I'm trying to stay hopeful, but it's hard. Of all humanity's late-capitalist artifacts to eventually collect at the bottom the boiling oceans, the unEvn ONE will probably take the longest to dissolve. It's an all-in-one portable gaming desk, a chunky Game Boy that can melt Crysis and a human spinal cord at once.
It's a desk capable of housing everything you need to play games, and it folds up into a jagged, lopsided backpack so you can play it anywhere, like in any of the empty rooms formerly occupied by your family, the back of a large van, or even a derelict hospital.
Anyway, here's all the shit that fits in this thing:
- Chassis for PC components
- Monitor
- Monitor mount
- Mouse and keyboard
- Misc cables
- Whatever shameful objects will fit in the locked drawer
I'm trying to think of legitimate use cases for this thing, and I'm failing. I suppose if you know dozens of people that still want to host LAN parties and have a couple thousand bucks to sleep off, then having some of these suckers on tap would save setup time, assuming there's no static venue for your meetups.
The unEvn ONE is billed as an esports product, but esports organizations provide desktops for their competitions. I suppose if I'm an organizer of those events, I might look to the unEvn as a simpler way to setup and breakdown a given tourney, but at $2500 just for the desk (monitor and components aren't included), I'm also hugging my budget like a dying dog. Not yet, old friend. Not yet.
Every mundane feature of the thing is treated like an architectural breakthrough. I mean, it apparently took a team of engineers and gamers to give the desk a curved edge. All that brain space and expensive schooling to produce two extra inches between gut and desk just to simplify reaching for the mouse and keyboard, which aren't locked in place anyway. Note the dotted line following the curve to indicate that this is, indeed, a curve. Finally, I can watch my groin pulse and glow as I game.
I haven't even addressed the name: unEvn ONE. It goes for gamer-ese so hard that it's become an inversion of the trope, indecipherable nonsense that looks like nothing while saying nothing. Take a cue from Razer and just name it after an animal. Pick any alloy and replace a letter or two with numbers. How you name an object whose defining qualitative feature is the evenness of its surface 'uneven' boggles the mind.
And besides the stress it looks like it'll put on your spine, or how red it'll leave your ass as it bounces from cheek to cheek with every step, the unEvn's greatest failure is that lugging it around is no simpler than carrying a tower and monitor to-and-fro. It's only convenience is that it's also a desk. If carrying around a bulky desk is worth $2500 then my lawn chairs are severely under-priced. My recommendation: Arms and bags. Give 'em a shot.
Still, I'm afraid there's nothing to prevent another dumb computer thing from existing. With over $10,000 of the $40,000 Kickstarter goal already met and 34 days to go, the unEvn is on pace to litter the ocean floors imminently. Let's just hope all that space makes for a nice, portable fish home.
