Beaten and restrained by Taitra security guards, I’m hauled back to the MSI booth from whence I came, the laptop I’d tried to spirit away handed back to MSI while members of the North American PR team look at me in stony silence. I lift up my head and meet their eyes, one by one.
“It belongs in a museum!” I yell over the clamor and din of the Computex 2025 showfloor.
One of the reps that I’ve known for years shouts to be heard: “John, what the hell, man? Have you lost your mind?”
“It belongs in a museum!”
OK, so that scene didn’t play out anything like that yesterday when I first set eyes on the MSI Prestige 13+ AI Ukiyo-e Edition laptop, but it damn well could have. All that I needed was a means of escape through the packed crowd at the MSI booth, all of whom gawked along with me at what is undoubtedly the most beautiful laptop any of us has ever seen.
The MSI Prestige 13+ AI is already one of the best laptops MSI’s put out in recent years, but the one on display at Computex was something entirely different. Splashed across the lid is a hand-laquered reproduction of The Great Wave off Kanagawa by the Japanese artist and printmaker Hokusai, a master of the ukiyo-e art style that dominated Japan from the 17th to 19th centuries.
I’m not as into Japanese art and culture as many of my friends are, a few of whom speak varying degrees of Japanese as a second language and all of whom own pretty much every Manga that has been released in the United States (as well as many that they’ve had to pay extra to order directly from Japanese shops), but I do love ukiyo-e..
I grew up in New York City and spent a lot of time going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art throughout my childhood, and the Met has a rather impressive collection of ukiyo-e prints, including an original print of The Great Wave, first produced in 1831.
Something about the bourgeois market scenes, manor intrigues, and quaint personal moments between friends and lovers that defined the ukiyo-e style resonates with me to this day.
But it was always the depictions of vulnerable humanity in the presence of unassailable natural forces that spoke most strongly to me. And no work of art captures that as well as The Great Wave, with its unstoppable water cresting over a pair of fishing boats, the owners of which are nowhere to be seen. The only proof of their existence is the boats left behind, pilotless and at the mercy of nature.
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The Prestige 13+ AI Ukiyo-e Edition reproduces this masterful scene thanks to the work of OKADAYA, a Japanese company renowned for its lacquerwork on fine chinaware and pottery.
Similar to how ukiyo-e prints were made in steps and layers back in the day, OKADAYA’s process for creating The Great Wave on the Prestige 13+ AI lid involves applying eight thin layers of lacquer by hand, incrementally building up the coloring and texture of the scene before polishing it to a smooth, resilient finish.
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The process isn’t limited to just the lid, either. The keys of the keyboard have also been stepped up to a polished, piano-key-like finish with gold-colored key labels to match the MSI logo on the inside of the device and on the lid, as well as the labels for the device’s ports.
While the artwork on the device steals the show (and by show, I mean Computex, as the Prestige 13+ AI Ukiyo-e Edition won Computex’s Best Choice Award this year), the underlying laptop is still impressive as well, with up to an Intel Lunar Lake SoC, up to 32GB LPDDR5x memory, 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, and a 13.3-inch 2.8K OLED display.
As an Artisan Collection product, the new laptop will have a limited run of 1,000 units, with each getting its production number laser-etched onto the bottom of the device. Given the handscrafting that’s gone into these laptops, you can imagine that they won’t be cheap, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of them have already been purchased before they even made their debut at this year’s show.
Still, even if it’s not possible to own one yourself (unless you get very lucky), maybe one of the buyers could do their good deed for the year and donate one of these masterpieces to a museum somewhere so we can all enjoy the artistry that’s gone into this device.
Having seen it up close and held it myself, I can tell you it wouldn’t be out of place among the finest ukiyo-e prints on display at the Met, and it’s something I’d happily take the time to go see whenever I’m there.
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John.Loeffler@futurenet.com (John Loeffler)
