A home space that helps keep an eye on work, the cat, and the kids — all at the same time.
Kate Cox is one of two senior producers running the Decoder podcast here at The Verge. Before she joined The Verge last summer, she had a decade and change as a reporter and editor covering tech policy, consumer tech issues, video games, and occasionally, nerd culture for several outlets.
She took some time to tell us about her workspace.
That’s a cozy-looking space. Where in your home is it?
Our house was built in 1951 and has this very weird, very small sort of L-shaped bedroom, with doors on opposite sides, directly off the kitchen. My husband and I share it as a home office, each of us sitting with our backs to one leg of the “L” and our desks perpendicular to each other, spaced out. The view behind / past my monitor is through the door into our kitchen, which is handy when I’ve got dinner roasting or simmering during the last hour of my workday and also when my kids are home and I can see the feet of a five-year-old who is trying to sneak snacks. And the blue accent wall shows up behind me in all my video calls.
I love my desk unreservedly. It’s from Crafters and Weavers, and I picked it up in late 2020 or early 2021, when I was sick to death of an old Ikea setup that I’d bought for an earlier apartment and decided I was a grown-up and could have real wood furniture.
I did a ton of research before I ordered it, and the last hurdle was emailing the customer service folks to see if they could get me a measurement from the bottom of the right-hand drawers to the floor because I needed to know if my 19-inch PC tower could clear it. (It could — just barely. Newer PC towers without a half-dozen drive bays are, happily, a little shorter.)
Reclaimed, distressed wood desk with three drawers, one of which can be used as a keyboard stand.
Tell us about your chair and, again, why you chose it.
The chair is a classic Ikea Markus. I do not love it unreservedly, alas. It was a good replacement for a much older, decrepit chair about six to seven years ago, and it was great for the part-time home use it got at the time, but I’ve been working full time from home since 2019, and somehow my hips and back keep stubbornly not getting any younger. I keep meaning to replace it. Someday…
Here’s the big one. Tell us about the tech you’re using: computers, monitors, etc. Be as specific as you can — including why you chose it and if you’re happy with it (or not!).
The laptop is a 2021 MacBook Pro, Vox Media issued. I don’t love using Macs, even though almost all of my work-issued computers since 2013 have been MacBooks, and my job is 100 percent cloud-based, so I also do a fair amount of work from my personal PC.
I actually just built this PC in July to fully replace the old one I’d been Frankensteining along for more than a decade, so it’s pretty new. It’s my first AMD build, with a Ryzen 7 7700X in an Asus ROG Strix B650E-F motherboard. The GPU is an Nvidia Founders Edition 3060 Ti that I did actually bring over from my old PC. They all work exactly as well as you’d hope. (The initial RAM sticks did not work as well as you’d hope, and I had to RMA them after only three months.)
An AMD B650E AM5 ATX gaming motherboard with 12 + 2 power stages, DDR5, PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD support, one PCIe 5.0 x16 SafeSlot with Q-Release, USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C rear I/O port, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C front-panel connector, Wi-Fi 6E, and Aura Sync RGB lighting.
The case is a Fractal Design Pop Air Cyan because I thought it was pretty, and really, most decent air-cooled PC cases are going to work about the same, so you may as well choose the one you find aesthetically pleasing. (The case is covered in small fingerprints because my five-year-old also thinks it is pretty and likes to sit under my desk and touch it.)
The monitor is a 27-inch Dell S2721DGF that suits my needs extremely well. It’s 1440p, not 4K, but I also got it a year or two ago, and my old PC would have keeled over and burst into flames if you asked it to run a game in 4K. I expect I’ll do a GPU upgrade on this machine in a few more years, and I’ll likely upgrade to a 4K monitor then. (I miss having a multi-monitor setup, but in this physical space, that’s just not really a workable idea.)