Another in the periodic intersections of furniture and casemods, here is a Canadian furniture designer's interpretation of high-end wooden PC cases:
The woodworking is beautiful, but these pieces still suffer from the tension between the replacement cycles of furniture (long) and computers (short). Suissa Computer, the company that makes these, claims " Solid, strong and beautiful, able to grow and change with future generations, Suissa Computers are designed to be upgradeable and expandable."
My feeling is that most people buying computers today have seen how quickly technology changes, so the idea of having a piece of hardware "for future generations" may seem like a pretty extraordinary claim, with little to back it up on the site. Saying that it'll "grow" is actually the opposite of what people have seen computers become. Expandability may be something that can justify the purchase of a particularly high-end system, but it's rarely borne out in practice, and I suspect that people may not purchase computers with that as a key differentiating factor more than once.
That said, the idea of making computers for the high-end market is interesting, and the recent purchase of Alienware by Dell and of Voodoo by H-P seems to show that major manufacturers agree, but high-end computer purchases seem to include a very different set of evaluation criteria than high-end furniture purchases. Other expensive furniture that includes technology, such as Ingo Maurer's lighting, are first and foremost furniture, with the technology integrated in support of the role of the object as furniture.
(I originally saw this on Born Rich).
