Apple and the gaming crowd have always had one of those relationships where you nod at each other across a party and never actually walk over. Apple makes the chips, brags about them beating a PS5 in some benchmark slide, then goes right back to talking about spreadsheets and stargazing apps. Gamers, meanwhile, buy a Steam Deck or a Switch and never think about the iPhone in their pocket as a gaming device at all. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman just reported that Apple wants to finally cross the room, having spent over a year quietly developing its own gaming controllers for the iPhone. The bigger twist is who gets to wear the name tag. Rather than an Apple logo, the hardware is reportedly launching under Beats, the audio label Apple has been slowly turning into its lifestyle catch-all since buying it in 2014.

Code unearthed in a leaked macOS 26.7 build gives the rumor real teeth, naming two unreleased devices, T6502 and T1057, each carrying its own dedicated controller profile instead of placeholder code. Both come with the standard gamepad vocabulary, sticks, triggers, a D-pad, face buttons, the stuff every controller on the planet already has. T6502 keeps things simple and wired. T1057 adds Bluetooth, motion sensors, and a noticeably different haptic engine, suggesting more than one idea is being tested at once. Nothing is priced, dated, or confirmed, but the code alone says this has moved well past a mood board.

Designer: Apple

Gurman’s sourcing on the branding is the part I keep chewing on. He says Beats executives are leading both the engineering and the product concept, not just slapping a logo on something Apple’s industrial design team already finished. His reasoning is that the culture and lifestyle around gaming controllers fits Beats better than it fits Apple, and that the sub-brand gives the company room to use cheaper materials and a louder design without dragging down the premium finish people expect from anything wearing the actual Apple logo. Read between the lines and that is Apple admitting its own aesthetic has a ceiling. Titanium and glass photograph beautifully, but nobody wants to grip a cold slab for a three-hour Genshin Impact session. Beats, with its glossy plastics and its very unserious relationship with color, is a far more honest home for an object designed to be squeezed, dropped, and thrown in a backpack pocket.

There is a decent trade-off lurking here too, and it is worth naming before anyone gets too excited. T6502, the wired one, is basic by design, which means it will likely be the cheaper, more disposable option with none of the motion sensing or richer haptics that make a controller feel alive. T1057 sounds like the one worth wanting, but Bluetooth controllers introduce pairing friction and battery anxiety that a simple USB-C plug-in never has to deal with. Apple will have to pick a lane, or price the two far enough apart that the choice makes sense, and so far there is no signal on either price or release window. History also isn’t fully on Apple’s side. The company has floated controller ideas for years without shipping one, and it once required developers to support the Siri Remote’s accelerometer as a de facto gaming input before quietly dropping that mandate. A leaked profile in a beta build is not a keynote slide.

Where this actually matters long term is the software Apple has already built around it. iOS 26 shipped a dedicated Games app that pulls your library, your Game Center friends, and Apple Arcade into one hub across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, and Arcade itself has quietly grown past 250 titles for $6.99 a month. A first-party controller, even a scrappy Beats-branded one, gives all of that infrastructure something physical to plug into, which is a very different goal from just selling more hardware. It also puts Apple in the odd position of competing with its own shelf space, since the Apple Store already sells the Backbone One and the SteelSeries Nimbus, and we covered how Backbone’s own Pro model already chases full-size ALPS sticks and forty-hour battery life at a premium price. Razer’s brand new Prio takes the opposite approach entirely, folding down to credit card size for people who would rather not carry a controller-shaped commitment at all. Apple showing up now, later than everyone, wearing someone else’s logo, says less about gaming and more about how Apple treats every category it enters late. Quietly, sideways, and only once it has found a version of itself that does not feel like Apple at all.

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There is something slightly ridiculous about having a PC and an Xbox sitting on the same desk, then needing to re-pair a gaming controller every time you move from one to the other.  SteelSeries thinks the controller should simply know where it needs to go. That is the idea behind the Aeon Pro.

The new wireless gamepad is built around a QuickSwitch Dock that can stay connected to both a PC and an Xbox. Instead of disconnecting one system, pairing with the other, and repeating the process later, the controller can switch between them from the dock. SteelSeries says the system is patent-pending and describes it as the first of its kind for Xbox and PC.

Designer: SteelSeries

The dock is also where the Aeon Pro gets its other unusual trick. It holds a second battery while the first one is being used in the controller. When that battery runs low, it can be swapped for the charged one rather than plugging the controller into a cable and waiting. The batteries are the same type used in SteelSeries’ Arctis Nova Pro headsets, which makes the system particularly interesting for anyone already invested in that ecosystem. SteelSeries calls this its Infinite Power System. The numbers are up to 25 hours over 2.4GHz wireless or 28 hours over Bluetooth, although those figures account for the combined use of the two batteries rather than one battery lasting that long on its own. The Aeon Pro can also connect through USB-C and Bluetooth, and supports mobile devices alongside Xbox and PC.

The controller itself follows the now-familiar premium gamepad formula, but pushes it fairly far. Its thumbsticks use Hall-effect sensors, while the triggers can switch between full travel and a shorter hair-trigger setting. There are 18 mechanical switches across the controller and four programmable rear paddles, giving players plenty of ways to alter how they interact with a game. SteelSeries has also avoided burying every adjustment inside an app. A small OLED display built into the controller can show the active device, battery status, and profiles, while letting users remap controls and change settings directly.

PC players can go deeper through SteelSeries GG, including trigger and button configuration, rumble adjustments, and software profiles. Then there are the smaller touches. The thumbsticks are interchangeable, with different shapes and heights supplied in the box, and the spare pieces can be stored in the dock. A textured grip runs around the controller, while its 310-gram weight makes it considerably heavier than a standard Xbox controller, though still lighter than Microsoft’s Elite model.

The catch is the $259.99 price tag. The Aeon Pro costs more than most premium gamepads, including Microsoft’s own Elite-class controller in many markets. That makes the QuickSwitch dock and battery system more than clever conveniences. They are the features that need to justify why this particular controller deserves a permanent spot on a gaming desk.

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Most controllers ask you to adapt to them. The 8BitDo Ultimate 3E flips that arrangement entirely, building a controller around the idea that your hands, your genre, and your platform should decide its shape instead of the factory floor. The face buttons, the d-pad, and even the joystick tops snap in and out as swappable modules, turning what’s usually a sealed, one-size-fits-all object into something closer to a toolkit.

Pop off the magnetic faceplate and the accessory pack reveals its real purpose. A silicone membrane d-pad sits next to a tactile micro-switch version, and the joysticks come in tall, dome, and thick-neck shapes, each suited to a different grip or genre. Racing games favor a different thumb position than platformers, and for once, the hardware bends to match instead of forcing a single compromise across everything you play.

Designer: 8BitDo

Underneath those swappable caps, the joysticks themselves run on Tunneling Magnetoresistance sensors, a technology built specifically to resist the drift that eventually creeps into analog sticks after enough hours of use. Interactive RGB fire rings pulse around the base of each stick, translating movement into visual feedback in real time, a small touch that turns an otherwise invisible input into something you can actually watch respond.

The triggers carry their own bit of adaptability. Hall-effect sensors power two selectable trigger-stop positions, letting a shooter’s hair-trigger tap coexist with a racing game’s need for a longer, more gradual pull. Switching between them takes a flick of a physical switch, not a trip through a menu, which matters when a genre change happens mid-session rather than between them.

Connectivity spreads just as wide as the physical customization. The Ultimate 3E runs 2.4G wireless and wired modes for Xbox and PC, and switches to Bluetooth for mobile devices, now backed by a USB-C signal adapter for steadier range across more rooms and setups. Apple has officially signed off on compatibility too, covering iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and even Apple Vision Pro, stretching the controller’s use well past the console it was designed around.

An integrated wireless charging dock handles power without cables cluttering a desk, while two pro-level back buttons and a pair of extra-fast bumpers add inputs for players who map more complex combinations. Three custom profiles let different games, or different people, keep their own configuration ready to load instantly, and a 3.5mm jack keeps wired headphones in the mix for anyone who still prefers a physical connection over Bluetooth audio.

None of this treats customization as an afterthought bolted onto a finished product. Every swappable piece, every sensor choice, feels like it was scoped out before the shell was ever molded, built around the idea that serious players tend to have very specific, very personal preferences about how a controller should feel in their hands.

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The Steam Machine has swappable faceplates, which is a genuinely good idea that Valve doesn’t appear to have fully exploited. The concept is essentially that the front panel of the console is a blank cosmetic slate, open to third parties and hobbyists to design around. So far, most of what’s been proposed has leaned on that word: cosmetic. Different textures, different graphics, different visual personalities for what is otherwise a matte black gaming cube.

This faceplate mod takes a different approach by asking what the panel could actually do. The result is a replacement front cover that integrates a charging cradle for the Steam Controller directly into the face of the console, turning what would normally be dead real estate into a functional docking station. Set the controller down, it charges. Pick it up, it’s ready. No separate charging puck dangling off to the side.

Designer: NefariousnessWhole25

The charging mechanism uses the Steam Controller’s own wireless puck seated inside the faceplate cradle, with a USB cable routed discreetly around the inside edge of the panel and into one of the Steam Machine’s existing USB ports. It’s a routing solution rather than a rewiring one, which keeps the electrical side simple and reversible. The puck sits in the cradle, the controller sits on the puck, and the whole arrangement slots onto the front of the machine like any other faceplate.

What makes it more than a wall mount with ambition is the kickstand built into the rear of the panel. It folds out from the back of the faceplate, propping the cradle up at an angle, turning the entire assembly into a standalone desk dock that works independently from the Steam Machine. Take the faceplate off the console and prop it up on a table, and it functions as a charging stand on its own terms.

The inspiration came partly from Valve’s own demonstration of an e-ink faceplate, which showed that the panel slot was capable of doing more than holding a decorative cover in place. That demonstration didn’t ship as a product, but it established the idea that the faceplate system had functional potential beyond aesthetics. This mod picks up that thread and takes it somewhere more immediately useful for anyone who has both pieces of Valve’s current hardware sitting on the same desk.

Design files haven’t been released yet, and there are no confirmed plans to sell finished units. The prototype is out, it works, and it raises a question worth asking about Valve’s approach to the faceplate ecosystem: if a single modder can turn the front panel into a functioning charging dock over a weekend, what would a dedicated accessory program actually look like at scale?

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Most original NES controllers haven’t seen active duty in decades. They survive in storage bins and attic boxes, physically intact and perfectly functional as controllers, but with nothing left to plug them into. The consoles they were paired with have long since been replaced or decommissioned. The hardware was always well built, but the form factor has been sitting idle for years.

This mod changes the job description of that controller shell entirely. The electronics inside a standard NES-style gamepad were stripped out and replaced with a Wemos ESP32-S2 Mini development board, a 1.54-inch 240×240 TFT display, a MicroSD card module, a 500 mAh lithium-polymer battery, a charging board, a speaker, and a slide power switch. From the outside, it still looks exactly like an NES controller.

Designer: Logic Gate Labs

Choosing the right processor was essentially a geometry problem. A larger ESP32-S3 would have offered dual-core performance and enough PSRAM to keep entire game ROMs in memory, but it was too big to fit inside the housing. Smaller ESP32 variants without PSRAM lacked the memory for smooth emulation. The ESP32-S2 Mini landed in the narrow window between board size and processing capability that the build required.

Getting everything to fit required real surgery on the shell. Internal plastic supports had to be trimmed back to make room for the display, and new openings were drilled for the screen, USB charging port, MicroSD slot, speaker, and power switch. A bare copper wire serves as a central ground distribution rail, cutting the number of individual ground wires needed and making it possible to actually close the controller afterward.

On the software side, the device runs the Retro-Go emulator framework, compiled using ESP-IDF and CMake since the ESP32-S2 isn’t a standard Retro-Go target. The result handles a range of classic 8-bit systems comfortably. As a bonus, Doom runs via PrBoom-Go from a Freedoom WAD file loaded on the MicroSD card, managing somewhere between five and 15 frames per second depending on the scene.

The total build cost runs about $17 using common suppliers, or closer to $8 when sourcing directly from overseas markets. That puts the project well under the price of a single modern game release. Flip the power switch, select a ROM from the MicroSD card, and the screen loads games that once required a dedicated console and television setup. No additional hardware is needed.

What makes this more than a novelty is how it reconsiders a form factor most people already have muscle memory for. The D-pad clicks the same way it always did, and the A and B buttons carry the same spring. What changed is where the signal goes after the press. Instead of traveling to a console that no longer exists, the controller now processes it directly inside its own shell.

The Retro-Go framework is open source, the parts are widely available, and the NES controller shell is one of the most common pieces of vintage hardware still circulating through the secondhand market. Nothing about this build required specialized equipment or proprietary components. The total part list costs less than a single new game on any current platform and fits inside hardware that most people already own.

The post Someone Stuffed a Full Retro Console Inside an NES Controller for $17 first appeared on Yanko Design.

When the Nintendo Switch 2 arrived in June 2025 at $449.99, it came with a 7.9-inch display, a faster processor, and a Joy-Con that doubles as a mouse. What it didn’t come with was a comfortable way to hold it for long sessions. The handheld form factor has always been a compromise between portability and ergonomics, and for players who log serious hours, that compromise starts showing up as wrist fatigue, awkward thumb angles, and a nagging wish for something with a proper grip. The accessory market has tried to fill that space for years, with results ranging from decent to deeply uninspiring.

Abxylute’s answer comes in two forms: the N6 and the N9C, both deck-style controllers purpose-built for Switch 2 play. The N6 wraps the console in a full-size ergonomic grip with Hall-effect joysticks, native 9-axis motion control, a dedicated C Button for GameChat, and adjustable vibration levels the player can cycle through without leaving a session. The N9C leans into personality, drawing from GameCube design DNA with mechanical buttons, trigger switches, and a capacitive joystick system paired with swappable gates.

Designer: Abxylute

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Joy-Cons were engineered for flexibility: detachable, shareable, usable solo or in pairs, functional as individual controllers for two-player sessions on a single console. That versatility comes at the cost of ergonomics, because a controller small enough to slide into a rail and function independently will never offer the grip depth, trigger travel, or palm support of something purpose-built for extended solo play. The N6 and N9C abandon that modularity entirely in favor of doing one thing exceptionally well, which is making handheld Switch 2 sessions feel like you’re holding a full-size controller instead of a tablet with thumbsticks glued to the sides. The tactile feedback is immediate and familiar, the kind of responsiveness you get from hardware designed around sustained single-player sessions rather than multi-function compromise. Both controllers connect via wired USB-C, skipping wireless pairing lag entirely, because when the target is solo handheld performance, eliminating variables takes priority over flexibility.

The N6’s open-top design is the first thing people will argue about online, and they’ll mostly be wrong. The Switch 2 stands over 11 cm tall, and a fully enclosed grip pushes that height further, putting your palms in the kind of awkward hover position that builds exactly the fatigue you were trying to avoid. Abxylute held the grip height at 8.5 cm, matching full-size controller proportions, so your palms have something to rest against rather than squeeze. The 7-inch grip width sits narrower than the console body deliberately, keeping your hands at a natural, relaxed spread instead of forcing them wide across a bulky frame. The physics of holding something for two hours straight are pretty straightforward, and this design reads those physics correctly.

Hall-effect joysticks solve a specific, measurable problem that standard potentiometer sticks fundamentally cannot. Potentiometer sticks use resistive contact that physically degrades over repeated use, which is why drift rates climb after a year or two of regular play. Hall-effect reads joystick position magnetically, with zero physical contact between moving components, and the N6 bumps the stick travel angle to 23 degrees compared to 18 degrees on Joy-Con, giving your thumbs more range for fine-grained inputs. A POM anti-wear ring around each stick handles mechanical stability without adding stiffness or noise to the movement. It’s a small detail, but the kind that separates purpose-built hardware from a generic controller with a different shell. On a device you use daily, that engineering choice compounds in your favor in a way that contact-based sticks simply never will.

Inputs across the N6 break down by material type, and the distinctions matter. ABXY buttons use conductive rubber for cushioned presses that reduce finger fatigue; the D-pad uses tactile switches for sharper directional accuracy; shoulder buttons deliver tactile clicks for faster responses in action-heavy play; and the linear digital triggers provide a genuine 0-100% input range rather than binary on/off clicks. That trigger range matters considerably in racing games and anything relying on gradual pressure inputs. Vibration adjusts at four levels, 0%, 40%, 70%, and 100%, switchable via button combo directly on the controller, bypassing the game-by-game settings adjustment that the Pro Controller requires. The grip’s internal structure forms a resonance chamber that redirects the Switch 2’s speakers forward and reinforces bass by around 10%, which you’ll register in a quiet room as fuller, punchier audio than bare Joy-Cons produce.

The N9C is doing something more niche and, honestly, more interesting. Where the N6 chases Pro Controller parity, the N9C chases the GameCube controller’s specific feel, complete with a centered A button and asymmetric face layout, rebuilt for a modern console using mechanical micro-switches and ALPS tactile shoulder buttons. Capacitive joysticks sidestep magnetic interference entirely, and the swappable 8-way and circular gate rings mean you can dial in a tight directional gate for fighters and swap to a smooth circular gate for platformers. A built-in battery hatch holds two replaceable batteries that reverse-charge the Switch 2 directly during play. Most grips on the market ignore battery life almost entirely, and a reverse charge system that powers the Switch 2 directly from the controller is a differentiator almost nothing else in this category offers.

The N9C carries four programmable rear buttons, two per side compared to the N6’s one per side, and each supports the same macro-recording system that chains directional inputs and actions into a single trigger. Switch 2 system-level button remapping works natively, requiring no third-party software, so a custom layout travels across every game without reconfiguring anything. An integrated rear stand sets the N9C apart from virtually every grip in this category, giving the Switch 2 a propped tabletop angle without relying on the console’s own kickstand. The primary connection is wired USB-C for ultra-low latency, with BLE available for configuration only, keeping the input chain clean during actual play. Every N9C ships with both C-stick and ring-style joystick caps in the box, so players can dial in the stick feel before the packaging hits the trash.

Mass production kicked off in March 2026, with shipping expected between April and June. Super Early Bird pricing runs $79 for the N6 (retail $110) and $89 for the N9C (retail $120), with a bundle sitting at $159. Nintendo’s own Pro Controller for Switch 2 retails at $79.99 and carries none of the Hall-effect sticks, programmable back buttons, or turbo functionality. Abxylute has shipped over 120,000 units across more than 20 projects to 100,000-plus customers, so the production infrastructure exists. What they’re solving for is specific: handheld Switch 2 play that performs at Pro Controller level without forcing players to accept the Joy-Con’s ergonomic ceiling as permanent.

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The post A GameCube Controller on the Nintendo Switch 2? Meet Abxylute’s Deck-style Joy-Con Alternatives first appeared on Yanko Design.