[VERGE] A visit to the one-man computer factory

This is the best summary I could come up with:

McNamara calls this device the “Mythic I.” It’s a sweeping, curved object that starts with a leather palm rest before sloping sharply upward like dunes on a beach, then gently cresting down again in the back.

McNamara spent months sourcing the right maple and walnut, slowly chiseling with hand tools until the coarse boards turned into the gently curving waves in the final product.

But after spending a couple of days in McNamara’s second-floor workshop, watching him alternately type away on the Mythic I and chisel away at the wood blocks that will become his second computer — the first machine he’s making for someone else — I couldn’t help but think he might be onto something.

(Sentences like “The Faustian fixation on infinite expansion of power via software and hardware has had horrible effects on the everyday personal computer user” probably didn’t help his case with the developer crowd.)

Ultimately, Novendstern decided he wanted four things: a good word processor for longform writing; built-in audio transcription, so he could pace his office and dictate notes; access to ChatGPT for research and inspiration; and a receipt printer so he could take lists or texts with him when he was finished.

He spent his days sawing and chiseling the wood into a similar shape as his prototype but had sourced new leather colors, different keycaps, and some new internal tech — a 10.1-inch screen, 2TB of storage, 32GB of RAM, and an upgraded NUC with a 4.7GHz i7 chip — to make Novendstern’s ideas possible.

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