Beaten and detained by Taitra security guards, I have withdrawn to the MSI stand from which I came, the laptop I had tried to breathe away, handed back to MSI, while members of the North American PR -Team look at me in Stony Silence. I lift my head up and meet their eyes one by one.
“It belongs to a museum!” I yell over the clamp and yours in the Computex 2025 Showfloor.
One of the reps I have known for years to be heard, “John, what the hell, man? Have you lost your mind?”
“It belongs to a museum!”
Okay, so that scene didn’t play anything like it yesterday when I first put my eyes on MSI Prestige 13+ Ai Ukiyo-E Edition laptop, but the damn could have. All I needed was a means of fleeing through the packed audience at the MSI stand, which all gawled with me on what is arguably the most beautiful laptop that any of us have ever seen.
MSI Prestige 13+ AI is already one of the best laptops MSIs that were put out in recent years, but the one that appears on Computex was something else entirely. Spray over the lid is a hand -charged reproduction of The big wave from Kanagawa By the Japanese artist and printmaker Hokusai, a master of Ukiyo-E art style that dominated Japan from the 17th to 19th century.
I am not so into Japanese art and culture as many of my friends are, a few of whom speak different degrees of Japanese as another language, and all of which own virtually every manga that has been released in the US (as well as many who have had to pay extra to order directly from Japanese stores) but I love ukiyo-e ..
I grew up in the New York City and spent a lot of time going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art throughout my childhood, and 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 houses and picturesque personal moments between friends and lovers who defined Ukiyo-E style resonating with me until today.
But it was always the depictions of vulnerable humanity in the presence of inaccessible forces of nature that spoke strongest to me. And no artwork catches it as well as The great waveWith its unstoppable water chambers over a couple of fishing boats whose owners are nowhere to be seen. The only proof of their existence is the boats that are left, pilot -free and by the grace of nature.
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Prestige 13+ AI Ukiyo-E edition reproduces this masterful scene thanks to Okadaya’s work, a Japanese company known for its lacquer work on fine chinaware and pottery.
Similar to how ukiyo-e pressure was made in steps and layers back today, Okadaya’s process to create The great wave On the prestige 13+ AI lid involves the application of eight thin layers of lacquer by hand, which increases the coloring and structure of the stage before polishing it to a smooth, elastic finish.
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The process is also not limited to only the lid. The keys of the keyboard have also been stepped up to a polished, piano-key-like finish with gold-colored key labels that match the MSI logo on the inside of the unit and on the lid, as well as the labels for the unit gates.
While the artwork on the device is stealing the show (and by show, I mean Computex, as Prestige 13+ AI Ukiyo-E edition won the Computex’s Best Choice Award this year), the underlying laptop is still impressive also with up to an Intel Lunar Lake Soc, up to 32 GB LPDDR5X memory, 1TB pcie 4.0 SSD storage 2.8k oled.
As a craft product, the new laptop will have a limited driving of 1,000 devices, each getting its production number that is laser-etch on the bottom of the device. Given the hands that have gone into these laptops, you can imagine that they will not be cheap and I would not be surprised if the majority of them have already been bought before they even debuted at this year’s show.
Still, even if it is not possible to own one’s self (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 art that has gone into this unit.
After seeing it close and kept it yourself, I can tell you that it wouldn’t be out of place among the finest Ukiyo-E-pressure on Met, and that’s something I would gladly take the time to see when I’m there.
