It's with a heavy heart that today, we're retiring one of the systems we've been the most attached to: Orion.
It started as a collaboration with Corsair and Jawa.gg, and it ended up going further than we thought it would; it took a podium finish in a field full of builders and modders we've looked up to for years, which still feels a little strange to say out loud. The whole thing came out of a pretty simple idea, though. We wanted to build something that felt like the moment you step outside at night and actually look up. We leaned into an art-deco direction to get there, mostly because that whole era treated the sky as something you could draw in gold and geometry, and it let us wrap genuinely modern hardware in something that feels older and warmer than a PC normally gets to feel.
Chasing the same feeling
Almost every decision after that was us chasing the same feeling. The front panel is perforated so that when it's lit, it reads more like a lantern than a computer. We iconized the sun and the moon for the screen on the cooler, and worked minor touches of Optimist branding throughout the rest of the build. We kept the whole interior lit in one warm gold, roughly the color the sky turns twenty minutes after the sun's actually gone, and we spent a stupid amount of time making sure no single part of it shouted over the rest.
We wanted to build something that felt like the moment you step outside at night and actually look up.
Honestly, the reason we're taking it off the store now is that we'd rather retire it while it still means everything it meant to us the day we finished it. Orion is the build that reflects one of the core principles we design around - that a machine can be quiet and beautiful and worth keeping in a room, and still do anything you'd ever actually ask a computer to do. We're going to miss having it around.
Thank you to Corsair and to Jawa.gg for making it with us, and thank you to everyone who purchased one for their own.
