Pokémon turned 30 this year, and every brand with a product page seems to want a slice of the cake. Polaroid’s Pokémon cameras and the Fitbit Air Pokémon Sleep edition came first, and now Beats has joined in with a Pill. The speaker launched October 15 at $149.99 with Pikachu and Mimikyu across the grille, a gray body, and a Poké Ball charm on a matching lanyard. It’s a perfectly nice object. I’ll confess, though, that I looked at that gray capsule and thought a better Pokémon was sitting right there.
Courtyard.io shared a concept that makes the case, and it turns the Pill into Diglett. The brown grille wears glossy black eyes and a raised pink nose, and the whole thing rises out of a sculpted pile of gray rocks like it just popped out of a tunnel. A second render stacks three Pills into a Dugtrio on one shared mound. Diglett has been a capsule with a face since 1996, so this is the rare mashup where nobody has to squint. Consider this my case that the Pill’s best Pokémon was Gen 1 all along.
Designer: Courtyard_io
Diglett already has the Pill’s silhouette
Diglett is a head on a mound, which makes it a capsule with a face. Courtyard.io’s render keeps the Pill’s rounded cylinder untouched and wraps it in a clay brown grille, so the perforated mesh reads like packed soil. The Beats “b” sits low on the body in copper, just above the rocks, and the three-quarter shot shows the lighter tan side band running down the edge like a seam in the dirt. Nothing about the form had to bend to fit the character. That almost never happens in a collab, and it is the reason this concept looks so convincing at first glance.
The official Pokémon x Beats Pill takes the opposite route. It keeps a gray body, prints Pikachu and Mimikyu on the grille, and adds a Poké Ball charm, the first charm Beats has ever bundled with a Pill. That is a graphic on a speaker, and a handsome one. Beats has also done character Pills before, a history Apple’s Oliver Schusser cited when the 2024 model launched. A Diglett Pill would simply bring that idea back with a Pokémon attached, which is a much shorter walk than it sounds.
The glossy eyes, the pink nose, and a rock base that doubles as a stand
The grille is matte and finely perforated, while the eyes and nose are glossy, raised pieces that catch the light like a vinyl toy. That sheen difference gives the face a collectible-figure look without a single printed graphic. The rock base adds a third texture, a pebbly gray sculpt that gives the speaker something to stand in and sells the burrow illusion. Courtyard.io embossed its name into one of the boulders, which is a tidy way to sign your work. Every surface has a job, and none of them are shouting.
Picture the real hardware under that mesh. The 2024 Pill claims 24 hours of battery, so a Diglett could play through a full backyard party and still have juice for the next morning’s coffee. Its IP67 rating means dust-tight and able to survive a dunk in about three feet of water for 30 minutes, which suits a Pokémon that lives in dirt. At 680 grams (about 1.5 pounds), it is light enough to carry out to the garden. A speaker that hangs out in the flowerbed makes more sense to me than a gray one with a Poké Ball dangling off it.
The Dugtrio render and what Pokémon collabs could learn from it
The Dugtrio render stacks three Pills on a single rock mound, each with its own startled face and copper “b.” Beats currently pairs two Pills at a time, in Amplify Mode for more volume or Stereo Mode for left and right separation, so the third head would need a firmware update and a little optimism. At the official Pill’s $149.99, three speakers come to $449.97, which is one and a half pairs of the PUMA Suede Pikachu at $300 each. Dugtrio’s whole identity is being three Diglett, which makes it the one Pokémon where buying three speakers feels like a feature. I’d happily make that trade for a bookshelf trio that gets guests asking questions.
Most of the recent Pokémon collabs work by decoration. Polaroid wrapped a camera in Poké Ball patterns, Fitbit added a sleeping Pikachu label, PUMA bent a Formstrip into a bolt, and Beats printed two characters on a grille, all of it charming and most of it surface treatment. Courtyard.io’s Diglett goes the other direction by letting the object’s own shape do the talking, and the renders live on Courtyard.io’s X page for anyone who wants a closer look. The franchise has had a capsule-shaped character since 1996, and Beats has had a capsule-shaped speaker since 2012, so this introduction was overdue. Pikachu will always sell, but Diglett would get the laugh.
