Lucky Bob handed Tech Tangents a beige lab box and a simple pitch. Printing is miserable. What if a job were as simple as writing a floppy? That box is PlotDrive, a CalComp serial and parallel print server that never needed Ethernet, a PC sitting idle, or a driver that still installs in 2026. You copy a file onto a 5.25-inch disk, latch the door, pick the file on a two-line LCD, and the machine streams the data out to whatever printer or plotter is plugged into the back.
IBM never sold this as a catalog item, yet the logo sits on the case all the same. Parco Pacified Limited of Hong Kong built the HUB-001SR as a compact speaker dock that also works as a three-port USB 1.1 hub and an FM radio, then someone stamped IBM branding on a batch and handed units out as corporate gifts or show swag. The same plastic shell later turned up with a Bisty mark tied to Japanese pachinko prizes. You end up with a desk object that looks official until you notice the generic Chinese tooling and the motor that slides a cover open when you press it.
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles put the ID. California Cruise on the floor at Düsseldorf’s Caravan Salon as the first battery-powered member of a name that has lived on diesel since 1988. Built on the ID. Buzz Pro, the van arrives in short and long wheelbases and keeps the familiar two-tone shape, adding only California lettering on the tailgate and Cruise graphics along the flanks. German pricing starts at €60,761, about $70,500, which undercuts the midsize diesel California Beach by a few thousand euros. First customer vans are due in early 2027, with more electric California variants promised by 2028.
Sony spent years turning over-ear canceling into something people actually wear all day, and the WH-1000XM5, priced at $199.99 (was $400), remains the pair that made that habit stick. Eight microphones and a pair of processors hush cabin rumble, subway grind, and open-office chatter so thoroughly that music and calls sit on a darker background than most rivals managed when these launched a few years ago.
