On March 1st, 2026, The Lego Group will begin selling the most ambitious brick it’s ever made: a tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 Lego brick. When it detects NFC-equipped smart tags nearby, embedded inside new Lego tiles and new Lego minifigures, or when it sees other Smart Bricks, the company claims it will make entire Lego sets come to life — starting with the humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light-up blasters, and the music of Lego Star Wars.
These “Smart Bricks” and “Smart Play” initiatives, just announced at CES 2026, aren’t like the huge Lego Mario toys that required two AAA batteries and mostly only activated when their bottom-mounted cameras detected color or barcodes. They’re wirelessly charged, with a pad that can charge multiple bricks at a time and a battery that “will still perform after years of inactivity.”
Trust Lemmy to be Lemmy. I saw this and thought hey that’s cool as I like Lego. Come to the comments to see most people shit on it.
After all these years I’ve finally found a group of people more cynical than myself and I like it, makes me seem like less of a miserable cunt. It’s all relative I guess.
Being on Lemmy has given me a sense of what I’ve been like in the past. I’ve been horrible to be around. Gonna try to be better for the people around me.
Exactly my takeaway too. I often knew I was a little insufferable with my morals and what I believe but you don’t really think about it until you’re surrounded by people equally as insufferable or worse.
Product tie ins happened.
Lego has only a few of their own properties now. Ninjago, City, Flower sets and some of the simpler technic models round out most of their self-contained IPs.
Now if you want pirates, you buy POTC like the Black Pearl or One Piece.
If you want space, you buy Star Wars sets. Fancier city sets? Marvel. Basic construction? Nintendo or Sega IPs.They have some pretty nice city sets, and they’ve reissued some older space themes, which is cool. You’re right that in general the coolest sets are the tie-ins.
To be fair, they were floundering without the tie ins as I recall. Weren’t they on the verge of dying around the turn of the century?
Yeah, that was more due to mismanagement at the top according to their PR story.
There are lots of other space sets besides Star Wars
The re-imagining of the Galaxy Explorer I got a couple of years ago was awesome.
This sounds like a modern successor to Mindstorms. They’ve always had some more advanced product lines.
They’ve also had simpler electric motors and lights for decades
Wonderful, now they’re embedding future e-waste onto their billions of pieces of plastic that they generate every year. Very cool.
Plastic is not evil. Single use plastic is. Lego is anything but single use. I’m a little disappointed they’re still using plastic bags in their packaging, hopefully that’ll stop soon. I’ll reserve judgement on these being e-waste till we see how they’re used, if they’re used, if they’re planned obsolescence, etc.
I received a lego set for Christmas this year and the main bag was made of recycled paper. (The smaller bags were still plastic.)
I got a large set, and all th bags were paper—including the small ones inside the larger one. It probably is a process of replacing them over time.
Nice, what’d you get?
Sorry for the terrible lighting :)
Lmao I love the trombone. That’s a nice set, excellent choice!
I got one of the flower sets to brighten up my office cubicle.
If the embedded batteries are non-replaceable, then they’re future e-waste.
Their announcements haven’t said anything about battery replacement, and they’re very small Smart Bricks (2*4 studs), we’ll see, but I think being non-replaceable with a sub-decade EOL seems real likely.
Lego is anything but single use.
Not true since the 80s. LEGO blocks used to be about building anything, over and over, but now all they sell is one time construction kits.
This is why modern children are stupid.
To be fair, it’s not like you throw them out after assembly though? So it doesn’t count as single-use plastic. Though I do understand what you’re trying to say here.
I’m pretty sure you can still just straight up buy sets of bricks. Definitely was still a thing when I was a kid, so late 90’s and early 00’s.
Quick look on the Lego website says they sell 'em under the name Lego Classic. Some of those still come with plans you can build, but most pieces are generic and can be used to build anything.
Lego as a brand is super overpriced, but if I’m getting my kid Legos for their birthday, it’ll be a big-ass box of bricks, at least for the earlier birthdays. Still a year or 2 off from that though.
Are they? Any recent sets my kids have received have been paper, I’d assumed they’d done it across the range.
I think it’s a recent transition, so there’ll be a lot of plastic until old stock runs out and new paper bags take their place
They switched to paper bags a while ago, I believe. I got a couple of sets for Christmas, and they were all paper bags.
Shame, only if it had AI in it, I would have bought 40% of world’s future supply.
I too was wondering how long till they slap AI to lego boxes
That’d be a no. Open Source Bricks - that’s a yes.
Kinda sounds like an April fool’s joke, except it isn’t April
Interesting to see where this leads. Sounds like it’s just sound effects right now. I’d love them to do more modern power features. I would think that exists outside official lego, I just haven’t searched hard.
They have light and sound, light sensors, inertial sensors to detect movement, tilt, and gestures, and they form a Bluetooth mesh network with other Smart Bricks, so they’re aware of each other’s position and orientation
Seems like more than just sound effects.
With a custom asic it’s unlikely.
I don’t think I’d want this. The fun of Legos is in part from using your imaginary. You imagine the light saber doing stuff. If it actually lights up and hums that feels like it detracts from the experience.
For playing, sure. But for old farts that just want display pieces, this is pretty neat.
No, this is for kids. Static displays won’t gain any benefit from this that Lego light bricks or 3rd party light and sound kits already provide. The only thing new here is $100 for a small 7+ set that has NFC functionality like the Mario ones
Reminds me of this from a few years so
https://mambogermany.removed/2022/08/this-lego-brick-actually-comes-with.html?m=1
Great, this wil be very effective at taking any possible imagination away from children/ 35 year old men living in mom’s basement.
The humble start of LEGO claytronics? Oh boy
They already released a bunch of Mario World sets that do this…whats the big deal.
If you read the quoted section of article in the post body, it explains the difference.
Not enough AI in this product yet
