I bought the above at Miniso recently. It cost $10, and it’s a ‘construction block’ kit. Since LEGO no longer has a patent on their brick design, many competitors are releasing near-identical types of products, often at a much lower prices.
As you can see this series has six different ‘retro’ technology sets, and while I assumed they were blind packed (you didn’t know which one was inside until opened) mine had the computer on the front and that’s exactly what I found inside:
Over the years I’ve purchased many of these ‘LEGO knockoff’ kits and the quality varies wildly. Far too often the colours are weird, or blocks are miscast, or don’t fit together well This had none of these issues at all.
In fact if the pieces were given to me out of the packaging I would have just assumed they were LEGO. They have the same feel, and fit together the same as a LEGO brick. Even the strings used for the keyboard and mouse cables were the same as LEGO!
The only difference I could find was the instructions, which were a bit abbreviated compared to the average LEGO kit. This could of course have been since they needed to be printed small to fit inside the capsule, or because the build was very easy. At least they didn’t have any mistakes, something which I’ve found often in other knockoff products.
The final product looks great doesnt it? A tiny model of a first-gen Macintosh computer that fits nicely into the palm of your hand.
An attractive little model for a reasonable price. This suggests the LEGO competitors are no longer as second-class as they used to be.