Every September brings a fresh wave of product launches, but 2026’s crop stands out for a specific reason: engineers across wildly different categories spent the year quietly refusing compromises their own industries had learned to live with. A foldable phone that doesn’t announce itself with a visible crease. A toothbrush that can see inside your mouth instead of making you guess where you’ve missed. A telescope that collapses down to the size of a lunchbox and still resolves a galaxy. None of these ideas are brand new on their own — foldables, smart telescopes, and camera-equipped personal-care gadgets have all existed for years — but this particular batch pushes each category further than its predecessors did, and a couple of them land at prices ordinary people might actually consider.
What follows is a closer look at seven gadgets that generated real attention this fall, based on verified specs, pricing, and release details rather than press-release spin. Some are shipping right now; a couple are DIY projects or one-off collaborations that will likely never sit on a retail shelf. We’ve noted which is which as we go.
Apple’s iPhone Ultra: the first foldable without the usual trade-offs
Apple used its September 9 event to officially introduce the iPhone Ultra, its first foldable phone and, by a wide margin, its most expensive iPhone ever. Reporting around the launch put the entry configuration at roughly $2,000, with higher-storage models climbing well past that. The phone pairs a 5.5-inch cover display with a 7.8-inch inner screen that unfolds into something closer to a small tablet than a phone, built around Apple’s new A20 Pro chip.
The headline feature isn’t the fold itself — Samsung, Google, and a handful of Chinese manufacturers have shipped foldables for years. It’s that Apple’s version visibly narrows the crease that has nagged every foldable display since the category began, through new hinge and panel engineering, rather than eliminating it outright as some of the early buzz suggested. Touch ID replaces Face ID here, since there’s no good place on a folding body for Apple’s usual depth-sensing array, and the dual rear cameras are more conservative than on Apple’s flagship slab phones. Whether any of that justifies roughly double the price of a standard iPhone is a separate argument, but it’s the first foldable from Apple that looks and photographs like a normal phone when it’s closed — and that, more than the fold itself, is the point.
ZWO’s Seestar S50 Pro turns a backpack into a backyard observatory
Astrophotography has traditionally meant a trunk full of gear: a telescope, an equatorial mount, a separate guide camera, a laptop, and a web of cables, plus hours of setup before the first photon hits a sensor. The ZWO Seestar S50 Pro, from Chinese astronomy-equipment maker ZWO, folds nearly all of that into a single 6.2-pound unit small enough to carry in a camera bag.
Point a phone or tablet at it through ZWO’s app, pick a target from a built-in catalog of more than 80,000 celestial objects, and the S50 Pro’s alt-azimuth GoTo mount finds and tracks it automatically. Its 50mm aperture feeds two separate sensors — a wide-angle camera with a 63-degree field of view for framing and a telephoto unit with a tighter 2.8-degree view for the actual imaging — while onboard software live-stacks dozens of exposures in real time to pull detail out of nebulae and galaxies that would otherwise stay invisible. A 10,000mAh battery keeps it running for roughly seven hours in the field. At $999, it isn’t going to out-resolve a dedicated rig costing several times as much, but it meaningfully lowers the price and the skill floor for actually photographing deep-sky objects from a backyard instead of just admiring other people’s results online.
Dyson’s CameraJet turns brushing into real-time dental imaging
Dyson’s CameraJet is exactly what it sounds like: an electric toothbrush with a camera built into the brush head. A roughly 100,000-pixel macro lens mounted beneath the bristles captures 28 images per second, feeding a machine-learning model — trained on close to half a million dental images — that identifies the gaps between teeth in real time rather than leaving you to guess where you’ve missed.
Once it spots a gap, the CameraJet fires a precisely shaped jet of fluid into it within about a tenth of a second, a flossing substitute Dyson developed through its own fluid-dynamics research. Because a mouth full of foam would blind the camera, Dyson also sells a companion non-foaming toothpaste and a low-foam mouthwash formulated specifically not to obscure the lens; the brush’s small onboard tank can alternatively be filled with a clear, SLS-free rinse. It ships in two colorways at $499 — a steep price for a toothbrush, but a clear signal of where Dyson thinks the personal-care category is headed: sensing and feedback rather than just a stronger motor.
Commodore and CD Projekt Red turn the C64 into a Cyberpunk collectible
The most unlikely collaboration this fall pairs two companies that have never worked together before: Commodore, relaunched under new ownership led by YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson, and CD Projekt Red, the studio behind Cyberpunk 2077. The result is the Commodore 77, a Night City-themed special edition of the Commodore 64 Ultimate — Commodore’s own FPGA-based recreation of the original 1982 machine. Worth correcting here: it’s a Commodore release, not a Retro Games Ltd product as sometimes assumed — Retro Games Ltd is a separate company that makes its own unrelated “THEC64” line under license.
Underneath the brushed-metal, neon-accented shell and smoked translucent base sits an upgraded AMD Artix-7 XC7A100T FPGA, double the logic and block RAM of the chip in the standard C64 Ultimate, which Commodore says lets the system run at speeds up to 77MHz against the original’s 1MHz. Every unit ships with a Cyberpunk-themed BASIC boot screen, an exclusive 2MB demo cartridge carrying an original chiptune soundtrack, and Night City-branded packaging, stickers, and pins. It’s billed as Commodore’s first outside franchise hardware partnership in the company’s history, priced at $377 with preorders open now and shipments expected in early 2027.
A DIY camera that “prints” straight onto reusable e-paper film
Not everything on this list comes from a company with a marketing budget. A Dutch maker who goes by Jens, running a one-person outfit called Strange Inventions Lab, built an open-source camera around a Raspberry Pi camera module that captures a photo and writes it directly onto a reusable 1.54-inch e-paper cartridge — no battery, printer, ink, or app required to view the result afterward, because e-paper holds an image with zero power once it’s been written.
The cartridges slot into the 3D-printed camera body like Game Boy cartridges, and because the e-paper panels can only render black, white, red, and yellow, Jens wrote custom software that remaps a photo’s colors into that limited palette, with optional dithering for a more photographic look. It’s explicitly a DIY project rather than a retail product: the parts list and build files sell for about €24 (roughly $32) on Strange Inventions Lab’s site, with a complete kit including six reusable cartridges running closer to €127 (about $140). There’s no mass-produced version to simply buy, so the closest real purchasable equivalent for anyone who wants to tinker with the same building blocks is the Raspberry Pi camera hardware the whole project is built on — this one is strictly for the hands-on crowd.
OrigamiSwift folds a full-size mouse flat enough for a jacket pocket
Travel mice have always forced a trade-off: shrink the mouse for portability and you usually lose the hand-filling comfort of a full-size one. Designer Horace Lam’s OrigamiSwift, sold through Yanko Design’s YD Select shop, tries to dodge that trade-off by folding flat instead of shrinking down — an origami-inspired triangular structure that unfolds into a full-size mouse shape in under half a second and folds back to roughly a fifth of an inch thick when you’re done with it.
At 40 grams, it connects over Bluetooth 5.2 with a claimed open-area range of about 33 feet, tracks with an infrared sensor rated up to 4,000 CPI and 30 inches per second, and recharges over USB-C for a battery Yanko Design says lasts around three months per charge. It works across Mac, iPad, Android, and Windows, and currently sells for $85 in black or gray — a limited titanium silver edition has already sold out.
A maker-built second screen turns the ROG Ally X into a makeshift dual-screen handheld
Not every entry here is a finished product, and this one is explicitly not for sale. YouTuber and hardware modder ETA PRIME built a snap-on second display for ASUS’s ROG Ally X handheld using little more than magnetic phone-mount hardware as a hinge and a budget 7-inch, 1080p portable monitor running at 120Hz — matching the Ally X’s own refresh rate — powered directly over USB-C from the handheld itself.
The whole rig snaps on and off without any permanent modification to the Ally X, and the extra screen is mainly aimed at dual-screen emulation (think Nintendo DS or Wii U titles), flight-sim instrument panels, and racing-game telemetry displays. ETA PRIME has published the build rather than selling finished units, so there’s no commercial version to order; the closest real purchasable gadget here is the ROG Ally X itself, which the whole mod is built around.
The Bottom Line
Pulled together, this month’s standouts share a theme more interesting than any single spec sheet: makers at every scale, from Apple’s chip-design teams down to a solo hobbyist in the Netherlands, spent 2026 refusing trade-offs their categories had quietly treated as settled. Not every idea here is for everyone — a $2,000 foldable phone and a $499 camera-equipped toothbrush are hard sells on price alone, and two of the seven aren’t retail products at all. But between a telescope that collapses into a camera bag, a mouse that folds flatter than a phone case, and a 44-year-old computer getting a cyberpunk-themed FPGA upgrade, it adds up to a genuinely unusual month for gadgets — proof that even mature categories still have room for someone to refuse the obvious compromise.
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