Apple

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With a dizzying number of options to personalize your iPad, iPhone and all of Apple’s other offspring, we’re frankly a little surprised that there aren’t more ways to customize your actual desktop computer. We’re not talking about slapping a bunch of stickers on the back, but about introducing new materials into Microsoft and Apple’s line of lovely yet cold, hard-edged metal clad computers. French entrepreneur and tech trend scouter, Julien Salanave, presaged the move – nay, mass migration – back to the handmade with Oree, a wooden keyboard that marries traditional materials and woodworking techniques with new manufacturing processes.

Salanave said he noticed that “modern technology products look very much alike, are highly impersonal, made out of eco-unfriendly materials and are designed for rapid obsolescence.” To realize his concept for a handmade wooden keyboard he brought on designer Franck Fontana, who has worked extensively with wood products since he graduated from ENSCI, and woodworker Christophe Della Signora, who began apprenticing in the craft when he was just 15-years-old. Using “cutting-edge milling technologies and timeless woodworking techniques passed down through generations of French woodcrafters and cabinetmakers,” each Oree keyboard “is crafted, polished, oil-finished and assembled by hand” in southern France.

Available in Maple and Walnut, the wireless keyboards work not only with Apple products, of course, but with any Bluetooth enabled device. When you include shipping an Oree keyboard costs about $200, but each keyboard is custom made with one of three font options (Fedra, Didot or MrsEaves) or left blank, though we’re not sure why anyone would choose that. You can also personalize your keyboard with up to 45 characters of text or an engraved background.