The past couple of years have been a wild ride. Thanks to your support, we were able to transition from cozy office space to roomy warehouse to take our computers to the next level. And while we have more amazing projects in the works, we wanted to take a moment to appreciate the hard work and popcorn-fueled energy that’s gone into manufacturing our desktops.



Our Production and Assembly Teams are at the forefront of our manufacturing journey. On a daily basis, we see them put effort and care into each handcrafted system. As we grow, we’ll continue to upgrade our manufacturing equipment to help reduce their workloads and improve efficiency. For example, creating bend lines on the chassis with our new laser-punch combo machine has eliminated the need to draw those lines by hand, which allowed us to cut down on the time and effort it takes to build each machine. We were also able to lower the price of Thelio as a result of the new process.

Manufacturing in-house empowers us to iterate on our ideas. When we wanted to more accurately gauge fan noise on our machines, we built a soundproof room for acoustics testing. (It looks like a Rubix cube.) Within weeks, we had exponentially reduced noise levels on Thelio, Thelio Major, and Thelio Massive.

One of our first challenges in iterating Thelio’s design was to prevent shipping damages. Components would shake loose during shipping, and heavy GPUs sometimes sustained damage from the journey. In redesigning the GPU brace, we were able to support more of the GPU’s weight and keep it from jostling around inside the chassis. Shrinking the drive cage, meanwhile, secured the 2.5” storage drives against Thelio’s lid. These improvements have gone a long way towards reinforcing Thelio in transit from our planet to yours.

The man behind these changes is the fearless John Grano, our Mechanical Engineering Lead and designated laserman. John keeps Thelio performing at its best. Preventing throttling is one of his top priorities, as it ensures your high-performance components can perform to their greatest potential. One of many fixes was to add “feet” to the chassis, which widened Thelio’s base and allowed us to stabilize the chassis and cut additional ventilation ports into the design. We’ll take a more in-depth look at Thelio’s thermals later on this spring.

With industrial design and production in the same office, we applied these changes within days of completion, if not hours. Once we have 100% confidence in any design improvement, we apply that to our production line to improve the experience for as many people as possible.

Keeping industrial design and production together also opens up the door for experimentation. In our latest endeavor, our CEO Carl Richell and many others at System76 had a lot of fun trying out new color options for Thelio by staining the birch veneer. We released three of these colors last week: Neptune Blue, Martian Red, and Dark Matter. You can see these for yourself on our website, and learn more about the staining process on our blog.

As we move into manufacturing laptops, the factory will provide an ideal environment for research and development. We now have the resources to create more accurate prototypes in-house to get an up close look at various materials, chassis builds, keyboards, and more, empowering us to create a computer fit for the incredible creators, makers, and builders of the world.

Each day at System76 presents new challenges to overcome and new opportunities to dive headfirst into open source innovation. Despite the aversion among U.S. companies to manufacture domestically, it’s actually really fun. We’re excited to delve deeper into manufacturing computers, and we can’t wait to show you where our adventures take us.