Hi,

I see a lot of talk about our choice of case design, in fact about our design choices in general so I thought I would jump in and clear some things up if I can.

We have always tried to make it clear that we aim to provide a machine that gets shipped on time.
 
Time to market is the most critical thing for us. We have a small window of opportunity here with a lot of competition coming out after us with products they claim are better than ours. (well after all they wouldn’t be very good competition if they claimed it would be worse.)

So  yes we have saved time on a few things. We can all agree that the look of the machine is not a top priority. We never said it would be. if it’s a big enough deal we could always put up a poll on our site and ask. Then we would know for our next generation. Sweden has some lovely design houses that would welcome the consult on a global product. This wouldn’t make it hash any faster but it would delay the product shipment for sure. These things would have to be modeled tested and tried etc etc, A far easier solution would be to use off the shelf parts which have a proven track record, over spec them by quite a bit (going back to our margins upon margins upon margins claim) So the decision was an easy one. The first boxes to leave our building will be delivered on time because we haven’t spent even a single meeting debating anything that was not 100% essential. The look is not essential for us at all, most of our customers don’t care and that means we don’t care.

As for the external power supply. Most small devices come with an external power supply ours is just a big devices that needs one. We could make our device bigger and have the power supply inside which would mean a larger shipping box, and a larger package sent to you. That would mean extra shipping costs. It would also mean more engineering of the airflow inside the case. (all fans must point the same way really) This comes under the “waste of time category” a far quicker solution is to let the customer supply and use an external power supply, (like all of the smaller components) Then you can simply have it on the outside of the case so it won’t get in the way of the airflow. Yes it fits on a 19inch rack shelf, There is space behind the unit for a power supply on the shelves (this is what we are doing in our hosting), You are welcome to use cable ties to make it look nice and keep it secure if you want to.
  Another one of our internal rules is that unless its 100% essential we simply don’t spend time on it.

The bottom line is what you are getting from KNC is over engineered and not over designed.  Imagine how upset people would be if we had something that looked great but we were delayed because of the design.

Thanks

Sam