrived in January 2002 with a 15-inch flat panel hovering over its base. Its sunflower-inspired form emerged from Steve Jobs and Jony Ive’s design discussions; Walter Isaacson’s account credits Ive with suggesting that the screen be separated from the base like a sunflower. HomeView echoes that silhouette but swaps the long swinging arm for a compact hinge, which suits a counter where nobody wants a lamp neck knocking over the olive oil. The tilt adjustment gives you some latitude on a low nightstand or a tall kitchen island.

The G4 showed how much personality a computer’s shape could carry. HomeView’s similar stance makes a box packed with a camera and microphones look friendlier, at least to my eye. A dome with a head-on-neck posture reads more like a desk pet than a gadget, which is a handy trick for something that recognizes faces. The thick black bezel is a taste call I’m happy to defend: it gives the Photos face a proper picture-frame border.

Apple Watch-Style Faces and iPad Glass Decide What You See

The screen looks like it comes from the iPad side of the family: a square slab of glass with rounded corners and a front camera for FaceTime. Center Stage adjusts the framing as people move or join the call. Apple lists a brightness range from 500 nits down to 0.3 nits, allowing the display to dim substantially at bedtime. True Tone adjusts the white balance to ambient lighting. Selected interface elements also respond to your distance, showing simpler information across the room and more detail as you approach.

The faces feel distinctly Apple Watch-like. Photos offers Portrait-style depth effects, while Flow reacts to movement in the room. Snoopy’s animations respond to the time of day, weather, and sporting events, a very Watch way of being useful and adorable at once. Home Modular puts favorite accessories on one dashboard, and Home Camera can stream up to nine video feeds at once. Fan designers were exploring this territory years ago. Justin Latham’s HomePod Nano concept, which we covered in 2023, imagined a speaker with a display running a proposed watchOS fork. It was a fan concept, not an Apple product or working software announcement. HomeView’s Live Activities surface the current song, an active timer, or an incoming Intercom message, bringing that glance-and-go logic to a household screen.

The Speaker Base Does the Heavy Lifting

The base recalls the HomePod, although Apple’s images show a perforated, color-matched exterior rather than the HomePod’s fabric mesh. Small grille holes also run along the display’s lower edge. A down-firing woofer and two force-cancelling passive radiators sit in the base, while two full-range drivers occupy the display.Apple says computational audio uses its silicon and onboard sensors to adjust loudness and bass response in real time.  The wall-mounted model has two full-range drivers but no base-mounted woofer or passive radiators, so the two versions shouldn’t be treated as acoustically identical. HomeView supports multiroom audio alongside HomePod, HomePod mini, and AirPlay-compatible speakers. Intercom also reaches HomeView and HomePod speakers elsewhere in the house.

The original HomePod was announced in 2017 at $349, when we dubbed it Apple’s “tune-busting Fabergé Egg.” Against that historical price, $299 for a speaker, screen, camera, and face recognition looks tempting on paper. You can pre-order HomeView on Apple’s site now, with both the tabletop and wall-mounted models arriving November 13. The tabletop unit ships with a color-matched USB-C cable, while the wall version relies on Schneider Home’s power mounts, which start at $59.95 and are sold separately. Siri AI launches in beta and in English, and Apple is not selling HomeView in the EU for now. Every ancestor in this object was Apple’s bet on a different decade, and HomeView is the first time they all share one counter.

 

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