Daniel Rutter wants to rice up his peripherals Bentley-style.
Where, I ask you, are the bespoke luxury computers?
William Gibson had the right idea in Idoru, with his hardware housed by the Sandbenders in casings made from coral, turquoise and nut-wood. The stuff inside might be your standard Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, but the exterior should be a joy to behold and to handle.
I don't know about you, but I spend a large fraction of every day beholding and handling computers, and I could certainly cope with a little coral. Beige plastic and powder-coated steel are cheap and durable, but there's a reason why Rolex don't make any watches out of these materials.
You can get this sort of thing in the car world, you know. Sure, most people settle for normal mainstream reviewed-in-the-newspaper vehicles, but there are more exotic options.
Spyker in the Netherlands make cars whose interiors look like bordellos for billionaires. Various manufacturers have come up with minimalist open-wheeled road projectiles driven by superbike engines -- occasionally two of 'em, sharing a crank. There are jet motorcycles and stretched Humvees and companies that recondition old Eastern Bloc all-terrain troop transports that can't be killed with a stick. You name it, you can get it, and often not for that ludicrous a price.
What all of the weird cars have in common is that they're made for a small market. Annual production of the real oddities may not get into double figures -- while Toyota makes more than a million Corollas a year.
But in the computer world, everything's mass-produced. Everything. Even companies like Alienware that sell spiffy-looking high-spec machines don't fabricate anything themselves; every part is OEMed by someone else, and if there's some particular case design it uses that nobody else has, you can bet that it still won't be made out of mahogany.
If money is no object, of course, you can have that keyboard with the genuine narwhal ivory keys of which you've always dreamed. Just as there are customisers that can make you any kind of car you want pretty much from scratch, there's nothing stopping you rounding up some artisans to make computer components the same way.
Except, of course, the fact that you'd end up with a computer that cost at least as much as the abovementioned popular Toyota.
A few fancy-computer companies are trying to find a middle way, almost invariably with wooden PC bits. Some of the stuff they sell looks pretty lame to me -- wooden siding on a steel computer case is not what I'm after here, much less techno-widgets iced out with Swarovski crystals -- but wood-cased monitors, keyboards and mice are a step in the right direction. And the prices can be right -- see www.swedx.com, for instance. Or holzkontor.us, for the other end of the price spectrum.
The problem, of course, is that computer gear ages fast. A gloriously retro micarta-Bakelite-and-celluloid laptop will be a lot more retro, in a bad way, in a few years -- and you won't be able to retrofit new hardware into it.
Some devices, though, are likely to endure. Input devices, in particular; plenty of heavy typists hammer away on buckling spring keyboards that haven't changed in 20 years (and yes, some of those 'boards are that old and still working), and the all-surface optical mouse seems to have reached the same evolutionary level now. Build a mouse or keyboard to last and it ought to stay useful until our computers start talking back to us in Majel Barrett's voice.
When you have a lifespan like that, there ought to be a market for a ten-times-as-expensive version with burr walnut and engine turned stainless and glove leather and cocobolo-wood buttons. And, of course, quality switchgear that feels good and lasts, which is something that seems to have evaded the wooden-keyboard crowd so far.
The market for such products would of course largely be composed of executive oxygen thieves who're attempting to convince themselves that they're men of distinction. But if the status symbol crowd drives sales of things that I want to own for non-poseur reasons, that's fine with me.
Don't get me wrong; I like a great military-industrial case mod as much as the next geek and typing on plastic isn't exactly killing me. But if people will spend thousands of dollars to put shiny spinning things on the outside of their mag wheels, I find it hard to believe that a keyboard that looks like a Bentley dashboard wouldn't find a market.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012