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>What is fundamentally wrong with metal & clean design? >The answer shouldn't come from the fact that "Oh shit, someone is already doing that, let's do something different. May be wood?".

Nothing is "fundamentally" wrong with it. In fact we have gotten to a point that laptop chips can function just fine for many tasks in suboptimal chassis because they are fairly efficient, let alone desktops. The reasons to choose a different design as a customer at least are personal. In my opinion the minimalist industrial design is overused and interacts poorly with my brain. In the absence of any design elements on it I find the products bland and with little character. I have a hard time remembering another glass/metal phone or another bland-painted building with aluminum stairs. Apple knew that years ago and imo it's probably why they stuck with the iphone 6 design for so long, so the market floods with it and thus it becomes memorable. The iphone 10 has more glass and the notch, so in a way it's scaling back the minimalism, closer to the iphone 4/5 era when the phone had a few more geometric elements on it.

In my opinion what is missing from every modern design, be it the applesque industrial or google's kitsch "throw all the colors that don't mix together, remove all textures" material design are little things that make the product memorable. Ideally these come from quirks that add usability or from the materials used. In a different era with a more limited materials available choosing the right thing for the job meant more diverse products. A macbook today is not more memorable than a razer blade or some other copycat. The same goes for chinese phones and iphones. I've confused an iphone with a cheap android replica so many times. Industrial design works when you are the only player doing it. But apple is not.

Product design is a relatively new thing and it is going through the same phase that architecture did with modernism and brutalism( and post modernism probably too). But this endless streamlining and simplifying of devices is not as positive as designers want us to believe. At some point they'll run out of stuff to simplify that people will buy and will try to differentiate by going to the opposite direction or just stick with brand recognition. So while I don't think a wooden pc case is the end all be all of design I'm glad s76 is doing something different. And this kind of change always comes from the "alternative" underdog.