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ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is
- nottorp 5mo agoWhen I saw the title I thought it would be some plushie. Turns out I wasn't far from the truth!
- afandian 5mo agoSaved you a click: > But right now, the most coveted product coming out of ASML is the 1,000-piece Lego version. I thought it might be something like service contracts or chemical refills.
- newsclues 5mo agoAnd it's not available to the public. Bummer.
- johncole 5mo agoFind a friend that works at ASML?
- bell-cot 5mo ago> ... sold exclusively to ASML employees with a strictly enforced “one per person” rule. You'll need to be their very best friend. And make sure they're not too close with their family, nor a big fan of either Lego or collectables, before you cozy up.
- cassianoleal 5mo agoThere is a knock-off on AliExpress. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010807104987.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010807104987.html
- johncole 5mo agoBrilliant. I knew there had to be a solution somewhere.
- haddonist 5mo agoMight be worth contacting the seller before buying. The "Color" (ie: type/what's being sold) is "PDF Manual By Email", so it's possible they selling just the PDF assembly manual...
- wolfi1 5mo agogetting the bricks shouldn't be that difficult, should it?
- davidjfelix 5mo agoyeah but if all you're getting is the manual that's free https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-215601/NightHawk11991/asml-twinscan-exe5000/#details https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-215601/NightHawk11991/asml-...
- loudmax 5mo agoThe Chinese knock-off TwinScan is almost as good as the original and far less expensive. Because of course it is.
- pantalaimon 5mo agoI would have expected a LEGO version of the SMEE machine
- doe88 5mo agoIt must be to prevent corporate spying ;)
- cassianoleal 5mo ago> Even at the absolute bleeding edge of human physics, we still have a fundamental desire to play. I'd say play is of fundamental importance at the bleeding edge of knowledge and technology. Without play, there's no appetite for failure. Without appetite for failure, there's no progress, no novel solutions, no creativity.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5mo agoI immediately have to reach for a quote from the game "The Talos Principle" as I think it just perfectly sums up my view on how core play and games are to humanity and how they are essential to what makes us as a species special: > The answer that came to me again and again was play. Every human society in recorded history has games. We don’t just solve problems out of necessity. We do it for fun. Even as adults. Leave a human being alone with a knotted rope and they will unravel it. Leave a human being alone with blocks and they will build something. Games are part of what makes us human. We see the world as a mystery, a puzzle, because we've always been a species of problem-solvers. https://taloswiki.org/images/3/36/Scientist-02_ProblemSolvers.mp3 https://taloswiki.org/images/3/36/Scientist-02_ProblemSolver...
- voidUpdate 5mo agoI'm not particularly surprised that the $600 Lego set sells better than the $400 million lithography tool...
- mrweasel 5mo agoIt's $200, otherwise I think it would be a bit on the high end in terms of price per piece. $600 is the cheapest version on eBay. Unless you need the box, you can get the instructions online (https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-215601/NightHawk11991/asml-twinscan-exe5000/#details https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-215601/NightHawk11991/asml-...). Though that might be a recreation.
- voidUpdate 5mo ago(I couldn't see a listed price in the article, so I just went for the cheapest resale price they said. Thanks for clarifying)
- shubhamjain 5mo agoThe kind of garbage that gets to the front-page is mind-boggling. Okay, maybe there's some useful trivia here, but combined with the headline, it's just trash clickbait.
- nikitaga 5mo ago> Employee Only: You cannot buy these in stores. They are sold exclusively to ASML employees with a strictly enforced “one per person” rule. Wonder if they include this lego set as a gift with their real machines? Or are they like – our commercial agreement is worth $400M and not a lego set above that.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago"why does this matter?" Oh hello AI slop how are you today?
- johncole 5mo agoIs this some sort of ai indicator now?
- markovBaj 5mo agofor me it was the 3 bullet point list, esp. the "The Sales Gap"
- amelius 5mo agoMaybe. At some point, humans will start sounding like AI.
- mschuster91 5mo agoThey already do, I recently heard people literally talk like tiktok videos in real life...
- AntiUSAbah 5mo ago"Why it matters" No it doesn't. And the only thing it does again, to remind me, that this is cool as hell but i'm not able to buy it...
- bux93 5mo agoTwo words. Volkswagen sausage.
- johncole 5mo agoNever heard of this, what does this refer to?
- j_maffe 5mo agoCan we please do something about these AI slop articles? It's becoming really sadenning having to open a frontpage link only to find the same, meritless, braindead article one time after the other.
- planb 5mo agoYou're absolutely right! "Why Does This Matter?" was a dead giveaway that this article was not written by a human — it was written by a large language model. But really: "Why does this matter?" When looking at an article like this, I rarely read the text. This is just fluff no matter if AI-generated or hand written. The info is "there's a LEGO set of that ASML machine" and the picture of that set. That's all I want to know before clicking the back button.
- john_strinlai 5mo agoand then open up the comments section, just to see several identical "ai slop" comments and someone inevitably making a "you're absolutely right" joke.
- girvo 5mo agoI’m flagging them, but it’s not enough. Front page is full of it these days. Sad times.
- btown 5mo agoFor those interested in ASML, and how much engineering goes into being able to make EUV lithography work reliably at scale for 3nm nodes (by hitting individual droplets of tin with highly accurate lasers and turning them into plasma!), I highly recommend this recent (Dec 2025) Veritasium video about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0 For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph... (There's something incredible and downright "alchemical" about the fact that the reason our sand can "think" is because we use light to vaporize tin which then carves intricate glyphs into the sand!)
- keernan 5mo agoThey sell fewer than 400 machines a year. https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/q4-2025-financial-results https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/q4-2025-fin...
- throwaway2037 5mo ago1) Why is this entry flagged? 2) For once, I had a good laugh from the obvious clickbait title. Hat tip. You nerd sniped me good! 3) What do you think ASML had to pay Lego to design and create this model? Or maybe Lego has a small division that does custom models like this? Do we know the employee cost for the Lego set? I have not access to this company store link: https://asmlstore.com/products/twinscan-exe-5000-lego-set https://asmlstore.com/products/twinscan-exe-5000-lego-set 4) How long until someone on YouTube creates a functioning lithography tool (say, 1 million nanometers grade) using only authetic Lego materials?
- girvo 5mo agoIt’s flagged because it’s obvious AI slop
- johncole 5mo agoNo because of Russian trolls.
- gangstead 5mo ago> 3) What do you think ASML had to pay Lego to design and create this model? Or maybe Lego has a small division that does custom models like this? Do we know the employee cost for the Lego set? I've done my own small scale version of this where I made models for internal distribution of the specialty equipment my employer uses. I doubt they paid Lego anything. There is software to design your own lego set. Bricklink Studio is what I used. It's essentially Lego CAD software with a component library of Lego pieces. You can do high quality renderings, generate instruction sheets and BOMs. Lego has a Pick-a-brick service where you can get new parts from a very limited selection at great expense. At third party marketplaces like Bricklink you can upload BOMs and they will assemble shopping carts from different seller's inventories of used pieces. Price and selection is better than Pick-a-brick but shipping / order fees / minimum lot size drive up the cost. I've tried many times but even the smallest 200 piece build ends up needing orders from 3 sellers across the world. There's always some part that was only ever sold in one rare set from 30 years ago and is unobtanium (the CAD program makes it easy to include a piece regardless of actual availability). There are also businesses that will give you a turn key product that looks very retail-like with parts bagged by step, printed instructions, real Legos, box art, etc. If you're willing to go with "lego compatible" third party bricks like GoBricks there are many sites that can source your entire build at once with new non-lego pieces. Part quality ranges from "good enough" to "indistinguishable" and the price and ease of ordering is loads better. You get a box of unsorted parts and spend lots of time grouping the pieces into kits.