[rileyphone]

Given that the modern trend in desktop cases is slapping a piece of plexiglass on the side, I don't think materials engineering has much to do with this field. Anyways, they're trying to market to hip companies looking to buy workstations, for which this is a good design.

[fermienrico]

I was just trying to make a general point in terms of the ID thought process that you start from functional/engineering needs and work outwards from it.

In the case of System76, they had to bend wood vaneer (poor bend radius) which probably added additional expense to the manufacturing process.

[isantop]

System76 Engineer here, who did a lot of work on the ID for Thelio. The veneer actually has a pretty superb minimum radius, depending on which direction you bend it. Bending with the grain for our particular veneer lets you bend around a 1/8" radius (about 3mm) pretty reliably. That's reduced a bit in our case since the finish is applied first (part of a cost-reduction), which limits it a bit, but Thelio uses corners that are pretty close to a 20mm radius, so that's not really a limiting factor here.

You can actually cut the stuff with a normal pair of paper scissors. It's pretty wild stuff.