 $7,650. 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 three 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, Alt 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? Like our sponsor, GlassWire did. Are you having poor quality video meetings? Use GlassWire and instantly see what apps are wasting your bandwidth during meetings and block them. Get 25% off today using offer code Linus at the link below. Let's go. 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 that 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 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 gonna be some, there's gonna 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. 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, oh 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 back rest adjust is a plus. What does 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 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, that's a lot more wobble. Look, it's 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, cause 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 gotta do is I can mouse around and then when I'm done, 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 wanna 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 what 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 lab, 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 Altworks 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 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 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 $7,000, 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, or even like a charging cheese pot or something like that. Instead, it just feels like Altwork 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 wanna 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 kinda 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 gonna 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 gonna need to put the thing in. And you can calculate how you're gonna afford it with our sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use accounting software that's designed specifically with you in mind, the small business owner. FreshBooks has everything you need to manage your books, invoices, expenses, track your time, and more. FreshBooks is designed to be easy to use with built-in automation, so you spend less time invoicing, expensing, and tracking projects, and more time doing what matters most, growing your business. So whether you're a tradesperson, creative agency, YouTuber, artist, with FreshBooks, you can choose the plan that's right for you. They have an award-winning Toronto-based support team who are always happy to help you if you need it, and you can try them out for free for 30 days with no credit card required at freshbooks.com slash linus. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy 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, so.