Teenage Engineering Field Desk

Teenage Engineering is fast becoming the official brand of vain idiots with too much money and too little common sense.<p>I mean $1600 USD for a few bits of aluminum and a piece of plywood?! This thing would be overpriced relative to manufacturing costs if it cost $160, yet Teenage Engineering have slapped an entire extra digit onto the end of the price.<p>TE literally made ONE good product over a decade ago (The original OP-1) and have just been milking every last ounce of goodwill from the market since then with their overpriced, overhyped toys and &quot;Designs.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ll also never forgive them for jacking up the price of the original OP-1 well into it&#x27;s lifecycle (When by all rights manufacturing costs have gone down and it should be CHEAPER) just because the used market was hot. Just sleazy, greedy, pompous pricks.

Too small.<p>I work on an extra long IKEA LINNMON 16353 in black-brown, which I believe now is the IKEA LAGKAPTEN 604.870.17 at 78 3&#x2F;4x23 5&#x2F;8 &quot;.[1]<p>After over a decade, the cheap veneer is wearing down in inelegant, but a charming &quot;used&quot; fashion.<p>The funny thing is, if I wanted this desk, I could just go down to the Home Depot or better yet, a woodworker specialty store and bolt an aluminum framing system to plywood I can get cut at the IKEA LAGKAPTEN dimensions above, and have a superior product.[2]<p>Seriously, if you want this at nearly a 10th of the cost, just go to a local woodworker store, buy some RTD plywood, or the plywood of your choosing, and search for an aluminum framing system and buy that and bolt it to the thing.<p>That&#x27;s seriously what they&#x27;re selling you.<p>Actually, what they&#x27;re really selling you is their aluminum framing system. That&#x27;s what you&#x27;re actually buying. The plywood is an afterthought.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ikea.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;p&#x2F;lagkapten-tabletop-black-brown-60487017&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ikea.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;p&#x2F;lagkapten-tabletop-black-brown-...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;list&#x2F;view&#x2F;details&#x2F;shared&#x2F;31f43060-a820-11ed-b351-918d0487c460" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;list&#x2F;view&#x2F;details&#x2F;shared&#x2F;31f43060-...</a>

I&#x27;ve always thought it was weird that their store has more SKUs for merch than the actual things they make. 1600$ for a desk, that looks like this, really just confirms to me that they consider themselves an art house&#x2F;brand first. Which is OK! Just not for me, or even nearly my budget.

Please stop promoting TE.<p>What once was an interesting company making unique instruments has become an overpriced brand pushing useless and objectively bad “designer” products.

I went in expecting a $1,000 folding table and somehow got a $1,600 non-folding table. Teenage Engineering is always surpassing my loftiest expectations.

I love, love, love Teenage Engineering&#x27;s design and they create really cool products, but this seems too crazy a price point even for them.<p>When they released the TX-6 mixer for $1199 I <i>almost</i> understood their reasoning, since pro audio equipment has always been overpriced, and they clearly put a lot of thought into it and it had a somewhat unique set of features, and most of all it was beautifully designed, but this... This is plywood on an aluminum frame. What&#x27;s unique about this? Maybe I&#x27;m finally just too removed from the target market. Could somebody help me understand if there&#x27;s something I&#x27;m missing?

Is this what it finally takes for people to realize that the emperor was naked all along?<p>That desk is positively one of the ugliest things I&#x27;ve ever seen, make sure you use it in an office with a great deal of stress inducing cheap strobe fluorescent lighting, and place your cheese grater Mac Pro on it.

Spoiler: a formica-on-plywood desk, 1195 mm&#x2F;47&quot;, 770 mm&#x2F;30.5&quot;, 750 mm&#x2F;30&quot; with a max load of 75 kgs &#x2F; 165 lbs is $1,599. And you have to assemble it yourself. And pay for shipping.<p>Ikea&#x27;s KULLABERG Desk, pine, Width: 43 1&#x2F;4&quot; Depth: 27 1&#x2F;2&quot; Height: 29 1&#x2F;2&quot;, is $199.00

Back when desks were sold out everywhere (&quot;remote learning&quot;), I built a small desk for a family member using piping and a workbench. Total cost was maybe $65 at Home Depot. I&#x27;m not very handy, but this was easy and satisfying to build. It&#x27;s sturdy enough to stand on and looks great.<p>A photo of the end result: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;jKrBm2D" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;jKrBm2D</a><p>Plans I followed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.housebyhoff.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;diy-piping-table&#x2F;#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.housebyhoff.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;diy-piping-table&#x2F;#&#x2F;</a>

Reminiscent of the 606 shelving system Vitsoe produces. Given the section dedicated to the desk&#x27;s &quot;Field Rail,&quot; I assume TE is going to release a couple more projects using it as part of some modular system. A brand with similar cult status, Snow Peak, revealed their own modular office concept[0] around a year ago, so I&#x27;m guessing that Teenage Engineering is planning similar things.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acquiremag.com&#x2F;lifestyle&#x2F;snow-peak-tuguca" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acquiremag.com&#x2F;lifestyle&#x2F;snow-peak-tuguca</a>

Looking at HomeDepot to see how much it would cost to build something similar myself, it would be about $250 for the material (at MSRP prices), so probably about $100 at wholesale prices.<p>You would have to cut the aluminum and the plywood to size, but otherwise the labor is the same.<p>Which makes it just like Blue Apron and all those other meal delivery companies: you&#x27;re paying through the nose to avoid the <i>easiest</i> part of the project, gathering the supplies.

Has anyone built a desk with modular rails like this (perhaps out of 8020)? I won&#x27;t be buying this, but I like that idea specifically. I have a bunch of stuff attached to my desk through various clamps&#x2F;screws&#x2F;3M stuff, and the modular rail idea seems like it could really clean things up.

Me before looking at the price: &quot;That&#x27;s a $2k table if I ever saw one.&quot;<p>It belongs in the background of a scene from Succession.

I just don&#x27;t understand what kind of company Teenage Engineering is.<p>I learned about them from music YouTube channels but they also make desks apparently?

Looks like proprietary extrusion similar to 80&#x2F;20 t-slot extrusion in function. You can get it in generics now (amazon &#x2F; ali express) or from the likes of McMaster.<p>Going with McMaster prices for quad slot and by the inch puts the frame with hardware at around $500 by my estimate.<p>Probably another $100 for the top if your having to get material and do the laminate yourself.

hate, hate Teenage Engineering but I love this approach to humiliating your customers who deserve it if they bought the OP-1

Is TE affiliated with Juicero by any chance?

Given current lack of availability and astronomically high price of Baltic&#x2F;Finnish birch (or any euro ply, apple ply equivalent)… the $1.6k price is almost expected. But still. Sheesh.

It&#x27;s wild, it&#x27;s basically an Ikea desk but for $1600. I guess IKEA doesn&#x27;t have the cool machined rails and stuff, but not clear what they&#x27;re going to do with that.

This reminds me of something Jean Girard from Talladega nights would use to draw out some master plan.<p>“Foolish American, you couldn’t understand the genius of overpriced Nordic engineering!”

If I were to walk into someone&#x27;s home or office and see this desk I would immediately make some very unflattering assumptions about that person.<p>Teenage Engineering has officially jumped the shark.

This is the definition of bad design. It&#x27;s overcomplicated, not simple, it&#x27;s overengineered, not elegant, it&#x27;s worse than a regular desk, and it&#x27;s made of materials that will simply not last at a price point where you could buy a real nice piece.

Nice. Designers understand structures.