The original QiYi Clock has completely revolutionized the event, back in the summer of 2020, the clock event was completely changed, previously people would use the LingAo clock which had various issues as the pins would often fall down, some people even used Rubik's clocks which put the speedcubing community in the funny situation where the only event where any competitive speedcuber would use a Rubik's branded product was with a puzzle they no longer produced! After magnets became popular in 2016-17, people started magnetizing LingAo clocks in various ways to keep the pins up.

In 2020, we first saw the ShengShou magnetic clock, this was the first mass produced magnetic clock and still serves as the recommended budget option to this day but it was completely overshadowed the next month when the QiYi Clock was released, for the past 4 years this has been the only good clock and in the mean time, the clock event has been revolutionized in other ways.

The first change was the introduction of 7-SIMUL, this is a method that allows the solver the solve the entire clock without flipping it at all, there had been no-flip methods in the past but 7-SIMUL is just far more efficient and has allowed people to get a lot faster, another change which came into place at the beginning of the year was to allow people to move pins during inspection, this change was mostly done because it was too difficult to know whether the pin was moved accidentally during transport.

It finally seems that QiYi is releasing an updated version, I am not yet sure what exactly has changed though, QiYi have previously released limited edition versions but there are rumours that this new blue QiYi Clock is actually different and it seems to not be a limited edition. I suspect the changes won't be anything major but it will be interesting if we finally have two different clocks to choose from (even if they are both from the same brand)

As of writing this article, the new QiYi clock is on pre-order