seven thousand six hundred and fifty
dollars that's the price of the signature alt workstation how can this
thing be so expensive and yet have
nothing but five star reviews online
even the lone 3 star review says they ended up keeping the thing for an
employee who suffered from back pain and hey wait a minute this thing's been for
sale for years and yet outside of the manufacturer's own website there's only
a single review from anyone even claiming to be an actual user
this reddit post was made by someone who created their account five days after
someone else inquired about the signature alt workstation and then they
were never heard from again
you guys smell that kind of smells like bs isn't it
well maybe but then again
all work was confident enough to send the signature station to me and run the
risk of me tearing it apart in my review and saying that it's a colossal waste of
money so why don't we find out if they should have taken the safe route here shall we
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when i said it would take a week or two of daily driver use to properly evaluate
this thing i couldn't get a single other person on the writing team to take the
assignment and risk slowing down their work so i begrudgingly cleared some
space in my office and tasked our new writers with assembling it for me they
complained the pieces were heavy and that it took about four hours rather
than the advertised two hours to assemble but reported that otherwise the
process was fairly straightforward thanks to the combination of written and
video instructions the one thing that they bunged up was the leveling of the
keyboard tray all work uses a third screw on the ARM attachment over here to
compensate for the natural sag of having something this heavy attached to just
one point on one side it took about 10 minutes for me to fix
with their video tutorial and then i was good to go initial impressions though
were not good if you're expecting to just
dive into this thing and immediately be comfortable you have got another thing
coming this one's on me but i also didn't realize that there's an included
magnetic mouse pad and a bunch of little
adhesive-backed magnets for your peripherals if your keyboard is extra
heavy by the way you might need to add some kind of like grippy thing to the
back of these magnets but once the magnets are in place the reclining
process is a lot less scary i think the
biggest contributor to that for me was the overall kind of
wobbliness of the setup like even doing something as simple as typing i'm not
going crazy here you can see the monitor moving around to be clear i'm not
criticizing the monitor mount or the you know the workmanship or the quality of
the materials or whatever this thing is not going anywhere and like
this is a 32 pound monitor it's a samsung odyssey g9 and everything from
the height adjustment look at this to the tilt
actually works perfectly exactly like i'd expect it's just kind of the nature
of the beast i mean when you build something and you want the user to be
able to get in and out of it easily see how it opens up like that
you can't cage them in which means you can't support it on both sides and as
soon as you have an ARM just on one side there's going to be some
there's going to be some wibble wobble other than that i didn't have any major
complaints you got these locking casters down here so it's super easy to roll
around and reposition as you please and we hooked it up with a desktop and an
external power bar but if you use a laptop for example and you want all your
cable management built right into the desk they've got a power bar on the
storage compartment and cable management routing right back here i haven't shown
you guys even half of the adjustments yet so out of the box i didn't actually
realize that this ARM and this ARM were meant to be just kind of like dialed in
exactly as you see fit so you put this
perfectly where you want maybe you're more of like a lap typer you tighten
this knob you tighten this knob i do wish they
were a bit grippier rather than smooth so it was like you could really wrench
on them and boom that's it that's how i like to sit that's how i sit if i prefer
it up higher well guess what that's an option too oop
oh yeah but wait there's more check out this headrest
so it's got height adjust like that you just hold on these handles
and goes forward or back so you can get it exactly where you're most comfortable
and you can do it without even looking at it so you just be like ah yeah you know what i want my head right there
there we go okay and then there's the motorized controls one
annoyance here is that the labels don't make a ton of sense to me the height
adjust makes sense it's plus and minus okay and then the leg rest thing that's
arrow up arrow down that makes sense too but the backrest adjust is a plus what's
plus minus mean in the context of the
back reclining or coming back up so i think there's a little bit of room for
improvement there oh man yeah i really i really did not use it in standing desk
mode very much this is not as good as seated you can really tell
once this ARM is up there's
that's a lot more wobble look it's still
still going the good news is for sitting the foam is nice and firm and i did not
other than a little bit at the edges because i have kind of a wider booty i
didn't notice anything other than foam i couldn't feel any of the harder
materials through the seat and for hours at a time it was perfectly comfortable
it's time to do it here we go i made some adjustments to my system here so i
put some electrical tape on the bottom of the keyboard rubber would be better
but it holds okay and then for the mouse
i actually grabbed the logitech g703 popped off the little power play thing
so here i'm just gonna put that back on
get on there there we go right so now all i got to do
is i can mouse around and then when i'm done i can dock it like that and pull it
off yeah yeah i'm sure you could come up with
something more elegant with a 3d printer or whatever but if you want to work from
a horizontal position this is pretty much end game i mean once it's all
dialed in and you're like sitting in your
zero g battle station like this it's like the you know the wow guy from that
episode of south park this feels like his final form you can see what i mean
probably about the monitor wobble not being as bad even in this position
compared to standing i think standing is the wobbliest but as cool as this looks
and seems like it would be in theory have you ever been lying in bed watching
a movie with your significant other you know holding the phone like this and
thought you know would be great eight consecutive hours of this at the
office yeah me neither in a matter of four or five
minutes i could actually feel the blood draining out of my fingers and that's on
top of the additional difficulty moving the mouse accurately when you're kind of
fighting gravity one way and being assisted by gravity the other way
in practice i would never consider using it like this for anything other than
like you know maybe if i wanted to be that ceo and i like taped my webcam here and
i'm having a meeting you know and i don't have to take notes or whatever
because my assistant over there is doing it or something or watching a movie that
would be pretty sick you know somewhat ironically for a device that's marketed
as being for work i think its signature feature is
probably best used for anything other than work like movies or actually gaming
for that matter i mean not with a keyboard or mouse this would be
absolutely horrible but with a controller in your lap
well it reminded me a lot of the world's most comfortable gaming setup project
that we did but with way better lumbar support there are actually a few things
about the alt-work signature station that weren't great for office use
they say it's good for collaborating that's actually in their talking points
but the demo videos show monitors from like
five years ago if i'm spending seven grand on this thing i'm putting a proper
monitor on it and the ergonomics of sharing my screen with a colleague and
conversing with them frankly were not very good if they added a lockable
swivel to the base of the chair for example so that i could kind of swivel
the chair out and talk to somebody that would help a lot but as it was i
actually ended up with some back discomfort trying to trying to interact
with anybody next to me there's also the sheer space thankfully unlike their flex
station this one does come with wheels but you will still need a substantial
amount of space in your office to accommodate comfortably getting in and
out of the chair look how long this absolute
boat of a desk is when you've got it folded out i'm walking here
okay i mean in the marketing materials they
go out of their way to shoot pretty much everything in a wide open environment
and some of them if you look closely are even shot outside and that isn't the
only thing that they gloss over some of the pictures in their gallery were
honestly pretty misleading to take this
picture the adult would have had to have her butt hanging at least halfway off of
the chair like look at this there is not
extra space here and there's like this big uncomfortable thing here like what
i'm i'm sitting like this so i can have someone sitting next to me and this
marketing video for their new self-leveling coffee cup holder
conveniently cuts off before the subject actually tries to drink coffee in that
position without dumping it all over his face come on guys
nobody is drinking coffee like this okay
and i don't know maybe i'm just finding things to whine about but at over seven
thousand dollars i kind of expected to have a handy place
to tuck my phone i actually had my phone fall out of my back pocket and
hit the thing like that i expected to have a built-in usb hub for phone
charging you know or even like a a charging chi spot or something like that
instead it just feels like alt work has taken the red digital cinema approach of
well if you can afford this product then you can probably afford the overpriced
accessories with that said
there are good things about their approach too i contacted their support
both as myself and anonymously with a vpn and to their credit the service was
absolutely on point they even offered to jump on facetime with me to help sort
out my issue that i didn't actually have our pc manufacturers from the last
secret shopper could learn a thing or two but in spite of all the good things that
i've said about it i will not be continuing to daily drive it
it's possible now that we've worked out the kinks someone internally will want
to take it off my hands maybe someone who doesn't need quite as much screen or
desk real estate as i do but i think that that three-star review
kind of nailed it it is comfortable it's great
it's just that i as someone who doesn't have any ergonomic special needs was
already fine with what i had so the bottom line is if you need this you
already know who you are and if you never felt like this thing should exist
it's likely that you'd be happier with a more conventional sit stand desk the
good news is that it looks like they offer a 30 day money back guarantee with
free return shipping within the continental us so we're going to have it
linked down below for those of you who are baller enough to afford both
this chair and the extra room in your
house that you're going to need to put the thing in and you can calculate how you're going
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Linus if you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy um one of our short
circuit videos unboxing a gaming chair that thing is
horrendous it was pretty bad this thing's better
also costs like 10 times as much though