Plenty of companies turn to crowdfunding in order to raise the cash needed to manufacturer and ship their products. Eve Tech made a splash a few years ago by doing something a little different — the company “crowd developed” a Windows tablet by incorporating feedback from potential customers along the way… and then launching a crowdfunding campaign.

When I reviewed the Eve V tablet in late 2017, I was pretty impressed with the results. It definitely didn’t seem to be a case of too-many-cooks spoiling anything.

Unfortunately while the folks at Eve were able to build a pretty great tablet, they weren’t as good at managing inventory, fulfilling orders, and offering customer support.

So now the company is trying something a little different. Again. Eve has partnered with manufacturer PCH International to produce its next products. And while it’s sticking with the crowd-development process, the next four Eve devices will be a little less ambitious than the Eve V tablet was.

Eve Tech mini PC

Within the next year or so, Eve plans to launch four new products, and it’s launched new sections for each at the Eve Community site, where folks can weigh in with their ideas.

We’re still pretty early in the design process for each of these devices, but Eve is asking folks to vote in a series of polls to help figure out what features to prioritize.

For instance, Eve has already decided that its mini PC will probably be bigger than an Intel NUC or Mac Mini, but smaller than a typical desktop. But the company wants to know what potential customers expect to use a mini PC for, why they’d rather use a small PC than a full-sized tower, and what’s wrong with existing options.

For the monitor, the company is asking community members to vote on screen size, aspect ratio, and what features are most or least important (such as color, brightness, contrast ratio, response rate, and viewing angles).

As for headphones, Eve hasn’t even decided if it will launch over-ear, on-ear, in-ear, or bone-conducting headphones yet.

Further along in the process is a docking station that Eve cleverly calls Donald Dock (or maybe not-so-clever if it results in any sort of legal action). This computer accessory has been in the planning stages since late 2017, so the company’s current questions are more about the potential pricing… and whether the specs as proposed still make sense.

Eventually future Eve hopes to produce new tablets and/or laptops, but for now the company says it wants to “focus on creating simpler products that underpromise and overdeliver, and avoid the supply chain risks that come with a more complex computing device.”

In other words, Eve is aware that it’s failure to deliver Eve V tablets in a timely manner pissed off a lot of people and the company is hoping to avoid that this time around by sticking with more manageable projects for a little while.

Hopefully things go a little more smoothly this time around.

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10 replies on “Eve Tech is crowd-developing a mini PC, monitor, headphones, and docking station”

  1. Eve-Tech when will you ship my order?
    ORDER #101223366666. Backed since December 2017.

    1. Invoke your rights under kickstarter’s terms of service in the comments of the project.

      It is surprisingly ineffective, but it’s a meme and everyone does it.

  2. Until now i never received my eve when i backed since 2017. They kept promising but never can give exact date for delivery. Almost give up and i just put in my mind this is scam.

  3. For a gaming box, matx is my sweet spot. Full size atx power supply, many matx motherboards to chose from, full size graphics cards fit. It might not be as quiet or cool as a full size atx, but I like the size difference.

  4. What’s so under-powered about the NUC, Gigabyte BRIX or similar mini PCs? And, what’s too large, or under-powered, about the Lenovo tiny ThinkCentres with their 6-core 65 watt i7 CPUs?

    Do the EVE folks even know what they’re talking about???

    1. They don’t. Their issue is they lied dormant for years after their Eve tablet made a splash in tech web circles amongst journalists and enthusiasts and never kept that magic and that spark alive. They hit the ground running once but now they are trying to recapture their former glory again and they msissing the clear vision and bold ideas they once had. Their reality is consumers can get a hexacore Intel Core i9-8950HK NUC clone off of AliExpress now for a mere $533. Unless they can overdo and outgun that value proposition or conversely, outdo and outgun the quality and performance of Hades Canyon that is further up the food chain, they will shuddering the windows and closing the doors to their business in no time. Count on it.

        1. I agree with most of what is said.
          However, there is a better product which they aren’t targeting: Home Theatre / Console.

          EVE group should think of building a very very Small PC but one that is user upgradeable. They can justify it as making it something that’s good value, ready setup, and easy to use. Otherwise, common folk would have to do their own research and come out either informed or confused/angry.

          Here are some options as to what the build could resemble:
          BUDGET BUILD
          SilverStone rvz02 SFF Case (or smaller PS4 sized)
          B450M Motherboard (with Bluetooth and Wifi)
          AMD r3-2400G
          +Option to add a full-sized dGPU
          8GB DDR4-2400MHz
          256GB SSD-No Brand SATAIII 2.5in
          1TB HDD-5400rpm 2.5in
          400W Bronze Modular PSU
          Windows10 Free (or AndroidOS-x86 or Linux Distro or SteamOS or Hackintosh)

          MIDRANGE
          SilverStone rvz02 SFF Case (or smaller PS4 sized)
          B470M Motherboard (with Bluetooth and Wifi)
          AMD r5-2600
          AMD RX570 dGPU
          16GB DDR4-3200MHz
          256GB SSD-WD Blue3D M.2
          2TB HDD-5400rpm 2.5in
          600W Bronze Modular PSU
          Windows10 Pro (or AndroidOS-x86 or Linux Distro or SteamOS or Hackintosh)

          HIGH-END
          SilverStone rvz02 SFF Case (or smaller PS4 sized)
          B470M Motherboard (with Bluetooth and Wifi)
          AMD r7-2700X
          Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti dGPU
          16GB DDR4-3200MHz
          512GB SSD-WD Blue3D M.2
          2TB HDD-5400rpm 2.5in
          600W Bronze Modular PSU
          Windows10 Pro (or AndroidOS-x86 or Linux Distro or SteamOS or Hackintosh)

          *key word here being RESEMBLE
          Although its sort of poor timing with 7nm AMD Navi GPU coming soon, and 7nm Zen2/Ryzen 3000 also coming soon. So perhaps if those products are interchanged, then EVE Group could be onto something with this…. basically a better Subor Z alternative for the Western Countries.

  5. Honestly, for me, the Hades Canyon NUC has set the bar in my mind as to “compact performance”, and its a pretty high bar, and from the sounds of this, they are not even looking at the bar, let alone trying to reach it…which makes me wonder what the point of the product is as we can go much smaller with the “regular” NUCs at the cost of quite a chunk of performance, or go ever so slightly larger and be within a few % of full sized desktops

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